Category Archives: Cello

In Which She Ruminates On The State Of Things

I’ve been doing a very good job of recording what’s happening, but not how I’m feeling. That has much to do with the fact that I’ve been feeling lousy for a good long time now. (Or perhaps that should more correctly read ‘a bad long time’.) This isn’t a particularly cheerful post, so be ye warned.

Winter really wore me down. I was cold all the time no matter what the heat was set or or how many sweaters and socks I piled on. I was in pain a lot of the time, too. And now that it’s spring things haven’t changed much. I’m still struggling with a sinus cold that’s dragging on, some major back and muscle pain, and ongoing fatigue. Mentally and emotionally I’ve been pretty fatigued, as well. I’m having trouble reading, of all things, not being able to focus or retain information for long. I have problems thinking through a project, whatever it might be. I’m finding it hard to focus through an entire piece of music while I’m playing. Heck, I have problems thinking through a conversation. I know it’s fibro. That doesn’t help me much.

None of this is doing my self-confidence or self-esteem any good. Pretty much the only thing I’m handling right now is freelance work on a very light basis. Weaving takes time and energy to set up and the actual weaving part is over too quickly. (Somewhere in my mind there’s a little voice saying, “Well, it would take only a bit more energy to warp a larger loom, it might actually be easier and less cramped, and you could do a longer warp for a bigger project that would last more than two or three hours of actual weaving.” To which the responsible adult part of my mind replies, “Yes, well, a larger floor loom costs money, of which there is none, is there?”) I did a bit of sample spinning with some of the incredibly lovely cashmere that Bonnie sent to me, and it’s exquisite: it’s so light and soft that I joked about sleeping with it on my pillow and carrying it around to pet it. I also spun up the Corriedale/Tencel blend I did on the homemade hackle and it’s very nice indeed, quite silky; it would have a lovely drape if knitted.

Part of my problem is because my focus is all over the place, I’m having trouble with time management. I never feel like I’m accomplishing anything of worth. Which is wholly untrue, I know. I’m bringing enough money in to cover my bills, though not any more than that. I’m baking a lot and feeding my family. I’m handling at least one freelance project per week, from start to finish; I’m at my desk nearly six hours a day because it’s slow going, though. I’m better at cello than I was even three months ago, although I’m not practising much because I don’t have the energy beyond getting to orchestra and my weekly lesson. But I lost the three-day a week yoga schedule I was doing, I badly miss being able to write, and I’m feeling generally lacklustre and rudderless. I suspect that last is partially due to the knowledge that we’re moving at an undetermined time this year, and there are other undefinable things up in the air time-wise, too.

I didn’t realise how bad it all was until I began considering a really short haircut or drastically colouring my hair last week. That’s usually a certain sign that I feel powerless and not in control of what’s going on. I’ve actually been avoiding getting my hair cut, mainly because I can’t afford it, and also because the boy asked me to grow my hair long again. I haven’t decided if I’ll do that or not, but for now that’s what’s happening by default.

So that’s the state of things, as they have been for some time now. I’m restless, can’t focus, feeling worthless, and really down on myself because I feel like I can’t do what I want to do for a variety of reasons. A lot of this is health-related. Some of it is the time of year. When the sun came out for over a week it noticeably helped, so I know things will get somewhat better as spring moves along. I just have to hang on till then.

Weekend Roundup, Spring Edition

On Friday night I had my cello lesson where some things fell apart, and others worked. I guess overall it was good, but there were parts that left me really down. This is the part of the-tearing-apart-current-technique process I hate. I know to expect sounding awful while my brain and muscles struggle to implement new info, but it doesn’t do much for feeling good about yourself or your work. A new étude that my teacher assigned had me trying to figure out what it sounded like, and I finally made the connection: it was in the same key and rhythmic pattern as the piece my teacher had suggested doing for the spring recital back in January, the Bach Gavotte from the third Suzuki book, a piece I love. I shared this insight with her and she was slightly taken aback, because we haven’t started it yet and usually she prefers students to present a polished piece they’ve worked on for a good long time. So there was miscommunication: I expected her to assign it when she thought it was time, and she perhaps forgot or had just been thinking aloud. She suggested doing the Lully Gavotte instead, but told me to work on both as the Lully has lots of stuff we can apply to the Bach, and if the Bach is good enough we can do that. We have three months; we’ll see what happens.

