Episode 3.2 - Melissa Brown
Our first podcast crossover of the season! For episode 2, we welcome Melissa Brown from Bold as Brass Podcast! Melissa not only shares about her experience as a performer and educator in the UK, but gives us a ton of insight into being a musician diagnosed with OCD. And of course, we talk all things Bold as Brass Podcast!
To learn more about Melissa and the resources she recommended during our chat, check out the links below!
Bold as Brass Podcast's website
Bold as Brass’s fundraising page - help get her to the U.S. this May!
Things Musicians Don’t Talk About Podcast
Brass on the Mind Facebook Group
Female/Trans/Non-Binary Brass Players FB page
Bold as Brass podcast sounding board of friends! Find yourself a village to help!
Full Transcript
Carrie Blosser 0:00
Welcome to the third season of Diversify the Stand. Together we speak with a wide range of musicians who talk about topics that are important to them. I'm Carrie Blosser.
Ashley Killam 0:08
And I'm Ashley Killam. We're so excited to dive into talks with a whole bunch of guests to see them. If you like following along and are a fan of our podcast, please leave us a five star rating and review. Today we chat with the first of multiple podcast hosts this season. Melissa Brown is a trombonist, educator, and the host of Bold as Brass Podcast. Well, thank you so much for joining us on our podcast after we have joined in on the Bold as Brass podcast a few times. We're so excited to chat with you today.
Melissa Brown 0:39
Thank you so much for having me. I feel so very honored.
Ashley Killam 0:42
We'd love to start off just by hearing a little bit about you your musical journey and what you currently do.
Melissa Brown 0:49
Yeah, well, hello, everyone. I'm Melissa Brown. I am a trombonist based in the UK I'm sure my accent gave me away immediately. Hilariously, stereotypically also sitting here armed with tea. So great to be here. So yeah, I am a brass player, teacher podcaster. do too many things, as many of us do. So yeah, to answer your question properly, I will give you hopefully a potted history. Hopefully this won't take quite as long as the 30 years of my life that has passed so far. So I started playing when I was about nine years old. My dad is a tuba player, an amateur tuba player. I hate the word amateur. I don't know why I continue to use it. It has horrible connotations. But anyway, he doesn't do it for work. So he is not much a tuba player. And I was fascinated by it, the tuba, and the fact that he went off and made noises out of this big shiny thing once a week. And it was fascinating and I wasn't allowed to go and I think my curiosity started that. So I grew up in the British Brass Banding tradition, still fairly near and dear to my heart. I still do bits over banding as and when I can. So I started at the age of nine on a cornet, those sort of funny-looking squished trumpets. Didn't really like that very much. Didn't take to it very well, wasn't very good at it. So they moved me up to the tenor horn, sort of the miniature tuba looking guy. Stuck with that for about four years, I knew I was getting slightly closer to what felt comfortable and what made sense to me. And at the age of 13, I finally settled on the trombone, slidy fart horn here I come. And we were all well from there. So I, I had my lessons through a local music service, where I met my sort of slightly longer term teacher, the Freelancer Duncan Wilson. He then taught me until I went to college. So then I took a place at the snappily named Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in 2009 and I was there for four years, whilst I did my bachelor's degree. And I also did a second diploma in instrumental teaching whilst I was there. I thought, this sounds like the sort of thing that would be helpful to get me work. And turns out, I was right well done to 19-year-old me for making that snap decision. When I had to choose my electives. I didn't really know which other ones would be helpful. Turns out that paid out pretty well for me. So nowadays, I spend most of my time teaching in various different settings, most of the time doing brass and piano one-to-one teaching, some whole class brass teaching, which is kind of similar to like the early stages of band program, except we're stupid, and we do it for one year. And then we hope that they have liked it enough to carry on. Most of the time it doesn't play out like that. And then I do two days a week of something I never thought I do and I teach curriculum music in a primary school for kids aged 7 to 11. And yeah, it turns out I quite like that. I've been there now for about two years. I thought it was gonna do it for one and just see how I got on and I decided to stay. And so yeah, besides that, freelance trombone and euphonium playing, you know, it's, it's COVID. That hasn't happened quite as much as one would like since about 2019. And I yeah, I am the "WE" that everyone hears about behind Bold as Brass Podcast, whenever we post anything and we say "we" what that really means is "I." So yeah, hosting, administrating, doing the interviews, editing them, social media. It me. It's all me. So yeah, that's me. Potted, potted history.
