The Event - Brassical Class

Travelling on the train to North Yorkshire

All the travel went according to plan and we arrived, set up and had a small rehearsal and started the concert on time at 5pm! We were pleased to have around 55 members in the audience, most of which fitting our broader target audience. In preparing the posters and other publicity, I decided to name the event "Brassical Class" as a fun play on words and to catch the reader's attention.
The performance space was a little smaller than anticipated so we’re glad we arrived early to sort out how we would sit, but fortunately the decision to take a trio rather than a brass quintet played in our favour.

Arrived at the venue!
Phil Wilby came to the sound check and listened to us, ensuring we had a good balance of sound from around the church. He had prepared 3 fairly short organ pieces which provided a welcome break to us and something different the audience appreciated listening to. His choice of pieces were to show off what the church organ, built in 1870, could do.
My Mum and a couple of ladies from church kindly offered to make and serve refreshments afterwards, for which we were very grateful. Ticket sales were handled by my Dad, another benefit to performing somewhere with pre-existing contacts (or family!). It was really lovely as performers to be able to mingle with the audience afterwards, engaging with them and seeing how they enjoyed the concert! There were many positive comments, but what I love about Yorkshire folk is that they will give their honest opinion, so there were a couple of things (such as the Plog Trio for Brass) which they hadn’t liked and told us so!
We really enjoyed the experience and learnt a lot from performing in such a different setting to London.
Performing "Greensleeves"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project Conception

Image
The initial idea for a rural outreach project came from my love of the countryside and music alike and a desire to share some of the incredible musical opportunities I have experienced in London. Since moving here I’ve been amazed at the number of concerts available that are accessible and free and it made me wonder why no-one does the same thing in rural areas. Is it the lack of “professional exposure” it brings the performers? Or the difficulty in accessing lesser-populated areas? Or maybe people won’t enjoy it as much because “they” are different to “us” city/cultured folk? Or perhaps they simply can’t afford to have many musical performances because there’s no funding for it in rural areas. I was interested to find out if any of these ideas might be true and investigate the potential need for musical work to be done in rural areas. Humans have been involved in making music for thousands of years, it's only recently that we seem to have segregated between the privileged and ...
Read more

Results

Image
Following the concert itself, we had short feedback forms to be filled out. Of the 55 audience members, 30 responded on a form - that’s a 54.55% response rate, meaning we heard from more than half of the audience! From this we found out that 2/3 people only occasionally attend concerts, more than half were more likely to attend another local concert and most people (27/30) would come to another concert by Rose Brass Trio! This WordCloud depicts the popularity of comments that were made on the feedback forms. Words that occurred most appear in the largest font. We made this so we could see clearly the data received and analyse it effectively. In addition, Anna, Freya and I spoke to people after the concert, receiving some lovely comments including one lady in her eighties saying she would go home and dust off the keyboard for the first time since her husband died because we had played “Fur Elise”, a tune she used to love playing on the piano. This was really special and highl...
Read more

Rehearsal Process

Image
Rehearsal set-up As a regular chamber musician, I generally like to rehearse as an ensemble at least 2 hours a week. Until July 2017, most of my chamber experience was with brass quintet or dectet so starting up Rose Brass Trio highlighted some new challenges. The most obvious of these is that due to the reduced number of musicians in the group, each individual is playing almost constantly in order to fill out the texture. There is very little opportunity to rest and therefore stamina becomes an issue because we all tire much faster!  Rehearsing in 123 In September we tried a mixture of 1 and 2 hour rehearsals to see what would work best. In terms of stamina, 1 hour was the most realistic. However, when you factor in set-up and time talking about the pieces and musical desires, it can be difficult to get much done before needing to pack away again! As we all found we were very busy particularly towards the end of the autumn term, 1 hour rehearsals were easier to fit in ...
Read more