The Pee-Wee Herman Look

Sorry for the day's hiatus in posting. The teaching schedule in Erbil is grueling and we had a long evening recording for a TV broadcast as well so I was in no shape to write late last night.

So I will be beamed around the world on satellite TV! Those of you who receive Kurdish International TV (Zoraya), be prepared! After the heavy day of teaching last night, we were bussed over to their studios in a far corner of Erbil. The lots were dusty and small children and chickens were wandering around. (Michael's comment: "This don't look like no satellite television station! This is AM RADIO!!") But they did have a little sound stage. And they sicced a hair-and-makeup guy on all of us. Everyone got a standard blowdry and hairspray look except for me-- for some reason the makeup guy got over-excited and slicked my hair up into a dramatic faux-hawk, then hair-sprayed it into a point that could have drawn blood. I LOVED the look. The other guys told me it made me look like Pee-Wee Herman.

My horn is still broken. I played a little Mozart all on B-flat horn. The studio was hot so I was sharp, I was playing with an electric keyboard and anyway I haven't been able to dig in and practice hard for weeks now so it was a mixed performance. I signed the release anyhow. The other guys played the Bach Double (me turning pages for James playing continuo) and Michael sang some showtunes. This was all courtesy of a violinist named Mr. Sirhan who is some kind of bigwig in the culture ministry and a very nice guy (although he wanted to do unlimited takes of the Bach until we complained of heatstroke from the lights...). We finished up late.

Today was the second full day of teaching. I now have three sections of my musicianship class-- 9, 11 and 3PM. So far they have gone surprisingly well. I spend a lot of time doing clap-and-response and then rhythmic training exercises I get out of a band book. The second half of the class is ear-training. I've mostly stuck with the basic divisions-- consonance and dissonance. They are doing okay and getting better with it. I played the first movement of Beethoven Moonlight Sonata at the end of each class today to demonstrate the handling of dissonance and it was fun to hear them murmuring "konts, diss, konts" (my Kurdish neologisms for consonance and dissonance) as I played.

The conducting class is still popular, but as I am rapidly going to run out of things to teach, I'm dropping the class to once every other day. I'm bombarding them with conducting theory-- MY conducting theory. Either I will create a new school of great conducting or Kurdistan will be doomed to permanent obscurity as a result of my teaching. (Teaching here makes one feel grandiose.)

Teaching in Erbil is more of a challenge then Sulemany. The classes are bigger, the level is generally lower (my trombone player would SHINE compared to some of the players here), and also we have students from the arabic parts of Iraq so we often need translators into both Kurdish and Arabic. My wind class is grumbling that the pieces we are working on are too easy, although of course even these they can't play properly. So it goes. I didn't think I was going to have any performing groups, but I got my clarinet section to honk recognizably through a trio version of Old Joe Clark today and I think I may throw them on stage.

Tomorrow we finally sort out our visa status. I have been illegally in Kurdistan for over a week now! We will have to pay some sort of fine at the visa office for which American Voices will reimburse us. Hopefully we won't get thrown into any Iraqi prisons.