I wrote a post about a trip to Bradford a few months back, we went up to Yorkshire for the regional National Concert Band Festival. At this festival we were awarded a Gold award and invited to the National festival in Cardiff. So this Saturday saw us all travel down to Cardiff for the festival. We had a rehearsal before our 20 minute performance, so basically my Saturday was 3 hour drive, 2 hour rehearsal, 20 minute performance, 3 hour drive. A pretty tiring day all in all.
I drove down the M50 which is a great drive, beautiful scenery. I had my camera with me but unfortunately I can’t take photos and drive so I have no pictures of my trip which was a bit of a shame. I was hoping to get to see the Cardiff bay, the main city centre and take a few shots but there just wasn’t time. Anyway, the drive wasn’t too bad and there weren’t too many idiots on the road, it was a 310 mile journey (155 miles each way) which is a fair way when I don’t do much long distance driving.
To try and help me concentrate what I tried
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Apologies to the vast majority of people who read my blog who won’t be interested in this post at all as its a bit of a specialized post. My brother was in the brass band regional championships at the weekend, I was absolutely furious with the result, it was a joke. I was just going to write a post when I found this comment on 4 bars rest, the website of choice for the brass band world. It says exactly what I would say but in a much more eloquent way. I agree completely with what he says except may be for the comment about Desford, I agree that their quality shone in certain parts of the music but too many individual errors cost them in my eyes.
I don’t often feel compelled to write but after attending the Midlands Areas I felt I must do so. I’ve been attending contests for a number of years and have experienced a wide range of performances and adjudicating decisions.
However few have been as baffling as yesterday.
I have no affiliation to any of the bands, so listening as a neutral I cannot understand how the adjudicators came to their decision.
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I don’t often blog about anything I get up to but I’ve had quite an interesting weekend. I went up to Bradford, not the most interesting of places but it’s where I studied at University. I hadn’t been back up since I graduated, nearly 4 years ago so I was interested to see if it has changed. The bit of the City of Bradford I went through didn’t seem to have changed much (I didn’t go into the very centre) but the University, well that’s a different matter.
They have been doing (and are still doing) some major reshaping to the main University campus, they have built a new atrium to the main Richmond building, ripping out half a side of the building to achieve this. They’ve then knocked most of the on campus halls of residence down (including the one I used to live in), the place looked a bit like a building site. Even the Tasmin Little music centre has had a face lift. That links me nicely into why I went up there. We had a rehearsal at the music centre for a regional competition festival, it’s call the National Concert Band Festival. It’s a festival,
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