Archive for the ‘ Uncategorized ’ Category

Student Success – Blake Manternach

Congratulations to Blake Manternach of Iowa City West High School for winning “Top Soloist” award at the 2013 Iowa Jazz Championships!

Kate’s Photo Website

Check out Kate’s (my wife) newly rebuilt photography website. It looks great!

Student Success – Scholarships

Brian Crew of Kennedy High School in Cedar Rapids has won a cash scholarship from the Cedar Rapids Beethoven Society for his performance of Camille Saint SaĆ«ns’ Cavatine for trombone and piano (Lee Nguyen, piano).

Congratulations!

Student Success

Congratulations to several of my students that made All-State Band and All-State Orchestra this weekend! Well done!

New Bio Pic and New Design

Kate took some new bio pics and they turned out great! I really enjoyed one in particular and wanted to use it for my home page. I felt that the style of the website did not fit with the style of the new headshot, so I selected a new style. Hopefully, that does not cause any confusion.

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Guest Artists

The guest artist schedule is beginning to take place. We are currently working on scheduling exact dates and times with Ko-ichiro Yamamoto, Moises Paiewonsky, and Donn Schaeffer. These will all be happening between now and November! In addition, we have four more artists to schedule! It is going to be a very busy and very exciting year here at the Iowa Trombone Studio!

Arts Share Camp – Year 3

I was asked to return to the University of Iowa Arts Share day camp to teach the music section. Arts Share is a division of the University that promotes the Iowa artists, musicians, dancers, and actors in the public schools. The summer camps is two one-week sessions of day camp for children finishing kindergarten through fifth grade. The children are divided four age groups and attend several classes daily in music, movement, art, writing, and theater. The kids are a blast to work with. It has been great having some of the same kids back each year. One thing that has surprised me year after year is my ability to remember names. I have always felt that I am terrible with names, but each year I am able to memorize 80-100 names in just a few days.

I feel that I have found my niche in teaching music to the children. The format is not such that we can really teach musical concepts as some of the children have several years of private instruction and some have never held an instrument. Rather, I have chosen to integrate some geography with world music. The children do a great job learning the names of countries and understanding some of the elements that make music from the various cultures some unique to that region.

I hope to be asked back for Arts Share next year!

Iowa Student Success!

Congratulations to Jessica DuCharme, Iowa graduate student and winner of the Grand Prize at the Southeast Trombone Symposium Solo Competition. Jessica is the proud new owner of a Shires Trombone! Congratulations, Jessica!

What I See

The University of Iowa sits on a gorgeous campus. I am so fortunate to be able to see big, full trees every day. My office is in a building that is just south of the Pentacrest, a green area surrounded by five buildings.

Along the brick to the right of the view above is this simple graffiti. Yes, it’s graffiti, but I like it.

Milwaukee and Chicago

Last week we went to Chicago to spend some time with Kate’s sister, Kim and for me to get closer to Milwaukee where I took the audition for the second trombone vacancy. Every audition is a little different – I have nothing but great things to say about the way this audition was run. I have never met a nicer group of people running the audition and I have never been at an audition where it is on time!
I felt pretty good about the way I played in the audition, but didn’t advance. By the time I left, around eighty people had played and only four people advanced. I am glad that I did the audition and I learned a lot in the process. Back to the practice room!
We didn’t do any sight seeing this time around in Chicago, just the annual trip to IKEA. Next time we will actually try to see some stuff….