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Living History Series Podcast
Living History Series is a documentary conversation with those who are cultivating and developing their dream career/life. Whether it is first a hobby or inspiration to a growing successful business and life, we go from the earliest years to present day.
Home School to Public or even Private School
Elementary School Years
Middle School Years
High School Years
College and Beyond
Starting with Euphonium Players and Card Collectors turned shop owners; turning your passion or talent into a dream destination worthy of a no regret life is the opportunity this provides.
Find each video segment to corresponding podcast on our YT Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@livinghistoryseries
Living History Series Podcast
Music, Tech, and Life Lessons: A Conversation with David Werden
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Brace yourselves for an enlightening conversation with our esteemed guest, David Werden, as we embark on a multi-faceted journey through the intriguing world of music, technology, and life lessons. Ever wondered how the first recording of a euphonium concerto sounds like, or how Flash converts to HTML5? Stay tuned as we unravel these mysteries together, touch upon the significant role of hygiene in wind instruments, and introduce a groundbreaking concept called Coffee Studios. We'll also navigate the complexities of designing a secure website, piecing together different components to form a cohesive webpage.
David brings to the table not only his college experiences - the selection of a major, maneuvering through different teachers - but also how these experiences influence his approach to assisting students in their musical journeys. We reflect on the tumultuous times of Kent State University's protests during his final year of music degree, delve into the importance of vocal techniques and diaphragm support for singers, and share insights into David's recruitment to the military band. Listen closely as we discuss the expectations of an E6 uniform and the strategies employed to excel in the recruitment process.
Join us as we follow David's musical journey in the Coast Guard Band, the challenge of learning new music each week, and his unexpected solo performance that marked his debut. Hear about his growth within the band, his experiences with different quartets, and the delightful Yuletide Jazz Suites. We also explore the advantages of digital publishing, the process of re-recording out-of-print music, and discuss the pivotal role of life, patience, and innovative ways to engage audiences in music. This episode, packed with insights, personal stories, and experiences, is sure to inspire and captivate every music enthusiast out there. Tune in!
Find the Video Interview at https://www.youtube.com/@LivingHistorySeries
#euphoniumsummit #livinghistoryseries #farmfordreams
you, you international euphonium summit interview. Living series living history series. Interview with David Weirden, october 19, 2023.
Speaker 2Third in series you no-transcript, you well, oh, give me just a second here. Oh, oh dear, where are we? I'm going to use my headphones today, my wireless headphones shoot and for some reason it's not going well, try again. I've got to see my screen sideways here. That's why I'm tipping, tipping way over the side. Okay, hold on just a second, I'll get my wired headphones, sure, okay, okay, am I coming through now?
Speaker 2I can hear you, I don't see you okay, let's see how I can fix that dark video. There we go. Okay, they hide the control panel on the thing, so I don't always remember that you can't see everything.
Speaker 1Yes, right same with mine, so it looks like you're about to head out, david. No, just a little bit cool here today well, yeah, it's been a little cool here as well, but not nearly as cool as Minnesota right now yeah, well, it's nothing to complain about you.
Speaker 2That's actually in the 50s, but uh, what? That's sort of in between phase when the you know you don't need air conditioning, obviously, but the heat really isn't doing a lot yet either. So it can get kind of a little bit cool sometimes, especially in the far reaches of the house, which is where I am right now.
Speaker 1So for sure awesome. I have a few things to kind of go over and put into your mind. With our cohort, have an opportunity to be the first. One of our cohort members has written a piece and I haven't been given the authorization yet to note the composer. In our cohort we have so many, so I'm privileged and honored to have an amazing cohort. But there is a possibility to where um, if we can, if you know of a band that would be willing to um site, read and run a full wind ensemble, piece 30, second recording of a section uh notated by the composer, uh to make a recording and to uh be the accompaniment to the world's premier euphonium concerto that this will be accompanying very soon here, looking for a wind ensemble that would be willing to um do this on the fly in a way okay, and I'm assuming the soloist is not determined yet or is determined yet it is determined and the soloist, uh, an organization will be funding the entire composition.
Speaker 1Okay, commission gosh offhand we just we just need someone to kind of site read and make a decent recording instead of using the midi file that would go with it no, I understood.
Speaker 2Yeah, midi files are the greatest thing on the world. Um, I'm not really in touch with wind bands around here in a way that I'd be comfortable approaching this topic. Um, I could approach the coast guard band. I haven't been in touch with them for a long time either, but yeah, they are on me with the first cap band yeah, they're into doing things and they've premiered some stuff in the past.
Speaker 2The only it'd be easy if, if it were, be one one of their soloists to play it, because then it's another incentive for them to do it.
Speaker 1In this case, it'd have to be a guest artist wherever the soloist is so this would be just a layering, um, a layering type of uh opportunity at first and then the world premiere is actually going to be in the midwest uh at a any particular university okay, okay, um, then I don't know um, I wouldn't suggest approaching the coast guard band.
Speaker 2I don't think I have any particular clout with them and you'd be able to speak more about it um to them more directly and see if they're willing to do it. They might the the band is different. I talked to some folks this summer on vacation who are former band members and I also talked to um, a lady who works in the building same building the band does and she runs the sort of morale and welfare office there. So you contact band people there as they come looking for tickets to stuff and you know some of the things she can do and the mood is quite a lot different from the time I was in and I think that's been largely because of COVID.
Speaker 2The band um did virtually nothing in terms of the normal stuff you would do. You know they weren't having a lot of public concerts at the time. They weren't uh. School concerts were a very big thing for the band um, they probably are again now, but they weren't doing those, they weren't touring, and it really when I was in the band anyway now this is a long time ago the very worst times morale wise for the band, uh, was usually around February, march in that neighborhood where you weren't doing much of the normal stuff. We weren't doing recordings, we weren't touring, then there weren't a lot of concerts coming in then, just because of the, the time of year, um organizations who might invite us weren't doing concerts. Midwest, for example, the, the music festival there, doesn't occur in those months, it's in December and so on.
Speaker 2And when the band had very little engaging stuff like that to do, morale really went right in the tank because you're just you're doing I won't call it busy work, I stuff that needs to be done, but you're taking care of things that you know we'd all rather leave till a better time um to do them, um, and when you're not, before the public too. That for me, my, my spirit's role was the highest when they were on tour, even though I didn't like traveling all that much. But to play in front of different concerts every different halls every night, different audiences every night, um, that was great, that was just that's what musicians live for, you know, and when you take that away from them for a while, they get a little grumpy. So anyway, the, the mood changed, I think during those times. They also got a new conductor during those years and it was a very awkward time for the band. I think so.
Speaker 2I don't. I don't feel like I have much of a sense of of connection at this point. I haven't stopped in and met the new people yet that kind of stuff. So they've usually been out on tour or on leave during the times I was back during vacation, so I didn't have the opportunity. Anyway, you might approach them. They're a very good band and they're wind ensemble size, a little bit larger now, but um so easily wind ensemble size. They carry two euphoniums, three tubas. Um, I think they beefed up their woodwinds more than when I was in there.
Speaker 2The woodwind section was a little under underpowered numbers wise, and they picked up a few other instruments I call for tuba tunes in this particular piece yeah, they'd have to at least, and they have a harp now, harpist, and you know that they've filled in some of those holes that were not available when the band was 40 well, really 43 playing members, um, if that normally 42 actually, because we had people that were assigned permanently to doing other things operations, officer stuff like that. So anyway, um, now the it's still a wind ensemble type organization. It's not a big, huge concert band like I had in college. You don't have the five euphonium sections and you know 20 000 clarinets and stuff like that. So it might fit that part of the the opportunity pretty well and certainly they play very well. And if they're just reading, are they reading only the accompaniment or would you have somebody stand in and play the solo for a section?
Speaker 2just the accompaniment okay, then there's no particular preparation. I'm assuming they could nearly sight read it right precisely.
Speaker 1Yeah, they might very well be able to do that.
Speaker 2Yeah, you can approach them anyway. If that didn't work, I'd check the other military bands.
Speaker 1You just never know right, I've got a, we have a couple in our cohort, we have one in the west point band, now we have two, two in the president's own, and then I have personal friends at the army school of music and and I've got the first cab band that I've been in.
Speaker 2And then and then the local universities and stuff around and other university professors who are conductors and directors of their respective bands as well so if it were me in your position, I would start by approaching the top bands, go right down the list of the there's five bands that are the top, you know, one for each do d service and one for the homeland security, which is Coast Guard and then go to the almost top grade the west point is excellent band, the army field band, also an excellent band. The academy bands are also quite good, the naval academy, so it just. You know, I'd start just kind of go down the list and see, and if you have personal connections, that's good too.
Speaker 2If you're running into walls, then it's time to haul out the personal connections, because all the bands you mentioned are good bands absolutely but I don't have the very best band possible playing it, especially if they aren't really going to prepare it for a long time, because it just makes it sound better. It makes a better impression on potential listeners. So absolutely.
Speaker 1That's great, great, uh, great input.
Speaker 2Thank you yeah, no problem cool um.
Speaker 1So as far as our third in series goes, I think what we're going to go over is taking us back to um, recapping the year of the russian tour, um at university iowa in um, and then going forward from there okay.
Speaker 2I think that's about where we left off on our second in series yes if my notes are correct and, as I understand it, that you present those separately the, the talks we've had about the, my history and stuff are presented as one entity, and then the little so, uh, each each are presented as chapters yes, so then the chats we do before you say I'm starting recording now oh, all right, this is all podcasts.
Speaker 1Yep okay.
Speaker 2So before we get to that, I have an easter egg. Oh, you know what an easter egg is? Right, absolutely camera today. Can you see it on camera today?
Speaker 2I can see a backpack yep, unfortunately it's too far away to get a good view of it, but it's a. It's almost a relic at this point. It's from macro media, the people who used to build flash. You know the system that was part of the web for a long time. Yeah, and it's their studio eight product is what I got this backpack with and that's the software that is on my website since the time I built it. That's the back end software that lets it talk to databases and do stuff. So you're not going to have a chance to see a macro media studio eight backpack and in most of your travels, I suspect no, that's I might have, my pop might have.
Speaker 1Well, my mom, rather, might have something of technological reference to that time period. Um, in my might, uh, but um, that's a wonderful easter egg, um for the techies.
Flash to HTML5 and New Design
Speaker 2Anyway, the company was small when it started here in Minnesota actually oh, and I was all, there was the company that started, then they got bought out by macro media and then later I'm was there an interim, and then I can't remember but they are finally owned by adobe, so they're part of that whole big suite of everything they ever wanted to do right.
Speaker 1I remember when adobe flash was required on all web servers and hosts to run internet explore and chrome well, yeah, sort of ran within those.
Speaker 2It was the way you got all the cool animations and you know, in fact, my first, that fingering guide that you mentioned to me, um, I put that out on the web, by the way.
Speaker 1Yeah, thank you very much.
Speaker 2I was an outstanding idea you had. Thank you, um. It's been very popular the. That first version of that was produced in flash, um, because I could do the animations very easily. Then, of course, as flash became deprecated and almost frowned upon because of security holes, I had to convert it to html5. But, um, so it looks the same. It just is operating with a different engine in the background.
Speaker 1I'm really happy that that worked out as well as I thought it was going to with uh. I'm carrying that over into the youtube segment and I appreciate the shout out to that, the mental odds. It's been uh an interesting last uh couple weeks as well, as you know, with marching band competitions and uh ramping up to the summit. I have some really amazing uh things to that I've been preparing in to be launched at the summit to include something I'm calling coffee studios. Um, that will be um oh I, maybe on our fourth in series I'll be more ready to talk about it. I've been developing it over the last couple um for the last five years.