Carrie Blosser 4:22
Thank you so much for giving us such a wide insights into your into your life. And you just mentioned Bold as Brass, your podcast. So we'd love to ask you how you got started doing that and kind of what your goal has been and maybe how it's changed over the past, since it started a little over a year ago.
Melissa Brown 4:40
Yeah. So Bold as Brass Podcast is one of these seemingly commonplace now COVID babies. So in, whatever it was, March 2020, when we all went into lockdown and weren't allowed to, you know, leave our houses, I had my work reduced from like five full days of teaching to about two and a half days of online teaching. And between that, and we were living in a flat at the time, so the amount of practice I could do was pretty minimal because we had neighbors that wanted to not hear the trombone. Between that sort of combination, I was slightly climbing the walls without quite enough to do. And I've been toying for a while with some sort of, again, I keep using was that I hate, but like journalistic outlet. I, don't consider myself a musical journalist at all. I ask people where they want their extra noses, for heaven's sake. But, you know, some sort of output like that something, perhaps interview based, and I couldn't decide if it was a YouTube channel or a podcast, or a blog, or something like that. But I wanted, but I knew that there was something that and really, the starting point of the actual podcast itself, came from a question that a family member asks me all the time that I hate, which is he always asks me what gigs I have coming up. Which, as a freelancer, sometimes the answer is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And I hate that that's the answer, but similarly, it's like, I don't have any playing, but can I tell you about this workshop that I'm running, or these classes that I'm planning or... Just not interested, wasn't interested, and it really rattled my cage that it was like, playing isn't all that I do because I'm a musician, you've heard this word and think I just play the instrument all the time. But also, I don't know anybody for whom that is their entire job. I don't think I know anybody like that. And I sort of started to knit these two things together. I was like, Well, what about if I spoke to these people, and we proved that wasn't our only job. This is basically a very small personal vendetta that I've strung out for two years now, quite a long time. And that's kind of just where it came from, was I wanted to create a platform for anybody that calls themselves a brass professional, to tell us their stories, or what their careers look like. And, like I said, to highlight the fact that that can be multifaceted in a whole bunch of different areas. So there are some people who for whom, like music makes up 100% of their career and they call themselves a professional. And this for some people, it's it's 40% of their career, but they can still call themselves a professional, because it does make up some of their working life. And that's kind of where it started, I've tried very hard to include, like I said, anybody that comes under that umbrella of a brass professional. When I did my initial research, obviously, I wanted to make sure I wasn't creating something that already existed. And there were some brass interview podcasts, which is great that centered around like, the, what would we call them. The hot shots of the brass world, you know, only those shiny names that you've heard of in every magazine, or every interview you've ever heard of. And that's not what everyone does. They're not the only people that exist. And what I then wanted to make sure I did was Yeah, sure, we want to include these people. They're important. And they give a lot of people a lot of inspiration. But, you know, the real day to day brass professionals, you know, the people like me who are doing all the little weird jobs that people think they're weird. I think my job is fine. But yeah, that was that was kind of the starting point of it. And yeah, we're nearly 100 episodes deep now and publish every Sunday. Haven't missed a week yet. And hopefully, long may it continue.
Ashley Killam 8:30
I think that's what I like the best that it's not just those names, because those names are, you hear the same interview over and over, they say the same stuff. And so it's been for me listening, it's been really cool to just see the wide range of what you can do. And like if I was, you know, starting out, getting ready to go to school, you can see all of the different possibilities.
