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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Okay, it isn’t done, but it is mostly done. The new website design is in place and ready to roll. The entire site is now running on WordPress, which is the same software LivMusic Interactive ran on before. WordPress allows the site to be updated much more quickly and easily, so anytime I write a post or an article, I don’t have to go through a chain of tasks that would make an Army Sergeant weep.

I will still write full articles and they’ll be stored under the Articles category. If you want to view only the articles and filter out my daily croons, you can just select the Articles category on the right sidebar. I will also be making an articles archive page, so that the articles can be referenced by title and date. To login or register (so that you can post comments on the site) just look under the Meta heading in the right sidebar.

One great way to keep up with the goings on here at LivMusic is to subscribe to the RSS feed, which is available at the top of the right sidebar along with a few of the most recent posts. You can access the full feed by clicking on the RSS icon. To subscribe to the feed simply copy and paste the URL on the feed page (http://feeds.feedburner.com/livmusic) into your newsreader. If you were a subscriber to the old LMI feed, then you will need to update to the new feed. LMI is no longer an active feed.

So there you have it, a makeover for LivMusic. Special thanks go out to Andrea Mignolo, who designed the beautiful WordPress theme, Oulipo, that I customized for this site. I hope you like it and find it useful. I know I am looking forward to writing more, and updating web pages less!

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