Speaker 1However, I never gave it a name till yesterday okay, coffee studio sounds good to me, I think oh, absolutely, absolutely thank you, thank you, um, but, uh, this is going to be a game changer for our entire cohort, um to be willing to, or be able to, earn a pretty nice, some pretty nice change okay. I mean, this is all free for y'all, but if I can make some uh extra income for y'all happen, what more incentive should I add?
Speaker 2that's always nice, of course you know we. We do it because all the stuff we do you know plan. We do it because we love doing it right. But at some point you have to have some money to do stuff and to buy. Do I want to buy another mouthpiece now?
Speaker 1you know stuff like that so right, hey, did you uh by chance get to see that? Uh, a new giddings mouthpiece, ellen uh took a picture of this morning, ellen bearer no, I didn't yeah, it's a pretty sexy mouthpiece. It's really nice looking. Uh, it's, it's very. It's got some nice curves okay, I'll check it out um, it's really interesting.
Speaker 1I was like I can't find anything on his webpage. It was definitely a custom mouthpiece um MVWR1 or I. I don't know how he rates his mouthpieces, but it's a really smoky mouthpiece. Looks like um. So as far as playability and stuff like that, it looks like it'll.
Speaker 2It'll attract a significant portion just by the way it looks well, that company does a lot of social posting, so I'm sure I'll see it before too long. Right, I haven't spent a lot of time on socials. The last several days. My website's been a little weird.
Speaker 2Something happened I think it had to be a serial update or something that changed the setting and so the, the website itself, the dwordencom site, was working, but when you got to the forum a lot of people saw it looked like a very old html page.
Speaker 2It was just all white background and links and stuff, and what happened was they forced the site into SSL, so secure mode.
Speaker 2Yeah, you know I don't do e-commerce, I haven't been worried about it and they they finally got that fixed and that once the site was working again I couldn't even get into the control panel because it made changes in settings during that time.
Speaker 2Once it was working again, I actually did switch it back and had it now working on html and SSL. So the, the main site, is secured and the forum is secured now, which again, there is no security issue for people, but a lot of people feel better when the site's secure and Google also has been forcing that really hard on web developers they'll downrank your site a little bit when you do searches if it's not secure, so that may help the site anyway and I've been meaning to do it. It's just, it's a very, a lot of lots, a lot of work to follow up and make sure I haven't missed anything where there's mixed resources on a single page or get a little warning. You know some items on this page amount security, want to proceed, that kind of thing. So I'm trying to find those little corners and fix them again, not that it matters for anybody who's on your page what's that?
Speaker 1there's a lot of corners and a lot of areas that are less accessible, as in. You have to click a few links to get there yes, and there's a couple.
Speaker 2I've forgotten about it. I was doing this project. A couple of our updated to the new theme, for example. So but yeah, there are actually some. Well, most of the pages you see are not a single web page. Behind the scenes there are several different component pages that go into it because you don't want to make the same of the menu, for example. It is on the main thing, we don't want to make that on every single page. So you have a module you pull in for that and the result is there's somewhere between two and three thousand code pages that I have to go touch to to make sure this is all working right. So, luckily, most of them seem to be, which is not what I expected.
Speaker 2So, anyway, that's been taking a lot of time, but I'll, I hope, to get back on the social a little more seriously soon well, there's the picture, there's the uh mouthpiece oh, not what I was thinking, almost going back to a classic shape like you might see in the old, early 1900s, except they would have a little more definition around the rim in those days, but that yeah, but the bowl shape looks about the same um as those mouthpieces.
Speaker 1It reminds me of a con helberg almost yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's a little smoother and longer. Look in the helberg is but this. I've got an old tenor horn mouthpiece. It looks a lot like that one that's it.
Speaker 2Like I said, the rim area is a little sharper on it, but otherwise it's very much the same shape. And I have found is that I think we talked about before that the shape of the mouthpiece affects the amount of mass, the distribution of the mass between rim and and backbore, and that does affect the sound. It affects not just the output of the sound but also the, the immediate feedback you get, what resonates out of the mouthpiece. It gives you an impression of what your sound is, even if that doesn't actually get out to the audience. So it can make a big difference.
Speaker 1I'm curious do you actually warm up your mouthpiece before you? Uh, out of all our discussions and and my own personal habits and I'm sure those that are listening, uh, warm up their horns differently. But as far as you go in your warm up, do you put? Do you warm up your mouthpiece in your hand and warm up on buzzes first, before placing the mouthpiece into the receiver?
Mouthpiece Hygiene and Breath Training Discussion
Speaker 2only if the if it's been stored outside and it's cold. These days the horn lives inside most of the time. When I was working in my day job, um, the horn had to ride with me to work and sat out in the parking lot. You know, it was maybe zero degrees or less here and I'd get to church then after after work and then, yes, I would take the mouthpiece into the bathroom. I'd run warm water through it, which is a good chance to clean it out too. My mouthpiece was maintaining better hygiene during those days and it typically did have. Now I do clean it every day, but back then I didn't anyway. Um, I didn't like the shock of a super cold mouthpiece on my job that I was afraid that might make the muscles react. Funny, even if it didn't actually physically make them, psychologically you'll feel something and react to it. You know my mouth might do weird things, so I would always warm it up to somewhere near body temperature.
Speaker 2Speaking of mouthpieces, I have another. That's not an Easter egg, it's just a little hidden thing. You can't see, I have my vibras with me.
Speaker 1I was looking at that part of our notes from series two. Oh, that's really cool.
Speaker 2Isn't it so the mouthpiece you know fits in there.
Speaker 2The little end piece here. I can pull it the right way. Is that the wrong way? No, it's the right way. There we go. The mouthpiece is the receiver. Essentially that comes out of it. Oh wow, so you can put a cornet mouthpiece in here or a French horn mouthpiece or a tuba mouthpiece, and then, once it's assembled, the little push buttons on the back are sort of flush. You can't really see them, but you just get close to the microphone here. The microphone is actually here now. Is that picking up anything? But actually that's it.
Speaker 1Maybe put your earbud into Hold on.
Speaker 2The microphone on your earbud is right here.
Speaker 1Okay.
Speaker 2It's probably trying to block it out, but all you hear is it vibrating right now. So I'm like this put on the chops. You get a little vibrating massage kind of with your own mouthpiece. So this is. You know, it's the mouthpiece I use. I can put it there and it feels normal After a hard session. The theory is get that vibration helps or encourage circulation again.
Speaker 1That's really interesting. So that makes me I keep forgetting. Remember what I was talking to you about on our last in series, about the breath thing I was telling you about, and I showed you that picture. I'll do it for the next in series with you. How's your water going?
Speaker 2Good, I've got two supplies. I've got my warm water in here, which is what I drink instead of coffee or tea. Right, and of course I'm like classic John Deere Logged from my cold water, so I'm all set.
Speaker 1I think I'm going to bring it in for our next in series. So I'm going to write breath contraption Next, making a note to have it for next time Should be fun yeah, I've been. So I ended up. It's a really intense workout I didn't think it would really impact my breathing and stuff like that. And when I actually set it forth and did the Because it has an app that you work with, basically a timer app, and I set it to max and it has you doing 10 reps back to back to back to back there's no breaks, 10 in the sequence or up to 10.
Speaker 1And so I didn't think anything of it and I was just doing it on my own without the app. And then, when I actually did it with the app, I'm like the way it was, the way they have the training done I was like, oh, good grief, I'm going to have to turn it down a little bit. I was like, wow, okay, but I've noticed a difference in the air capacity and the way I buzz, as well as my low range and my the higher range, the triple octaves and such. But I've noticed my breath support's a lot better in those areas, just buzzing in the car. And so I'm really intrigued by that, and I don't know if it's because of that, and I'm certainly thinking it is because the whistling dynamic that we talked about last time I've been working on that as well, and it's, I feel, like that dynamic has only gotten better by doing that breath training.
Speaker 2Well, you would think an app would help something like that. There are silly apps out there that don't do much, but I've talked about this in lessons. I'm not sure if it's made it to any of my instructional videos, but I have this concept of this little voice on the back of your head and it's sometimes just working against what we'd really like to do because it's trying to take care of you. So if you're trying to play a oh Daudi-Dazsion 16th pattern Marches at hands across the sea, I think Anyway, Like that, that's fine, that's easy, it's in B flat and not too hard. But if it's a hard key somewhere back here, it's telling you, take it slower and it's hard. You can't move your fingers that fast.
Speaker 2Something's back here is trying to coax you back a little bit from doing it exactly right, and the same with the volume. You might want to punch a note at things like that. Your body's trying to Now wait a minute. Do we really want to do this? It's stuck in guessing and I think to me the app is what takes away that factor a little bit. It forced you to do things you might think in normal practice if you weren't running a metronome, for example. Yeah, I'm holding that note long enough. But then you put a metronome at 60 and try to hold it for two full measures, something like that. All of a sudden it's really a long time.
Speaker 1You know something that's really interesting that I've even noticed talking to our cohort the decibel meter and adding that into the practice, learning to synchronize that with the metronome and seeing if you are indeed controlling that decibel, if it is the same volume, throughout that whole sequence. Yes, I love the background there Throughout the whole sequence and I ended up getting a decibel reader, especially with my kids. I haven't added it to my practice or anything yet, but I ended up finding this today.
Speaker 2Oh, hardware meter Okay.
Speaker 1Yeah, and let's see if I can optimize pitch and stuff like that, even my kiddos, if they even want to take that up as a challenge to get to know they're playing a little bit more intimate.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1That's a nice tool.
Speaker 2I'd love to have one of those to play with. I've got a software app on my phone that does it, but I'm never sure how accurate it really is. I think it's relatively accurate in terms of the. I'm now playing here on the app and then I play here on the app. That means I'm playing louder. I think that part's fine, but I don't know if the actual decibel reading is, you know, would follow the same standard that a hardware device might follow. But I still.
Speaker 2I've tried it a few times lately, after we talked about that again. You've triggered my thinking in some ways. That hadn't bothered to go for a while, I guess. So I got that out because I was having trouble with one particular phrase in a piece I did a while back. That was a slower, emotional piece and I thought does that peak at this point really? Am I really peaking or am I just telling myself I am, you know, just going up higher is I want to get louder? So my sort of bad? And no, by golly it is. It is actually getting louder, but I wasn't totally sure I was, because you can, you can fool yourself as tone, color changes a little bit. That can give you the impression that it's louder and yet it really isn't louder in terms of what gets out to the audience. They might still hear it better because if it gets brighter you know they hear the tone better. But anyway, just those tools can be good like a metronome, like a tuner, electronic tuner, and they're all good tools if you know how to use them.
Speaker 1Yeah, but you can't necessarily rely on them, apparently, because you know software does fail and batteries do make things you know a bit more tricky and you've got to know that you know to replace your batteries in your metronome and tuner and to be on top of that kind of like the smoke detector. At least the smoke detector will beep at you if it's starting. I mean it'll beep at you, but that's that you're thinking it's in time and it may not be.
Speaker 2Now, mine is a little battery symbol that flashes on screen for a while, so that gives me 10 minutes or so, you know, but yeah.
Speaker 1I yeah you're right.
Speaker 2Yeah, I still am reading. If you ever see me playing anything on YouTube or in person, it'll be from a piece of paper. I haven't gone to the iPad yet. I probably will at some point, but at this point I like my paper. Thank you, I'm going to keep using it because I oh, there's this horrifying video.
