Klarinet Archive - Posting 000049.txt from 1995/09

From: Bill Hall <billhall@-----.NET>
Subj: Re: The Gig From Hell
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 1995 11:06:35 -0400

My gig from hell wasn't actually a gig - it was a rehearsal - and I wasn't
playing clarinet.

When I was in college at Louisiana Tech University, our band was in concert
season, and we were playing something by Shostokovitch. It had so much
percussion that the band director ran out of percussionists. So he said,
"Hall, get back there and play the gong!" So I found myself standing at a
4-foot Chinese gong with a two-foot long mallet, never having played one before.

At the beginning of the piece, I had something like a hundred measures of
rest, so I patiently counted. My "entrance" was a ffff note, if that's what
you call the sound a gong makes. At this time I weighed in at just under 100
pounds soaking wet, so I wasn't muscle-bound. I figured that ffff needed to
be pretty loud, so when my entrance came, I hauled off, using both arms, and
hit the gong for all I was worth.

The resulting sound, needless to say, was LOUD! It was so loud that the
entire band stopped playing, and I suddenly found everyone was turned around
in their chairs and staring at me with wide eyes. There was this pregnant
silence, and only sound was the gong's vibrations slowly fading.

Then the band director said, "Uh... a little less gong, please."

Everyone laughed, and the band director bounded back to my position to show
me how to "warm up" gong by gently tapping it, and how a gentle tap was all
that was necessary to produce a quite impressive sound.

And we call percussionists dumb!