Messiah, Cello, and Jingle Bells

December 4, 2005 at 3:50 AM

Messiah is tomorrow. It's sounding nice, and I'm really excited!!! There's something about having that many people onstage.

Also, today I reset the neck on my old teacher's cello that I'm rebuilding.

At the high school, our conductor wrote a holiday overture for us. Its full of inside jokes, but it souunds great (aside from our many mistakes). Its made up of jingle bell variations, but starst off sounding normal. It quickly goes into a minor key (which is really fun). Then, it copies those dreaded up-bows from Sleigh Ride. Next, we do it Samba-style. Then, we have a "Del Borgoesque" variation (for those of you not familar with hil, Del Borgo is an arranger/composer of high school music, and his compostions all have the exact same structure and style... so we do jingle bells in that style - slow disonate chords on the melody, pizz. melody with a high sustained note in the firsts...)
We then play jingle bells as an Irish jig (thats one of my favorites). The best (and hardeset variation is when we immitate a handbell choir - you only play about once every two measures, lots of counting, but when it works, its so neat! After the handbells, we go back to the theme (and minor part) from the begining, and close with a "Finale alla Tchaikovsky" - big chords seperated by grand pauses and it seems like it will never end.
Its really great!!!!

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