It is that time of year again. Summer is screaming to a close and I find myself back at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for more challenging and inspiring music and music making. For me, this festival is always a welcome end to my summer because it provides a much needed recharge of the artistic batteries that can tend to fade in sweltering Miami summers, especially when the rest of life creeps in and demand your attention. In fact, this summer I went into a bit of a self-imposed online exile (if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you may have noticed), but now I am back in Santa Cruz, the weather is cool, rehearsals are underway, and I find myself back at one of my favorite Santa Cruz spots — Lulu Carpenter’s — enjoying a fabulous latte; I’m already feeling more energized.

Rehearsals for the festival are underway, with the first full orchestra rehearsal last night. This festival is Marin Alsop’s 20th anniversary as music director here and the festival promises to be extraordinary. Last night we began rehearsing pieces for the performance on Saturday night (Aug. 6). The bulk of the rehearsal was taken up with a piece that Marin discovered while conducting in Japan. The piece is by Shuko Mizuno — a composer that was unknown to me prior to this festival (here is a page with some info on Mizuno — and is fittingly titled “Summer”. It is a fascinating piece that captivates with an aggressive Neo-Romanticism: moments of great beauty are followed by passages of clamorous intensity. This piece is probably the most physical piece of the whole festival for me, which means that the tradition of starting this festival with a chop busting first rehearsal is alive and well.

This afternoon we tackle music from Friday night’s performance, which features music by Christopher Rouse, Mason Bates, James MacMillan, and Margaret Brouwer. It promises to be another demanding rehearsal, but I am really looking forward to hearing the music. As for now, it’s time to finish this latte and go warm up, I have a feeling my face will appreciate that.

{ fin }

Obviously, my writing on here has been sparse of late. I have, however, been busy working on many other aspects of my “web presence”, so I thought I would take a minute — while waiting out an airline delay to — to simultaneously catch my LivMusic readers up to speed and test out the latest version of the WordPress iPhone app.

My soloist website is now up and running featuring an elegant design by Kimberly Hopkins at Khop Design! (www.khopdesign.com) The site features pics, sound clips, and other related press materials. Check it out here: www.craigmorristrumpet.com

Also, while I have had trouble carving enough time to post frequent blog posts lately, I have been maintaining a fairly active presence on both facebook and twitter. Feel free to follow me on those sites at the links below:

Twitter: craig_morris

Facebook: Craig Morris Trumpet

And as for that WordPress app? Well, let’s just say this is the second time I am writing this, so that doesn’t bode particularly well. The good news, though, is that my flight delay is over, so now we’ll see if I can get this to post before I get the official power-down-scowl.

I know the life of a performing artist appears glamorous at times — doing something you are passionate about in front of an adoring audience, traveling the world, being immersed in a creative art form, etc. — but appearances, as always, can be deceiving. I was reflecting on this very fact last night while trudging in the pouring rain across an acre-wide, flooded parking lot, wearing my black suit, no umbrella, and with a heel broken off of one shoe. The concert I had just completed had gone fine, but that was the only consolation from a night where I:

1. Started warming up and felt like playing the trumpet was the single most difficult thing ever undertaken by man.
2. Had the heel of my left shoe inexplicably fall off while walking backstage just prior to going on stage.
3. Played well, but felt like I was in a death-cage match against Attila the Hun.
4. Forgot to acknowledge the composer for the brass quintet we performed.
5. Came out of the hall to find monsoon conditions had once again arrived in South Florida…
6. … and realized my umbrella was in my car, which was about a half mile away across the aforementioned flooded parking lot.

I am very fortunate to have the life I do. I love music, my job, performing, collaborating with talented and creative people, and all of the great things that come along with it, but the sacrifices are immense and the glamour? Uh…. no. Not so much.

Théo Charlier: 36 Etudes Transcendantes. I remember the first time I saw those words scrawled on a piece of paper by my college trumpet professor, Ray Crisara. I had no real idea at the time what kind of journey I was undertaking or how many hours of my time would be poured into the music in those pages. I simply took the note and placed my order for what I assumed was just the next etude book. Studying those etudes, though, was a seminal experience for me. I was forced to re-evaluate my playing — new weaknesses were exposed, old weaknesses were laid bare. These etudes cover essentially every aspect of trumpet technique, and they do so within a musically challenging and rewarding context. Given that, I suppose it is no mystery why this etude book has become a long-standing rite of passage for most trumpet players. But unlike most rites of passage, these seem to keep coming back to haunt you, to test your improvement (or lack thereof) to challenge you again in many old ways and also to offer up new challenges that perhaps you hadn’t experienced before. This etude book is not the “Trumpet Player’s Bible” like the Arban Method, but its role in the development of serious trumpet students is unparalleled. Virtually every college level trumpet player works from the book, and if there is an etude book that is universally revered, studied, and debated within the trumpet community, it’s this one. And now I have undertaken a project to record these etudes with no editing or effects of any kind and upload the results to YouTube (CraigMorrisTrumpet ) for the entire world to see. This is how you know that I am clinically insane.