Saturday was our spring co-coven all-day retreat. I was up at six baking a double batch of cinnamon buns that I’d mixed the night before. We left at quarter to eight to drop the boy off at his local grandparents’ house, pick up the last-minute supplies we needed, get gas, then pick up our two coveners and get to the workshop site (theoretically for nine, but we didn’t make it there till nine-twenty because of traffic and losing a bit of time at every stop). The morning was great: the cinnamon rolls and tea or coffee, then our opening ritual that invoked the energy of the elements in various ways to bless the weather, our creative pursuits, and new beginnings or reawakenings, then a good talk on shield theory, and a discussion comparing and contrasting the handling of energy in Reiki and magic. Lunch always arrives surprisingly quickly, and it was fabulous: cannelloni, honey-garlic chicken, salad, and homemade bread. The main ritual was a guided meditation, after which I had to leave for a replacement rehearsal at orchestra as we’d lost two earlier in the season due to weather and March break.

The rehearsal was good work. Things are starting to come together, although I have determined that I have White Stick Syndrome. This is similar to White Coat Syndrome in which people’s blood pressure skyrockets at hospitals or doctor’s offices, except in my case when the conductor turns around and stands right in front of me to conduct our section I completely lose any ability to read my music and play things I know perfectly well. Sitting second chair has its hazards.

Two and a half hours later I went back to pick up the rest of the crew. We dropped them off and picked up the boy, then went home for dinner. In my quest to turn my son into a fellow Vaughan Williams fan, At the end of dinner I played the Wasps overture for the boy so he’d know it at the concert, and then the March Past of the Kitchen Utensils which came next on the CD (why are there no recordings of this to share? I am sad, it’s a great piece), doing a puppet show for him with my hands over the half-wall between the living room and the kitchen while telling him this was the wooden spoon marching past, this was the ladle, and, timed to coincide with the crashing chords, this was the meat tenderizer, THUMP! He giggled so hard he almost gave himself the hiccoughs and kept saying, “Do it again, Mama, do it again!” I promised him we could do it for HRH one day with the real kitchen utensils, and we went through the tin of spoons and such by the stove to figure out what we would use. I may even break out the fabric stash to make little cloaks for them, and possibly acquire googly eyes to stick on with a bit of blue-tack for extra fun.

Sunday morning I felt awful. I’d worn myself out on Saturday, so the sinus cold that I’d been fighting for the past week gained the upper hand. I took sinus medication, which pretty much knocked me out, and I spent most of the morning in a doze wherever I was sitting. While HRH vacuumed, I showed the boy the live feed of Molly the wild barn owl sitting on her eggs, the first of which was due to hatch Sunday. It’s absolutely fascinating to watch her; barn owls are incredibly elegant, and knowing there was an owlet working on chipping its way out of the egg made it hard to turn the feed off. The first one hatched while we both napped and HRH was out getting groceries, and then the feed went down, so we watched a recording of the owlet instead. (The feed is back today, thank goodness; the servers crashed because so many people were watching it.)

As it was the first weekend of spring, we celebrated by going out for ice cream. We visited the opened-last-summer Bilboquet location in Pointe-Claire village, which has seats inside (our regular spot doesn’t) and it was just as fabulous as everyone who’s enjoyed the downtown location has ever told me. The boy had straight chocolate, I had chocolate with white chocolate-vanilla slabs and nuts in it, and HRH had tire a sucre ice cream, vanilla swirled with real maple taffy from a local cabane a sucre. It was incredible. It’s a limited-time availability thing, so, um, we’ll be going back next Sunday so we can all have some before the season is over. It snowed on Sunday, too, enough to cover the grass again (although it melted overnight) and there was something peculiarly decadent about sitting on the stools at the front window, eating ice cream while watching the snow fall.

