Monday, May 13, 2013

Euphonium

It's hot outside and I've been driven indoors to read the Facebook news where I found out that my friend's son will be going to the University of Redlands in September to study music. He plays the euphonium, king of band instruments. It has a wonderful dark, deep tone and moans and groans along in slow moving serious pieces such as laments and requiems. Beautiful sound.

As you can guess there are few jobs available for even the virtuoso  "eupho"  players - which can be called euphoniumists, euphophonists, or euphonists. I looked up jobs available out of curiosity and found few posted online -  teachings and/or bands.

If you want to hear the instrument played very well, here's a very showy piece:
Gypsy Airs - a virtuoso performance

And this is a young man performing at a TED concert. He's created some new sounds, sort of jazzy and hip hoppy, for the instrument. Interesting, but much more of it would be too much at least for me.

Ted concert

While listening to Matthew,  the crazy band of Spike Jones came to mind. My cousin played with Spike for a number of years. He actually made a living as a musician between band work, studio work, teaching and finally owning a music store in Burbank.

I love this Spike Jones performance:
Cocktails for Two

Tough career choice, music.... I'd think you'd want to develop some unique and marketable skills as soon as possible to pay the bills. Something like the Mnozil Brass Band.  This may not be dignified, but it is entertaining. 
Mnozil Brass Band

Time to run out and dribble more water on my poor little seedlings. The pots dry out so quickly in this heat - I'm afraid my birdhouse gourds won't make it. If they do, they'll look like this. Ha.


No comments:

Post a Comment