In response to a request for more pictures of the Bradka contrabassoon I showed in a previous post, here are close-ups of the finger keys. This image is of the left-hand keys. I found these keys particularly interesting, as the touchpieces that represent finger holes are rings. There are no finger holes under the rings, but I presume that the idea was to provide something that felt like finger holes.
This picture is of the Right Hand keys.
Rehearsals for the Victor Bruns Six Pieces for contrabassoon and piano have progressed to a studio at Juilliard that has a Steinway grand piano. Before we had time with the Steinway though, we did quite a bit of work with the Yamaha keyboard I have, which I use to help prepare my orchestra parts. We were actually able to get a lot of work done with the electronic keyboard, but there were certain things which just couldn't be fine-tuned until Barbara had her hands on a real instrument.
A beekeeper came today and extracted our bee colony from the walls of our house. It was a fairly new hive, and the access was relatively easy through an outside soffit, so I think we got off relatively easy. We only have two holes to patch: the one the bees used as access, and the one the beekeeper made to access the bees.
