Caz Summer 09

Yep, I'm at camp...and we get silly.

For the past six weeks, I've been teaching flute and woodwind chamber music at Cazadero Performing Arts Camp, a great organization based in Berkeley, California that brings several hundred young musicians to the Sonoma County redwoods every summer. I'm a faculty member, which means that I teach the campers and help the counselors learn to teach better. Even though enrollment was down, I taught around fifty flutists over the course of the summer.

I had the good fortune to coach a high school flute and cello duo that was very talented. In addition to being great players, these boys were also avid composers. They learned a couple movements of Villa-Lobos' Assobio a Jato (The Jet Whistle), and then each of them composed a short work for the duo. They ended up performing all three on the student concert. One of them added a small offstage flute part for me to play. When they performed their own works on the outdoor stage at dusk, with the redwoods surrounding us, it was exceptionally beautiful.

The other reason I love this job: the other music teachers. We get considerable amounts of time away from the kids, which means we get to play a lot of chamber music on our own. Highlights include an arrangement we made of an aria from a Bach cantata for flute, violin and cello; a flute, alto saxophone and piano trio by Koechlin (the player and the music must be particularly notable for me to get near a classical saxophone); and a proposed staff flutophone/theramin ensemble.

Like I said before, we get silly.