(Nerdy) Dream Deferred

It's been a big week for me.  Or rather, for the 8th grade horn super-nerd that lies just below the surface of my supposedly professional demeanor.  Sometimes music is just awesome!

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to (prepare for gushing) meet my French horn hero.  Well, one of my French horn heroes.  This person has had an amazing orchestral career, masterclasses all over the world, and has blazed the trail for a lot of female horn players overseas.  If you don't know much about the elite French horn world (what, have you been living under a rock?), that person is Sarah Willis. 

...nbd.

But here's the great thing about classical music-- even the world's top musicians will sit down with you in a lesson, answer virtually any question you throw at them, give you honest professional advice, and invite you salsa dancing afterward.  This is why hero worship in my field is awfully silly.  Here I am stalking Sarah Willis on the Berlin Phil Facebook page, but in real life, she's very nice and humble and not unlike someone who'd be my friend in real life. 

The other big exciting blast-from-my-junior-high-past is an upcoming performance of Benjamin Britten's "Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings" with my buddies at Classical Revolution.  Guys, this piece is THE BEST.  No, but really.  It's the best piece written for the horn and I've loved it since I first learned to play more than like 8 notes on my instrument.  I loved it so much I was even interviewed about it on the local public radio station when I was 13.  (Don't be too impressed- the poor classical music host had to feed me lines so I'd stop simply saying, "I like it when the horn plays!")  I was a helluva precocious kid and most of the time I shudder at the things I fell in love with in my early musical years, but this piece has really stuck with me as I've grown up.  I've never gotten a chance to perform it, so this concert feels rather momentous in the arc of my horn-playing life.  But I'm trying not to make too big a deal out of it.  Cuz making big deals out of things is so 11 years ago.

(But confidential to the awkward, brainy adolescent who spent her allowance on CDs entitled "The Magic of the French Horn": HIGH FIVE!!!)