Category Archives: Words Words Words

Blogger Insider

Kate sent me her Blogger Insider questions, and I actually answered them the day I got them. All but the last one, that is, which I’ve been mulling over. In true Autumn fashion, I’ve not directly answered it, but sort of answered beside it. Here you are:

1. What’s the most bizarre instrument you can play (e.g. musical saw, noseflute, etc.)?

Caveat Number One: I’m boring. Caveat Number Two: I rarely have the urge to try something unconventional. Hence, I think the most exotic instrument I play is the harp. And I certainly don’t play it often or well. It’s big, heavy, and hurts my back.

I bought a tambourine recently; that’s a bit odd. Isn’t it?

2. What’s your favorite spot in Canada?

Sigh. Prince Edward Island. It’s so tiny I thought I might be able to get away with saying the whole province, but if I have to be more specific, Cavendish Beach. But it has to be deserted. Just me, sun, red sand, waves, and a good book. Sigh once more.

3. What’s your favorite comic book and why?

Argh. Tell me to pick a favourite child, why don’t you. Currently: Promethea. Overall? Dunno. Depends on my mood.

4. Who’s your favorite fiction author and comic book author?

Why are you making me do this? Fiction. Hmm. Who do I buy instantly in hardcover? Connie Willis, Neil Gaiman, Timothy Findley. Dead people who don’t have anything new coming out but I’d buy in hardcover if they were still publishing: Robertson Davies, Charlotte Bronte.

Comic books? A tie between Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. (According to my shelf of graphic novels.)

5. What’s your favorite song in “Once More With Feeling,” the “Buffy” musical episode?

“R.I.P” stuck in my head the first time I saw it, but upon listening to it over and over, I find Xander and Anya’s song “I’ll Never Tell” is really quite well-written and performed, and is the one that keeps popping up in my brain when I’m distracted.

6. What’s your favorite opera?

Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Followed by a three-way-tie between Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment, Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and Il Barbiere di Siviglia. (The latter for its delicious mezzo-soprano role, and for the act one finale, if nothing else!)

7. If you could move anywhere in the world, where would it be?

The Borderlands, Scotland.

8. Who’s the one character you can’t stand to see when watching a “Star Wars” movie?

Old series or new series?

New series: Threepio is rapidly rising up the list in the new series. Jar-Jar, of course.
Old series: Boba Fett. Honestly. He’s so overrated. Ep2 sort of redeemed him for me, though. His dad was at least cool. (His action figure is certainly the best one. Is it just me or are the SW:Ep2 figures below standard?)

9. What are your top three totally irrational pet peeves?

Firstly, someone who shall remain nameless putting a margarine container, with the barest sheen of margarine along the bottom of it, back into the fridge. (“I didn’t finish it!”) Actually, that nameless someone putting anything back in the fridge or cupboard with only crumbs or drops left in it.

Secondly, not writing something down on the shopping list if you’ve finished it (or, all right, almost finished it). I don’t eat often, but when I do, I like to have all the fixings there. This will drive me directly to Axe-Murderer status, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

Thirdly, people standing behind me. In a related vein, people reading over my shoulder. Or, people standing in front of me and conversing with sunglasses on. I hate not being able to see people, and if I can see them, I have to be able to see their eyes.

I have more, if you’d like them. Such as bad editing in a published book. Stupid spelling mistakes. (Especially in my own work, when I’ve proof-read and run a spell-check.) People adopting American short-cut spelling such as lite and donut, and believing that it’s the right way to spell something. Shall I go on?

10. If you could perform any piece of music to a large audience by yourself, what piece would it be?

Ha! Assuming I could perform it with any sort of technical capability and emotional interpretation, pretty much anything by Bach. I remind you all of Caveat Number One (I’m boring), and add the following footnote: as much as I adore performing, I prefer chamber work with a few others. Solo is so… alone. You have nothing to interact with. So actually, my dream would be playing cello in a string quartet program of Beethoven’s String Quartet opus 132 in A minor, followed by Ravel’s String Quartet in F. Rather than performing solo, I enjoy hearing how my line intertwines with a few others. I also enjoy singing quartets or trios more than I enjoy singing alone.

There you have it.

Jean, darling that she is, brought me a whole new bottle of my Secret Weapon from her trip to Plattsburg last weekend. Now I have a bottle for home, and a bottle with a few left to keep at work. No Vanilla Coke, though. She says she’ll try again next trip. Curses! Foiled!

MIA

I discovered something bad yesterday.

I packed up my cello and my music bag to go over to a friend’s house, and my music folder was missing. My beautiful, new, black leather music folder. With my favourite pencil. Oh yes, and all my music with my notes all over it.