Weekend Roundup

Yes, another boring recap of my scintillating weekend activity. It’s for my records, after all.

My very sore throat of Thursday developed into a full cold on Friday. I slept badly Friday night but got up at 7:30 to make sure that I had a leisurely morning before heading off for my cello lesson at 9:00. It was a great lesson with some excellent breakthroughs (such as one doesn’t move one’s left elbow forward while crossing strings, one moves one’s forearm, so as to avoiding “breaking” the wrist; I love making discoveries like that), but it was an intense lesson and very draining. Got home, put down the cello, picked up my bag of fibre projects and supplies, and packed the loom into the car, and HRH, the boy and I headed back to the West Island. They dropped me off at Ceri’s, where we were having our monthly craft session, and I got a quarter of the loom warped. The boy and HRH went to Tal’s house to help move some furniture around, and the boy had a terrific time playing with the young lady of the house. They picked me up a couple of hours later, sharing some of the delicious quiche and apples and cheese and cucumber sandwiches we’d assembled for lunch before we all departed. When we got home we managed to get the boy to nap, despite it being almost two hours later than usual. I napped as well, being totally flattened by the morning and early afternoon. When we got up the boy asked to play Lego Star Wars, and played through two new levels of it mostly on his own, with just a little help from us, for which we congratulated him enthusiastically. Evidently my nap refreshed me, because while he did I made my homemade iced cappuccino (slushed milk, cocoa, brown sugar, and coffee in the ice-cream maker), a batch of chocolate-peanut butter cookies (kitbashed together from two different recipes plus cocoa), and I made another homemade spaghetti sauce for supper. I even remembered to put the clocks back on Saturday night.

It was rainy and windy and damn cold when we got up on Sunday. We had our regular pancake breakfast, I mixed up a batch of bread dough and set it to rise, and then I packed the boy up (an hour later than I wanted… we were all rather slow) and we ran errands together in the storm. I exchanged my new red earbuds for lavender ones, we picked up cat litter, and went to the library, where I discovered that I had a late book for the third time in my life. (All three times have occurred in the last year. Hmm.) While the boy napped I warped another third of the loom, got dinner in the slow cooker, and then headed out for our monthly group cello lesson, where I played my lines rather better than I’d anticipated. It’s so much easier when you hear the other lines and figure out where your line fits in (Yes, I realise this contradicts my complaint of last month, where I said that I couldn’t play my line because I didn’t know how it fit in. Yesterday was magically different. Or I practised the new material. One of the two.) We also sight-read two pieces, a cello quartet arrangement of the theme from Haydn’s quartet op 76 no 3 (we sight-read this one last time, too, but we all had different parts this time; last time I think I had the viola part, and this time I had the first violin) and a piece by Rameau.

I was exhausted but restless last night, and slept badly again. My back has been achy for three days straight, and while my cold is almost gone, the boy is home with me today because he now has an occasional cough and has a bit of sinus congestion; we weren’t sure whether to send him to preschool or not, so we erred on the side of caution. We kept him home but when I spoke with his educator she said she had the same thing, and if he was the same tomorrow to send him in anyway. So he is home with me today, and is very energetic (as always; we know he’s really ill when he is listless). If I felt better I’d take him out to the park or something, but I suspect we will do crafty things instead.

Book Announcement

No, not one of mine… exactly.

I am giddy to announce the release of A Modern Cellist’s Manual by Emily Wright. I had the very enjoyable task of editing this book.

A very different sort of cello method, A Modern Cellist’s Manual combines technical information and plenty of photographs with advice on approach. Topics addressed range from the basics of a painless bow grip to injury avoidance, working with a metronome, and tenor clef. Emily’s tone and sense of humor lighten the mood of any practice session. A Modern Cellist’s Manual is suitable for those taking private lessons as well as returning cellists looking to bolster rusty technique.

