Endless Discovery

       This post is gonna be about a piece called Trisence . It was composed by Eijiro Nakagawa. He is a trombonist and composer. He has an extensive career in Japan and the United States, but he is also a member of the group, Slide Monsters . On Nakagawa's YouTube channel, he has a recording of Slide Monsters playing the piece as well as other Slide Monsters recordings. The group is a trombone quartet comprised of Eijiro Nakagawa, Joseph Alessi, Marshall Gilkes, and Brandt Attema. Eijiro Nakagawa and Joseph Alessi were the ones who founded the group together, and Alessi was the one to select the other two members in the group. On the group's website, they talk about how their focus is on original works. Their two albums were "Slide Monsters," released in 2018, and "Travelers," released in 2022.  Trisense is a part of the first album. Eijiro Nakagawa has a good number of compositions in both albums. I'll leave the video for Trisense  below. The piece is ...

     This one I have wanted to talk about since the listening presentation. I was thinking of including it back then, but chose to wait to make an independent post on it. So this group is called the Crazy Angel Company . They are a performance group in Japan that mixes dance, color guard, instruments, and more together to make an exciting and fun experience! I noticed in a lot of the recordings of their performances, the audience has the hand clappers. I don't know if you remember ever having those as a kid, as a little party favor for example.      It's just a very fun experience to watch them perform. It seems like every member of the group is trained to do the various parts of the performance such as the dancing, color guard, and playing an instrument. There is a lot of mixed implementation of the dancing and playing whenever they can, and it's all done live. I find that very cool and something I would absolutely struggle to accomplish. The Crazy Angel C...

For this post, I have gathered of small collection of music that has caught my interest while digging around. I made a playlist for you to follow along with each one. A couple of these I want to flesh out further in their own separate posts because there's more to learn from them, but here's what I gathered so far. This first piece is called "A Song for Japan." It was composed by Steven Verhelst as a response to the tragedy that struck Japan with a giant earthquake and a tsunami back in 2011. He also used it as an opportunity to create awareness and charity funds for the people affected. If you look it up there are hundreds  of recordings over the years all over the world. Verhelst originally wrote it for trombone but made various versions for other instrumentations such as brass ensembles, quintets, wind bands, and more. A Song for Japan (2011) Steven Velherst (b. 1981) Tokyo Brass Symphony The next is the "Princess Kaguya Suite" composed by Keiko Takashim...

 Hiya there! Since you've stumbled upon this humble little blog, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I'm Neile, I'm in the midst of getting my master's degree at the Univerity of Iowa for the french horn (aka the coolest instrument on earth). I also really love tennis, it was a major part of my childhood along with music, but that's just a fun tidbit of my life.  To give you some backstory to this blog, I honestly took a painstakingly long time trying to develop the name for this blog and how I would theme it. There were so many ideas and blog themes I had in mind and wanted myself to follow and it was exhausting, to say the least. I eventually came to the conclusion that the best solution would be to simplify my ideas to something more flexible and open for me to change if needed. This is the result! The blog is called "Endless Discovery" named after Japan's tourism slogan. Back in 2010, the Japanese government started an initiative to help gro...