September 18, 2021 - A Whole New Team

September of 2021 saw a new look Leadership team. Michael Sushel had stepped down as the Board Chair, and I asked Javier Oviedo if he would take the role, and he did. Javier comes with Jean-Pierre Schmitt (who would also become a Director), and because the pandemic still flailed on, we got both of them every Saturday. Samara Rice who was recommended by the American Composers Forum was a composition/piano instructor. She frequently composed for toy piano. Karen returned. Jack would privately mentor kids who were interested in music tech. And Aeralie Brighton would offer private mentoring to our voice leaning students (Angela, Elliana, and Huxley).

There was a plan for the fall, and it included getting into the studio. We would see string mentors leading up to a strings recording session. Spring would follow the template with winds. And then we'd hit brass, and completely run out of time for our recording with our summer collaboration.

We began guest mentors with John Wineglass, probably my favorite contemporary composer. (I explained why in the Southeast Symphony section.) He's also a violinist and really demonstrated how to build to a climax and structure pieces.

Karen asked JP to do the viola session since she had done one the year before. They worked together on it.

Maksim Velichkin returned! We again had the problem of Maksim not being able to Zoom from his apartment, so we went to a small studio near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Angela and Christopher joined in person, and everyone else Zoomed in. Did we nail hybrid this time? Yes we did! We became less afraid of coming back live with kids still scattered across the country.

Aeralie Brighton delivered another fantastic workshop.

And then we met Lucas Fehring as a mentor. Lucas had already engineered our recordings over the summer. He was a GRAMMY winner with MB and Opium Moon. And we wanted to have him talk to the kids about what to expect at our upcoming strings recording session. Karen moderated this session, as I was helping my new GF dig through her storage. Although I did log on here and there, it was the first time I really flirted with the idea of not always having to be there.

Bass player Alan Wang came in to mentor. He had a lot of good info, but maybe in the up and coming bracket. ASMAC's Milton would refer us to Igor Kogan at the beginning of 2022. Igor has been our first call for bass ever since.

In December of 2021, we were ready for a string recording session. Chuck Fernandez was going to conduct the session, so he came in the week before, having improved upon everyone's scores, and gave a great workshop on music prep for the copyist that I still refer to.

This led our first true in person recording session.