More Traveling, An Interesting Lecture and some new experiences

Greetings from Innsbruck! This week I was once again up in Germany (Deutsche Bahn are doing very well out of me these past few months!). This time it was to get my final few credit points for my Masters from the Orchester Zentrum NRW. On Monday I attended a very interesting lecture called Culture Management. Wednesday was a seminar in communication training, in which we discussed the different aspects of working in a team and effectively putting your point across in a clear way. In the lecture Culture Management two numbers stood out the most to me, and these were 10,000 and 2,000. 10,000 corresponds with the amount of full time professional orchestral jobs in Germany (the country with the most orchestras) at the present time. 2,000 is the number of music students PER YEAR graduating and looking to win one of these coveted positions. As with any arts graduate, finding steady work in your field of speciality is always challenging, however should you be amongst the lucky few folk fortunate enough to win one of these jobs, it is likely that you will stay there quite a long time, especially as a tuba player. With this in mind, very few job openings tend to come up. There are currently only 5 jobs in world open just now. It is therefore important to keep developing your playing so that when an opportunity does arise to audition for a job then you are in shape. In the meantime bills need to be paid, so this month I have been very busy trying to find some local work. I now have my first tuba student! I am very much enjoying teaching him and am looking forward to hopefully getting more pupils! As well as the teaching I also applied for some extra work as a stagehand at a huge stadium concert this weekend. The band, Volbeat, who come from Denmark, had an absolutely huge setup. I thought it was tiring playing concerts…this was something else! Above is a picture of the concert in full flow, and it gives you and idea of the size of the thing - after collapsing this stage and loading it into trucks I got home at 4am! It was amazing how professional, nice, and efficient everyone was at putting everything away. No stress, just people who are very organised loading countless amount of trucks with a countless amount of gear. A very interesting experience indeed. More news soon. F