Yup! That’s me! I get to stand up first My dad has the recording zoomed in on me, I am tearful and so so so happy. Did you hear the audience get louder when I stood up? I can’t believe I was a part of this and I don’t feel like I deserve it but somehow I do. What a joyful joyful night. Like I said to run to my dad after the concert when he was in the parking lot settling my grandfather in the car – and run to hug him and I just start crying and laughing at the same time, to see tears in his eyes and what he told me…I’m seriously on cloud 9. You guys this isn’t some amazing school known for the music department, but by golly we will be now!!! My good friend wrote something after our dress rehearsal:
Go for it!!!! A compelling reason to come and watch the CSUEB Symphonic Band find its heart.
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Sunday, May 30, 2010 at 10:01pm
This is the classic underdog story.
Take a ragtag group of misfits, give them a seemingly impossible challenge and watch as they surprise everyone INCLUDING themselves to come out the other side as better people.
We are the CSU East Bay Symphonic Band.
We are students, not students, musicians, fathers, grandfathers, technicians, brothers, sisters. We all have played music for 1 year, 10 years, 50 years and we all are going to discover our hearts on Tuesday, June 1st.
We do not deserve to play Maslanka’s 4th Symphony. Or rather, we shouldn’t be playing this piece. This is Grade V+/VI stuff and it demands the very most from each individual player. A single lapse, a single broken chain can bring the entire symphony to a halt. A university such as East Bay, with its commuters, teachers, students, cannot support a musical ensemble dedicated enough to WANT to do such a piece.
And yet, we are going to do it. And we are going to do it well!
Why?
Because we are. Because the music exists to be played and damn it why NOT us!? Why shouldn’t we be able to come together, once, in time and in spirit and in harmony and dedicate ourselves to the impossible?! Give the music its respect, give it everything we’ve got? Allow the music, as Dr. Maslanka succinctly put it tonight, “to move YOU through its intertwines?” Allow the music to move YOU. To play YOU. You are the medium through which the music flows, it cannot exist without you but it does not care about you, it simply is and must be! You MUST dedicate your entire being, your whole concentration, your first, last and everything (thanks Barry White) towards allowing the music to cry out amongst ourselves and be heard!
And when the piece is over. When the last notes of that glorious C Major chord dissipate through the ceiling and pillars of the wonderful church we will be playing in you shall look upon your neighbor and smile and breathe and sigh.
You will have just discovered exactly what music is and was and forever will be and this happened because you CHOSE for it to happen, because you WANTED it to happen and because you gave yourself up towards the greater good, because you SACRIFICED yourself to the music and allowed the music to speak through you! And when it’s all over we will all be better people, better musicians, better simply because we tried!
So GO FOR IT! Sing out through the notes, play the dynamics, accent the accents and feel the energy! Because this is it! This is our task and we are going to see ourselves to the end come hell or high water and WE WILL BE GREAT!
So what if we miss notes? The energy of the rhythm and the sound in our heads and the love in our hearts for this beautiful music shall overcome our deficiencies! We will NOT SURRENDER ourselves to bad intonation! We will NOT SETTLE FOR BAD RHYTHM! We will dedicate every fabric of our being to the music and we shall triumph!
We will win if we CHOOSE to win! We will triumph if we CHOOSE to triumph and we are GOING to rock the patrons of the church with music that has NEVER been heard in those halls and NEVER been played by these musicians! WE WILL LOVE!
So go for it!