As a freelance musician, when it gets busy... it gets stupidly busy... as a pair of freelance musicians with two young kids... well, when BOTH of us get busy, it goes completely nuts.

My wife and I have a crazily packed month coming ahead of us. She is doing WAAAAAYYYYYY too many university recitals... where she has to learn stupendously hard pieces to play with students, who are difficult to play with... and with a scheduling that generally is catered for the panel who just have to turn up and sit down.... and ignores the pianist who will be scheduled to do about 7 performances back to back every day for a couple of weeks. So, my wife finally cracked and put her foot down and said that she wasn't going to do that... and if they insisted, then they could just get someone else.

... but she is one of the best pianists around... and she needs to remember that more often, and they changed the schedule after apologising and saying that they had no idea that this was happening. Well, they would have known if they had bothered asking...

So, slightly less stressful, but still very stressful... and then our group has three different concerts in that same month... one will be relatively easy, and we will both give a lecture concert together... and then there is an outreach concert, where I have decided to do the whole concert as a solo string player so that my wife doesn't need to learn anything for that... and then we have our last main ensemble concert for the year, which is pretty heavy for both of us.

I've also taken on board the moving and tuning of the keyboard instruments... I'm not sure that I have that much time either, but I'm not the one that needs sleeping pills to sleep at night at the moment...

... and then I'm also on tour for a couple of weeks, and that will be the only time for me to finish up both of our taxes... using the pretty reliable Cointracking software to try and collate and declare our crypto end of things (that is always a bit of a headache...).

I will also have to give a pre-concert talk for something else as well, but I think I should be able to wing that without too much preparation... it is for a lay audience, and I know the topic pretty damn well!

... and finally, a Symphony orchestra project... which I do regret taking on, as it is a bad busy time... and they are doing Baroque music, which is my specialisation... and it is interesting to see how differently they do it, and how they are a bit at sea with what to do and how to play it! I hadn't thought that it would be quite that difficult... but it is mostly difficult for me, as I can see many things that they are completely and utterly unaware of, so there is a certain bliss in ignorance!

But I keep it all to myself, no one wants to be the guest player who keeps mouthing off... and I suspect that it wouldn't be possible anyway, which would make for more people being unhappy in addition to me being frustrated. Modern classical musicians really approach music in a VERY different way to the way that we do... time, rhythm, reading, sound world... everything is completely different! Again, something that I hadn't realised... but we tend to be much freer with improvisation, time, rhythms... whilst the classical people tend to stick very much to what is printed without much breadth of interpretation. Ah well... enlightening, but somewhat sad.

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