Melissa Brown 8:52
Yeah, like when I graduated from college, I thought that it was wrong, that I wasn't doing an audition every second month, and that when I was doing auditions, I wasn't advancing in them and nor were my friends though. And I didn't understand why because that was the job we were all supposed to have. What a dumb thing to think I was stupid at 21. I'm not much better now, to be completely honest about it. But I really wish they'd been something because my teachers at college they were all orchestral professionals. I learnt with the professional trombone of the London Philharmonic, and he's amazing. And he was a great teacher. And then I learned with the second trombone at the Philharmonia, who also was amazing. And I learned with Carol Jarvis, who is superstar freelancer. They're all amazing musicians and amazing teachers. I wish I'd known them that my job wasn't going to look like theirs. And that that was okay. I spent so long feeling so bad that my job didn't look like theirs. But that's what I knew was the life of a trombone player. So yeah, that's, that's sort of the other string to this is that hopefully this is a resource for for people who, you know, in 2022 have this thing to run. To that we didn't have fingers crossed.
Ashley Killam 10:02
Exactly. And along with that, with you being trombone, extraordinare doing all the things. And you I mean, you talk a lot about stuff beyond just trombone too. And I know you were the first person that I had seen, that's been vocal online about your experience with OCD. And really, like, I know, there's such a stigma. And it's like a very taboo, all like mental health has been such a taboo thing until somewhat recently ish. It's getting better? And we'd love to hear a little bit about your journey and what people may or may not realize, specifically, in your case about OCD.
Melissa Brown 10:36
Yeah. So people may have heard me talk about this in other interviews before, and I apologize for the fact that I'm going to preface all of this with this is MY lived experience, I cannot speak for everybody. Some of the things I say may only apply to me. And if you do want to find out more, there are plenty of reputable online resources that are free to access. A few of the things that I've pulled in my notes here I've taken from MIND, which is a UK-based mental health organisation, and they're pretty thorough with the information they put out. So I know, I've been sort of lightly laughed up before for putting this preface on it. But I think it's really, really important. You know, I can't speak for everybody and what I say might not apply to literally anybody else. So that's that's the sort of boring housekeeping out of the way, I guess. So OCD is something that I can almost guarantee that every person that's listening to this has heard of, for all the wrong reasons. We've all heard of it, because it's in mainstream media being made fun of 90% of the time, possibly more. Obviously, that is not a real statistic, I've pulled that one out of my proverbial. Anyway. OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder is a cyclical mental health condition. So it stems from obsessive, intrusive, not chosen thoughts, that then trigger the ritualistic compulsions that balance out those thoughts. And I realized that whenever I explain this, or I read resources about it,, it sounds mad as shit when you talk about it, because it just it doesn't make any sense. And I know as a rational person, because, you know, my OCD isn't all of me, that it sounds absolutely batshit. And this is part of it. People with OCD tend to know that it's completely bizarre what they're doing. But they can't help it. There's this imbalance and this fighting. And so one of the things that I read that I thought was interesting, and I wrote this down, because I wanted to remember to say, this again, doesn't apply to everybody. But people who are neat and methodical hold themselves to high standards, hello, musicians talking to you, can be more likely to develop OCD. So it made complete and utter sense when I finally made my peace with my diagnosis that this applied to me, because all of those things were exactly how I see, saw, am, in day to day life. So my, my experience with OCD is kind of weird. I think I've known for a very, very long time that I had something a little bit odd in my brain, aside from the fact that I decided to become a musician for my whole life. And I remember as young as nine, having the urge to perform compulsions, tidying ones, were the ones at the time, you know, making sure the coasters were square on the edge of the table, all those sorts of things that people think of when they talk about OCD. And I remember that, and I didn't really, it wasn't a big deal then because it wasn't impactful, really in any way. And this sort of maybe bubbled away under the surface until my final year at college. So I would have been 21, it was 2013, when it kind of went a little bit out of control. I'll spare anyone the specifics, because, one, they're not necessary. And two, they're not helpful to be specific about that. If people do want to talk more about this, my inboxes is on my socials that will make mention later on are always open. I'm happy to answer respectful questions, but they're not pertinent to the explanation at all. So I think it was the increased impact of the stress of my final year at college that really set everything off. And the thing was, at the time, I'd never really heard of OCD. So I knew that I was getting all of these like, really weird, repetitive, kind of scary, distressing thoughts that I just, I couldn't