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... that you've done on stage or has happened to you on stage? Here is something I did many years ago that still haunts me. I was in my college orchestra as a percussionist. As you know, percussionists are expected to play a variety of percussion instruments. Actually, all of them. People think it's easy, that we just sit around until we're needed. Then we get up and whack something with a mallet. But you try counting rests for seventy-five bars with a conductor that's all over the place. It's not easy. One evening - a very special evening - we played Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. The violinist was superb. Everyone was dressed to kill. In this piece, at the peak of tension, there is a wicked duet between the trumpets and a snare drum that consists of a fast, relentless sextuplet figure that goes on bar after bar ... The trumpet double tongues it (good luck!) and the snare drum marks the rhythm. It's a very difficult thing to pull off, keeping both instruments together for the duration. So what happened? Did we screw up? Embarrass the school with sloppy playing? No, my friends. We played it flawlessly. But what I can never forgive myself for doing is this. I played these marvelous sextuplets in a three piece brown suit. Courduroy, nonetheless. Everyone else looked dignified in black while I stuck out like a pretentious used car salesman. Oh, the shame. The humiliation! I remember going shopping with my mother to pick out the suit. Did I actually say, "I'll take this one, it's only $60?" Oh, the shame. Please share your embarrassment - if you dare.

I heard the live version, and honestly couldn't find that many faults, altough I could chalk it up at this being a totally unknown piece for me. Nevertheless, it struck to me as slightly "disjointed" overall - meaning I would have wanted smoother transitions rather than an excessively episodic treatment. Granted, this is quite tough to do when writing for a solo instrument, but there's still enough good musical material here not to work it up into an improved work. Thanks for sharing!

So... you did write this, right? If you had fooled me into believing that this was an arrangement of a song by, say, Stephen Foster (such as this one), I would have totally bought it. It is THAT good. Congrats!

This was the first time I was trying to compose slaps for flute (on this recording, the alto flutist was not yet skilled to play slaps though), more freely floating music with sense of lacking clear pulsation (the aleatorics cannot be found in my music until 2008) while thinking how could I become more sort-of atonal without betraying my love for beauty in music.

I wouldn't call this too out there. It's wonderful storytelling music. You need Disney to do another "Fantasia" and animate this for one section. :D I particularly like all the "wind tones." Now I'm a curious as to what you would add, in your more developed state, if you were to do something like this again. Was there a particular technique you were itching to try?

In my freshman spring band concert we played a piece as our finale that has a very sudden loud chord at the beginning. I was emptying my spit inbetween pieces and not paying much attention to the director, so I was completely caught off guard when the rest of the band started. The first chord startled me so badly that I literally jumped off of my seat. The horn parts were completely absent for the first half of the piece as the whole section was in hysterics.

I'm sure nobody can beat this one... Feeling dizzy and having your stomach upset during a performance of the children choir you were part of... turning pale, vision blurred, stepping forward halfway into a song to tell the conductress you were sick... and all of a sudden, without any warning, vomiting over her right in front of the audience's eyes, before fainting. It happened to me. As soon as I reopened my eyes and came back to my senses, I knew my days in the choir were over. And so was my career - at 8 years old.

My freshman year of college I was a sadly mediocre third clarinet player in my school's marching band, which honestly is pretty mediocre in itself. Anyhow, we we performing an arrangement of Taps and Eternal Father and during the beautifully orchestrated tutti chord at the end I had one of those wonderful reed malfunctions that mediocre clarinet players are prone to have...it was not a good day. I've since moved on to be playing glockenspiel or being drum major.