Gesu Bambino

This sunday I was able to fulfill a dream of mine - to play Gesu Bambino.

When Mari and I were engaged and I was at an internship in Germany, I had more time on my hands than I was used to, without a computer to play on. So I decided to learn to play the recorder. I had this Nordstrom Christmas CD with a bunch of great instrumental versions of Christmas songs, and my favorite was Gesu Bambino, performed with a soprano recorder, and alto recorder, and a piano.

So I bought a nice wood recorder and learned to play the soprano recorder portion of the song, note by note. But I haven't been able to find another recorder player, or more specifically, an alto recorder player, until this year.

When I found out that our ward clerk, Bill Hanton, played the recorder, I talked to him about playing together, and he sounded interested. The only problem was, I only had the CD to go by, and Bill, like most people, needed written music. Also, the music isn't available online, and I wasn't able to contact the composer. So I listened to the CD and entered the notes into a program.

The alto recorder part was pretty easy to write, but the piano part was very hard. I'm not a great musician, and I had a hard time picking out all the notes. But eventually, I was able to pull out enough notes that it sounded very good and very close to the actual music. I wasn't able to get the music to Bob Hoover (our pianist) until about 3 weeks before our performance.

Well, we performed yesterday in church, and it was very good. We had one glaring mistake, but I didn't mind in light of the whole performance. That's just part of being an amatuer, I think. I loved it, and was just glad to be able to play with Bill and Bob after 6 years of dreaming.

Now I'm hoping to find another recorder player, and maybe we can perform as a recorder trio. I really like practicing, and I love having variety in the types of music I hear at church.