If any of you are thinking about entering the Second Frank Ticheli Composition Contest sponsored by Manhattan Beach Music, I recommend checking out the CD that MBM produced. It features ALL of the finalists’ pieces (not just 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place) in a performance by the University of North Texas Symphonic Band captured beautifully by none-other-than Mark Custom.

Not only that, but MBM is also offering you a FREE CD if you intend to enter the competition! How cool is that? Check out the link for more info.

Or, I guess you could pay money…

Two freakishly amazing things happened on Friday: 1) The Poteet High School Band (known this weekend across Texas as the TMEA 4A Honors Band) gave a brilliant performance of Shadow Rituals; and 2) NBC actually broadcast the teaser of our Conan musical on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

First, Poteet. Rick Davis conducted the group and good lord were they impressive! I’ve always heard that Texas was known for their bands, but Jesus Christ. They played with excellent balance and intonation (which is hard to do in SR because my orchestration is so dry and my dynamics are so inconsistent). But when the best high school band in Texas is performing your music, how could one summarize the performance to be anything less than freaking awesome?John Mackey also had a piece on the Poteet program. He was kind enough to spend some time with me and introduce me to some of the people he knows. John’s always been really supportive of me and my music and I’m really lucky to be somewhat friends with him.The convention was HUGE, as most things in Texas are. Here’s one of the exhibit halls (above). I made this panoramic; it’s got some perspective errors but it does give you some kind of sense/scope of how huge it was… and that’s only about 75% of the exhibit halls. Click on it to see a bigger pic.

Part Two:
This part really needs no explanation. A year and a half later, NBC actually broadcast the teaser to our Conan musical. The fact that Conan himself made fun of it is just hilarious and awesome. We are forever humbled.

This weekend, Brian and I went location scouting for one of three films we are going to shoot for Bully Mammoth in the next couple of weeks. One sketch is kind of a period piece from WWII, and we basically need an older looking room that Jews can hide in. Arizona doesn’t have much in the way of “old” or even “period” architecture at all since most of the houses here were built within the past 10 years. Maybe 20 for some of them. The best we could do was my grandma’s old ranch house. The house is straight from the 60s, aqua paint and all. Each room is a unique shade of… some bright color. Blue, green, orange, and a happy mellow yellow for the living room (not all the rooms have a John Deer tractor in them, though).We are choosing to go with the orange room which we hope, with some clever lighting and art direction, will be a reasonably believable Jewish hiding place. We’re not too interested in making it all that historically accurate. After all, it is comedy.We also learned that a lot of homeless people live on the acre backyard. Here, one such “transient” (as grandma calls them) has made a nice little shanty town in the far back corner.This one prefers a more modest set-up.
The house is, for all intents, a pretty cool retro house, and if I had $370,000 to buy the acre lot from my grandma, it might even make a cool studio space. But if I did that, I’d probably have to make it transient proof. That, or maybe if it was rezoned, I could turn the backyard into a tax deductible Hooverville. Oh well; pipe dreams.

So far this is a helluva semester with 18 credit hours so I probably won’t be blogging as much as usual (some people would think that a good thing). There are a couple of really cool things that will be happening during the semester, though:

1. Next week, I will be in San Antonio for TMEA via a special invitation from the 4A Honor Band, Poteet High School. There is going to be a TON to do and unfortunately I’ll only be in town for barely two days so I’m going to have to really budget my time. If you want to get lunch or breakfast or something, let me know! And oh yes, there will be pictures…
2. We (me and the Bully Mammoth team) are currently in preproduction to film three short sketches from their sketch comedy show. The videos will be made available on their newly designed website which will also be online in the coming weeks.
3. Dare I say Turkey in the Straw will finally be published by the summer?? Hopefully I’ll have a fantastic demo recording by then.

Until then, I’ve sold my soul to ASU in order to keep up with scholarship criteria. I’m a junior without a major; might as well just suck it up for another year.