Friday 13th February - Day 5

Performance day is upon us! Most of what we are going to show has been done so it's now just finishing touches and hoping nothing major crops up to throw a spanner in the works!

The whole group arrived on time in room 222 this morning and after a brief final chat with our mentor we set to work practicing the tricky instrument changeovers and ironing out any remaining blemishes in the arrangements. 

By 11.30am this was complete so we started setting up our chosen "stage" - the courtyard at Trinity's King Charles Court. Natalie and I wrote up on a whiteboard the bits of our project the audience might like to know such as which instruments we're using and the pieces incorporated in the arrangements in case anybody couldn't recognise them...

Unfortunately whilst setting up we noticed a slight flaw in our preparatory thinking - we had considered a wet weather plan, but not the possibility of strong winds knocking over music stands and instruments! Very kindly, Roz Surtrees (a member of the CoLab operations team) arrived loaded with clothes pegs, plastic wallets and card so we could try and fix our music in place. This proved much more difficult than anticipated and part way through the performance we ended up with members of the audience jumping in to help out by catching flying music and holding the stands during particularly strong gusts! 

Initial set up of the group for the historical arrangement.

Music started flying off!

 Despite all this, we managed to pull off a fairly good performance and we quickly became very skilled at playing with one hand whilst keeping the music in place with the other. Luckily no instruments were damaged from falling stands or likewise and I'm very proud of our group for demonstrating our exploration and work from the week. We've had such a good experience discovering what it's like to play all these trumpet-related instruments in an ensemble and it's been a pleasure working with a wonderful group of trumpeters!