Speaker 2It's a, an accompanist I think it was a cellist doing the solo, and the piano accompanist is going away in the background and she reaches up to turn the page. She didn't have a foot pedal, apparently, so she clicks, you know, to turn it, but hit the thing wrong or I'm not sure what happened, but it went into the edit mode, so didn't turn the page for. And then so she clicks a couple more times and it went down to the. It went out, I mean, went down to the desktop so she was seeing all her icons, it's like that while she's trying to play with one hand and keep a little of the music going, as far as she can remember. Well, the cellist is totally unaware that cellist was out there, you know, just doing this stuff. And anyway, those, those moments sort of horrified me.
Speaker 1So I'm not quite ready yet. One of our cohort actually had something like that happen, but it wasn't the edit. It went into an update automatic update and it shut it down and it started during the performance, during the recital.
Speaker 1I think that was one of my, one of our earlier in series in our cohort. I almost want to say Carson tells the story. Someone at the beginning of our cohort has this story and I don't remember which cohort has it, but they relate that story of had to do the automatic update, forced update, during the performance.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 1And you can't stop it.
Speaker 2Interestingly, I heard that story locally happen to somebody. Oh really, and yeah, and I'm thinking I think that was early in the day of the iPad doing this kind of stuff and people just haven't figured out yet how you have to set them. I'm sure there are all kinds of things online that tell you don't, you know, automatically install updates. You have to tell it to install them, that kind of thing you can. Also the recording software.
Speaker 2I use the Shure software that came with my microphone that I plugged here into the iPhone. That also tells you to put it in airplane mode and also put on do not disturb, you know. So no text or anything like that come in. You don't want to think multitasking while it's trying to do a stream of video and audio, which is hard to do. I mean, anything can interrupt that and give a little bubble in the recording that you wouldn't want. So that actually came with the machine. As you install it it tells you this stuff and it seems to me that should be an opening screen on an iPad you're going to use for music or the app whatever. Before you use this, like in terms of conditions you know, before you use this, do you know? But I probably will get one someday.
Speaker 1I love that.
Speaker 1That's great For those that are listening to this particular podcast with David Werden on his third in series.
Speaker 1Thank you so much again for being part of our cohort that reminds me of.
Speaker 1I'm sitting here now. I'm going back over our in series conversations and we actually talk about it is right here and you're talking about how our conversation led to you kind of reframing something and like seeing if it was what you were telling yourself is true, with the sound and the projection. And at the end of our last series with you on the podcast, you can find that around the two hour and 15-ish mark of actually wrote the timestamp down on that about acoustics and making up to sound, because you're talking about the host, the song, oh, yes, yes, and the reference there and to get that sound out and that will be part of the whole as we go forward into the video recording of this, going back into the when the band was preparing their tour for Russia and then going forward from that. So that's really cool that that interplay of communication and putting those, the elements that we find ourselves communicating on, into reality or actual practice of sorts. So that's really cool to see that come full circle like that.
Speaker 2Yeah, it's well, we live and we learn, and we learn in many different ways. Absolutely, read an article that inspires you. Or, in this case, I had the experience of sitting in the guy's bell and you know, before the tour and sitting out in the audience after the tour to learn the difference between those two situations and why he was doing something. That seemed odd when I was so close to him and seemed perfectly wonderful when I was out in the audience.
Speaker 1Okay, so I want to recap that in the actual video segment We'll start there, all right. Okay, that sounds like sounds Starting point to our third in series. So, for those that are listening or and or watching on the podcast video segment because there's some really cool things that I've been developing with what's going to happen with these podcast segments or long cast form in the video, I've got some really cool things coming on for that. Oh man, I can't wait to tell you all discipline.
Speaker 2You both have discipline.
Speaker 1Indeed, the stuff is still in the. I just started coming up with the stuff yesterday for that particular segment, so still fairly new and defining and refining within that. So we'll see how that goes and maybe by the fourth in series you'll be one of the first to get to hear what's coming on for that.
Speaker 2Okay, I'm hard of hearing it whenever I get to hear it.
Speaker 1Absolutely. Let's see Going over to here. Choose virtual background. There we go. Cool, that's rolled Recording in progress. Hello everybody, and welcome back to the International Euphonium Summit Living History Series with our guest for his third in series, david Wehrd. And thanks for coming back on and being part of our series and part of our cohort.
Speaker 2Sorry, mate, it's been my pleasure and I've learned a lot as we talk, so this was great fun.
Speaker 1It is. It's quite exceptional and for those that are watching this now and haven't been able to listen to the podcast just yet, take a look over there. Without saying anything else, there's an Easter egg in the picture. If someone can identify that without hearing this podcast and the answer to that and list it below, put the answer below In the segment below. Here you can find out more information on David Wehrd and all his other interviews in series with this at internationaleuphoniumsummitcom David-Wehrd. And for now, as we move and maneuver toward launching the International Euphonium Summit the actual, virtual each year and will be established, with a portfolio soon to be at farmfordreamscom and that's to be updated soon. All the links as they go live will be listed down below. Make sure you subscribe and just follow this journey. Thank you again. And as we covered in the podcast at the end of that last short sequence, the getting to prepare for the tour of Russia with your college band and that sequence.
Speaker 2Did you want me to recount the one story about the?
Speaker 1Euphonium Soul yeah sure.
Speaker 2Let's go ahead. Yeah, because that was a monumental experience for me at the time. The background on that is in my freshman year in college, the University of Iowa band was going to Russia. That was a very big deal. We got a lot of people all of a sudden who decided they would get their masters that year, who were out teaching but thought that would be a good year to come back and get their masters so they could play in the band and have that experience.
Speaker 1I was auditioning for the band.
Speaker 2And they made it. But after several weeks I began to realize how much it was going to cost to go. Some costs were covered but a lot of them weren't. Then I had to back out. I just couldn't afford it. The band left and I stayed home and had some good experiences there on the other bands that were working.
Speaker 2But during the rehearsals for the band the first Euphonium player, who was Dick Butler and he was a fine trombone Euphonium player he had been in the Army band, I believe had studied with Falcone, and he was a brash and was just an amazing player. We got to the whole second suite and he played the solo in that. I was sitting third chair, so I was one chair away from him. I felt like my head was being knocked over. She was playing so loud. The term came up in the postcard band about our bass trombone player blow-drying person's hair in front of him. It felt like that kind of experience. I thought my gosh, why is he playing so loud? Then that came and went.
Speaker 2Then the band went on tour. They came home and did a celebration concert when they got home to play some of the music they had just done on tour. I was in the audience, of course. For that they did the whole second suite, which I was very happy about. I liked this piece a lot.
Speaker 2When Dick played that solo when I was out in the audience, it sounded perfect. It didn't sound too loud, it sounded pretty and musical and as loud as it needed to be. So was Claire, who was the boss right then, so to speak, who had the important line right then. That made a huge impression on me, on a difference, especially with the euphonium, when our bells were pointing up and to the right and we were sitting at the time from the conductor's point of view, we were about a third of the way for the right-hand side of the band, which means our bells are pointing backwards some. That was a situation we encountered a lot when I was in the Coast Guard as well and other bands that you often are not pointing in the ideal direction to get sound out to the audience.
Speaker 2It takes a lot of work to do that. The trick, of course, is to learn to play very loudly, which Dick had learned to do, without sounding loud, without sounding like you're playing a fortissimo, when the solo is perhaps mezzo forte and dolce or something. You want to have that smooth song effect of a folk song which Cole's got that melody from, and you want to have that come to the audience as a pretty song, not to disguise playing really loud, and now you can hear it. So you want to have the smoothness and the delicate tone and such. That was again a remarkable experience for me, because I've closed it sound like he was way overdoing it up front. No, not at all. In that same solo. I did talk about this on a video, one of the instructional videos I have on YouTube. What's that?
Speaker 1Oh yeah, I'll upload it to that video below.
Speaker 2Thank you. There's a, so you've got three half notes in cut time and those are not to be really accented, they're just part of the melody. But out front I've heard that line often played by people and it sounds like. So you need to learn to push those out. And again, that's something I learned after this experience with Dick Butler. I didn't realize he was doing that, but you need to push them with your gut more, not with your tongue. You don't want to smack them Ta ta, ta. That'd be the wrong effect. You've got to go huh, huh, huh Behind it in order for those notes to be heard that you actually are separating them. But just the tongue separation on those is not going to be enough unless you're actually shortening each half note, which you don't want to do. So anyway, there's a lot of things like that that we can learn. I'm very thankful to have that experience that I did have and in fact, if I had gone on the tour, I never would have gotten to hear the band out front, so I would have thought he was playing too loud the whole time. So it was, in a way, a better learning experience anyway for me in that one regard. So that was an opportunity I missed and fortunately the Coast Guard gave me the chance to go to Russia in 1989. So we didn't get to go over there with that band. So later I at least got to see the country and see what it was about.
Speaker 2In the 60s, when I was in college, there was all these mysteries about Russia. We didn't know nearly as much. There was no internet back then, so we couldn't learn a lot of things and I was not a world traveler of any means. So they were preparing us for what you might have to do to travel in places where there's no laundry on the hotel and things like that, how you have to actually, oh, they recommended certain kinds of shirts you could buy that were good, drip, dry shirts, which is a term they don't use much anymore. I don't think so you could wear it by laundering them in the sink and have them be OK for the rest of the week, whatever. And so, anyway, I learned a few things like that along the way as they were instructing us. But when they stayed home, I had the experience of the conductor, mark Kelly, who was one of the more experienced conductors. I'll say I don't want to say old, because I'm probably older than he is, or he was then, but had a lot of experience conducting bands and he had his own style and I remember I think it was Mark I've never tried to be a serious conductor, partly because I've had too many complaints about conductors in my brain, the ways I could probably make things easier for us, and didn't choose to do so.
Speaker 2But a big problem when you've got a whole band, especially in the university bands with large ensembles you've got your stick up here, you're conducting with and you want the band to play together, and that's no problem if you're just beating time and it's moving along. But when there's a pause in the music or a tempo change and we now have a new entrance, that has to be here. Well, it wasn't together to his satisfaction and Mr Kelly would say no, no, it's not going to be, you've got to follow my beat. So I want the attack to be right here. Well, I didn't know. I saw no difference between you know, other than the height. I didn't see any motion difference. I thought okay, so but I guess it worked. Anyway.
Speaker 2So my college experience actually I had the first year or two yeah, I think it was two years. We had Fred Ebb's, who was rather legendary among Midwest band directors and he was a very stern conductor. We had Frank Pearsall for the rest of my term there for the main band and he was a super nice guy, just a very sweet person. It could be harsh when they needed to, but he was just a very nice guy totally different personalities. Then I had Mark Kelly. So I had three different band directors, not to mention the directors of the ensembles, the brass choirs and so on, who were different as well. Some were the grad assistants. One was the trombone professor, who was a very nice conductor and very great musician.
Speaker 2A lot of learning chances there, and as a euphonium player in the 1960s at a major state university I didn't have a euphonium professor to study with and there was no seat for that there. So I had, other than the year of my recital, my senior recital. That year I got the professor I was just talking about. He was a trombone player but he did play euphonium pretty well and he taught really well, especially on musical things, which I felt was what I learned most from his year. But I was there five years.
