Day three of the orchestra trip.
We all got on the bus and headed over to Harrison School of Arts. Basically an Arts Magnet High School set right next to (ie: the buildings overlap somewhat) a regular High School. There we, first Sinfonietta, then Sinfonia, and then their orchestra performed. Sinfonietta sounded really good, we sounded about par for the course, and the Harrison group sounded really really good with some problem spots in the really really hard places but they had likely had their music for more than a mere month and worked on a block scheduling with dual orchestra and several music related (theory, keyboarding, etc.) classes so they got a minimum of 90 minutes of orchestra a day plus the additional classes. They did start off kind of rough, since the woodwinds decided not to play in tempo with the violas, or vice-versa, but Palmer was incredibly right in warning us that we might seem strange by having so many asians. They had a whopping 2 asians. One sat assistant concert master and the other sat first chair second violin (likely either 2nd or 3rd overall violin depending on how Harrison handles auditions/seating). Yichen (I seriously have no idea how her name is really spelled, but it's pronounced as 'E Chen' so that's my best guess) asked me if I thought Harrison was better than Sinfonia and I said that I couldn't tell from one performance, but I guessed that their Chamber was likely on par with us for the most part, if slightly better. The first chair bass player stopped playing after a large, high tempo 16th note passage to mark something in his music. It was a bit odd seeing someone stop to mark something mid performance. I'm not certain whether to be impressed by his musical dedication or slighted that he was taking this perfomance for us as a triviality.
After they finished performing, we got sent on tours with their people, where we say all the various low doorway'd room that they did speech or keyboarding, or theory in, the whole campus took perhaps 5 minutes to walk around with all the descriptions included. We then went back in and all got on stage (that was 3 Sinfonietta Basses plus 4 Sinfonia Basses plus 6 Harrison basses for a total of 13, with plenty more in the other sections). We played Psalm and Fugue, which is a piece I personally have sightread twice under Palmer and not liked by me either time, nor this one. The noise was rather impressive, even though several of our number were left in the audience by sheer lack of space. Then we scaled down to merely Sinfonia and Harrison Chamber (which was far larger than what one would conventionally call a Chamber Orchestra) and played "The Texians" by Carold Nunez, which Harrison had been working on for some time now, and our advanced players had done last year, except they took a slower tempo (so Chattahoochee rushed alot) and our players who hadn't played it were totally lost in sightreading the massively fluxutuating time signature changes. Actually, our group was slightly smaller than what it should have been because Harrison had only two cello copies of the music and Palmer had only one so that brought it down to seven cellos (only 3 from Chattahoochee) playing on 3 stands. That was the third Nunez piece that day, with Sinfonietta playing "Chapter One" and Sinfonia playing "The Chattahooche" which Palmer had comissioned for us. I came to the conclusion that he uses the same rhythm patterns very often.
We went to a mall for lunch where my meal total came to an uncanny $7.77 and was really tasty. We, this we being Keith, Sarah, Edmund, Jason, and myself, then visited several stores including an EB (yay, ZoE II is out and so it DMC II), a Hot Topic, an ice cream store which was sadly out of bubble pearl tea though it was on the listing of avalible things :(, and a Dollar Store (where Edmund got some badminton rackets out of randomness)
Then we went back to the hotel to get changed. Most of us gathered at the pool where I walked Palmer into a stalemate in Chess (I had 5 pawns, a queen, a bishop, a rook, and a knight versus his king, but he walked into a corner while I advanced my pawns to make more queens). Jerry Fu was somewhat teaching others how to play Chinese Chess (he wasn't totally a master at the game) which seemed inordinately complex since not only were there all sorts of odd rules, but the characters from each side were written differently, just to make Colin go insane I assume. Then we went out to Medieval Times, which'll get it's own post. After that we returned to the hotel and played some Smash Brothers: Melee in Joseph's room, where I learned that Jason is really good and can play a mean ranged Link and then want back to our room at curfew for some Bomberman and then sleep.