Gone.

I had a sinking feeling that was oddly juxtaposed with rising panic. I must have closed it at that horrible rehearsal, then left it on the music stand. I remembered the wooden blocks I put under the back legs of the chair to tilt the seat (thereby reducing the stress on my lower back), which I usually almost forget, but I was so rattled that I forgot my music folder and walked out.

This is bad: I like that new music folder. It was my “I’m a serious musician” folder. Sure, I could go buy another one for 17$, but it’s the principle of the thing. I’ve lost all my music, my fingerings, my bowings, my highlighted key changes.

I do still have the originals (thank the gods!). As soon as I get new music, I photocopy it and use the copies as practice music. I cannot bring myself to scribble on originals, even in pencil. We sign out the music, and have to sign it back in at the end of the season, so it’s good that I stored them in a seperate folder. I can always make more copies, trim them, paste them back to back, and try to recreate my fingerings, and bowings� gods, I want to cry just thinking about it. There was over three months of work in those copies.

Now. We rehearse in an auditorium in a high school. There’s always a chance that someone found my folder the next day and gave it in to the teacher who also just happens to be my conductor after hours. There’s also the chance that some kid found it, kept the folder and tossed the music, or mutilated it in some way then handed it in, or just had fun destroying it all and I’ll never see it again.

The orchestra has this week off, though. I won�t know until next week if someone found it.

In the meantime, I have the originals, and I might as well devote a couple of hours to standing at the copy machines in the library down the street, staring at the wall as the harsh light rolls back and forth, and copy them all again. Which is technically against the law, I suppose, although they’re for private research/rehearsal purposes. It could also be argued that one cello part is nowhere near the full work. In fact, it�s only, what, approximately 1/12th, I think, which hardly qualifies as a major portion of a total full orchestral score.

Does life ever seem futile to you sometimes? You try and try and try, and you never seem to get anywhere?

Gnash

I had a truly horrible rehearsal on Wednesday night.

I’d even practiced that morning. I’d gone through the evil Minuet & Trio from Beethoven’s First Symphony and some of the nasty shifts from the first movement too, and I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Then I got to rehearsal and we began with the Rossini overture, and the substitute director took it at a really fast clip. I lost it. I ended up just sitting and staring at the music, unable to grab an anchor point to pick up again and be in the same place as everyone else.

It got worse: we then moved to the Bizet. (Remember? The tenor clef? The treble clef?) Any progess I’d made on this piece left me, bags and all. They even slammed the door.

It was around this point that I realised the next concert is only four weeks away.

Then we moved to the Beethoven, which should have been my best performance of the night. I was so rattled by this point, though, that I spent a lot of time feeling rather nauseous, staring at the score again, miserable.

I have absolutely no emotional connection to this music. The Mozart symphony we’re doing is easy for me, because it’s so beautiful, so lyrical. These other pieces are technically challenging and very difficult to make sound easy, which is important. Music should sound effortless. Since I have no emotional connection to them (other than the sinking feeling I get when I look at them, which is probably classified by a large percentage of the population as “negative”!) it’s hard to make them sound pretty, let alone care about getting the notes right.

So, I bought a new set of earphones, and batteries for my Walkman, and I’ll just listen to it all over and over until I can sing it in my sleep. That will help.

I was really down Wednesday night when I went home, and Thursday morning wasn’t much better. On the way to work, though, I heard a terrific recording of the overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Tafelmusik on CBC Radio Two, and suddenly, I was reminded why I play the cello, why I joined the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra, and why music is so important to me. When I got to work, I dashed off a quick e-mail to the show’s host Tom Allen, thanking him for helping me out. He e-mailed me later in the day to say that he was “glad to hear your musical cloud has lifted” and telling me to “keep the faith”.

I’m looking forward to working on my music this summer. It’s a pity that my concert will be over just as my time off begins, so I won’t be able to devote the time I’d like to preparing for it, but I’ll choose a piece to really polish up to feel good about before orchestra starts up again next fall.

Music is such a gloriously emotional thing, and it brings such a variety of people together to perform and experience it. I don’t know who invented it, but I think I’d like to shake their hand.

CURRENTLY READING:
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, which is about a woman returning anonymously to her native village in France to open a restaurant in the house she grew up in. It’s two stories simultaneously: the modern storyline, and the story of when this main character was growing up sixty-odd years ago in German-occupied France. I’m enjoying the war storyline more; the modern story is about her weak nephew and his desperate, food-snobby wife trying to steal her mother’s recipe book to help their own ailing high-class restaurant, which the protagonist has discovered is also a kind of diary in code which her mother kept during the war. I find the modern antagonists pretty lame, although I love the recipe book/journal aspect of it. Harris uses food and wine as a metaphor for everything her characters can’t actually come out and say in all her books; it’s an interesting trope, but it’s becoming predictable.