get out of my brain, and it's exhausting. And the whole time you're trying to convince yourself, they're not real and you don't know why they're there, and you must be completely losing your mind. And because I didn't know what it was, and thank God, my mom hasn't disowned me by this point. I don't know how. I was on the phone to my mom, maybe 10-12 times a day because I just I honestly thought I was losing my mind. I thought there was something really, really matter with me. And she went away and she did a bit of research and she came back and she was like, Hey, I think you might have OCD and I was like, I don't want that. mmm, no. Because I thought it was a bad thing. I thought it was so embarrassing. And it was so stupid. And I didn't want this. And if I have this, and people were gonna think I was an idiot, so I kind of read up about it. And I was like, Okay, fine. Makes sense. It sounds sounds about right. But I still don't really want it because I don't want people to know that this is the matter with me. So I buried it really, it was bad way of dealing with it. But it was 2013 and nobody was talking about this stuff. And it got to Easter of 2013, about 10 weeks away from my final recital at college and I said to my parents, I just don't think I could do it. I don't think I can do my final recital, I can't put in the practice hours, I can't focus, I can't be on my own, I'm finding that really difficult, I don't think I could do it. So I went home over the Easter vacation, and I didn't play and do anything. I spent about a month just resting and not needing to think about anything. And it turns out nowadays, what we call that is self care and time management, and all sorts of things that are good for us. I didn't know that the time that that's what I needed to do. And short term, obviously, things got a little better for me, I went back, I finished my degree I graduated, and I managed to get through that little corner. And I did then start to think about having some therapy. This is my one big takeaway from this whole journey is research your therapists. Don't just find the most local one and go to them and hope for the best. Because that's what I did. And she was awful. The thing was, she was not an OCD specialist, she, she straight up have just said, I'm not qualified to help you with this. And we'd've been all good. She decided that this stemmed from and was a cause of grief. I lost an uncle when I was 20. And she decided that it was all linked. It wasn't. I just said, I've been suffering this thing since I was nine. No, they were all alive then, we're all good. So the problem there was that she was trying to treat me as a grief patient, which is not what I was there for. So I thought I was getting better because I was treating it with stubbornness. Which is how, basically how I fix most problems in my life in general. That that was a big learning curve and it's one of the few things that I, maybe I wish I had never happened. Maybe, maybe it was helpful that it did, I don't know. Anyway, she was useless. So that was maybe 2014. And I thought, yeah, I'm all good to go again. Came back again. These things are cyclical. Who knew? So in 2017, I had another fairly big setback. Again, it was stress related I was finding. I moved, I had a new job, a lot of things were difficult. And the trickiest thing this time around was I met my partner in 2016. And I was quite honest with him quite early on, and I was like, hey, strap in for this, it's gonna be a wild ride. Not in the way you're all thinking, mental health wise, get your minds out of the gutter. That, that really things could get a little bit difficult, but I obviously didn't really know, to what extent. And I moved two or three counties across to live with him and I got a new job. And a lot of that was quite difficult. I didn't know anyone where I lived, my new job was hard, and I was getting a bit of criticism, because I was struggling with my mental health. And so I wouldn't do my job quite so well. And I got criticism for that, which made it worse, it was an excellent time. But you know, I was really clever about it. And I told nobody and so obviously it got worse. So I realize I'm talking about this quite flippantly and sarcastically now because I can see all the things I did wrong at the time. Feel free to take these all as like lessons that you don't have to go through because I did the stupid things for you. And so that time around, I knew I needed to find a better solution, and I need to find it quickly. And I was equipped with the fact that I needed to do some better research. So I found a therapist in Oxford, a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, CBT specialist, which is the one of the best ways of treating a disorder like OCD. They use particularly this thing called ERP, which is exp, exposure response prevention, which is essentially, if you're scared of spiders go and hold a spider. It's that type of stuff. It's a similar thing that you usually face the thing that causes you to discomfort, you don't perform the compulsion, and over time you realize that there's there's no outcome from having performed the compulsion in the first place. And so the the other thing that I should address is that I sought this in a private practice. It was expensive. My family were able to help me pay for this. It's not something that's available to everybody. However, there are good free resources, especially here. I just needed a quick solution, as in, not a quick fix, I needed some help when I realized I need the help, I couldn't have waited six to 10 weeks because it was, like I said it was