Audition

My daughter is visiting from Chicago.  She had an audition for the Kansas City Symphony on Monday. It is a highly codified process. You play the exposition to the first movement of the Haydn trumpet Concerto, then orchestral excerpts from Pictures at an Exposition, Petrushka... She didn't make it past the first round but it is her first audition with an orchestra.

She is 5' tall and weighs 105 lbs and can bench press 90 and do 10 pull-ups. She also does rock climbing in the gym.

She likes reading and listening to podcasts about top performers in sports. What she is trying to get into is a competitive profession with 20 jobs opening a year with many trumpet players trying for them. Really, though, the competition is not the hundreds of players auditioning, but the dozens that really have a chance at them. You audition behind a curtain playing the same excerpts as everyone else, so it as close to a merit-base system as exists. She is extremely analytical about her strengths and weaknesses.  I wonder where she gets that from?

We watched a cooking documentary on Netflix called SALT FAT ACID HEAT that was pretty good. We watched part of the NBA finals but got bored and so we finished the last episode of the documentary.

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Tomorrow I am going to New York. My local choir in Lawrence is part of a larger group of choirs singing in Carnegie Hall on Sunday. Then we will visit my brother in DC.  I won't be blogging from now until mid June or so.

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I read a short novel Las batallas en el desierto by the Mexican poet (and I guess novelist) José Emilio Pacheco.  A kid in post WW-II Mexico City falls in love with the mother of a classmate (Jim) who is the mistress of some politician. His family treats this perfectly normal infatuation, one that every heterosexually inclined adolescent boy has had for an older woman, as some great sin and psychiatric disorder.  He has to confess to a priest AND go to a shrink! The family takes him out of school, and later he finds out that the mother of his friend killed herself, but doesn't quite believe it. He end by saying that Mariana (his love) would be 80 years old now.  

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I found this notebook where I write down every book I read.  For some reason I haven't been doing it since last December, so I made note there of the Pacheco book and resumed my record of my readings. I started in 2017 and have read 161 books, but that isn't counting the times I have forgotten to keep track.