Besides the obvious insanity, however, there are some good reasons to take on this project. In this day and age there is so much editing and processing that goes into recordings that it is difficult to know what a top professional trumpet player actually sounds like, what his/her abilities truly are. You can decide for yourself if I actually belong in that category, but whatever your opinion, these etudes will give you a very real idea of how I actually play. My hope is that this knowledge will be useful for players who are trying to ascertain where they stand in their progress on the instrument, at least as it pertains to these etudes. Sometimes we are too hard on ourselves for playing that we should really be proud of, worried that we just don’t measure up to the players we hear on recordings, especially so called “live recordings”. At other times we aren’t demanding enough, thinking that perhaps top players have perfect recordings simply because of the editing, not knowing how well those people actually played. In this project, however, there is no doubt. For better or worse, this is how I sound. I simply start recording takes until I have one that I am reasonably happy with, and then I continue on, hoping to improve on that. After I’m done, I listen through my top takes and select my favorite to post to YouTube. Simple, honest, and hopefully not horribly painful as the etudes get more difficult (this is where that insanity comes into play).

Beyond those lofty goals, however, there are some personal motives driving this project as well. It was a little over 20 years ago when Ray Crisara introduced these etudes to me and proceeded to shape my playing and musicality with them and through them. I remember so clearly — sitting in his studio and carefully listening as he would point out one problem or another, suggest some different musical ideas and approaches, and demonstrate with his pristine and beautiful playing how he felt they should really be played. For me, revisiting these etudes in a serious manner is a walk down memory lane, a study in my progress as a trumpet player and musician, and a test to see if I can actually come close to how I believe they should go, all rolled into one. For this reason, I am recording the etudes in the order that I first went through them with my teacher. Inside my old Charlier book (a well-worn, large size edition with a missing cover) the dates that I had these etudes assigned to me is written at the top of each etude. My plan is to follow that order throughout, perhaps recounting some of my experiences from when I first learned them along the way.

It will be an interesting journey, as I plow ahead through these transcendent etudes by Théo Charlier. I don’t know that there will be anything transcendent happening, but hopefully this project will give people studying these etudes some kind of real benchmark to shoot for and even surpass. I make no claims to greatness, no assertion that these recordings will be definitive in any way. No, they simply show what is real: just a guy with trumpet, a macbook pro, a USB microphone, and a tattered old etude book, doing the best that he can. I’m glad I have some great teaching and invaluable memories to help light the way.

Continuing with my series of lists covering the 2010 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary music, I have compiled this list of favorite photos that I took while at the festival.  There are certainly other photos (taken by others) that deserve to be in this list, but I don’t have the original files for those.  If  some of you CabFest musicians have photos to share with me, then I can make a separate list for those.

You will, no doubt, notice that many of the photos have nothing to do with music or the festival directly. IMHO, that is a defining characteristic of a successful festival: a setting that will attract the best musicians and give them a reprieve from their daily lives and whatever music they happen to be playing at the time. All the pics of the California Coast (below) were taken on our day off, and believe me — amidst the insanity of the music we play (and, as Daniel Barenboim used to say, “I mean that in the nicest possible way”) — we needed these peaceful surroundings to be able to recharge our batteries before tackling the programs for the second week of the festival. I hope you enjoy the pics as much as I enjoyed taking them.

10. Soif! -- One of THE places to be after a show. Great Wine. Great Food. What’s not to like? I think this is the only time I saw it during the day…

9. Santa Cruz Boardwalk – The Essence of Santa Cruz

8. California Coast – Where else would you find this scenery?

7. Up on a Rock — Taken from atop a lone rock, 30 meters in the air. Only in California…

6. The Cross at Mission San Juan Bautista — Sunset at the mission is stunning. Fantastic light.

5. Grey Day — Feeding my inner Ansel Adams.

4. San Juan Bautista Bells — The Bell Tower at the Beautiful Mission San Juan Bautista

3. John and Me — John Adams and me after the performance of City Noir at the Cabrillo Festival 8/14/2010

2. Jutting Rocks — Does it get any more dramatic than the California Coast?  Love my Leica D-Lux4

1. The soloists. The composer. — The true value of any festival comes in the people you work with. When I look at the quality of the musicians in this picture, I know that the value of the Cabrillo Festival is as high as they come. (L to R: Craig Morris [tpt], Ava Ordman[trb], John Adams, Tim Mcallister[sax])

{ fin }