Monday, December 25, 2006
The Source Of Life starts at... 11:31 AM.
+Junior College Band Festival 2006+
(This entry was intended to be posted on Christmas Day, but sorry for the late entry- like as if you care right?)To conclude my Band Months Series, I'm going to talk about my first ever Band fest experience.
12 Junior COlleges...
3 days of practices and sectionals at NIE...
4 Festival Bands...
Bizet...
Debussy...
Ravel...
Saint Saens...
15 Pieces...
3 Conductors...
Mr Kikuo Atarashi...
Dr Alan Lourens...
Mr Joseph Cheung...
21st December...
Esplanade Concert Hall...
An experience I will never forget!I was in the Saint Saens Band and we played four pieces- March Suite Espanol, Folk Dances, St. Florian Choral and Copacabana- four pieces that I like! My favourite was Copacabana!
The festival lasted for four days, where the concert was on the last day of the festival. Three straight days of practices made me lean a whole bunch of stuff! For example, I've learnt how to play like a professional saxophonist and how I could prevent my lips from hurting due to long hours on the instrument. Besides that, made some new friends even though I was and still am intimidated by them because they're way better than me! Yikes!
Within those three days, the practices and the sectionals were great and I guess I've flourished in my music-making skills. Mr Cheung was fun and Mr Atarashi was magnificent in what he does (even though his English was a little hard to understand, but we still had a good laugh as a band).
Oh ya, I've heard the cheperones (is that how you spell it?) said that Saint Saens band was the best band out of the four. I hope that's true! When I told my parents about this, they told me that Saint Saens was the best band because we played a very popular Jazz piece- Copacabana!
The on concert day, assembled at 2.30pm on the concourse (I actually met up with Betty earlier to follow her getting her court shoes from her workplace) and our cheperones handed out our esplanade passes and the heavier instruments people were the first ones to be escorted backstage to get our instruments and the first ones to get into the dressing room. We walked for quite a distance and up/ down a few storeys to fetch our instruments before proceeding to the dressing room.
OMG the dressing room, firstly, it was packed (Debussy and Saint Saens guys in the same room) and some of the girls decided to hang around the male dressing room and we just waited for our turn and had fun! Some were practicing, while others were just mingling and played some games. Me and Samantha played Bingo and did some mind-games and it was blood fun la!!
Then when it was almost our turn, went for tuning la, warm-up la and some other stuff before the emcee introduced "BAND SAINT SAENS".
The hall was not fully filled but at least it's the Esplanade Concert Hall, so I didn't give a damn about the audience. My parents were there too! And they were sitting so close to the stage and oMG it was awkward you know. They waved, I waved and started to focus.
Damn I'm tired from typing... to sum it all up, the JC Band Fest 2006 was a BLAST! Damn! I'm so joining it again for 2007! So see you guys...Here are some pictures taken from www.jcbf2006.blogspot.com
Toodles!
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