A Modern Cellist’s Manual can be purchased via Lulu.com for now, and should be listed at major online retailers eventually.

Congratulations, Emily. You’ve worked hard for this. And for those who read it and want more… I have it on good authority that she’s working on it.

Concert Announcement!

It’s that time of year again! The Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra proudly announces their spring 2010 concert.

Date: Saturday the 27 of March
Time: 19h30
Location: Beaurepaire United Church, 25 Fieldfare Ave, Beaconsfield
Admission: $10, free for children under 18

Programme:
The Wasps Overture – Vaughn Williams
Symphony no. 83 (‘The Hen’) – Haydn
Méditation from Thaïs – Massenet
The Banks of Green Willow – Butterworth
Petit Suite – Debussy

This is a gorgeous programme. The concerts usually last approximately two hours, including the refreshment break. There are driving directions and public transport info on the church website, linked above. I usually encourage people who are vehicle-less to find someone who has a car and share the cost of the driver’s admission to the concert among them. It’s more fun to enjoy the evening in the company of others, after all.

Mark your calendars now! And feel free to share the information with anyone you like; it’s a public concert. See you there!

Weekend Roundup

Spring hit this weekend, with a vengeance. I wore shoes outside for the first time in months, and a spring coat on Saturday. The boys spent a lot of time going for walks or trike rides (and oy, the boy has so very outgrown the tricycle) or shovelling snow from banks in the yard and spreading it on the gardens to melt there, because we had below average precipitation this winter and the gardens are going to be very unhappy. (HRH was also trying to put the bulbs back to sleep by piling snow on top of them, but I suspect it’s not going to succeed.) As of this morning, our snow was gone in the front and side yards, and it’s not going to take long for what’s left in the back to melt either…

Also, we suspect the boy is on another growth spurt (we’ve given up counting), what with the multiple meals and two-hour naps.

Friday night I measured the warp for a pillow cover. The first warp I started measuring seemed way too short, what with loom waste, so I doubled it. In the end I realised that while I was wrapping the warp I was thinking I’d doubled it, but with two wraps per measure I was actually quadrupling it. Oops. (I wish I could say that it worked out to two pillow covers, but with loom waste it would only be one and a half. If I did the fronts in the woven fabric and backed them in plain cloth I could have three throw pillows, though. It bears consideration.)

Saturday morning the boy let us sleep in for two blissful hours, playing on his own and watching cartoons. I was supposed to take Ceri to some quilt shops to help her choose fabric for her baby quilt, but I got a call saying that something has come up and she’d have to switch the outing to sometime in the afternoon. So I warped half of the loom instead, had lunch with the boys, and picked Ceri up around two. We spent an hour and a half in the first (and, in the end, only) quilt shop, pulling out different fabrics and laying them against one another and having a wonderful time. Ceri went home with all her main fabrics for the quilt blocks, we had tea and cake, and I came back home. The boy decided that he wanted spaghetti for dinner, so I made a sauce. After he went to bed I finished warping the loom, and then wove while HRH played Dragon Age.

Sunday morning we went out and did our weekly grocery order. We also hit the office supply shop and I finally got a new binder for my cello lessons, as the smaller one was chock full. There were earphones on sale and I picked up a pair of red ones, but now I’m thinking I should have picked up a lavender set because it would be less of a contrast with my black and white damask-patterned iPod skin. I’ll exchange them this week.

Sunday afternoon ought to have been skating with the Preston-LeBlancs, but HRH remembered that he doesn’t have a pair of skates, and even if I’d had the energy I couldn’t take the boy instead because we couldn’t find my pair. I couldn’t weave during the boy’s nap because the levers of the table loom go clunk, so I spun some of the llama fibre Jan picked up for me last month instead. It sheds like crazy and even when I think I’m over-spinning it, it tends to drift apart.

When the boy got up I wove for a bit, then took the cello downstairs to practice because I had a lesson scheduled for that night and I wouldn’t be able to play in my office like I usually do since everyone was home. I regret not practising downstairs before, because the sound is phenomenal down there. And the phenomenal sound went with me to the lesson, which was great. We are moving on from Boccherini and working on Webster’s Scherzo now, which is nice for the change, but is also all about the incredibly controlled bow movement.

