The hills are alive...

... with the sound of music!!! Just when you think you have time to breathe - reality kicks in and it's all back to the busyness of life. Here are a few things I'm involved that are coming up soon:

• ANU Open Day: I am 100% stoked for this!!! I have been asked to play in a flute masterclass with Virginia Taylor, participate in a flute ensemble concert, and perform a solo piece in a pre-tertiary showcase recital. Apart from that I absolutely cannot wait to talk to some people there about the courses ANU has to offer, career advice, and all that sort of stuff. I am really looking forward to a very rewarding, educational day.

• U3A Music Appreciation Concert: This is the 2'nd concert I've ever had (the privilege...?) to organize. Involving the Snowy Mountains Ensemble, it's really encouraging to see how much progress we have made since we did the same concert last year. I'm also accompanying about 10 solo items for this concert, the first 'real' accompanying I've had to do yet. Should be a challengingly nerve-racking but fun afternoon.

• This is the real BIG news for me!! I have very kindly been given the opportunity to play with a professional orchestra in the Cooma Choir Festival 2011!!! The combined choir will be performing a comic opera, 'Trial by Jury,' for which the orchestra will accompany them. The ridiculously crazy thing about it is that I will be getting paid to play! Everyone in the orchestra is getting paid from a grant, and somehow that includes me. I still haven't gotten my head around this concept; normally I would pay a LOT of money to have the opportunity to play with such a good orchestra, but somehow it's the other way around?!?! I don't need to tell you how excited I am, do I?!

• The next weekend is the annual Cooma Music Competition which is a huge highlight for me/us. Last year we didn't get very involved at all, but this year it looks like we'll be quite busy. My students will be quite involved too; I'm looking forward to encouraging them to take the plunge and discover the joys and terrors of playing in public. One thing I love about this competition is that every year we discover some new hidden talent in the community. Plus it's great to be able to catch up with all the rest of the music community and see what progress everyone has made. Watching people learn and improve (at anything, not just music) is so inspiring.

Other exciting but not-so-close things are our holiday to Kioloa (near Bateman's Bay) with Mum's family, the Australian Flute Festival, the Cooma Band Festival, and Cooma's production of Handel's Messiah. We are so privileged and blessed to be given so many fantastic opportunities in a rural area like Cooma.

Sorry this was all about music. One of the advantages of having a blog, though, is that you can talk about whatever you want, and people only have to read it if they want to and enjoy doing so. =)

What are you looking forward to?

Free to a good home

This little boy needs a new home. He's only 14 weeks old, and exceptionally docile and good natured, but I can't afford to keep him as he isn't up to breeding standard. Free with a week's worth of food and rabbit care information sheets.

A little project

Hope you're all having a great week. I just thought I'd share with you something of what I've been doing: this is an audio track I made using Sibelius and Notion 3. Notion, an audio editing program and virtual instrument library, is still very new to me and I have yet to work around such issues as dynamics and phrasing, but I'm very happy with the result of this, one of the first of my finished works. It only took a few minutes to make this track after I'd finished arranging the score in Sibelius. I love the virtual instruments, and while it is apparent that this is not a 'real' performance, it's surprising how real the instruments can sound at times.

So here we go: this is an arrangement of Pavane by Gabriel Faure. Parts have been cut out from the original version to make it easier to play, but other than that I've tried to keep it as close to the original as possible. I hope you enjoy it!

Pavane by Matthew Ventura