Lesson with Steven Mead!!

Monday, November 17th

This was an awesome day, because I got the chance to have a lesson with Steven Mead (www.euphonium.net). The journey to the lesson at the RAF base in Uxbridge, however, was one of the most stressful experiences of my life. After going to a fantastic class of Shakespeare and giving my presentation on the performance of Othello, I warmed up and got all my things ready for the lesson. I left at 4pm, arrived in Uxbridge at 5:10pm, plenty of time to get over to the base for our lesson at 6pm. I asked some locals for directions on how to get to the base, but they all sent me in different directions. After literally an hour of asking and people saying “oh…that’s quite a ways from here…” I was about to give up. It was like a terrible nightmare, where you’re about to have the greatest lesson of your life, and you’re so close, but you can’t find a giant air force base in the middle of town.
Finally, like an angel descending from heaven, the U3 bus arrived at a bus stop and I asked the giant, bald bus driver who was built like a tank, “How the hell do I get to the RAF Uxbridge base?” He motioned that it was this bus, and I was extremely relieved. I then asked a person on the bus where the base is, and he told me exactly how to get to the main gates. I arrived at 6:05pm, and one of Steven’s students, Matt (a euphonium player in the RAF Central Band) signed me in and walked me to the rehearsal hall where my lesson was to be held.
I walked in and was greeted by one of the greatest euphonium players ever, 10 minutes after I was standing in the middle of a dark alley with no clue on where I was or where I was supposed to go to get here. Then we had an hour-long lesson in which we covered a ton of stuff from consistency in the low register to proper breath control. The ideas he mentioned helped me immensely in that one hour, and I left the lesson extremely happy. He even gave me and his student Matt a ride back to the tube station (I rode shotty in his really nice Volvo). After seeing how close the tube station really is to the base, it should have only taken 10-15 minutes maximum to walk there. Wow.
On the tube ride back, I talked to Matt about brass bands, and he explained how he’s in one in Oxford, and that the second euphonium player has to miss rehearsals occasionally, and if this happens, he’ll let me know so I can come up and sub for them. I’m not sure if this will actually happen in my last few weeks here, but that’d be amazing if it did. My next lesson with Steven Mead is slotted for Wednesday, December 10th. When I got back to my flat, I worked on the BAA paper until about 3am. Yeah college.