University Experience and Career Path
Speaker 2That's a long story too. I won't go into right now. That'd be perfect. Okay, I'll make it a short story. I was dumb, not IQ-wise. I was a dumb kid. I didn't know how to apply myself, didn't know how to work my life, basically because I didn't read the catalog before I went, I just counted on my advisor, and my advisor was a very nice foreign player but not a very good faculty advisor for a student, and he let me get into all these things I shouldn't know, courses that didn't account toward my major, really. So anyway. So after five years I did graduate.
Speaker 1So what did you go into the university as a major as? And then did that ever change?
Speaker 2No, I was a music education major when I went in. That's where they came out as. But I saw some other, oh, ethics. I thought that sounded fun. Let's take the ethics course.
Speaker 2Well, it turned out that I was already satisfied with whatever, with the humanities I'm not even sure what section that would be, but it just sounded interesting. So I took that one and several other mistakes I made along the way. So I learned a little about life, at least in great time. And anyway, during those five years I had Professor Hill one year. The other four years I had four different teachers and that was actually a rather remarkable experience in terms of pedagogical knowledge. I got out of there with five different concepts of teaching people that I could learn from, and I had one guy was a bass trombone player who had been in the Woody Herman band and he was a great player. The other was Robert Wavy, was a tuba player but also did quite well in euphonium. I had another trombone player, henry Howie, who again played euphonium, and the one really interesting one was Arthur Swift, who was the other.
Speaker 2We had a primary competent professor, but then Arthur Swift was the other one there and Arthur was a troubleshooter. He didn't say that he needed to with me, but he had actually considered part of his gift and his mission to help students that have problems, physical problems, things they do wrong. So when he'd hear somebody that sounded bad with a really bad attack, the way you might build up pressure before you release. So instead of going ta, they went ta, like that, build up pressure behind the tongue. He'd practiced doing all these things wrong so he could demonstrate to students and say here's how it sounds, and that also gave him insight into what they're doing physically. What do I have to do with my tongue and my mouth to sound like that student sounds? So it actually was quite good at straightening people out that had problems.
Speaker 2So anyway, so the that was my that was, yeah, arthur Swift, I believe, was his name, I think, well, it was Swift, I think it was Arthur Great player. But as it happens, I think is, if I had to pick his excellent skill, his most excellent skill, that'd be helping the straightened kids out, because that our primary teacher, the primary trumpet professor, was known to not be very good at that. He played wonderfully, but he never had problems playing. He just sort of picked up the horn and always worked for him. So therefore he had trouble if a student had a punchy attack that wasn't working. Well, he had no idea why that was.
Speaker 2So they might spend a semester then with Arthur, you know, and come back to John for the rest of the major, perhaps. So I heard the same thing about Maurice Andre, by the way, the great French trumpet player. It's all just been easy for him. So if you want to study with him, you go there to learn the literature and learn beautiful musicality and interpretations. You don't go there to learn how to play the trumpet. So there's different kinds of teachers and, like I said, I benefited from a rather diverse group. So that was great fun for me.
Speaker 1So take us through the fifth and final year of your music head degree there.
Speaker 2Okay, the fifth and final year was actually my second senior year. My first senior year is when I did my recital. So my second senior year was a rather bad time to be a college student. There were a lot of protests about the war there were. That was the other had to face up to some courses I'd sort of put off. For example, I had to take vocal techniques. So I took that one that year and it seemed like there were one or two others as well.
Speaker 2So I just wasn't enjoying myself much. I hated to sing in front of people. Now I don't mind it. I mean I've learned more as I sing in lessons. I have to do that, especially in masterclass. I can't just pick up your horn all the time. Sometimes you have to save time and just sing what you want to hear. So I've gotten more comfortable with that. My voice had gotten perhaps better at doing it. But she did teach me a few things the instructor One about using your diaphragm muscles and those controversy over what that actually is. But the fact is she got me to think more about that and supporting the tone properly. And I learned from her that I had a Midwest twang in my voice. I didn't know that I did. I thought I don't have an accent. Those guys on Boston have an accent, the guys in California do it. It's down south too. I don't have an accent. Well, apparently I did. But that semester I had her was my final semester.
Speaker 2And if you haven't, if the listeners haven't learned about Kent State and the protests there and the tragedy there, that would be a good thing to study on just to learn history. But like some of the protests we've seen here, they can be dangerous if you're walking around one. And there were sit-ins, there were students starting fires, places, things like that. But after Kent State there were actually some. There were multiple students killed by I think it was the National Guard troop, if I remember right that just there was a big confrontation and somebody thought there was an order to fire and there wasn't. It was a tragedy and the reason you want to avoid those things, you know. I'm not sure if it was actually anybody's fault or just something that happens. That's why you don't want to get in those situations.
Speaker 2But anyway, that happened just before the end of the semester and the protests were so bad on campus, most places, including Iowa, that they told us we didn't have to take finals. We just we'd get whatever grade we had based on the work we'd done so far, which in my case was. I don't think it was either a loss or a gain. I don't think I was a student who knew very well how to cram, so I wasn't hoping for finals. To, you know, bring my grade up a little bit higher. I was pretty consistent all the way through the semester, I suppose. So we didn't have finals that year, which was very strange.
Speaker 2That same year I was very eligible for the draft. They had a lottery system where you you were given a number and the lower the number, the more likely you were to get drafted. And the numbers went up to 365 and I was 63. So very good likelihood of being drafted. I took my draft physical that year and that was sobering. A little different experience For a kid who didn't really hadn't done much at that point to go up and be facing that. But I found that I did very well on that. That geometric instruction test they gave you all set to. Yeah, they were set to send me to engineering school after I got through that if I came in.
Speaker 2But I didn't see myself as a soldier type. I wasn't good physically and whatnot, and I'd never been an athlete Nothing wrong with my body, I was a decent strength and whatnot. I just I couldn't. I couldn't do a layup shot in basketball to save my life. I mean, I had no coordination in that sense. So basic training could have been interesting for me. But I decided, well, I need to take sun charge over this. I wasn't going to go to Canada, I wasn't that type, but I wanted to use what I thought I did in life, which is playing music.
Speaker 2So I looked into the bands and I learned about the Coast Guard band because a buddy of mine from high school, who was here ahead of me all the way, had left school early to join the Coast Guard band and he told me all about it. I found out later from him he had a very bad experience there himself. He hated it because he hated the war. He didn't make the band, he just hated the whole war idea and he was a problem for the band directors sometimes. And anyway, but I'll give him credit. He gave me absolutely no hint of that in the letters he sent me as I was asking him about this. He gave a very balanced, what I thought to be true. When I got there he said here's the downside, here's the upside, and by go, he was right on. So that's how I liked the job. I liked the sound of it, I liked the fact it wasn't in Washington DC.
Speaker 2I came from Davenport, which is about 100,000 people. That was okay with me, but the whole Washington metro area just didn't appeal to me very much. So I targeted the Coast Guard band, but they didn't have a good system for auditions back then. It was taking them a long time to get back to me and I was getting concerned.
Speaker 2So I did send a tape out to the Army Band as well and they invited me out to audition and I unfortunately didn't know they were going to pay my way. I got lost in the communications somehow, or I would have gone. So I was thinking, oh my gosh, I borrowed money to go to the Coast Guard audition. Can I borrow more money now to go to this one? And in the meantime I heard back in the Coast Guard that yeah, you're okay, come on in. So that's what I chose to do. But so that was all part of my senior year. It was an exciting year and not the best year of my life in terms of the whole protest experience and the whole mood of the country was not very happy back then.
Speaker 1So that all happened during the second senior year.
Speaker 2Correct yeah.
Speaker 1So first year senior residual, you're finding yourself second year no finals, Like during the. At what point of your second senior year did you start looking at that military band positions and stuff like that and start preparing for those, and how did you prepare for those?
Speaker 2I only had an inkling of what my friend had been through. I can't remember how I heard she wrote me a letter of what after the fact, just out of the blue, before I actually got into that year, had some inkling that there was a Coast Guard band and didn't even know there was one. First of all because you never heard about it. In Iowa, you didn't hear about Coast Guard band or the Coast Guard at all as far as that goes. So I wouldn't have known about it that way, except for David and I know about that one.
Recruiter and Military Band Recruitment
Speaker 2But frankly, I didn't start looking at it. I wasn't good at planning ahead. I didn't start looking at it probably until first of the, the first part of my second semester. I started thinking about it then, as reality began to sink in, that I was going to get out and I was going in the military. You know, one way or the other I was going to go in. So now, okay, that's the fact, what are you going to do about it? So at some point that sank in and I started talking to people a little bit about it.
Speaker 1We did have a recruiter come through.
Speaker 2Oh, two years before that, I think, he was in the Air Force band. The Omaha band at the time had a band in Omaha. He was a recruiter that came through and he said well, our teacher told us, go and play for him. If you want to, he'll be happy to listen to you and tell you what to think. Well, he was all set to hire me. That was my sophomore year, I think, and it was a good experience because he had me do some sight reading and I was a good sight reader it doesn't scare me at all and he gave me the piece that was in my favorite key for some reason, which was in TroubleClaf, g Minor.
Speaker 2I used to practice some pieces in high school and I was just playing around that happened to be in G Minor. So I, just in terms of trying different notes and trying to learn to add lib which I never did, by the way I fooled around a lot of G Minor and it was all 16th note, fast scales and whatnot and 6, 8. And it just didn't look scary at all, I just played right through it. So he was all set to hire me, but not really. He actually told me you want to finish school. He said it wasn't like some of the recruiters to see on Private Benjamin or some of the movies Just out to make a quota.
Speaker 2He was honest with me and straight forward. He said finish school and then come back and talk to us if you want. We would have to talk to him and I suppose I could have. But by that time now that was since I was in the five year plan sophomore year, what's this finger down here? So I had three more years after that yet. So I sort of but that was the end of the course.
Speaker 2Yes, yeah, and I'm sure I would have liked it. I learned later the Air Force had a very nice music program and their bands were quite good, the Post Bands, of course. The Air Force band itself was very good. But, as I say, that's not the path I chose. I decided to look into the Post Guard band. I just had that focus in my head because of my friend and that sounded like the deal for me and I'm glad it worked out. I was on pins and needles for quite a while but it did work out. Now shall I go into that next? Yes, please, okay.
Speaker 2So now I didn't know anybody really close who was in the military. I didn't have an older brother who was in the military or something like that. I did have an older brother in law who was in the Air Force, but I'd hardly met him at that point. So because he was deployed and by the time I did get to knowing when he was moved back closer, he was no longer in the Air Force. So I didn't know much about the military from him or anybody else. So I didn't have an idea what it was like. They sent me down. They told me that. Well, coast Guard told me that when I came in I'd be coming in as an E6. I wasn't sure what that was but they said, oh, it's the first class, probably the opposite. Okay, but you'd be wearing chief's uniform. I said what? I didn't know what that was either. That's the E7 uniform. But they wanted the whole band to look alike and the differentiation there was, the E7 wore the more the officer style but the E6 was had more of the sailor type you know clothing at the time and they wanted the whole band to have one uniform appearance. So you came in at E6, you put on a chief's uniform without the chief's collar brass, and then you did your thing. So I sort of know a little bit about that.
Speaker 2They sent me to St Louis to be recruited because there was no Coast Guard recruiter in Iowa and then I drove out. They told me about they would pay for the move at a mobile home at the time that they paid to move out there. So I went out and the Coast Guard had no basic training at all at that time. They still don't. They have an indoctrination that started before I left. It was about a two-week indoctrination program in Cape May, their training base where you get your uniforms issued and things like that. Learn about military protocols, learn saluting people's import, you know that kind of stuff. Then you get sent to the band after that.
