Walkürenritt

image via http://www.brevardmusic.org/

A little post over at my friend Grace's blog reminded me of a time, years ago, 

when I lived in North Carolina for a summer.

Yes, the summer of 2006 I lived in the foothills of North Carolina in a little town called Brevard. I spent six weeks at the Brevard Music Center having the best musical summer that's ever happened. It was ideal. Music everywhere. All the time. That may or may not have been directly related to the fact that the only place air conditioning existed on the campus was in the practice rooms. Incentive much? Aside from that, it was a magical place of the first order. Really. For a week and a half leading up to the opera company's performance of The Sound of Music, I would wake up each morning to the resounding ending chords of the reprise of "Climb Evry Mountain" floating in through the trees with the glittering morning sun.

Each morning we were awoken by a trumpeter playing "Reville" and we were sent to bed each night with an equally as talented trumpeter's performance of "Taps". It was lovely; mostly because it was slightly mysterious, as the trumpeter was always stationed far enough away by the lake that the sounds wafted in with the cooler night air. You never really knew where it was coming from. And then one morning, it was different.

One morning, as we slept peacefully in our cabins on the hill, the low brass got themselves together a little choir of about three tubas, four or five trombones, and four or five euphoniums. They planted themselves right outside of our front porch at 6:00 am, and played Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" with all the gusto and volume they could muster. I don't know if you've ever been startled awake by a full low brass choir playing at fortissimo, but they could have been playing Debussy, and I still would have almost fallen out of my bed. Moral of the story: don't sleep where there are enough brass players to conspire against your slumber.