If someone wanted to find me in Santa Cruz, they could do worse than to go to Lulu Carpenter’s and look behind any latte they see. Yes, I am back here again this morning after a fun, but grueling night of rehearsing, enjoying another beautiful latte, and doing research. Research, you may ask? Yes, research. And at the moment, the research isn’t going particularly well. You see, I am trying to describe the opening of last night’s rehearsal, lest you confuse the Cabrillo Festival with, well… with pretty much anything, really.

I arrived at the hall early to take another look at the music and to get set up. When I arrived they were doing a sound check for the first piece on the rehearsal, Moments of Bliss by Brett Dean. They were setting levels for the MIDI track, which includes a huge variety of sounds, including something akin to a jet engine blasting away with intermittent spoken phrases interspersed throughout. I look to my right and see that there is a large spinning wheel that looks a bit like a giant dartboard that fell out of a carnival arcade, complete with a big blue flashing light on top — this is apparently the “Wheel of Fortune”, but I’m not sure of the significance of that just yet. From there I look to the front of the stage and I see Concertmaster Yumi Hwang-Williams standing there holding a 5 string electric violin. Nice.

Once the piece starts, however, unique goes to bizarre. Towards the beginning of the piece is a nice harmon mute trumpet solo marked “smoky” (hmm… As Marin Alsop pointed out to me, perhaps “smokie” would have been a better choice). The solo is a pretty straightforward, jazz influenced, harmon mute solo, nothing too bizarre there. But in this solo, there are a couple of small breaks between solo statements (approx. a bar of rest each). Now, I had been envisioning a certain kind of music in these breaks, and the actual music that is in these breaks isn’t far from what I had imagined. What got my attention, though, was when members of the orchestra suddenly grabbed 3 foot long plastic hoses and began spinning them over their head! You know the ones, they are made of ridged plastic and make a pitched “whooo… whoooo… whooo” as you spin them. The faster you spin them, the higher the pitch. So there I am, trying to play a beautiful trumpet solo, and every time I stop playing my colleagues grab plastic hoses and spin them around over their heads. Somehow, I’m not sure that my musical expressivity is really coming across…

And this is where the research comes in. What are those plastic tubes called? I Googled everything I could think of and I even sent a text question to KGB (the text answer service), all to no avail. All I got from them was “everyday there are a few questions that we can’t answer and unfortunately yours was one of them.” Craig: 1 KGB:0. Great. I am winning a game I don’t even want to win!

So the Cabrillo Festival is underway again, my face already feels abused, and I am back at Lulu Carpenter’s ruminating over a latte.

It’s all good.

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