impacting my job, it was impacting my relationships with my colleagues and with my family and my, my friends. And so, it I'm very lucky that that was the way I was able to go, I could find a therapist, I had my appointment like within four days of making the inquiry. And my therapist there was great, he was amazing. I was there for four months, I can't obviously say that I was fixed. It's not one of those. It's not a, you get a virus, you take some drugs, and you're better from it. But you learn a set of skills to help you manage it. So you can't, nobody can see it. This is an audio platform, Melissa use your brain. But behind me there's there's a bookshelf that hosts all of my music and hidden in there as my my little coping folder. And if I'm ever having difficulty, it's always at hand. I am recording this right now from my living room, which is also my teaching space. It's the room I spend most of my time in, if I have any to refer back to my notes, and the things that that helped me, it's over there. I keep it nearby almost all of the time, just in cases. But the thing that eventually made me decide to speak about it openly was I'd seen one too many OCD jokes online. And it didn't matter how many times I said, Hey, this isn't very fair, this is inappropriate, this is inaccurate, and people wouldn't take it down or they'd make fun of me for having made the comment. This happened to me the other week, some people have seen this online. I called out a mainstream British comedian for making fun of OCD and he deleted and blocked me on all of social media and any of my friends who also stood up to him about it. So you know, to answer your other question is, Are things getting any better? In some ways? Yes. In other ways, definitely not. Because it's, it's still seen as a bit of a joke. And I haven't really gone into a deep dive on specific obsessions and compulsions. There are some really great Instagram resources if people want to find out a little bit more, but the obsessions can be far reaching. They can be small, trivial things, or they can be you know, big, old scary things. The one that is often used as an example, is you're waiting for a train, the thought that comes into a non OCD person's head is what if I jumped in front of this train, and then they go on with their day, and they don't care about it. Someone with OCD might then get really hung up on that thought like, but what if I did do it? And what if it wasn't this train? What if it was the car? And what if it wasn't me? What if it was that person there, and it loops and they mutate, and they repeat, and they get stuck on a loop. And there's not really anything you can do about it. They kind of just nestled there and they go on and on and on. And in order to make them go away we have compulsions, and these are not keeping things super tidy. This, I really wish sometimes when I spoke about this on interviews, I could show people my living room I have OCD in my living room is an absolute dump. It is so messy. That is not a compulsion that I have ever suffered with, as my mom's listening to this for sure and going. Yep, that's true. I know that for sure. It can be tidiness for some people. It can be hand washing for some people. Hi, it's me. And I hate that by the way, I hate that I am a walking stereotype of my disorder. I hate that one of my compulsions is hand washing. Because everyone's like, Oh, yeah, you make sense. Annoying. But it can be things that people don't realize counting, touching, you know, like, touch wood. And then having to do that over and over again. It can be mental compulsions, sometimes you can't see people doing them or notice they're doing them. It's such a complicated disorder, that I realized that I'm really banging on about it. But it's something I realized that I feel far more passionately about than I ever thought that I could. Because it, it's so annoying. It's so annoying to have lived through. And when people make a joke about it, I kind of want to be like, I wish you could have seen me that time that I was late for work because I washed my hands for 30 minutes straight and my back was so sore from standing at my sink and I knew it was stupid, and I still couldn't leave. And when I say it now it sounds absolutely mental. But that was my reality, daily. Multiple times daily on a bad day and there's there's no way to rationalize that. I know it's not sensible and I know it doesn't make sense. But, you know, that was my life. And thank God that I've you know, I've come further but it I kind of feel like it's my responsibility to use the platforms that I have to talk about it and bring awareness to it and realize that I still have a job. I still have friends. I have a partner. We have a house. We have dogs, we have a life and my OCD is very small part of that, but it's a big enough part of my existence to date that I need to talk about it and other people need to learn about it. And there are so many things I know we're being bombarded constantly with this is something you need to learn about, this is something you need to learn about, I completely get it. The one thing I really hope that people can take away from this is just be mindful of your language. Because the amount of times I hear oh, I'm a little bit OCD, or they're a little bit OCD. And actually, what that means is they like to put their shoes away when they get home. That's not the same. So just think about how you speak about these things. It's really my, the long and short of all of this, if you see a joke, call it out. And just be careful of what you say, anyway. Flippin' heck, that's a long explanation in'it.