Dinner last night was a truly delicious pork roast with baked potato wedges and raw veggies. Worthy of mention, anyway.

And through it all, the weather was spectacular. I am reminded yet again how much of an impact the sun has on my mood.

Weekend Roundup: Canada Takes Lots Of Gold Edition

This was a good weekend, despite setbacks.

Saturday morning I had my cello lesson, which was notable for happening half an hour after I woke up. I’d been sleeping badly and HRH decided to let me sleep in, which was lovely, but then he realised at 8:26 that I had a cello lesson at 9:00, and woke me up when I’m usually stepping out the door. I got dressed in record time, he made me tea in my travel mug, and I flew out to the West Island. The lesson was pretty good. It’s nice to be asked, “How long have we been working on this étude?” and to answer, “Well, actually, you assigned it last week and this is the first time I’ve played it for you,” and then hear the teacher say, “Well, you’ve done what you needed to do with that, let’s look at the next one.”

I asked to work on ‘The Entertainer’, which we’re playing in a quartet arrangement for the June recital, and gah. I’m playing Cello 2, and there were some rhythmic things that I just wasn’t getting. My teacher tried all sorts of rearrangements and subdivisions to help me get it, and they just succeeded in confusing me more. I’m a very basic kind of ‘just play the correct rhythm for me and I’ll internalize it’ kind of girl; rhythm tricks just worsen my muddle. I got it in the end, mainly because a few bars later the same rhythm showed up with different notes, only preceded by two eighth notes instead of a quarter note and that seemed to make all the difference. Then we moved to the Boccherini minuet.

Oh, Boccherini. Really.

I have a hate/love relationship with pops and chestnuts. They’re overplayed and so I grit my teeth at them, turn them off when I can, and resist them. If I have to play them, I discover all sorts of lovely things about their internal workings, admit there’s a reason for their popularity, find something to like about them when I hear them, but I still don’t enjoy them. Boccherini’s Minuet is a classic example of an overplayed pop that I hate. And I hate it all the more now that I have to play it, because those opening sixteenth notes are a huge obstacle for me. I can play them in the repeats, but starting from a static bow? Gah. No.

It’s one of those pieces that is all about bow speed and weight and control and I’m sure it’s very character-building, but I’m hating myself because I can’t flipping get that mini-run of sixteenth notes. My teacher pointed out that I can play the piece with my left hand, and that I regularly play much harder pieces in orchestra. (In fact, she expanded that to cover all the Suzuki material I’ve done and will do, which was very gratifying to hear, since sometimes I beat myself up about being on book three after playing for sixteen years.) The point of this is to work the right hand, and my problem does in fact lie entirely with the bow. From a dead stop, I can’t micro-manage the speed to get that lovely sort of swoop and jump for precise phrasing on those two first bars. (There’s an argument in the music world about the validity of the Suzuki method for adults, and what people tend to forget is that review is a huge part of the method. Yes, after sixteen years, you can go back to the earlier books and work on the pieces with all your knowledge and still find technique to polish. The method is a philosophy, not just a set of books.)

We spent the last ten minutes focusing on phrasing those two bars and trying to play them over and over, and I finally said I had to stop because it was getting worse and I was tensing up and losing control of bow and phrasing entirely, and it was doing more harm than good. That’s the kind of thing that stays with me, and despite the lesson overall being great, I had to keep telling myself not to brood about it on the way home.

Saturday afternoon I went out to meet a wonderful couple to discuss performing their handfasting in April. It’s a renewal of vows, seven years to the day they got married, and the handfasting will be followed directly by a Wiccaning for their three and a half month old daughter. I’m very sensitive to working with people I don’t feel comfortable with, but as soon as I walked into their home I felt relaxed, much to my relief. They’re absolutely wonderful women, and I felt so at home with them right off the bat. And their daughter is exquisite.

