We hit the road from SLO at 8:00am. The drive was beautiful - California really is such a beautiful state, I need to explore it far more thoroughly if I really want to be a proud native. There were cherry trees in bloom, lakes and rivers, SO much greenery everywhere... again, beautiful.
We arrived at California State University East Bay in Hayward at around 12:00 noon, ate lunch in their student center, and then spend the afternoon in their music department. First we observed a rehearsal of their New Music class, then we got to rehearse our own ensembles a bit before being clinic'd by their director of bands. It was a pretty fun experience, it's always good to have a new conductor in front of the group, it makes everyone step up their game a bit and tells us what we really sound like when we're not slumping through the daily motions of class. We brought most of our wind ensemble, and only about 7 members of our orchestra. Both groups got about a half-hour clinic.
We then took the bus another couple hours north to Vacaville. After dinner at BJ's, we went to see an Air Force Band concert, which was amazing! All the different military branches are notorious for their extremely high-level wind ensembles. The concert was great, with some different repertoire than I'm used to hearing in a wind ensemble (Offenbach, Gershwin, to name a couple).
We got back very, very late, and I've been doing homework for about four hours now. I think I'm about to call it quits, I'll have about an hour in the morning to finish up the chunk I set aside for tonight. Not to worry about taking the time for this post, it probably took all of 10 minutes, as you may be able to tell by the lack of imaginative or even complete sentences.
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