The last movement the horns-only group of Fulcrum ensemble members played was labeled in the program as moderate swing. That designation didn’t mean a thing. I don’t know what the notes looked like on paper, but there was no swing feeling to the piece at all, which was too bad because I only suffered through the preceding 25 minutes of the concert, the best part of which was the faint sound of the church bells in the distance at the top of the hour, in the hope that I would enjoy the ending.

My mind wandered from the start, wondering why the French Horn player had his hand stuck up his bell. (No, that’s not a colloquialism used by the author of Sex and the City and Us at the Writers Museum last week.) Was he looking for something he dropped in there, like a note? Probably not, as I learned from a website that described the positioning and musical function played by the inserted right hand, which got me to wondering why it said right hand. It turns out that the french horn is “almost totally a left-handed instrument, and furthermore unique in that respect amongst all musical instruments.”

My research into the french horn also led me to frenchhorn.net, which has a joke about C, E-flat, and G going into a bar, which helped alleviate my suffering.

Watching the trombone player reminded me of the Final Jeopardy answer on June 11, which was “In playing this instrument whose early version was called a sackbut (again, not a term from Sex and the City), it’s about 6″ from A to B, about 7″ from C to D.”

I also observed that the tuba player briefly inserted a mute into his instrument, which made me pine for an all-muted concert, where the sounds could be left entirely to my imagination.