I worked my little ass off the last couple of days. I arranged my Holy holy for instruments. I developed an arrangement for both it and the closing hymn this Sunday (“I’m so glad”) in which I wrote a marimba part and 6 other parts. A trio of advanced parts and a trio of easy parts. Also wrote out bass and drums and a vocal score for guitarists. This turned into a big effort.
Yesterday afternoon I had the brilliant idea of writing a cakewalk variation on “I’m so glad.” I even composed a reasonable decent “Scott Joplin” piano part for it.
Good thing I wrote decent piano parts because my pianist (Jen Wolfe who has a masters in performance) really helped me get through the evening last night. She nailed her part in a similar manner to the way she played for me at my Aug LemonJellos gig.
I also wrote a simple piano part for the Holy holy and a simple piano duet for “I’m so glad.” Unfortunately these players did not show. That is, one showed but was surprised his Mom had volunteered his abilities and decided not to play.
I loaded a lot of my equipment into the car and took it over to church last night. My electric piano seems to have developed a hum making it unusable. I discovered this of course right before the rehearsal. I dragged down the other piano from the choir room for my two pianists who didn’t play anyway. Standard church work procedure.
I did have twelve of the fifteen people whom I was expecting show up and seem to have a good time. Of that twelve, I’m expecting eight to come this Sunday and play. Also a couple of people who couldn’t make it last night are planning to come.
I am exhausted this morning, both physically and emotionally.
Usually the day after this sort of thing I have some real emotional backwash of wondering why I put my heart and soul into what I do and if it’s really worth it. This quickly passes. But I have to get through it.
I can see that one of my strengths is that I can develop good materials for musicians. One of my weaknesses is I can’t seem to attract many volunteers to music in church. Part of this is probably just that I’m an old fart and what I do (live music) doesn’t really hold a lot of interest these days for as many people as it used to. But also I think that people are less interested in the delayed gratification of a commitment to the time it takes to do stuff in an excellent manner.
Anyway, I do have a core group of committed people at church. It is these people that I try to help have a worthwhile musical experience as they volunteer their time and effort to enhance the music of their community.
And of course I enjoy arranging and performing music.