This is the third Harris novel I’ve read; the first two were Chocolat and Blackberry Wine. So far, Chocolat is still my favourite. Jury’s still out as to where Five Quarters will fall.

Synchronicity

Cool! At this very moment, when I went to check my blog, Stephen’s Chirographum was in my BlogSnob box.

I love coincidence.

Now if I could only get rid of the sudden striking pain through the right side of my brain…

CURRENTLY READING:
Again, I finished the book before I could blog it: Salamander by Thomas Wharton. I have a soft spot for Canadian literature – it was my secondary focus through my BA and MA – and I enjoy trying new authors. Wharton has an interesting style. Very readable, once you get past the complete abandonment of quotation marks. The story begins in the ruins of a sacked town, as an officer rides through the streets slowly. He catches movement inside a destroyed bookshop and investigates, discovering a young woman, methodically going through the debris, and ends up talking to her about reading. She tells him a four-part tale about what stories might lie between the unopened green sealskin covers of a small book she has rescued, a wonderful technique for launching the reader into the book proper. The story is partially fairy tale, partially magical realism (think Umberto Eco crossed with… well, Umberto Eco, actually), wandering through Italy, Egypt, London, China, all over various seas and oceans, involves pirates, music, automatons, acrobats, and the secret, hidden Library of Alexandria. It revolves around a printer who is summoned to an odd mechanical castle in Europe to create the ultimate riddle book. He falls in love with the daughter of the house, then is imprisoned for almost two decades, eventually freed by his daughter, who then quests for her long-vanished mother while her father (now slightly mad) travels with her, still seeking to fulfil his mandate of creating a book which can simultaneously contain everything and nothing. I love stories like this because you get the paradox of a printed book talking about the printing of books; the text becomes the very subject examined, bringing an odd insight juxtaposed with the difficulty of seperating the book you’re reading from the book being written about.

My bus-book at the moment is a mystery called Harm None by M.R. Sellers, who has transgressed unforgivably in my opinion: he can’t use “its” and “it’s” correctly. Ever. I’m reading it because it’s an occult mystery written by a witch, and I also like to support small-press literature whenever I can. So far (a few chapters in) the story is fine, but this irritating grammatical error trips me up every time. There are others, and some bad sentence structure, and an over-reliance on description – all amateur errors, so I’m being very open-minded as I go through it. If I’d been let at this manuscript before it had been published, though, it would be different, let me tell you.

Quizzes and Memes

Here’s another no-prize…



find your element
at mutedfaith.com.

…as anyone who was around for Raven knows. Pippa Scott lives! (Somewhere, a scattered crew of a now-destroyed UFP starship cringes, for reason unknown to those around them. Especially Angus.)

Actually, I possess an odd talent for seeing multiple outcomes of a situation simultaneously, in vivid detail. I get overloaded easily, and this discomforting little ability pops up at the worst times, like in bad weather when I have to hit the brakes in a car. I can see all the positive, neutral and negative possibilities right then and there, all at once. It’s no wonder I get headaches, and have deja-vu so often it no longer feels like deja-vu. I also have a habit of remembering things that didn’t actually happen in great detail. This Time Mage thing explains it all!

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.

Irony

Call from Concordia Sports Medicine last night:

“Hi! It’s about your appointment next Thursday.”

“The seven-thirty?”

“Yes. We’re really sorry – we have to cancel it. Your osetopath just had surgery on her elbows.”

What the heck are you supposed to say to that?

“Argh!”

“Has it been long since your last appointment?”

“Well, about five weeks.”

“Ouch! Any problems?”

“My back is going “crunch” in the middle.”

“That sounds bad. Would you like to see another osteopath?”

“Well… I lived like this for months before I saw someone, so I’m not dying or anything. Tell my doctor to not worry and that she needs to heal just like everyone else. If my back gets really bad I’ll call you.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll shoehorn you in somewhere as soon as you call. Thanks!”

Little do they know that I now have a secret weapon: Excedrin Extra-Strength, with acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine. Somebody who loves me has family that goes to the US. It was a lovely surprise. That plus finding a nice flat spot in the park so I can simultaneously lie in the sun and realign my spine sounds like a terrific idea.

Speaking of border-crossing, Vanilla Coke makes its new debut of the millennium on Wednesday. You know, I’ve never been to Plattsburgh…