Dear Senior Symphony,
I hope you’ve had a successful week. Great work getting through all you are doing!
It was really wonderful seeing all of you and I was very impressed with our first rehearsal, so let’s keep going! I look forward to this coming Monday.
A goal for Monday is that we finish the night sounding fairly confident on both the Higdon and Saint-Saëns works. That’s a big expectation–you are brilliant, so it’s possible. Just make sure you do at least an hour or two of private practice with your metronome and tuners…and be patient. If it doesn’t come together completely this weekend, we’ll work together on Monday.
Remember for those pesky rhythms, neatly mark some beats and subdivisions to help impress solutions to difficult measures on your mind and muscle memory. Practice passages slowly enough to be correct/perfect at the slow speed, after you find the solutions, add repetition to polish and then move up the tempo. Some polishing takes 50-75 or more repetitions….a bunch of you know this already. Gotta build those brain/muscle memories.
Leaders/Coaches, please work almost exclusively on the Higdon with what your section needs. Other music if you have time, of course.
Higdon
Entire Work: mm. 1-153. Focus first on areas that need special attention….please use metronome. Under tempo is just fine…concentrate on uniformity.
Monday, September 25
- 5:20 – Report to Sectionals
- 5:30 – Sectionals: Focus on Higdon (Violin leaders, coordinate timing of any sectional work)
- 6:30 – Break
- 6:50 – Higdon, Blue Cathedral https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2Tps5cgc4
- 7:40 – Break
- 8:00 – Saint-Saëns, Symphony No.3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLJAJcVwjlc
- 8:45 – Rehearsal End