Speaker 2But I just went right into the band. So they immediately sent me up to the tailor to get uniforms, although I had some that my friend had left when he left. He left me his locker and uniforms and whatnot, and so I had some that I could wear. So they fitted me out and in two days I was off to Martha's Vineyard for the band's first gig. It was a parade and concert situation once we got there. So okay, fine, I've done both. I've done parades, I've done concerts. So we got there and we started down the parade and you've all seen college marching bands, I'm sure. They march with high steps. So when you march you lift your leg up. So it's like this so the top of your thigh is parallel to the ground. Right Chin points straight down. Your toes are supposed to point down. You march faster than military bands usually.
Speaker 1So you did what's that I'm assuming, that sometimes I get into trouble by assuming like this, but I'm going to take a step at it just because. So the military training in indoctrination and everything they didn't cover actual marching formations and stuff like that at all.
Speaker 2They didn't have the indoctrination. When I came in I went straight to the band. So no, there was nothing, wow, and it was like I said, the whole recruitment system back then was very loose. The band had only four years before that, I believe become a congressional band. Before that I was the academy band. So their workload was a lot different. Their responsibilities were different.
Speaker 2So anyway, we're on Martha's venue, we're doing our first parade and I'm marching in the front row and I had my king euphonium with me. The front valves and the bells will run aside, pointing forward, and I'm doing. I did learn not to high step, which I really didn't like actually, I mean, it was more work to high step. But when you're high step you come down on the ball of your foot. When you walk down the street you come down your teal. So my mouthpiece is bouncing around like this. You know, doing what I'm not used to doing just walking. But I was doing this thing as I was going, like we did in high school, and then at the base of my lungs, I kept reaching over and grabbing my bell. He'd hold his horn and reach over and grab my bell, so I couldn't do that.
Speaker 1No, don't do that.
Speaker 2And it took me a while to break the habit. But by then my second parade or so, I was better at not doing that. But they'd reel those things into you really hard when you're in college. Much my experience in college was much tighter discipline than I had when I got in the Coast Guard. Those guys are serious when you're in college marching band, you know, for the football games, so anyway. So I got to see Martha's Vineyard that was kind of cool on my first trip, Got to ride the ferry boat and stuff which I don't think I ever had before then and gradually learned how things work.
Musical Journey in the Coast Guard
Speaker 2We got to the back of the Academy then after that and went right into the summer concert series where they did a week a concert a week at the Academy. Every Sunday there was a concert and they had a good local following because they'd been doing that for some years before I got there and it was great music. That's where I that first summer I started to think. You know, my original thought was I'd serve four years. That was the contract for enlisting. Serve four years, get out and go be a college or a high school band director, which is what I'd planned to be, and I enjoyed playing so much in the band. I thought this is fun because we had new music every week and we had some of the old, all the Demetrius, singer and townhouser and those kind of things Fingals, Cave and Broadway tunes and marches and all these kind of things that are just fun music to play. And also, frankly, I got bored in college preparing like a Pasacalli infu.
Speaker 2That was one of the pieces on the concert we worked two months on. Well, you know, the euphonium part's not that much fun in that piece. It's not challenging other than to play in good style and intonation and stuff. But there's no technical challenges. But here I was getting challenged every week to work up pieces I'd never played before. That had technique. You had to be able to play notes and stuff fast. Notes I went by quick, so that was great fun.
Speaker 2The first concert this piece has followed me. The first concert one of the pieces was the whole second suite. So we are there in the first rehearsal and again this sort of shows you that the organization wasn't all it could be, but at the time we had two players. The other guy who was there was the assistant director of the band. He'd been there by that time, probably 20 years, he was a master chief. Didn't know what that was exactly, but it was important because he had more stars on his collar. And so I'm sitting there, we're playing along, and we get to the let's see. And then the time was boom, boom, boom, boom. They start that scale before the solo. So, as that happens, I put my horn down and wait until I listen to the guy next to me and he jerks his horn up and plays the solo.
Speaker 2It doesn't sound very good but you know there's only a rehearsal. And he said afterwards you're supposed to play the solo. I was a principal, nobody told me. And he was a great player as far as technique and whatnot. He played anything the band threw in front of him. He could play on his calm with short action of valves and stuff and he liked the horn he liked. He knew all the music because he played it all before and he was always in the right place at the right time, that kind of stuff. But he was not a strong, you know, soloistic type player. So that just it scared, it made him nervous because he never had to do that. So anyway, so that was an interesting lesson.
Speaker 2And nobody told me you don't want to assume, you know, when you come in I was a shy guy, I wasn't going to assume I was a principal player, just having started with all these and I figured there was more of a and some bands it is, and some band it isn't, so much based on seniority. In the Coast Guard at the time it sort of wasn't, sort of wasn't, and in later years it mostly wasn't. It was based on who's the best player and in some of the military bands it wasn't that way. So, but I didn't know what to expect Anyway. So that was.
Speaker 2It was a fun first summer, a good learning experience for me, and I gave Bart a good learning experience that he should have talked to me perhaps before we started playing. But anyway, then later, I think still in my first year, I was a trombone player who after was hired because he was a good keyboard player. So the band needed for the dance band, you know, a pianist and for the Dixieland band he played what was called a quarterbox, which was sort of an accordion with an external speaker, but he used a belly-based keyboard, you know, like an accordion does, and that was his primary instrument. What's that?
Speaker 1Kind of like a keytor.
Speaker 2No, no, it was a walking accordion shape and everything, but it didn't make the sound. I don't think through the box itself, it wasn't a squeeze box, it made all of the sound, I believe through the amplifier and stuff that was before it. I believe I wasn't paying a lot of attention to Priscilla because his back was to me and he was holding the thing in front of him so I couldn't see what he was doing. But anyway, that was Phil Goldblatt, just a super sweet guy. But he had to play an instrument, because when the band goes on parade you know you've got people who are, oh, typically in a band. You might have an oboe player.
Speaker 2In our band they she played the glockenspiel. You know the instruments you don't use in marching that are more concert band instruments. You find something else that would do and in this case they had Phil play trombone. Well, phil had a little bit of shaky sound. He didn't have the solid breath control that you might have if you'd grown up as a wind player, and they found out that you know trombone pointing straight out was maybe not the best thing for him. So they switched him to the euphonium section. So I had Art and me and Phil in the section and Phil was again. He was almost a senior, as Art was. He had him for a long time. He was a senior chief, I think at the time, but just a super sweet guy and very unassuming and he taught me a lot about life. I sort of adopted him as my father in the band because he was just good at giving advice. He was a solicitor or not.
Speaker 2He was very gentle about it when he chose to offer you advice you hadn't asked for, which probably saved me from a couple of overseas along the way. But he was also really, really interested. Now, this guy, his career was made. He didn't have to do anything except sit in the section and, you know, survive. Really. They were going to fire him then and he was doing his primary job very well. They still liked how he played, you know, for the keyboard stuff. But he wanted to learn, he wanted to do the job well. So he'd ask me questions all the time about how to do this and how to do that and he'd go home and practice. And he finally bought himself a tape recorder so he could hear himself practice and play it back. And he gave me a revelation that he took with me after that. He said I'll clean up the language just slightly, but he said, you know, he said Davis, the darkest thing. He said the recorder don't record your intentions, it only records the results. So you know the fact. Kind of brilliant. Actually. It's very shocking when you well, when you first hear your voice on the recorder too, it doesn't sound anything like you think it does. It's one of those revelations. But he was a hardworking guy.
Speaker 2He unfortunately died after about five years of my time there. He died of a heart attack rather unexpectedly and it was just a shame. He was just such a sweet guy to have there and a stable influence in my life, you know. But these things happen and the band went on as it always does and we hired at that point art was retiring as well around that same time. So rather than leave me alone in the section, they hired the euphonian player and that's that would be the second euphonian player.
Speaker 2They actually, I believe, auditioned as a euphonian player and that was Dennis Winter. When he came in and Dennis had been, he'd grown up in Ohio and he came in and played the audition and played up on his con constellation that he had and we had the whole second suite solo as part of the audition and I swear I've never heard that played prettier. It wasn't really as loud as it would have had to be or as bold as you might want it, but it was the most beautiful sounding. He just had this way of playing beautiful melodies. If you've ever heard our tuba quartet play Green Sleeves, dennis starts a melody on that. It starts just him and nobody else. And or the Atlantic tuba quartet album the same thing, and they're on YouTube. You can find that on my channel.
Speaker 1We just have this video up here. What's that? It's a link to your channel. It will be up in one of the corners here.
Speaker 2Ah, good, good, good, but it is. If you go to my channel just outright, you'll find a whole bunch of recordings that aren't euphonium. So it could be kind of confusing Just doing a lot of historic recordings of old cornet players and bands, and I've got a Doc Severinson collection that's rather extensive on there and then so anyway. So Dennis was a very nice partner. He became my best friend in the band and he was enthusiastic. He had this inner joy and enthusiasm about music that was contagious. He was partly, or probably mostly responsible but I really did respect his opinion for the fact that there was a Coast Guard tuba quartet. I was just kind of nah, you know not too often wanted to bother with that and the Dennis got me talked into it and that became something we kept then until I got out of the band and it kept going after that. So it was obviously a good thing.
Speaker 2Dennis was largely responsible for getting the band's recital series going, which was the first among the major service bands of a member-led recital series. So the only thing the administration did was offer support like advertising and things like that and you know, making sure that they support us when we needed the hall. But other than that. It was guys in the band who were, by the way, e6s. They were starting great in the band, two guys who were running the recital series and they were responsible for doing everything. Programs, I mean, for creating them Again, the print shop would do that for us, but they did the programs programmed the recitals, get the participants to volunteer to do it. And that series is still going on now, to this day as well.
Speaker 2So Dennis was part of that, just a great person to have around, and he died of. He had early onset Alzheimer's and died way too prematurely and we'll miss him. He was just a nice guy. We had a fight now and then, but we always. I just didn't agree with him always and I'd be stubborn. He'd be stubborn, but we'd get over it. Anyways, he was a great partner and he really helped me learn some things. And it was Dennis who came to mind, nicholas, when I was talking to you about I wanted to thank you for suggesting I put those diagrams of the compensating system in action on YouTube. That was the kind of thing Dennis used to do for me, because Dennis was very creative about thinking and promotions and whatnot, and he would say to me that Dave, you play great. But he said you need me as your manager, then you'd be out there doing all these things. He was right.
Coast Guard Band
Speaker 1We never did that, but he was right. No, that's awesome. That's a great way to segue into the after review of our during the podcast after this segment, and to break for your fourth in series at this point. That's a great way to end this third in series with David Weirden, and for more information, you can check out his channel, which will be up in this corner right here.
Speaker 2I kind of love the background right.
Speaker 1And find out more information at the link below internationally phonium summitcom slash. David dash Weirden. If you go to our YouTube like actual channel and subscription page, subscribe please. That'd be awesome to show your support. If you want to continue and start your series even and be part of our cohort and what we have going here, the link is in the introduction area to book your first food series and you can come along this journey and share yours with those that are listening and viewing and just wondering about life and how to get through different segments of their life, like David has, and relating his college experiences, relating his high school, his middle school, all the way up through military ban system and now, especially if you listen to our podcasts that we have before and after these recorded videos really great information, as well as if you could actually name that Easter egg that's in the video right there.
Speaker 2I'll be very impressed if you do. By the way, very impressed.
