u/Pitiful_Standard_740

Hello! I'm entering into my senior year of high school, and I'm looking for a very difficult Marimba solo to spend about the next 9 months working on. I'm trying to to find a solo that has lots of technical variety in it's skillset; has plenty of obvious musicality (obvious in the sense that someone who's not a trained percussionist like my family members will be able to enjoy listening to it for fun); and musicality in the sense that it has great potential for musical phrasing (Dynamic and/or Tempo wise).

Last year I performed Northern Lights by Eric Ewazen (albeit quite roughly), so this year I really want to challenge and end my senior year with a bang. That being said, I've my director has told me no to Etude in E Minor by Casey Cangelosi, so I have been given an upper limit on difficulty lol.

I'm also trying to find a solo that I subjectively really enjoy listening to, so here's a list of some solos that I've really enjoyed listening to, to hopefully help describe the type of music I enjoy:

• Any solos by Eric Sammut,
• Any etudes by Casey Cangelosi,
• Over the Rainbow and Pining for the Spring Breeze by Robert Oetomo (for their musicality),
• Northern Lights by Eric Ewazen (for it's variety).
• I also often enjoy many of Anders Elten's arrangements of classical music for Marimba,
• And arrangements of Impressionist style music for marimba (Debussy & Ravel).

tl;dr I'm looking for a solo with:

• Difficulty > Nothern Lights, but < Etude in E Minor
• Has potential for lots of musical shaping
• And has lots of variety in it's skillset.

Thank you for reading all this if you have!

Edit for additional info: My school has a 5 Octave Marimba and I'm preferably looking for a 4 mallet solo

So notably MIT limits students to 3 Recommendation letters. I'll be a Senior applying for a degree in Mathematics this year, and I'm worried about my actual AB, BC, M/V Calculus teacher not being a teacher I ask for a Rec Letter.

The teachers who come to mind first for me to ask are our Computer Science UIL teacher (I'm our UIL CompSci Captain); my AP Lit Teacher (Who I've hosted DnD club with the past year); and my Percussion Director. Each of of these teachers knows me pretty well as individual both Outside and inside the class, and I trust all of them to write me a kind Rec Letter.

However, my Mathematics teacher, while having been his student for 3 years now and knowing that I am his favorite student, essentially only knows me as a good student, test taker, homework helper, etc. I know that he would write me a good letter, but since he doesn't know me very personally I don't think it's possible for it to be a Great letter. But I'm worried about not having a Letter of Rec from my Calculus teacher while applying to be a Mathematics Major.

If I were to ask him I'd be replacing either the Rec Letter from my Band Director or AP Lit teacher (because I know my CompSci UIL teacher by far the best), yet that would also be problematic due to then covering fewer aspects of who I am since it's two STEM teachers.

I'm fairly confident that the best decision would be to just commit to not having my Calculus teacher write me a Rec Letter for MIT, but I wanted to know if anyone of y'all who read through all of this have an opinion on this matter to help quell my indecisiveness.

Would a letter of recommendation from my Band Director (specifically a Percussion Director, but that's not really important) qualify as a Humanities letter of Rec? I surmise the answer is obviously yes, but pedantically & anxiously I want to double check here that this is true because their website doesn't technically list any Fine Arts under

"Humanities/social science/language potential subjects: English, History, Foreign language, Classics, Economics, Government, Psychology, Social studies, and Geography."