I had a part in a prestigious classical music performance, one that was premiering a work that I'd had a hand in completing. I was playing piano, while my piano teacher was singing and playing flute. Some well known composer had written the theme and the other musical material, and I'd filled in the blanks to complete the piece.
We'd already had one performance, which had apparently gone great. But the next night, after a rough sleep, I was having trouble getting my music together. I tripped on something while I was carrying the music around and fell, bitting off a corner of the music in the process. This greatly annoyed me, since apparently I did that a lot accidentally. I went off to print a new copy of the score, primarily of the first page which had been bit particularly badly.
I couldn't find the score on my laptop though. I went online to download it from the composer's website, but he only had a new version, with different lyrics. I wasn't sure if the music was different or not, but I didn't want to risk it. I searched through my computer's temp files for the PDF that I'd printed off before, but didn't have any luck.
Eventually, with the room already full of audience members and the time a little past when we were supposed to start, I decided to just improvise something, perhaps on ukulele instead of piano. I saw my piano teacher come backstage where I was, having just given a T-shirt to the winner of a little pre-show contest, which had been won by my roommate.
The performance went alright despite the mishap with the music, although I felt very guilty that I couldn't find the score.
Posted by Trevor Savage at June 24, 2009 12:19 PM | TrackBack