Haircut and Background Music

On Saturday I had my first German haircut! My entire experience was in German – the lady cutting my hair didn’t speak any English (or if she did, she didn’t let on!). I asked her to cut it about 15 cm shorter. She asked if I wanted it straight across all around or if I wanted it “stufig.” I didn’t know what “stufig” meant, so I asked, “Geschichtet?” which also means layered. So now I know two ways of asking for layered hair.

My hair is now shorter, and I'm happy about it. It was way too long before!

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Today (Sunday) the orchestra had its first “performance,” which was actually playing background music for Kari and Mike Greenhoe’s wedding reception.

We were asked to play for half an hour, but I only had 4 days with the kids to get the music ready. We played “Evening Prayer,” which they had all learned for the Christmas concert. After that, we played about 10 hymns. The students learned those really quickly because they were familiar with the melodies and they were in easy keys. We also played an excerpt from the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack (I arranged it for them from the piano score).

We played everything through once, which took about 20 minutes, then we played Evening prayer and two of the hymns again. I told the kids we were done, but they all wanted to keep playing!! So we played a little bit of “Londonderry Air” (I played along with them because they don’t all know the parts well enough yet), I played “Oh the Deep” (I wrote that for Erich and Ellen’s wedding), one of the students played “You Raise Me Up” from memory (a couple of the students and I accompanied him with harmonies made-up on the spot), and one of the students played “Meditation from Thais.”

It was a fun thing for the kids to do. They are enthusiastic about playing in a group – I love to see them getting excited about the music! I’m looking forward to spending this semester with a great group of kids!