Carrie Blosser 25:38
That was a great explanation. And thank you so much for sharing, I think it's always, it's really important that we talk about these things. And thank you for being very open and honest, and talking about your conversations and shout out to your friends for also standing up to people on the internet, because sometimes, that's what it takes.
Melissa Brown 25:54
For sure, for sure. Yeah.
Carrie Blosser 25:56
You hard talked a good bit in there, which is fantastic about like, kind of like what we can like, what other people who want to be more aware can do in like our overall awareness and like, not accepting language, or jokes, or things like that on the internet. So thank you. Those are all things that we should all be doing, as we can.
Ashley Killam 26:18
So, completely jumping back on the train of like life projects career. Do you have any exciting projects you're working on currently?
Melissa Brown 26:26
Yeah, I have decided to do, I would like to say an exciting thing. Really, in the back of my mind, I'm calling it the stupidest thing I've ever done. And I'm running a Podcast-a-thon, which is a word that I think I made up, my predictive text tells me anyway that I made it up because it refuses to make it a word whenever I type it, which is excellent with all the promo that's going on. So yeah, it's a 12 hour online podcast situation. It's a fundraiser, first and foremost. So the thing that we sort of, don't really get to talk about very much is that not only is Bold as Brass, a one-woman operation, it's literally all just me, we have no financial support, we run a Patreon, and through that, we get the monthly running costs of the show covered. So that's things like our hosting website, our editing software. And that, that's literally it, it just means that those base rates don't come out of my bank account every month, but everything else kind of does. And so if we, like when we need to pay for the next renovation on our website, that will be from my bank account. And we have been very generously invited to attend the International Women's Brass Conference in May of 2022, which has been held in Denton, Texas, which is approximately, according to Google Maps, 4000 miles away from where I currently am in Leicestershire, in the UK. And because we don't have any funding for the show, without doing a fundraiser, we're literally not going to be able to go because it turns out the flights to go there cost twice as much as my mortgage does every month. And you know, weighing these things against each other, I need my house. Who knew? It wasn't something I needed to explain was it. And so we're running this event, I wanted to do a fundraiser that was linked to what it is that we're doing. So it was like, Oh, I could do a sponsored run. That's a hilarious joke. I couldn't do a sponsored run, if you like gave me a million pounds. I can't even run for the bus. I was thinking about things like that was like, Could I walk 4000 miles? No, I don't have enough time. I literally tried to work it out. And I was like, I'd have to walk 10 miles a day for the next four days around having a full time job. Four days? No four months. My brain is not working anymore. And it just you know, things like that weren't worth it. And I was like, I could do something crazy, like shave my head. And then I was like, oh, no, I'd look like a bald potato, nobody needs that. And so with a bit of sort of brainstorming, I was like, alright, what can I do that's linked to the podcast? And I was like when people do sponsored this, that and the other. So could I do something sponsored for the podcast. And one of my friends was like, Well, why don't you do a 24 hour podcast-a-thon, and I was like, You're insane. Make it 12. So, you know, 24 hours, I can talk as you have already noticed, but I can't talk for 24 hours. So I decided 12 hours was sort of manageable, at least then we might actually stand a chance of having a few people be able to participate and watch the thing. So the the idea is to run a different panel discussion every hour of the day. It's running from 9am to 9pm on the 28th of January, which is a Friday. And we've got 12 different discussion topics. Nine of those hours are live on the day and three of them have been pre-recorded mainly because I need to do human things like eat and pee and nobody needed to see me do those live so we have three pre recorded I was in there so that I could just, you know, like I say, live a human life away from the computer because maybe I sound like it but I'm not really a cyborg. And so I really rely on the generosity of others when I do this podcast full stop, because I have guests that come and they give me their time for free because I have no