Category Archives: Weather, Seasons, & Celebrations

Canada Day Concert Review!

To everyone who made it out to the wilds of the West Island to hear me play last night – a heartfelt thank you! The concert was smashingly well received. Two notes: Next time, I will wear my glasses, no matter how hot it is; and I will never share a stand with that particular partner again. The night was a challenge: I’ve never played in such extreme conditions (no, not even that freezer of a church in January where my hands were so cold), so the exhaustion produced by playing for two straight hours with no break was compounded by the exhaustion brought on by the heat and humidity. I’d take the chill of a January church over that humidity any day. In addition to the human response to heat, the instrument response was a nightmare as well; wood moves all on its own in humidity, of course, so everyone’s instruments were swinging in and out of tune wildly. Apart from a couple of rocky patches, though, we seem to have come through just fine, judging from the enthusiastic audience reaction (especially between the first and second, then the second and third movements of the Beethoven! Was the heat so horrible that you wanted the concert to end so soon?) and our conductor’s gentle smile at the end of it all, his hands pressed to his chest as he bowed ever so slightly to us. In light of my last post about singing in either official language, I also found it highly amusing that our soloist chose to begin her rendition of O Canada in French; threw everyone off, I hear. I also had the pleasure of showing off my early birthday present of a lovely backpack cello case. I adore it; it’s everything I wanted and more. (The pockets alone are worth it!) No more hefting and swinging and bumping the instrument into my legs; now I have hands free, and it feels lighter to boot. Thank you, o parental units!

Said parental units are on their way back to Oakville today; I’m extremely glad they have air conditioning in their car, otherwise I’d have told them to stay here and to call in sick from Montreal! We had a lovely day wandering around Old Montreal yesterday; I highly recommend the newly restored Chateau Ramezay for anyone who is interested in local history. (“There was a Battle of Chateauguay?” my husband asked in amazement, looking at a large map of local military movements.) I’ve forgotten how much I enjoy museums.

It’s just too darned hot today. (Yes; go and cue the Cole Porter.) I slept poorly, and had to get up way too early for an osteopath appointment. The last one was a bit aggressive, and I was in a lot of pain (modified, but pain nonetheless) last week, so today she took a much gentler approach and I feel pretty good. Lethargic, but good.

Been playing around with my template again… I figure this will be the summer edition of Owls’ Court. You know, like green leaves, and we’ll return to the autumny browns and reds in the fall? (Maybe?) My comments also seem to be on the fritz, and for some reason I can’t access my YACCS control panel to fix them. Maintenance will be ongoing, I promise.

Books I’ve read recently and have had no time to blog (let alone list in my reading box!): Fall of Neskaya by Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J Ross (not bad, but not MZB’s Darkover); The Green Man: Tales of the Mythic Forest, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; Good Night, Mr Holmes by Carole Nelson Douglas; Wicked by Gregory Maguire; and Deryni Tales, edited by Katharine Kurtz. I’ve been pretty voracious lately. It’s almost like I’m making up for lost time.

I wanted to sit down today and come up with some sort of rough weekly guideline for practice and writing and such, but my brain doesn’t seem to want to engage. Not that I’m trying to create a rigid schedule; on the contrary! This summer is about not having a schedule. I know, however, that if I just let myself drift, I’ll feel useless and get irritated with myself. I wanted to use this time to write and really work on my cello, and while a week of relaxation won’t kill me, a week can easily turn into two, then three, then it will be September.

Well, maybe not quite that quickly.

I’ll think about it tomorrow.

Canada Day Concert Countdown

It was a three-hour, gruelling dress rehearsal. At the end of it all we stumbled out of the church, exhausted. We were driven, forced to repeat bars over and over again, made to feel like we were all fumbling amateurs, threatened with removing pieces from the program if we couldn’t get it absolutely right. When we were released, our conductor thanked us, and said quietly that we should all be very proud of ourselves, because we sounded fantastic.

I should know this tactic by now; I’ve worked in theatre for seventeen years. It gets me every time, though.

If I had any doubt as to my sight-reading abilities, they were assuaged by the smooth, adept performance of the German aria Andras distributed when we arrived. It seems that in the eleventh hour we have added another piece to the program. For those of you who know Marian Siminski, our lovely and talented Mozart soloist from our last concert (and, incidentally, the musical director of Lakeshore Light Opera who has directed me for years), she’ll be back on Monday night.

The church is lovely, so if anyone gets bored with the music, they can look at the architecture and all the saints (if they tire of Andras gesticulating wildly). I know I spent a lot of time looking at it while various sections worked through rough sections and transitions. (Oh, we had our share, don’t think we didn’t.) We played with all the doors open last night, and people walking by came in and sat at the back for a while when they heard the music. I thought it was lovely. Imagine taking a stroll by the lake as the sun is going down, and the air is cooling off, and you hear this wonderful soaring Mozart which draws you in. The church melds the sound beautifully; I can see why many groups choose to record in such places. I can also see the immense technical headaches they create, namely that the brass and winds sound like they’re a fraction of a second behind the strings at times, because the sanctuary is round and collectes their sound before projecting it outwards.

