What If? AU Challenge

I submitted my recordings for the Doctor Who Fan Orchestra today! The deadline is Sunday, but I won't have time tomorrow to work on them, so I made a schedule to get everything done by today (it's still Friday here). So it's off and away, and hopefully it's good enough. I did talk to the coordinator/conductor beforehand and he said that he accepts any skill level, but, well, I can't but worry. I've been watching the message boards and a lot of the participants are professional musicians, and I wonder how he's going to be able to mix professional performances with extremely amateur performances and make it sound good. Ah well, the important thing is that I had a lot of fun getting to perform DW music, and I learned a lot.

We had to use professional equipment to do the recording, for both fidelity and noise reduction, so I had to learn about music microphones and purchase a reasonable one. I didn't want to spend a lot on a microphone that I might only ever use once (not to mention, with us both being unemployed, my husband wasn't happy with me spending on this) so I purchased the most inexpensive acceptable microphone, a CAD U37. It seems pretty good except that it makes a weird staticky noise when I'm playing upper chalumeau (which is another thing I learned -- the words for the upper and lower register on a clarinet, "clarion" and "chalumeau"), but I figured as a clarinet in an orchestra, no one is going to hear me anyway, and thus, certainly they won't hear a tiny bit of static.

But I also learned a lot about my own playing. I've always been told this but never actually tested it: the best way to improve your own playing is to listen to a recording of yourself. When you're playing an instrument, what you think you sound like is nothing like what it actually sounds like. You can only hear what you're doing wrong if you listen to a recording of yourself.

My friend Tim has always said that I have this weird kind of bloaty sound when I'm trying to put an accent on a note, and I finally heard on the recording what he's been talking about. And then I figured out what the problem was: I've been putting the ligature too low on the mouthpiece. This gives the reed too much play and it over-vibrates. I moved the ligature up and now it sounds a lot better; further improvement will come with better embouchure, which I'm working on.

Another thing that I noticed on the recordings was that I've gotten lazy with lower clarion fingerings, such that I'm starting the note slightly before the fingers are all firmly in place, which causes a slight squeak. So, I'm now paying a lot more attention to how I do that.

As far as the actual music goes, after playing this ten-minute medley of DW music over and over and over again for the past few monhts, I noticed that the music is actually really repetitive. Note, of course, that it has to be, because the main purpose of the music is to be played behind scenes in the show and cannot run out before the scene is over. Murray Gold has to write the music to be long and repetitive so that he has a lot of of recorded music to splice and fit into the TV show. (He was at Gallifrey One a few years ago and demonstrated how he does that -- it was fascinating.) Fifteen's main theme, which is appropriately titled "Fifteen", is at least fast and fun, so the repetition isn't boring. But man, if I never hear "Joy to the World" (which I assume was the theme for the character Joy in the eponymous episode) again, it'll be too soon. (Of course, it's the one that still stuck in my head. Because it's repetitive. So it just repeats. Over and over again.)

The medley ends with the current version of the main theme, and that was brilliant to play. I'm not actually sure if I prefer this version to the series 1-2 version, which was my previous favorite of the modern versions. I think I have to rank them in this order: Fifteen, series 1-2, Thirteen, series 4, Twelve, Eleven. Actually, Eleven might have two versions -- series 5-7a and series 7b. Or he might even have had a different version for "The Day of the Doctor". Not sure; all I know is that I wasn't fond of his versions.

Anyway. Current main theme = awesome. Getting to play it = even more awesome.

Okay, at this point I'm rambling. I'm just happy I got this opportunity and it was brilliant. And I practiced more for this than for any other performance in my life! That's how much I enjoyed it.