Speaker 1That'd be very awesome, and I might have to put a kind of a price support or something like that. Yeah, if someone you know what, that'd be a really cool incentive. Why not? I do this, okay, for those that actually know what that Easter egg is in the picture. For those that the first person that lists it at the time of this recording October 19, 2023, when I actually post this should be today, because this is the third series you can find all the videos on his page that I've listed below and in the links below For the first person that names it, whether they see this video on Facebook and gets it right, and so, whether you see that answer first or not and correlate that with me, I will send them the podcast segment to your series all three that you have so far so they can be the first to listen in on those podcast segments before I release.
Speaker 1And that's only good until I release those, and then you know, all hands off deck there. But as far as that goes, thank you everyone for participating, watching and getting to experience David Werden's journey from the beginning through now to his fifth year in the Coast Guard Band and getting to play alongside of Dennis Winter and getting to share Phil's story and art story and kind of the beginnings of the Coast Guard congressional band. As you know, I never knew, as a military musician myself, the formation and kind of the reverence that each of the service bands has. That's really cool and great insight. David, thank you so much for joining us in this series and being a part of our cohort my pleasure.
Speaker 2Thank you for having me and thank you, folks, for listening.
Speaker 1Thank you, take care everybody. See you next time. Recording stopped Fantastic.
Speaker 2Yeah, so we call the next segment growing pains of the Coast Guard Band. That's about where we got to. That's awesome. Man, there were some pains.
Speaker 1Yeah, sounds like it. A lot of you know. We had a similar type of thing happen in my band when, just before I was ETSing and getting ready to well, starting to analyze whether getting med boarded or ETS One of my good friends, sergeant Philbrook, was a Sergeant 1st class. He ended up having a stroke and he was in the hospital for a while. Great clarinetist, great musician, he was like a dad to me as well and it hit the band, I think, a little hard because he was our admin guy and he was the one that kind of. I think he was adamant for the care of the younger troops like myself and those that are like E5 and under. He was kind of our go-to guy in the band. It was really awesome to have. But when he ended up in the hospital without stroke and a couple years later he ended up retiring from the military and I think he got med-boarded I'm not sure, but I don't think you would have had it any other way than being in the military band.
Speaker 1He absolutely loved it. I loved the different opportunities that existed. I'm pretty sure, yeah, he wasn't with us downrange. He stayed back and was part of the ops team in support while we were in Iraq for the year and, yeah, a lot of really remarkable moments in the military band system that I can definitely relate to with you.
Speaker 2Well, knowing how the bands our band thought about Bill when he died, for example. Then I learned later. I didn't know about this history beforehand, but when the Navy band lost a third or half of its complement when the plane went down, it wasn't the 50s, it wasn't, I think, or the late 40s.
Speaker 1And didn't hear about that.
Speaker 2Yeah, the Navy band. They were touring somewhere or whatever. They had a plane crash with one of the passenger planes and they were smaller planes. It was either not the whole band going or the band was split up. I don't remember how it was, but it took out a third of the band and that just has to be overwhelming for the families, of course, but for the musicians and the group, the people you work with. So for that kind of loss, it's a band for Pete's sake. Okay, yeah, 9-11 and the firefighters and the tragedies all over things like that, and that's a dangerous job, and so it's not quite as surprising as when, out of the blue, we you know it was a bunch of musicians. So Absolutely.
Speaker 1Anyway, I'll have to go take a look at that. That's interesting, man. What a marvelous time. And for those that are listening to the podcast, you don't get to be the ones to hear the first and second podcast, you hear this one. You'll already know all the answers and have that opportunity. So, yeah, it's, you know, being able to be part of this and to host the summit and put forth the opportunities for our cohort, like yourself, and it's just you know, as you're. As you recollected your time with Dennis, did he have a son and is he in the military band system?
Speaker 2No, okay, no, I mean they had two girls, as I recall his first wife, rachel and Kendra, I think, and I don't believe either one of them went to a military band.
Speaker 1There's a it's not plural Winters, it's just Winter, right, Mm-hmm Okay.
Speaker 2There was only one of them, yeah so Interesting, uh, stintax yes. Yeah well, dennis is a very unique guy in so many ways, and he watching him march down the field was an experience. What do you mean For somebody who's such a good musician? Making his feet come down at the right time was just a real challenge for him, and staying in a straight line is up. Maybe just that just was not a skill he had.
Speaker 1Not like you swaying your bell.
Speaker 2No, not like that at all. Nothing he grew out of either while he was in there. Wow, and he was just. He had a different sense of humor too, so he'd always come up with the unexpected joke, which is always fun, you know, meeting somebody who doesn't think just like you do. He was also, perhaps partly because of his heritage. He was Jewish. I'm not sure if that's part of his makeup. He was a very hairy guy. He had to shave often more than once a day to be legal by the time he got to a nighttime concert.
Speaker 2And of course, a lot of hair down here, you know, through the down, and we were touring Alaska in 77, I think it was and we didn't have good accommodations, except in Fairbanks, otherwise we were staying in. Well, the police barracks was the first place we stayed in Sitka, and because, again, the band was not good at touring by that time yet. So it was a gang shower and someone said, you know, I saw Dennis step out of the shower and he said look at that guy, that hairy guy. I don't know how he got out of Alaska without being shot through a bear. You know, super seven squad, yeah, with that too, he was just, he was such a colorful guy, and again he's. He helped us thumb more and encouragement than actual production, get a publishing company going too. We thought that was a good idea.
Speaker 2That was Gary Buttery, dennis and I had written arrangements for our tuba quartet. That was, as I mentioned, started in 76. And there was no good music really for tuba quartet. That was a crowd appeal type music. Our first gig was going to be an, a tuba fest. Well, you know, you're not going to play real serious stuff, generally an outside gig like that with this beer involved. So we wrote some things and by I think after that gig or maybe after a second gig, we started getting inquiries about how do we get this music? We want to have that for our group. So we decided to start publishing it and that was a growing experience as well. The first things we did you know what flair pens were. You may not old enough to remember those. They were the first Fiber Chip pens. You know like the like a fine point, magic marker kind of thing, but they were the just for everyday writing.
Speaker 2Yes, yes, yes, yeah, they were water-based ink. You know they're not waterproof at all. We had all of our arrangements were written by us by hand with flair pens and at first we just wrote them again to play. We didn't really write them to publish, so I recopied mine at least. But even then, before we had computers to do these things, you know you had to try and make the lines come out, even by the end of the line. You know, what we didn't know is there was space there. We'd have a bar line before the staff was through on the blank manuscript paper. But we published it and it worked in Robert King, which is a very functioning company at the time.
Speaker 2They once led Duke bottom and didn't work so well anymore when the family got out of the business. But they had a deal with us. He said when every with anything new, send us three of them and bill, bill for them and that'll get them in our catalog and then you know they'll be re-order as they get orders for them. So that was very effective for us for a while. So that got us going and then later we I think I recopied mine once with a little more care, with the Flutter Pen being very, very, you know, slow and tedious about it. And then I started using manuscript pens. I got a set of Pelican manuscript pens, nice, and gold tip pens and stuff, really nice pens. But you know they have the sort of flat points you know the, the, the the, the the colligraphy points.
Speaker 2Yeah, what's that?
Speaker 1The colligraphy points yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. Nib, nib, nib.
Speaker 2Nib, there we go. Yes, so I had to write my own book of books in in high school. I didn't have the pens at the time, but I would. I'd draw those figures as though I had the pen and I had to fill in with the broad tip would normally make it for you. So I had some experience with the concept anyway.
Speaker 2Anyway so I did a set that way and at the time it wasn't a very good money making business. I mean, we'd pin up a hundred of them just to have some low cost per unit. But then I ended up throwing about 70 of them away as I thought those just look awful. I don't want to see those anymore. So I made a new set and built those anyway, and then we went through about. I went through about two or three different versions of computer software to do this until I finally got to finale, or no, I didn't get to finale. I got to shoot what was that called Nightingale? It was a.
Speaker 2I was using an Atari computer at the time and Nightingale was made for the Atari. I think they had a back version as well, and so I used that. It was pretty good. It looked almost like finale, but it was much cheaper and faster to use, and finale was forever. I think we talked about that. We did, yeah, Anyway. So that's, that was the growing pains of our publishing company and the growing pains of the band. A lot of growing pains in my life.
Speaker 1So it's interesting they bring up tube of quartet music and stuff. Have you ever played the Neil Neil House Christmas Jazz Suites for Tube U Phoning Quartet.
Euphonium Music and Global Connections
Speaker 2I think we read some months in the group. We didn't have that many Christmas Gays that we ever actually used them. But if we had had Christmas Gays we wouldn't have used the Tube of Christmas books because they were too simple, you know these.
Speaker 1These are really quite difficult for the ensemble to actually, I would say grade five, grade six, almost.
Speaker 2I recall that.
Speaker 1Yeah, they're amazing. I couldn't find anybody to play them with me, because it actually. You actually have to sit down and make sure everybody is in their spot, or wouldn't put together. It's like those mind work puzzles where you have to turn it, just so right for it to fall into place.
Speaker 2Oh, okay, it means seating position was actually critical to.
Speaker 1I don't think so. Maybe, perhaps, but let's see if I can. I know I oh, there's the two of them, so I've got the last copies before they went out of print sent over from England. Actually that was pretty penny to ship. It says grade three. But these are just some of the books. Yeah, and I don't think it was really the seating, it was more of the articulations and the way certain notes were emphasized that if it's not done the right way it's a real tedious piece. Pieces all of them, but there are some of my most favorite jazz and Christmas pieces I've ever had the opportunity of trying to work through and work on.
Speaker 2Yeah, I wish we had done more with them because I enjoy that kind of music myself. But Gary Buttery also would have been very into it. He liked jazz music himself. Dennis and David the other two guys in the group would have been okay. Well, I mean, they would go along with it, but neither one of them had a great instinct for that style.
Speaker 1But yeah, two leaders that helps.
Speaker 2That would get you there I think Absolutely.
Speaker 1So. That's just something that's been in my collection. Whether or not it gets played eventually, I'm sure it will, especially now that it's on the podcast segment and there's someone that's going to go. So if you're interested, let me know. Yuletide Jazz Suites and the Christmas Jazz Favorites originally written for the saxophone quartet but the tuba euphonium quartet are even just for use. Oh, it sounds so beautiful. I'm most certain of it. It gives me chills just thinking about the prospect of actually having it happen, or even as part of the euphonium sense, it's around the Christmas time to actually do these with the larger euphonium body that will be present for years to come, not necessarily this first virtual year, but the hybrid years to come. It's fantastic.
Speaker 2Well, it's good that you bring those up. I mean, there's a lot of music in our past that we're lucky, I think, to live in an age of digital publishing, online publishing, where they can produce copies of old recordings, for example, that, oh gosh, I can't think how many I've got now. Probably half of the recordings I've bought in the last 10 or 15 years are things that have been re-recorded, that were out of print previously, because now it doesn't cost that much to distribute them, and before it used to, you had to print up how many thousands CDs to make at Profibles to sell your first one, then you hope you sell the rest of them.
Speaker 1And the same with sheet music because they offer.
Speaker 2I buy a lot from Music Notes, for example. That's one place, sheet music direct is another. But if I'm music notes has good, especially the pop-type tunes or big band tunes, then what they call a pro series, which is a little more care in the arranging and they're often styled after the sonatra, be it unfamous or wherever. They're often written the way he sang it, which wasn't all the right melody notes. I mean he did his own stuff Much harder to read, actually, than there was no melody to work in, because when you try to read something that was somebody's feeling, you write it out in these funny rhythms. They weren't thinking those rhythms, they were just thinking feelings. So anyway, but we've got those things now available and that's a great thing, and maybe somebody will pick these up at some point and bring them out again.