One. One more day. Seven hours. Then friends, and music, and a summer of freelancing, writing, and catching up on me again.

Instrument Inventory

So on Saturday morning I e-mailed Ceri and wondered if she’d like to meet me for coffee, since I’d decided at SEVEN A.M. when my husband woke me up to say good-bye (“It’s either that or not say good-bye,” he explained to me; bitter thought in return: On Saturdays, it might be worth it) that I would get outside and enjoy the sun, terrifically windy though it was, and pick myself up a tambourine.

Short tangent: why do I need a tambourine? Because I don’t have one. Tangent over; back to your regular blog experience.

She called me and said yes, not only would coffee be neat, but had I eaten breakfast yet? Of course I hadn’t. (Breakfast is a week-day thing for me.) So I hopped a bus to the metro with my trusty current bus-book (Lathe of Heaven) in tow, and had read half of it by the time I’d hit her place. (Read the rest on the way home. I am now paranoid.) We had breakfast with Scott, and then puttered about music stores all afternoon. After trying out every single noisemaker in the first shop (I work retail, and occasionally have the urge to go dish it out gleefully to other poor wage-slaves) I picked up my tambourine, squinted at the price of the music stands, then watched Ceri sigh over the saxophones. I proposed another music store (heh heh heh) and she got all perky and excited. Scott left us at this point, and off we went to sigh over more saxes. Ceri was feeling so bereft of her rental sax of last year that she even went so far as to have the salesgirl calculate out how much paying off a new Yamaha alto sax within one year would come to by monthly payment.

I freely admit, I did this whole temptation thing intentionally. Why should I be the only one with a pile of instruments I don’t devote enough attention to? “But I have lots of tin whistles! And a bodhran! And I don’t play any of them!” Ceri wailed. So? If you don’t have a sax to ignore, you also don’t have a sax to pick up and play when you’d like to, is my reasoning.

My list of instruments (in order of acquisition):

Voice (ha! You thought I’d not include it?)
Flute
Cello
Viola
Harp
Tambourine (yay!)

The husband has a chanter and a bodhran as well. We have a piano in someone’s basement that will be there until we can afford to get it moved by official trained piano movers. (“Do not try this at home” takes on a whole new meaning when it involves an upright piano and basement stairs.)

Why do I have a household of musical instruments? I had to think long and hard about this the other day. I’ve concluded that it’s due to the potential that rests in all of them. I can sit in a patch of sun in the living room with my harp against my left shoulder (mildly heretical, but I bat left-handed too, maybe that has something to do with it), lean my cheek against the soundbox, and just feel all the music inside it. Call me crazy, but I can do that for an hour, then just touch the strings gently here and there, and then put it away again. It’s not about releasing the music, or liberating it, or whatever you like to call it; it’s about connecting with the instrument, feeling it inside you, releasing something in your own spirit that’s in harmony with it.

(Ed. note: It’s raining! Woo-hoo! I will put on my CD of Vivaldi double concertoes in celebration.)

Sure, accomplishing a terrifically hard run on the cello is satisfying too, but in a completely different way. Producing coherent and recognisable sound is work, which isn’t the same as pleasure for me at all. So why did you join an orchestra, I hear some of you asking in a snarky tone. Well, because when I was playing cello quartets a few years ago, I dicovered that I loved hearing the interaction between the different lines. I adore Bach, for example, four or more careful musical lines all dancing with one another, often produced by only two hands on a keyboard (I also adore Glenn Gould, so there). When I sing in a group, I love hearing the tenors sing against the altos; hearing certain musical lines in unusual juxtaposition thrills me for some reason. Working in orchestra satisfies me in a similar fashion: I can work through all the different lines and hear them come together to hear a richly textured tapestry of sound, and I’m right in the middle. I often wonder how the audience can ever approach the experience I’m having, simply because I’ve been studying these works performed in-depth along with thirty other people. (Not that I’m diminishing the audience’s experience in any way; as a writer and performer I am a firm believer in the audience-co-creates-experience theory.)

Where was I? Oh yes. Ceri and her saxophone. So I say, heck, yes! Own that sax! Hold it; press the keys gently; watch the complex mechanism move; lose yourself in the dance of sunlight on the brass. Blow a couple of notes here and there. Above all else, love it, and love the potential that lies within it, that lies within you. If no one ever hears you, so what? Music is about you and your experience. It’s pure emotion. It’s about raising your spirit. Technical brilliance is never a measure of that. If you enjoy working musical challenges through, hey, great; otherwise, life’s too short to say, “Oh, I’ll never be able to devote the time I should to it.”