I got home, watched half of a movie with HRH, then played with the boy till the local grandparents came over for pizza and babysitting. We headed over to Ceri and Scott’s that evening for cake and company, which was very enjoyable, until we got a phone call saying that the boy had been sick. Home we went, and the poor kid was sick a couple more times.

Sunday morning he woke up with a fever, and all he wanted to do was drink water. We’d already cancelled our attendance at his monthly pagan playgroup, so I installed him on the chesterfield with a blanket and some stuffed animals and the Sunday morning cartoons. I cautiously introduced watered juice when he asked for it, then got him to nibble a graham cracker a few hours later. He didn’t want lunch, just juice, but the fever peaked in the early afternoon and had pretty much subsided by the end of the day, at which point he ate half an apple, a bowl of Rice Krispies, and some rice and chicken. Still, apart from his three-hour nap, all he wanted to do was curl up on the chesterfield and watch movies, which was fine until the men’s gold medal hockey game came on and he wanted to watch Star Wars. HRH and I ended up in my office watching the HD stream on my computer. And what a fabulous game! I enjoyed the simultaneous discussion happening on my Twitter list, too. I said last week that Twitter was like having all my friends from all over working together in the same room, popping heads up now and again to chat, and this was similar: it was like we were all watching the game together. When the boy’s movie was over we put the Olympic recap on so we could all watch it together, and even had a picnic in the living room. HRH and I watched the closing ceremonies, too, even though they got progressively weirder and weirder, although I put up with the beavers and moose and voyageurs for the sake of Michael Bublé. The Sochi presentation was incredible.

I am not an Olympic fan. I think there’s an awful lot of controversy about the cost and the impact on the host cities that isn’t considered enough. I’m always irritated by the general emphasis on sport and the lack of equivalent support for arts and culture, and the Olympics just highlight this imbalance for me. And frankly, I’m not a sport fan in general (other than curling, because that’s my game). But being a citizen of the host country for these winter games finally broke down my curmudgeonly resistance and invoked my patriotism. Between the summer and the winter Olympics I will always choose the winter games, and damn, but Canada is good at sports that involve ice and snow. Part of my resistance also comes from the fact that downhill skiing and snowboarding and bobsleighing and such things bore me, and that’s what’s on mainly at the beginning of the winter games. I used to watch figure skating but it doesn’t do it for me any more. However, I happened to watch the women’s freestyle aerial ski jump last Wednesday night for the first time because HRH was watching it when I came home from orchestra, and it was fascinating. We saw the men’s aerial freestyle final too, and the women’s final hockey game, and the women’s final curling game. I’m not much of a hockey fan (my heyday for that was back in late high school), but if pro hockey was played the way the women’s gold medal game was played, I’d watch it regularly. Maybe part of my lack of enthusiasm came from the fact that I’d have needed cable TV to watch the things that actively interested me in the first half of the games.

And I can’t deny the impact my own patriotism had on me. I am a complete and total sucker for our national anthem, especially when sung by enormous stadiums full of people who are crazy proud of our country. The damn ‘let’s make sure they know whose game they’re playing’ Coke commercial that changed to ‘now they know whose game they’re playing’ after Canada won the gold in both women’s and men’s hockey even made me cry. And the whole making history by winning the most gold on a host nation’s home soil? Yeah. I may not be a sport fan, but I am Canadian.

But if I couldn’t have our fabulous national anthem, I’d want Russia’s. I’ve always loved it, and the choral rendition of it at the closing ceremonies was thrilling.

Apart from all that, I tried to spin the overdyed fibre I did last week, and it had felted. I split the roving lengthwise and spun it without drafting, and in the end I have dreadlock-like yarn that I have called ‘Chocolate Cherries for Cthulu’, because it’s dark brown with touches of dark red and green, with green sparkle here and there. It’s awful, although I love the name. No one will ever be able to do anything with it, either. It’s that bad. I’m chalking it up to a learning experience.

Today is March first, and we’re in the home stretch for spring! It was a very spring-like weekend, too.