Oh why oh why did we do this to ourselves????
As part of our ensemble's vision (well, my wife and I...) to bring together people to just enjoy playing music... and a taste on our take on Early Music (Baroque/Classical)... we did a little test run of a community music playing day at the end of last year.
... and that was surprisingly well attended, and the response was quite positive!
And so, we took it upon ourselves to expand it out to two days on a weekend... and then include little workshops, both instrumental and dance. And getting this thing organised is quite a bit of a haul... most of the logistical and admnistrative stuff was relatively easy. We are sort of vaguely competent at that... well, compared to other arts organisations anyway... but that is a pretty low bar!
But due to our desire to include but historical instruments (at 415 pitch) and modern instruments (at 440 pitch)... it has been a nightmare to find pieces in keys that work well in both pitches. If we had professionals only, then it would be just a matter of suck it up and play.... but given that we have a wide range of abilities and experience... not all keys are equally easy depending on the instrument!
And that 415/440 pitch difference is a semitone... which mostly means that if a piece is written in an easy key at one pitch, it is horrendous in the other pitch!
But there are a few overlaps... actually, about three! Where it is tolerably not too difficult in both pitches.
My wife and I had shortlisted a whole batch of pieces, and today we finally chopped it all down to also take into account variety, instrumentation, and ability levels.
The ability level is definitely a thing... and something that I'm having to come to grips with as I tend to pitch the ability level quite high (even when we have professional musicians join us...) and I am sometimes surprised that I'm pitching waaaayyyyyy too high! So, it is something that I have to temper expectations on... it is quite a stark difference to programming for our own concerts... where we just choose the pieces that we want to program that make for a good concert arc and we (and our colleagues) just do our jobs and learn it...
... but that is from the perspective of a person who ONLY does performance for a living all the time... and that isn't quite the profile of our participants in this mini-festival. So additional though and care needs to be taken...
Frankly, this has been stressing me out quite a bit... it is quite difficult to balance everything, and the biggest headache has been the pitch mixing. We learnt that lesson in the trial run... and so we have split sessions as well, but it is still nice to have EVERYONE together for a bit of musical chaos!
Perhaps something to think more about when we evolve this into the future... But at least having settled the choices brings a sense of relief.
Now to get to work on transcriptions...
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