Speaker 1Absolutely, they're definitely in my collection. And, oh man, that just leads me back to kind of where we were at the beginning of our segment. Here is the coffee studios I can't wait to I am biding my tongue and I am certain that by the time this is released it's going to be already out there. But just I'm giddy with what's coming and what I've been developing and working on over the last couple of even days in building up for the International Unflunny Summit and to see the prospect of being able to make opportunities out of something that hadn't been utilized to this capacity yet.
Speaker 2Okay.
Speaker 1Yes, I'm skirting around the subject just a little bit.
Speaker 2You're teasing us how they would say that.
Speaker 1Yeah, absolutely. I'm really excited about what's in store for our community and euphoniums globally. Oh, I'm curious Do you know of any? I've done a little research, but I'm wondering if you know of anybody, Since we find so many euphoniums being manufactured in India. Do you know of anyone who actually plays euphonium in India?
Speaker 2I don't Okay.
Speaker 1That's what I was kind of thinking. I'm curious If you're somehow in India listening to this at this point and you haven't seen any episodes, reach out to me, that'd be awesome. I would love to get your input and your journeys. Because the more the global reach because right now we're at 11 countries, four continents or so right now but the more reach, the more extensive that we can bring our euphonium family together, together, together, together. It just means a literal world to me to be able to reduce the barriers of entry globally for euphoniums Musicians.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's a shame about Facebook. Like the euphonium players group, for example, there's tens of thousands of people in there by now. I think there's got to be somebody from India in there, and yet there's no way to search for that. They don't want you to search by demographic or or by the Sanskrit, or yeah for language.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2So it's really too bad. Because it used to be the Tuba Journal. The ITEA journal would publish a directory of members and it was broken down by country. I don't think they do that anymore. Do you have any?
Speaker 1of those older magazines by chance.
Speaker 2I don't think so I'm actually looking here. I've got some in this room with me right now that I've been going through to sort out, but I don't think I saved the directories because they were out of date at this point. I mean, we're talking about the ones I've had here from, oh, 1980s and 1990s, some of them.
Speaker 1But they're lineage, maybe some of their kids.
Speaker 2Oh, that's, true, yeah.
Speaker 1And so that's why I asked for the reference.
Speaker 2I wonder if If I run across them, I'll look for that. I'll also check online just to make sure it isn't there somewhere hidden. I talked to Oesteen about that recently, what the breakdown was, and it sounded like they don't have that as a publication right now or as a fact that they look at, like the number of euphonium versus tubal players, for example. That he was just guessing there too. It'd be nice to see those numbers at some point.
Speaker 1It would, it would be great. I mean, those metrics are important in today's reach and strategy for just getting the word out and how to reorient and to be a part of something bigger.
Speaker 2Yeah, and there will be. I'll tease this a little bit. There will be some exciting developments, I think, coming around with ITEA pretty quick to Oesteen and I are talking about I shouldn't say pretty quick, I'm not sure how long it'll take, but we're talking about a significant project to help make the membership in the organization be more valuable to everybody, different backgrounds and abilities. So it's in the talking and early planning stages right now. We're brainstorming and starting to organize thoughts. So anyway, we're trying to make that better too and I think I'm going to keep this idea in mind.
Speaker 2About the Well, I'm not sure how much you could publish. If you even publish the name, just the name of the person and the country they're from, for example, and the incident. Now, usually they'd have phone numbers and stuff like that, which you maybe don't want to do these days, but it might be possible to get that information. Or maybe we could at least get the number of people in India who play your phone in. If not the people, that wouldn't satisfy your need right now, but if it's zero, then you'd know at least that.
Speaker 1Right and then perhaps like because Banyanth in Thailand, for instance, get the names of like universities that have a music program and maybe a point of contact, and I would even be willing to distribute some resources to be able to contact and get the names or the details, because I think that would be for me that's really important.
Speaker 2Yeah, and they've got some superstars over there, some really good players in Thailand in particular. If you interviewed any of them for this, yeah, was that like a 3 AM interview for you or was it a time slot issue?
Speaker 1Sure, was Sure was I don't do these on my own 8 to 5. It hits all hours, all nights, making interviews from Australia happen to England, to Italy, to Thailand, to China, to Japan, to wherever in the world that if there's a opportunity to cover someone's journey, I want it to be as low barrier access to someone, and if time is that barrier, then I'll wake up. I make sure I'm up for every single interview, whether the individual decides not to actually follow through with their appointment, which has happened a couple of times. Unfortunately, things happen. People's priorities are different. I know me and that's not what I'm willing to do to make this project happen.
Speaker 1So, yeah, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning and to get up. So I've had instances where I'll be doing an interview and it'll go to 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning and then go to sleep for 1 and a half hours like for 90 minutes, get back up and do another interview and then have all my kids go to school in the next hour and then more interviews right after that or work on the creatives or just all the stuff that goes into all this. It's amazing. It's not really tiring, because this gives me the energy that I need to power through all this, but when I do have a moment to breathe and realize the magnitude and the dynamics that happen on this and the connectivity, it's Such a blessing to be able to do all this.
Speaker 2I could propose a tagline for your Facebook profile or something that would say sleep is highly overrated. I like that. It's the life you're living right now. I envy you your energy to do that. I'm not sure I was ever built that way. I mean, the band had to do some uncomfortable things, sweet-wise here and there, but it didn't go down well with me. It's hard, I did it, but it's hard. And I suppose it's hard for you too.
Speaker 1It is, but I think it's the experiences that I've had post-military and trying to come home mentally from Iraq, all the years of battling with the different medications and having no sleep for days on end because of those and because of the nightmares and the experiences that end my supply of almost never ending supply of my own personal coffee. That has a little bit to do with the ability to utilize all the tools that I have, whether it was a negative at the time, for the positive, of the benefit of our community.
Speaker 2Yeah Well, I appreciate your energy and your willingness to do that and the struggle you've been through to get back home again, so to speak, to get back to normal life.
Speaker 1You and I both live in those that are putting the information out there and being a contribution to the community. Here and in any sort of life, a person may live my hats off to those that put the effort forward and that's the effort that I would love to cover from all our cohorts and for those that are listening that haven't yet put forth that desire to join our cohort, by all means you're going to want to join the cohort, especially with the announcements I'll be making this internationally. It's huge, it's huge, it's huge and it all circumvents the whole the rising artists in community, the rising composers in community, facets and facilitation of those elements. Boy howdy, I'm so excited to.
Speaker 2Well, you're accomplishing a lot with this and there's a lesson in there, I think, for the people listening, that if you want to be well, let's go to a realm we all understand better.
Speaker 2That's a player, just as a euphonian player.
Speaker 2If you want to be the next Stephen Meade globally, or the next Brian Bowman, more in this country or Japan, it's not just a matter of playing as well as Stephen or Brian. That's not enough. You've got to put in a lot of work, a lot of energy, be willing to do some really uncomfortable things with your time frames and whatnot, and travel to do it and of course, you would enjoy doing it. But it's just a lot of work. I never felt the inspiration, I guess, to do quite that much, so I wasn't going to compete with Stephen for the world honors and whatever, and I would have had to practice much harder than I was willing to at the time or even now as far as that goes, and there's a lot involved. So again, if you're thinking about you really want to be a wonderkind at some point, that's great and you should work on your playing absolutely. But also you need to change your and not even just the world fame, but just if you want to be successful in your town. That's at a small level.
Speaker 1Even within the career that they find themselves in. That's not even euphonium related, but it provides that ability to continue euphonium as a hobby even down the road to be successful in life in general and put in that effort forward.
Speaker 2Yeah, you can't just wait for stuff to come to you for one thing, and you can't just accept the easy gigs. You know so and I've done a little too much of that. Things I'm telling you not to do and that's how I want my life to be and I had no big plans to do otherwise. So that's okay for me. But if and I did work very hard in some ways to do the website, that's probably where I put a lot of my energies that would have otherwise gone to practicing or getting out and doing gigs, and the publishing company was the same way. So I told to put some of that energy into other things and still probably not expend as much overall if some of these guys do. I'm amazed at the energies that these folks have, right.
Speaker 2So, and you look at Oistin's career, for example, the fact that he took a year off I'm not quite sure how he hadn't had a chance to ask him that how he did it financially to take a year away from everything except practice. He considered his full-time job during that year to practice, so eight hours a day was practice time. He would take lunch hours and break just like he would at a job, and then go back to practice and he says he learned so much during that time, developed so much and built so much endurance in many other things that again it's a unique path. I haven't heard too many people doing it quite that intensely. Most people sort of learn on a normal kind of path to jobs by doing a lot of gigs and stuff like that. But to really spend that much time methodically planning your life and working toward it was a very successful form. Yeah, he was very intentional and by golly it worked. So there's the different ways to get there, but again, the path to the top is not usually really easy for most people.
Speaker 1It never is, and it's sometimes. You know, I've experienced it in my life and maybe you have yourself. It's like boy howdy as I go into the Greek myth. Or is it Roman, the one that rolls the stone up the hill?
Speaker 2Yeah, can't think of a name but I forgot. But yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah, I'm not Hercules. Anywho gets the, and it's not Atlas. No, oh boy, I used to be really good at all that, but as the podcast goes on, so will this conversation.
Speaker 2We'll catch up on that fact next time right, right, yeah.
Speaker 1But you know, in a person's life and maybe those that are listening will resonate with this at some point, you know, you may think that you're doing things over and over again and nothing's making progress or you're not making. There's no reward for what you're doing right now. It'll come, it always has, it always will. If you put forth the right effort with the right intention, the right reward, the right predicament, the right, the right reward for one's effort will manifest in its correct time.
Speaker 2Yes, if you're intentional to some extent and patient to some extent. They taught us an educational psychology back in college because that wasn't an education path at the time With learning curves. You know, your curve goes up, it looks no, it should be this way, it shouldn't anyway. Your curve goes up for a while but at some point you'll hit a plateau and it just it's not going anywhere and you get frustrated. But you need to be patient because at some point then it will start to go up again. But that's it's a normal thing for that to happen. It's a normal thing in your practice for that to happen. You may be working and working and making progress and all of a sudden you're not making much progress.
Speaker 1And then you can't do that. Yes.
Speaker 2Patience is what comes into play, then, and that's not just with practice, that's not just with learning. It's a lot of life is that way too. You know there's dry spells, but you're you need to be patient and do what you can do at the time. Right now, I can practice. I'm retired from my day job, so to speak, and I have the chance now to practice every day, which is great. I didn't do that before, for 20-some years, after I left the service, and even so, there are some days I don't feel like practicing.
Speaker 2But back when my wife was playing, we both had this rule that you go down to the practice room, or up in the case of our first resident. Anyway, you go to the practice room and just say I'm going to get the horn out and play for five minutes. So you must at least do that, and I've yet to have that happen to me. Once I get down there and play for five minutes, I want to keep going, Right, but I didn't want to go down. But I thought, oh, it's only five minutes, that would get me there, and then my energies and then send it would take over. So you find ways like that that work for you. That's what worked for me, but you find ways to help you keep going and be smart. Listen to yourself, observe yourself and figure out what you need to do.
Speaker 1You mentioned something that's really interesting your wife plays what?
Speaker 2She used to play clarinet. That's how we met was in the band. She came from well. She played actually in college. She played a little bit of bass as well.
