International Trumpet Guild Conference 2013

Story time, folks! It's time for a freestyle informal blog post. I'm not even going to spell check or edit this one, or make any attempt to sound "professional"... I'm going to speak from the heart because it represents my incredible heartwarming first-ever ITG experience. Care to read on? :) GO! Just kidding. Stop for a moment... because the ITG experience for VCU doesn't actually start at ITG...

Before the Conference...

So we're headed to the Richmond Airport, right? My alarm went off at 4:25am on Tuesday the 11th... early flight to prepare for, and I know I'm going to be exhausted by the time we perform at 9pm in Michigan. But it's cool because VCU's entire trumpet ensemble got funding to attend the ITG conference. The vast majority of our expenses and logistical organizing were taken care of by our Professor Rex Richardson and the college of VCU. What happened when we got there, though, was an unprecedented experience for us -- 5 minutes before boarding our plane, the guards and police evacuate the ENTIRE airport and - over the course of maybe 30 minutes - push us all completely off site towards the parking lot area. Hundreds of people stand around frustrated, trying to figure out what happened and why we're all out here... Turns out the airport received a bomb threat by phone serious enough for them to kick us all outside for about 3 hours. Guess we're not making our flight...

Photo Credit: Caitlin Costello

But the experience ended up putting VCU's Trumpet Ensemble on the news! After an hour or so, ensemble members got restless and decided to warm up in their practice mutes. Meanwhile, WRIC 8 and NBC 12 news stations show up on site to get live coverage of the bomb threat situation, they see the trumpets out, and they decide to come talk to us. They asked us if we had anything to play for them, that they might put us up on live television... So we did. "Marcus wrote this piece!!" the ensemble members said, pointing at me after we played a movement from the Grant Suite for Six Trumpets. Haha, thanks guys :) before we left the airport, we got some great coverage on the news as an ensemble, and a couple of us were interviewed individually to be included on the news story. Very cool.

Meanwhile, VCU's Music Office gets our flights get re-routed to split the ensemble onto two different flights... and then RE-re-routed because one of the flights was scheduled to take us to a connection at the Atlanta Airport, where we learned the power was out, and we'd have to find a different flight. (Good grief!) Between it all, we arrive at the Grand Rapids Airport in Michigan for the ITG Conference at 4:28pm... after originally planning to arrive at 10:57am!

At the Conference!

Once we got there, it was quite an amazing experience! VCU performed before two big audiences, and probably the most intelligent audiences our trumpet ensemble could ever perform for. On Tuesday at 9pm, we premiered our trumpet ensemble arrangement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, Mvt. I (audio recording above).On Wednesday at 4pm, we performed the Grant Suite for Six Trumpets. Both our performances were received well! So well that an anonymous spectator who saw our performance on Wednesday saw us at a restaurant eating together and paid for all of our drinks "because [we] played so well", our waiter said. How incredibly nice!

I got to speak with a few of my heroes at the conference. Allen Vizzutti gave me a hug, Vince DiMartino complimented our ensemble on our performance, Adam Rapa gave me great composing advice, even Natalie Dungey talked for a little while, and so many others shared their time with me. I learned a long time ago that "famous" people are people just like us, and most of them are as kind and as humble as can be. But if there's anything I learned by going to this conference, it's that this fact goes even a step further: internationally known musicians - trumpet players, in particular - treat each other like family, and the trumpet community functions as a brotherhood of extremely intelligent, caring, talented, and supportive musicians who love what they do and love to share it with each other. I can't wait to return to the conference next year!


http://msgrantmusic.com