Distractions - Jensen Thomassie

Performed by Jack Reason for District Music Contest 2024.
Commentary:
This piece was a lot of fun to learn, and was an eye-opening insight to many challenges of this style of solo. I received a I rating for this performance, however I feel like my execution of this piece lacked precision and the tier of overall quality that I would label as a “1” performance. The biggest struggle across this piece was tempo. This piece exists at two extremes: fast and choppy or slow and methodical. There is no middle ground. This makes the piece very challenging. In the beginning portion, I had a lot of moments where my hands just flopped and I fell out of tempo entirely. Similar moments occurred in the ending part. The middle feels more stable, but could’ve done to be executed with more musicality. What makes the tempo feel of this piece doubly hard is that the backing track provides little in the way of tempo at the start/transitions. To perform this piece well, you need to automatically grasp the target tempo and ride it out until the track gives a consistent metronomic “hint”.
None of this is the FAULT of the writing. This seems to be the GOAL of the writing, and it all plays into the difficulty of this piece. Thomassie’s composition here truly is stellar, and I underestimated the challenge at first.
I’ll be performing this piece again in the near future so I hope to improve significantly in the parts that were lacking here!