Do it.

Missing The Point (But They Were Delicious)

So it was Ostara a couple of days ago – Vernal Equinox to most of you. Spring arrived in Montreal and brought another ten to fifteen centimeters of snow with it. This is funny because all winter we had practically no accumulation. In the past week we’ve seen about five to six times more accumulation than we have since winter began. Mother Nature – she’s so wacky.

Anyway, one of the things about the Vernal Equinox is that it’s one of the two times per year that everything about the Earth is so balanced (axis, gravity, blah blah blah), you can stand a raw egg in the shell on its end.

At work, we didn’t have any real eggs, but we still wanted to experiment. So we tried using Easter Creme Eggs. They didn’t work very well.

So we ate them.

There’s always the Autumnal Equinox…

Spring!

Whoa! Somewhere along the past day and a half, this page received its three hundredth hit.

I’m stunned. In just under one month, people have stopped by by three hundred times to see what I’m rambling about. (And yes, I set my counter to ignore my own hits on the page.)

Wow.

In other news, damn it, it’s SPRING! We’ve thrown open all the windows, I’ve gone for a walk to buy orange juice and a paper, and now I’m sitting at the computer in a patch of cosy sunlight, breathing in the warm spring smells, listening to Mozart arias on the radio. Apparently it’s going up to 16 C today. Life is pretty good.

Tonight I’m leading a class on ethics, then I’m off to a good old-fashioned sleepover with four other women. There will be much chocolate in various forms, as all good sleepovers must have. The added bonus of adulthood means daiquiries too. Woo-hoo! Tomorrow morning we shall dawdle over silver dollar pancakes and waffles, then I’ve got a Star Wars game in the afternoon, and a book club soiree in the evening. Needless to say, this does not allow for seeing Men With Brooms, so we have plans to see it next Saturday that shall not be overturned!

CURRENT READING:

Typically, I’ve begun half a dozen things at once:

Witches & Neighbours by Robin Briggs is a socio-politico-cultural examination of the witch hunts in Europe, creating a historical context of the changing face of society in order to further understand the phenomenon of the hunts. Interesting.

Pilgrims of the Night by Lars B. Lindholm is a fun look at the ancestry of modern magical belief, Western mystery schools and esoteric practice. After looking at people like Thomas “Chip” Aquinas (you had to be there) and Agrippa, I’ve learned about John Dee (who had more money than sense, most of it apparently originating with the Philosopher’s Stone and his alchemical experiments) and Albertus Magnus (whose name means “Big Al”, and who was below average height).

Mutts Six: A Little Look-See and Mutts: Sunday Mornings by Patrick McDonnell. No one told me there was a new Mutts collection out!!

Teach Yourself HTML and XHTML. Yep. I’m trying to figure out how to create another table in this template so I can format it to have different fonts and colours so you can actually read it.

And, yes; I found Perdido Street Station, so that’s next…

IN THE DISC DRIVE:

Affairs of the Heart: Music of Marjan Mozetich (and if you don’t recognise it, it’s probably because it’s Canadian and modern).
Classic Yo-Yo: a collection of nifty bits of Ma’s recordings, about half of which I don’t have. The other half is good enough to have twice.
Yo-Yo Ma Plays the Music of John Williams: no, it’s not Star Wars on the cello. I never knew Williams had written a cello concerto, let alone an Elegy (expanded from a musical theme used in Seven Years in Tibet) or Three Pieces for Solo Cello.

Olympic Pride

The Olympics are done and over, and we�re coming home with a record seventeen medals, coming in fourth overall. That�s quite the haul! Of course, the sweetest medals were our two hockey golds, and the gold awarded belatedly to Sale and Pelletier; but every medal is sweet.

What�s not so sweet is the destruction visited on public and private property in the wake of the men�s hockey victory. As we were driving home last night we passed several cars with Canadian flags waving madly through the windows, bearers thrilled that our car sports a Canadian flag license plate in front. We passed people on foot with painted faces and flags as well. In our own living room window, my husband had already hung our huge Canadian flag in celebration. There�s nothing like citizens deliriously happy that their country has won a major victory on the field of honour.

That was in NDG, however. In downtown Montreal, the fans poured from sports bars and clubs, rioted, hijacked a city bus, stopped traffic in the centre of town, and generally made nuisances of themselves. I have never been able to understand why a significant hockey victory is the siren call of idiocy and destruction. Particularly in this case where every Canadian was proud to have stuck it to the Americans, who we�ve always considered slightly less cultured (come on, deep inside you think it too). A pity that the next act was to display boorishness, lack of respect, and vulgarity.

And what�s with the high of 4 degrees C today? It’s still February!