YouTube’s tagline is “Broadcast Yourself”, and though I’m not exactly broadcasting myself, I am being broadcast, so I suppose that counts for something. My good friend, colleague, and wonderful composer/conductor Thom Sleeper has put up video of a live performance of me playing his Concerto for Trumpet (with Thom conducting) on YouTube. This performance was done at the Beijing Modern Music Festival and you can find it by simply searching for “Craig Morris Trumpet” on YouTube. The camera work is a little “inspired”, but other than that it isn’t half-bad. There is also a new release on Naxos of me performing this same Concerto with the Frost School of Music Wind Ensemble that has just recently been released. Let me know how it sounds, because, believe it or not, I haven’t heard it yet!

As you may have noticed, LivMusic was down over the weekend. This was due to our web hosting company relocating to Boston. The site was only supposed to be down from late Friday to noon on Saturday, but it ended up being down until Monday afternoon sometime: just a slight miscalculation there. Really though, when you stop and think about what an enormous task it must be to relocate an entire web hosting company and all of its accompanying hardware, it is amazing that it only took one weekend. Somehow, I keep coming back to an image of my whole website loaded onto a truck and hauled up the Eastern Seaboard, like a tomato on a tomato truck, and unloaded safe and sound in Boston, ready to be reconnected to the mysterious beast that is the internet. It’s a wonder that everything still works, really.

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Well, wouldn’t you know it. No sooner am I done writing the above post than I discover that the site is down again. I think someone may have bruised my tomato! Hopefully, all will be normal again soon. Of course, if you end up reading this, the chances are that everything has indeed returned to normal, which is kind of ironic actually.

Today I had a relapse of ARS (Altered Reality Syndrome). This condition had been in remission for quite some time, but today I suffered a significant setback.

Upon arrival in Toronto — I am doing some master classes at the Glenn Gould School of Music — I hailed a cab and set off for my hotel. Once downtown, I caught glimpse of what turned out to be the Opera House.

“Is the symphony hall in this area?” I asked the cab driver.

“Excuse me?” replied the cabbie.

“The concert hall for the symphony, is it around here?” I replied, sure that I was just not speaking clearly enough. The cabbie glanced at me in the rearview mirror with a puzzled face.

“The concert hall for the Toronto Symphony, the orchestra hall, is it near here?” I asked again, hoping that the use of the word orchestra would somehow stir his memory. Sadly, though, he stared on with the same puzzled expression. Then I saw his eyes light up with recognition and he quickly turned to look at me directly, knowing that it is important to deliver good news while looking at someone directly and not through a mirror.

“Are you looking for City Hall?” he asked.

“No, no,” I said, looking out the window at the tall buildings rolling by, wondering how many people live in major metropolitan cities that have never even heard of a symphony, “Thanks anyway.”

It does have a way of making that opening solo in Mahler 5 seem a bit less important doesn’t it. Perhaps I should have asked about the Maple Leafs instead!