Speaker 2I don't know. No, she went to Concordia in a Fargo-Moorhead area and she went from there directly into the band and stayed there for nine years, got out when it was time to have a family, and she was not one of those people. We did have some couples in the band who had their kids while they were in the band and stayed in the band. So we'd go on tour and in some cases they would call ahead and try to arrange for sitters at each venue so they could go to the concert and leave the kid with somebody they could trust. In a couple of places they had dependable sitters at home that they would then pay to go on tour with them, so they had built-in babysitter riding along with them the whole way.
Speaker 1That's cool.
Speaker 2Yeah, it was cool and they had a good time and the kids got some good education out of it. The guy who runs Simron Music his wife was in the band.
Speaker 2Brian Dowdy After I left Dowdy, yeah, brian Dowdy, and he would go along on the band tours with the kids. And there was a show on TV for a while called Made in America and it was run by John Rassenberger. He's a guy who played Cliff Clavin in the show Cheers yeah and showed up very briefly in Star Wars 2. Well, star Wars 5, that would be anyway in the Ice Cave. He had this show on about here, what's that?
Speaker 1As an engineer, if I'm correct.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2He was down there in the Ice Cave and talked about, well, I'm not sure what, anyway, whatever it was doing, but he had this show where he'd talk about a different plant in different cities. Here's where they make locomotives in this city. You go through the factory to show you this thing and then here's where they make whatever little bitty things here in this factory. So he had he published a book at some point that was the episodes of the show and it showed all these different factories. So Brian's family would take that book with them and whenever they were in one of the cities and we often were, because we'd sit St Louis and the largest cities they'd make sure to make a tour of whatever factory that was that they'd see on the show. So that was a great way to keep their kids engaged on the tour. Look forward to the next time oh, we get to go see the so-and-so factory. So there were a lot of ways to do that and it seemed to work pretty well for those folks.
Speaker 2But we just didn't feel like that was what we had in mind. So my wife wanted her to vote her time really to raise the kids and not have to worry about going to work every day at the Coast Guard Band, but staying home and working with the kids in the house. So that's how we did it. So she was in for nine years and she played for a little while after that. She was teaching and whatnot and played a couple civilian gigs, but at some point that just became not what she wanted to do. So we have three clarinets Sydney and Cabinet here lovely clarinets and they probably aren't going to come out at this point in our lives anymore. But you'd never know.
Speaker 1Well, one of my kiddos does play clarinet. If you're ever interested, I would like to call dibs on purchasing clarinets. So I would love to be able to continue that tradition.
Speaker 2And I'll mention that to her. She has what's reputed to be the best clarinet E-flat clarinet ever made. The person who took over her after she left the band had borrowed her horn a couple of times and he said name your price, I want that horn. If you ever sell it, name your price, I want to buy it. So it's apparently a very good clarinet. She liked it a lot too. She chose it carefully and had Hans Menig, who was a great clarinet repair person. A built him, I think in Europe. Originally he was in Philadelphia, I believe she had him work the whole horn over and regulate the keys and everything else to make it really just top notch.
Speaker 1So yeah that's fun.
Speaker 2All sorts of offers out there. I'll try to find the funding. Don't hold your breath, but we'll see what happens. We talked about downsizing here and it hasn't happened yet, but we've talked about it. That'll bring a lot of decisions to the fore.
Speaker 1That includes euphoniums and maritones and mouthpieces and such.
Speaker 2Well, if you count all the horns I have, I have about 10. That's not nearly what some people have, but I'm currently trying to sell a lovely King 2B Liberty trombone. It's Schmidt Music. They've got it on consignment for me. It's a delightful horn, made in the 30s I believe late 30s. It's a small horn but it's a wonderful horn. That's probably the best one of the lot that's going to go. I've got a valve trombone that they're fixing up for me now but I'll sell when I get to that point. I've got my son's trombone that I'll probably sell, which is a Dandy Yamaha 525 War straight horn with three different lead pipes that you can change around to get the exact kind of feel and response you want out of the horn. That's a nice instrument. I may let my tuba go at some point, my E-flat sovereign.
Speaker 1There's one in our cohort that needs an E-flat tuba, who's actually a composer also, but he's in need of an E-flat tuba to play in his brass band, but he doesn't have access to them.
Speaker 2I'm not quite ready yet, but I may.
Speaker 2I'll let you know about that one because it's as big as heavy. I don't play it outside the house lunch anymore. I used to play on a brass group with it at church and I played in the Sheldon Theater brass band for a little while in the classic brass band in Connecticut for a little while with it. I like it now and I want to do a demo recording of one of my tuba quartets. I can multitrack and play the two tuba parts on the bass, but that's not a very good reason for keeping it. It may go at some point.
Speaker 1Oh, that's a perfect reason for a lot of people.
Speaker 2Yes, I know, but space becomes an issue.
Speaker 1It does. Is that valve trombone, the flugel bone, or is that the?
Speaker 2No, no, no.
Speaker 1Real-life valve trombone from the old days.
Speaker 2That's a butcher. A butcher. Yeah, it was built in low pitch. It had changeable slides, but one of them was frozen, oh boy, so you couldn't bring it back up to pitch. So the repair shop was trying to get it out, but it was so stuck that it actually broke the tube that was in. So he's making a new tube for it. Oh, that's cool. It's a beautiful horn. In many ways it had that thing with it. It was a silver-plated horn, but they had the engraving on the bell and it was gold inlay there. So you get this sort of gold and silver pattern that they did a lot of back in the early mid 20th century, back when making horns was an art, not so much a production.
Speaker 1I think we're getting back to that point. A lot of the bands are really. I mean, look at Gary Curtin's horn. Holy smokes, that's a gorgeous feast.
Speaker 2Yes, adams is trying to bring that concept back. Certainly I suspect there'll be other companies doing the same. There probably are. In fact I know there are because I've seen them in trumpets and cornets Some fancy instruments coming up in places. I'm glad we're seeing that again.
Speaker 1Even the Sterling Rose. That's a gorgeously interesting instrument.
Speaker 2Yes, it plays real different.
Speaker 1I can't wait to ask Micah about that because he's part of our cohort. I need to mention that in our next in series with him about that. His experience is on that.
Speaker 2Have you ever played or compared two horns, one with a soldered bead and one with a just crimped bead around the bell? No, because they're offered both ways In custom trombones. I'll offer you which one you want. Adams will offer you what you want. To some extent the E2 is made with a soldered bell. The E1 and E3 are by default made with a non-soldered bell. The rim, it makes a difference. It solidifies the tone a little bit. It's not quite as free and open, but it is more compact. The Sterling Rose instrument is like that on steroids, because it's a big, heavy reinforcement around that fancy rose pedal. Look to the Scott, because otherwise you'd be bending those corners to the right and left. It's got that very heavy bell feel to it.
Speaker 1That's interesting. Did I disclose the interview with Francesco Minetti, part of our cohort from Italy, no we're called Remind me.
Innovative Ways to Engage Audiences
Speaker 1He created a mute system. It's part of the podcast segment that's not yet released. He developed a mute system for Marina Bozelli in Italy, or the new CD that they'll be releasing after it's done mastering within the next two months. The beginning of 2024 is when they're projected to release that CD. He showed me the mute. It's a gorgeous mute. It's based off the Dennis Wick mute system but it has these inserts and capabilities, but it has a snare drum top to the actual mute system. It's a fantastic piece of. It's gorgeous. He 3D printed the whole framework and everything. It's a gorgeous piece.
Speaker 2It's like a resonator then on top of the horn, kind of thing, yeah, vibrating.
Speaker 1He built a Is getting patent. The dampener that goes on. It too.
Speaker 2Okay, interesting stuff. Yeah so not really just a mute the horn but to affect the tone.
Speaker 1Uh-huh and the timbre and Cool. And so many different opportunities. Then he's gotten an oscillating fan, kind of like how a vibraphone has those oscillating. Yeah, yeah he has a segment to where you can attach certain things in this mute system and it's just Awesome.
Speaker 2I'm like I want dibs. So then we need to come out with a custom mute case for your phonemes to carry around.
Speaker 1He actually has a mute case that his sister made, which is a ballet dancer, I believe. And oh, there's so many cool things. I talk about his interview because I had just interviewed him and then went into my next interview with Dr Stephen Barr and talking about interaction between the band on stage or the orchestra or the opera or whatever, and the audience and getting the audience engaged and bringing that interactive component to light and reactionary. And we actually talk about that with Francesco's interview even before our talk on the cohort with Stephen, and there's some really amazing things being discussed. It's fantastic, Wow.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's sort of the holy grail it has been, I think, for a long time of how to engage the audience a little more.
Speaker 1Yeah, we talk about that Making them feel part of the performance, yeah. We talk about that.
Speaker 2That's why I sing along with Mitch, who was a popular TV show for a while, Mitch Miller. He was a choral leader and he had to show you this. They do kind of old-fashioned songs and whatnot, but it was literally the bouncing ball you'd see go across the screen on the lyrics oh, that's right.
Speaker 1That's why the Einstein's yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 2But I mean we did that in a Coast Guard Christmas concert. We'd have an audience sing along. That did engage the audience, but it wasn't nearly as inventive as we could be today with all our technology.
Speaker 1Oh there's some amazing things happening, like he has so with Francesco on our cohort. We talk about the theremin, because he has the theremin, and he talks about increasing the magnetic field to incorporate a auditorium setting.
Speaker 2Okay. You go with a magnetic field, after that with lasers or something like that. To read and translate that into the theremin.
Speaker 1Yeah, Well, no, no, he has a. There's something else that he has that can do all that.
Speaker 2Okay.
Speaker 1And I'm like okay. And then right after that it went from that interview with that cohort to Stephen Barr and talking about how maybe we could do kind of like how the book series where you, you know you choose your own ending.
Speaker 2Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1And then have a flex score, as we call it nowadays, of different opportunities to flip to a certain page and the concert goes this way instead of that way, and dial by number and getting the audience engaged. It's just really fantastic.
Speaker 2Okay, I'm not sure I like that as an audience member.
Speaker 1I might not agree with the person who wants to kill this person, and that's why it's a text, a number, or have a, an ability to input, kind of like how. What is it how? American singer, american Idol, where they can text in their votes? Oh yeah, yeah, and then stuff like that integrate that into that dynamic.
Speaker 2Okay, I've seen that done in well, when they have the presidential debates and stuff like that, some of the places that cover it have that little bar graph that's going constantly. You know they like that. Well, they didn't like that. You see it go up and down depending on what the person says.
Speaker 2You could do something like that with an audience too, I suppose, if you had a little like a little pulse meter on there or something Like a line of adventure tests, Well, kind of like that. Yeah, you know excitement level, you know. Anyway, that's maybe going a little too far, but but that's still.
Speaker 1There's still ideas, that progress, and certainly it is. Oh, what a fantastic time we live in.
Speaker 2It is Hard to keep up with some of it. I need to leave pretty quick out a four o'clock call. I have to be on so I've got to change around you for that yeah.
Speaker 1I have to go pick up kiddos from chess and then be part of the watch the kids get ready for area marching competition this Saturday.
Speaker 2Ah, busy man.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, David. Thank you so much for joining us today for your third in series and looking forward to covering all other details and are growing. You're growing pains on the fourth in series Coming soon. Thank you.
Speaker 2I hear the title growing pains yeah.
Speaker 1That was your title actually. You mentioned it right at the end there. So yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 2Thank you, nicholas. Okay, get some sleep. It's not happening. Take care, bye, bye.
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