The New Hot 5, a traditional Dixieland ensemble I recently joined, will be performing at Festival Jazz en Vercors, a jazz festival held in 6 villages in the French Alps. It runs July 30 through August 7, and the New Hot 5 will be performing at several different venues. If you happen to be in the area, come and say Hi! Here’s a program.

Also, stay tuned for the debut album of the New Hot 5, due to be released soon. Some great music, with CD artwork from the renowned visual artist, Walter Askin!

Although I sub with the Utah Symphony, it’s been a number of years since I officially belonged to an orchestra (Cedar Rapids Symphony and Waterloo Symphony ending in 2004 and Arkansas Symphony before that), and I look forward to working with this distinguished group! May the Nutcracker never grow old!

Specifically, there were 4,140 visits from 112 different contries/territories in September. Top 5 countries in visits were US, UK, Canada, Brazil, and Italy.

Glad there’s something useful here (or at least interesting)!

We’re happy to inform you that your Hub, Trombone History: A Mischievous Trombonist in Renaissance Italy, has been selected among 6 candidates for this week’s HubNuggets on HubPages! HubNuggets are high-quality Hubs published by new writers like yourself that are featured in our weekly newsletter, sent to over 60,000 recipients.

The criteria for selection as a HubNugget is entirely dependent on votes, so please encourage your friends to vote for your Hub on this page before Wednesday of this coming week:

Entertainment and Media

(Click on the HubNuggets – Vote Now tab at the top, right below the title)

ANYONE can vote and voters do not have to be members of HubPages. Consider sharing the voting link as a status message on Facebook, as a tweet, or in your email or discussion forum signatures, to help get the word out.

Good luck and thank you for publishing on HubPages!

My role has been to record on several of the low brass instruments (tenor trombone, alto trombone, and euphonium), schedule recording sessions for all of the instruments, and serve as musical consultant/liason during recording sessions.

An anechoic chamber, by the way, is a room with special walls, ceiling, and floor designed in such a manner that there are no echoes or reverberation, where reflections that normally affect frequency response can be avoided. Especially noticable in the photos are the wedge-shaped panels covering all surfaces in order to dissipate as much audio energy as possible. The floor is a web of metal cables suspended above a set of acoustic wedges.

The resulting performing environment for a musician is unusual and challenging. Playing in a “dead” practice room is difficult enough! With no reverb at all, aural feedback becomes noticeably limited. In fact, aural feedback for trombonists, I came to realize, is somewhat unusual among musical instruments. When we play trombone, the majority of the sound radiates in a very directional way out of the bell (which is itself relatively far away from our ears), directly away from us, such that the sound we actually hear and adjust to when we are playing is primarily sound that has reflected off of some surface and then returned to our ears. So when there is nothing for the sound to bounce off of, as in an anechoic chamber, it is challenging to hear what you are doing! Everything sounds softer, of course. The tendency is to play louder and louder in order to hear yourself and try to “create” some kind or resonance. Dynamic shadings (part of what they measured in the study) are difficult because of the lack of aural feedback, and you end up going as much by the feel of your embouchure as by sound.

Overall, it’s been a very interesting, educational experience! I plan to take my whole BYU trombone studio on a little field trip to the chamber in the fall. Also planned for the fall is a continued collaboration with Tim Leishman in studying the directivity of each musical instrument–measuring the precise way sound radiates away from each instrument across its full pitch range, then creating 3-dimensional animated models of that “sound bubble” for each instrument.

Barthold Conrath, painted ceiling, Church of St. Lawrence, Tönning, Germany

Just looking over March’s Google Analytics (website stats I get once a month) and noticed that the site topped 3,000 visits for the first time. After eclipsing 2,000 for the first time in November, it reached the next thousand pretty quickly. I doubt this trend will continue, but it has been fun to see that people have found something useful or interesting here.

I have appreciated the feedback and comments from a range of people, including professionals, amateurs, historians, magazine editors, early music specialists, and museum curators.

The Trombone History Timeline pages continue to be the most popular, followed by the Alto Trombone pages and the Breathing pages.

Countries people most commonly visit from are United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy, France, Poland, Belgium, and Spain.

1615—Reggio Emilia, Italy: Lionello Spada’s fresco in the cupola of the Chiesa della Ghiara includes depictions of numerous angel-musicians, including an angel playing trombone (see facing image; public domain) (Quintavelle, plate 81; Monducci 130).

c. 1610—Rome, Italy: Lionello Spada’s painting, Concert, which shows a group of musicians presumably preparing for a performance, includes a clear depiction of a musician removing the outer slide of a trombone (see below image; public domain) (Egan; Monducci 81).