As I sit here waiting for the radio feature to play on KALW, (in case you haven’t heard, there will be an hour long interview/special on me and my music on KALW San Francisco public radio tonight at 8pm PDT. To hear it, visit this page and select “Listen Live”) I am struck by what an eventful day it has been. I coached the brass section out at the New World Symphony for the first time this year, received 4 perusal scores in the mail for some amazing (yet devastatingly hard) modern trumpet concertos, and then have the radio interview coming later tonight. Throw in a few good hours of practice and you have a pretty damn good day!

The New World coaching was an intense 2 hour immersion into audition preparation and philosophy. Those guys hung in there and asked some fantastic questions over the course of the long lecture/discussion. Hopefully it helped them de-mystify the audition process somewhat. The afternoon was followed with a couple of great lessons with more excellent questions. All in all, my time on the beach was draining, but very rewarding.

And when I got home, I had the four perusal scores waiting invitingly on the front porch (I can’t help but laugh at the thought of someone stealing the package, ripping it open, and looking with wonder and disgust at what they had collected as “loot”). The pieces are:

• Turnage – From the Wreckage
• Gruber – Aerial
• Gruber – Busking
• MacMillan – Epiclesis

These are intense pieces and even just looking at the score is daunting. Like always, though, a little time to reflect and process can make even the most complex and difficult things possible. It’s a remarkable process, really. The piece by Gruber titled Busking is a new and fascinating piece. It is written for solo trumpet, banjo, accordion and strings! I haven’t really had a chance to dig into this one yet, but my first impression is a good one. Look for more thoughts about this piece in the future. There’s lots more to share (and posts will be more regular if it kills me), but for now I will add writing for my blog to the list of rewarding activities today. No complaints. Now, hopefully I didn’t make a fool of myself in this interview…

Here I am — once again blogging from the airplane, thumbing my way across my tiny virtual keyboard, able now to reflect on what was an unpredictable, edgy, adventurous, and successful music festival, a festival that defies conventional classical music world logic, that challenges its audience and orchestra in unimaginable ways, and in so doing, rewards them in an equally fascinating and unpredictable manner. Cabrillo. Marin Alsop. Santa Cruz. This is where it’s at if you want to know what is actually happening in art music today (or the so-called and woefully named “classical music” if you prefer). For two short weeks in Santa Cruz, some of the best musicians in the world convene for a musical exploration that is unparalleled and truly out of this world, and the 2009 edition certainly did not disappoint.

You may wonder about the basis on which I stake these grandiose claims. If so, pull up a google window and check these names out.

Composers in attendance in 2009: Osvaldo Golijov, Avner Dorman, Brett Dean, David Heath, Enrico Chapela, Joby Talbot, Kevin Puts, Ingram Marshall.

Other notable composers who had pieces featured in 2009: Aaron Jay Kernis, James MacMillan, Magnus Lindberg.

Throw in a fantastic orchestra, an incredibly efficient management team, and an out-of-this-world music director in Marin Alsop — one of the foremost champions of new music, a leader with artistic vision, musical integrity of the highest caliber, and a work ethic that would make Paul Bunyan weep — and the result is a sort of musical perfect storm: a two week Santa Cruzian Nirvana for music and musicians.

In case you can’t tell, I had a pretty good time at Cabrillo. I had intended to write regularly during the festival, but as it continued to unfold before me, it became more and more difficult to find time to even reflect on what was going on, much less write about it. On top of that, my second week of the festival featured a major concerto performance combined with an untimely and completely unexpected lip infection. Got your attention now? I thought maybe. No need to worry though, the concerto performance came off beautifully and received a rousing reception, all thanks to the miracle of antibiotics. Well, that and literally countless hours of preparation, but you probably guessed that part already.

As the festival approaches each year, and as I prepare the unrelenting music, I wonder how we will ever live through it this time. But each year as the festival closes, I am left wondering how we will live without it.

In the next few days I’ll recount some of my experiences from the last two weeks, the same experiences I had planned on communicating while they happened, but which sucked me in to such a degree that they left me unable to write about them as they unfolded.

Perhaps through these writings you will see why I think the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music is such an extraordinary event, and why I think it deserves even more attention than it already gets. But for right now, I’m going to raise my tray table, close my eyes, and rest — the sounds from yesterday’s concert in the Mission San Juan Bautista still soaring through my mind.

CabMuFest 09 has come and gone. I for one, am sad to see it go, but with the 2009 version disappearing in the rear-view mirror, I am already looking forward to the next one emerging on the horizon, curious about all the wonders it may have in store. Bring it on.

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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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After 4 hours of score and part study on the plane — with my eyes starting to cross and my brain showing signs of overheating — I decided it was time for a change, so once again my handy iPhone comes out to blog. It is still amazing to me that I will be able to write and post this from my phone while traveling — write in the air, post when I land. It wasn’t so long ago that connecting a phone cord to a bulky home computer was the only way to even access the internet. Now, I have a much faster connection virtually everywhere I go with a device that fits in my palm. I’m glad I didn’t have to carry-on my old tan desktop! Very difficult to fit underneath the seat in front of me.

Since my 150 or so traveling companions are not likely fans of trumpet fundamentals, I have decided that some good old-fashioned score study would be a good way to get in some necessary work. While pouring over the music for the Cabrillo Festival, I am once again struck by how difficult it is to prepare for this festival. Most pieces you play are totally unkown and unrecorded (no buying the recording to see what a piece sounds like for this festival). Not only that, much of the music is by composers whose music is unfamiliar, so you don’t have the instant knowledge of tendencies and style that you would have with a Stravinsky, Mahler, Brahms, etc. Oh yeah, and the music is just flippin’ hard too; that definitely plays a role.

So as the plane lands and I fight my way through the airport, I will likely be fingering thoughtlessly through a tricky passage, or singing some off the wall rhythm, or wondering how, as is indicated in one piece, it is going to work to have me play into the bell of a tuba with my Harmon mute on, while the tuba player wiggles the valves creating a “watery effect”. It might be cool. It might not. Either way, it will certainly be different.

Tray table is up. Time to update my blog.

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If I were to choose any trumpet concerto to sit and listen to, just for the sake of enjoyment, I believe I would choose Desolation Wilderness, the piece that has been occupying real estate on my music stand for quite some time now. The reason I would sit and listen to it isn’t because of that, however. There are plenty of concertos that I have spent a ton of time learning that will never see the light of day on a playlist of mine. This concerto by Joby Talbot offers us trumpet players something that is sorely lacking from our repertoire: a beautiful concerto that is exciting, challenging, and flashy, while giving the trumpet player that rare chance to really sing a truly heartfelt line. Simply put, it is finely crafted and dynamic music, with a soul.

I suppose it is a good sign that I feel this way as I work to get the piece ready for it’s U.S. Premier. This is one concerto that should definitely become a staple of our repertoire. I know it will of mine.

Oh yeah, and one more thing, unlike many trumpet concertos, it doesn’t have a crappy 3rd movement. Rejoice!

Joby Talbot

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