money to pay them. And when I needed to do this 12 hour podcast, I think, I thought, well, I can't do it for 12 hours, nobody needs to hear me just for 12 hours. So I've just had to ask a whole bunch of friends like, Hey, do you want to come and talk to me for an hour about a topic? Here's my, my slash Ashley's List of 12 different topics that we can we can talk about if there's something that particularly interests you, jump on that, and we'll put you on that. And so we've got a schedule, I think there's about 35 people taking part across 12 hours. And yeah, the sponsorship aspect is really what's driving me. We're 25% funded already. And we're trying to crowdfund half of it and match half of it myself. So I'm not trying to raise the whole amount. That's the aim, is 12 hours of brass chat and everything that goes live will eventually be turned into podcast episodes, too, so if people can't catch it, like on the day, it's no drama we will put out to you. But please do remember that I do this all around having a full time job. So 12 episodes are going to take me just a little while to get out into the world, but they will come to you, promise. So that's probably it. And then obviously, the the hope of this insane event is that we can raise enough money to fly out to Texas in May, and take part in the conference and come and record some episodes there, both part of the conference. And hopefully we'll be able to scoop up some spare people and force them into a room with a microphone and get some extra episodes recorded while we're there. And even better is hopefully meet up with, I mean, you do for a start, but there are so many people that I've had on the show that are going to be at the conference and I really want to go there and meet them. Folks, please help me. Please help me. Look, this is me begging. Now you've got to begging stage please.
Ashley Killam 31:53
As of right now, when we're recording this, this is post Podcast-a-thon. So follow Melissa on will tag all of the socials, in the podcast description and in our social medias. But if you follow Melissa at Bold as Brass, all of the links to the just giving page will be there. And we'll put the donation link in the podcast description. And on the socials, support her, help her.
Melissa Brown 32:17
Yeah, and that link will still be live when when you're hearing this episode, we're going to leave it up for about six weeks after the podcast-a-thon, after which I will need to try to book a flight.
Carrie Blosser 32:27
Awesome.
Ashley Killam 32:27
Then our last question that we ask everyone is what's on your music stand this week? And how are you diversifying your stand?
Melissa Brown 32:34
Yeah, so I'm in very new year get back to practice mode. So my stand mostly is the old favorites. I've got How trombonists do it and the Arbans up on my stand, not very interesting ones. However, my project for 2022, just before christmas somebody dropped me an email through my website and they said, Hey, I've written this piece for trombone and piano. Do you want to learn it? And would you like to record it for me? And so yeah, that's something that I'm going to be working on, fairly local composer, chap called Paul Ayres. So I'm going to be looking through his piece for him and hopefully taking a recording down for him so that he can hear his piece in real life. And this sounds like blowing smoke up their ass of hosts of podcasts. But Winds of Change is something that I'm recommending to a lot of my students this term, because they need some new repertoire to learn that isn't focused around exams. A lot of the lessons here are set to performance exams. Some of my students, especially my adults aren't really interested in that and so they're looking for new and interesting repertoire. So yeah, your book will be being shared forth and being used this term, especially with some of my adult pupils. So like I say, at the risk of sounding like invoke blowing smoke. Really, your book is going to, go into good use this term.
Carrie Blosser 33:51
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Melissa, for joining us. We are so excited to chat with you and can't wait for our viewers and listeners to listen to your podcasts and hopefully, support your future projects.
Melissa Brown 34:03
Thank you!
Carrie Blosser 34:04
Thank you for listening to Diversify the Stand. To support us and our projects. Visit our website at diversifythestand.org.
Ashley Killam 34:11
And a huge shout out to Eris DeJarnett who wrote the intro and outro music. The piece that we've been playing is Bored Games for Two Trumpets and fixed media. Links to their website are in the podcast description.
Carrie Blosser 34:21
And as always, we ask our guests what's on your stand?