Bad Reeds *ARE* The End of the World

My day didn’t start off very well on Thursday. When I got to band class, I realized I had left all my good reeds at home. We were recording our district contest music and I had a solo in every single song. I managed to get through it ok, but not as well as I would have liked to and that’s the recording that the performance will be remembered by. But that would have been embarrassing on any occasion—I know that in high school band lots of people don’t bother to play on good reeds all the time but I’m trying to hold myself to something like the standards I’m expecting in years to come. And in college, episodes like that will be utterly unacceptable.

Then, at ProMusica, it was basically determined that I would have to call those places for which I could not find a name to contact yesterday. For a while, this caused in me a swell of something like panic. Not more soliciting phone calls! Not more silent auction requests! Julia asked me to burn a couple CDs at about this point in the day and I meant to call places while they were burning. I didn’t, but I began when they finished. It was funny, because overall I was fine once I did. (as before) but I was just as overwhelmed to begin with, if not more so, as I was on the first day Julia asked me to do basically the same thing.

I did finish printing letters for Ashley yesterday, and the last thing I did was help Julia make some vouchers for students participating in the side by side performance the night of the student gala. Basically, there has been this ticket challenge thing where students at high schools competed to sell the most ProMusica tickets and the top five schools get to send students to play with ProMusica at the April concert. The winning school was supposed to open the concert on their own, but the director opted out because it was a younger ensemble and he didn’t feel they were ready for that kind of experience. So they’re all getting recognized but they aren’t playing a piece alone. The point is, I was to make vouchers for them to attend the student gala for free.

It occurred to me when I was working on them that most of what I’ve done hasn’t really required much creativity or even just decision making at all. Most of what I’ve done has been putting information into a template. So it struck me that even though it wasn’t some huge important thing, this was probably one of the more significant tasks I’ve done lately because I was just told to make some vouchers that should take up about a third up of a page and ask for contact information. I know it wasn’t some huge deal and there wasn’t tons of room for error, but it was still kind of nice.