At ten years old, I was thrown into the world of beginning band, not really knowing what to expect. Never would I have expected to be where I am today, let alone where I was a year ago. My senior year of high school I was first chair flute in wind ensemble, and all district band member, and a qualifier for state. Needless to say, I worked harder than ever that year, especially when it came time for solo and ensemble festival. That year, I had picked a solo completely out of my league; literally, it was written for a musician at least of the college level. This piece was Poem by Charles Griffes. It was seven pages long, and played around eleven minutes, even with sections cut out of the final performance. Poem, for any flutist, was a monster.…show more content… The previous solo I had played was a very straightforward piece by Mozart. So, while playing Griffes’s piece, I threw everything to the wind, and started playing with a blank slate, not really knowing what to expect from this piece. Starting off, I didn’t think this piece would be all that difficult, seeing as though the first page was a beautiful, slow, lyrical section. It wasn’t until my eyes saw the next page and where I was headed after that, that I began to panic and over analyze what was written on the page; playing things louder and faster than need be. Poem has so much to it, not only are the time signatures complicated and constantly changing, the rhythms, an awful key signature, with an uncountable number of accidentals and some of the most complex ones at that, pitches, dynamics, even the accompanying part was tediously demanding. I was playing things in this piece that I never even knew existed in the world of music, I was learning far more than I anticipated, and probably practicing more than I would have ever imagined. I practiced at least an hour a day every day of the week, for about two or three months. Poem had become my life, and what a complex life that was. Charles Griffes wrote a poem within the music; there was so much emotion in every section – in every note. The opening of this song was like watching waves on the beach in the early morning. While the middle section was a volcanic eruption of anger. Anger of which
