A Little Bit More on the Flute Fair

Ah... stupid o'clock---the time of day where I sometimes grab an alcoholic drink, and start writing semi-readable nonsense.

So less than a week ago, I was a participant at this year's edition of the Autumn Flute Fair. I was normally just a passive participant, in the sense that I would spend time mostly at the trade floor, hanging out with the dealers, trying out flutes/piccolos, confusing people with music that they aren't used to (i.e. Chinese orchestral stuff), and the such. This time though, due to my affiliation with the King's Flute Choir, I was involved in quite a few of the other concert-like events. In the face of bonafide flute players [who do it Very Seriously], I stuck with going with The Big Flute instead.

Hardly anyone wants to play the contrabass flute for three big reasons:

1. Shit's big, long, & heavy;
2. Shit's not flashy; and
3. Shit's expensive.

For a frame of reference, the amount spent on The Big Flute can be used to get a professional-level concert flute, with spare change possibly to buy a couple of non-bling accessories.

So, why'd I play it?

Well, mostly because of reasons #1 and #2---I like low flutes after three decades of going high. And on that note, I get all the flashy stuff out of my system through ample dizi playing, and thus have no real wish to spend up to four times more time to master the Flute 1 parts. Most flute choirs are top-heavy anyway, and thus having more bass is always a good thing, making the role that The Big Flute play somewhat more interesting than might otherwise noted.

The flute Jamboree on Saturday afternoon was a fun one, and the closest to the largest combined flute choir-like entity that could be summoned during the Festival. The sonority of having a full-range flute choir when playing out chords was something to behold, especially when coupled with the good acoustics of the SOTA concert hall. While there were a total of three contrabass flutes lurking throughout all the performers, only two were available during the Jamboree proper (the Taiwan contingent came in late enough that they didn't manage/want to unpack their contrabass flute).

It was also interesting to note that of all the eight or so flute choirs that turned up for the Festival, there were only three contrabass flutes to go around. I knew that the contrabass flute wasn't that common, but I didn't realise just how uncommon it truly was.

For additional reference, The Big Flute is probably only the second contrabass flute to be in SIN city as at now, with the first one spending most of its time located in Johor Bahru due to the player [based in Singapore] finding it annoying to lug the heavy flute to and fro the Causeway for rehearsals with the flute choir that is based in Johor Bahru.

But I digress.

I won't write about the concerts, other than they were full of different harmonies due to their different composers.

I think I am likely done with writing anything else about the Festival for a while, even as I slowly find myself becoming a part of the flute fraternity of Singapore (and possibly SEA), possibly due to The Big Flute.

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In other news, the upcoming month or two is going to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, things have finally tapered off somewhat due to the end of the year, with many of my team taking turns to go on long leave. On the other hand, I'm still stuck holding the fort, and having a couple of new mini-projects that I need to work on, as well as supervising an intern for a special project.

I know that I have no plans to travel out of SIN city, but damn I feel tired. We'll see how it goes.

I wasn't expecting it, but Brotato is a damn fun game. It's like a less claustrophobic version of The Binding of Isaac crossed with the ``be the bullet hell'' progression of Vampire Survivors, and it is addictively fun. I have been playing it at bursts, and have been enjoying it. It also has some quality of life options, like allowing the re-attempt of a failed wave to make it less annoying (I naturally took it---I'm an older man now with little time to spend on grinding unnecessarily).

100 Bullets is a very gritty story that is worth a read.

I think that's about it. The Anchor Strong beer isn't particularly strong (6.8%), but it is getting late. The last thing I would say is my bemusement at realising that an Applebot crawler is actively crawling this blog, possibly when its operators realise that a real-ish human is still writing new entries on it, as opposed to some AI-generated slop.

To the Applebot crawler: don't be a dick.

To everyone else; till next time.