Category Archives: Cello

… And Birthday Prep

Today is kind of a mess. There needs to be a cake and two batches of cookies baked, as well as our regular bread. HRH is doing most of the grocery shopping after dropping the boy off with the caregiver, while I finish up the latest assignment and hand it in. We need to head out to the craft store in the east end to pick up supplies for the crafty part of tomorrow’s party; party decorations need to be picked up as well, at a different store. We need to hit a particular grocery store for a couple of items not available at our regular grocery store, and another speciality store to pick up gel colouring for dyeing roving tinting the cake icing. I have a cello lesson tonight and it would sure be nice to get a lick of practise in today before I go. Dinner needs to be made and eaten in there somewhere, too. At least HRH has offered to ice the cake while I’m at my lesson. (ETA: Ack, need to pick up reserved books at the library, too.)

I think the tension is coming from the fact that I’m thinking of today as a work day with a bunch of other stuff that needs doing.

I suspect I will pass out once everyone’s left tomorrow after the party. I intend to hit Ariadne for the subversive Spin (Not Knit) In Public day when the boy naps, but evaluating how achy I am today after yesterday’s outing, and knowing what today and tomorrow morning entail, I suspect it’s not going to happen, no matter how much I want to try the wheel.

Ooh, news flash as of a phone call two minutes ago: Sparky has a new baby cousin! Well, of a sort; my cousin has a new daughter as of this morning, and we call our children cousins. (His daughters are my cousins once removed, but I don’t know what the term is for the relationship between our children themselves.) Hurrah! Can’t wait for pictures. We’ll get to meet her when we go down to Toronto in ten days.

Belated Weekend Roundup

Okay, here we go.

Thursday night: Marc’s vocal concert, at which I unashamedly cried because I’m so darn proud of him. He gets better every year, and his range is really expanding. (I mean vocal range, but the style of songs he’s exploring is also broadening.) There were about ten of us there, and it’s always fun to sit with friends at this kind of thing. We are all about the support.

Friday: Lunch meeting with Marisol, at which I was much more with it than the meeting we had in late winter. We nattered about a bunch of different things connected with her thesis, which she’s trying to recast as a personal memoir and anthropological exploration of language, cultural origin, and spirituality, specifically in Quebec with all its wackiness. It’s fascinating. I know nothing about anthropology, but I made a few suggestions to help make it more attractive for marketing and she’s all excited and fired up to begin. It’s fun helping someone uncover and refine their focus. Then I wandered around downtown in the sun for a bit, hitting the Body Shop and Lush and a used bookstore, where I scored copies of Deborah Lipp’s The Study of Witchcraft, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, and Robert Jourdain’s Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, all of which I’ve been wanting to read. (Eclectic, that’s me.) The boy begins showing evidence of a cold.

Saturday: Errands, mainly going out to pick up a gift certificate for Jeff and Pasley’s eleventh wedding anniversary, and prep for the family dinner. The big event of the day is the boy’s family birthday party. This is kind of blurry for me, as I was low on energy and doing stuff, but it went well. Everyone arrived around four, was served a drink, and the boy opened his presents. We were somewhat shocked to watch him tear one open then another and another without pausing to appreciate what was inside, which is most unlike him. We suspect an unintentionally misleading gift bag with a large WALL*E on it, which led him to think there was a large WALL*E toy he’s been coveting inside, so when he found clothes he kind of rifled through them and then turned to the next large thing, expecting to find it. Once everything was open he did go back to each gift one by one to explore it, though. There was a simple Millennium Falcon kit, a bug terrarium, new Lego, and Transformers, which wowed him thoroughly. He got me to open them right away, and grabbed Bumblebee from my hands. I said, “Just a second, I’ll show you how to…” and didn’t bother to finish because the four year old who’s never seen a Transformer before went flip-flip-flip and transformed it from car to robot in no time flat, then back again. (HRH and I = very proud. Also, go us for choosing a cool toy.)

Dinner was excellent: wet-brined home-cut pork chops glazed with a Dijon/maple syrup/beef bouillon glaze, and grilled vegetables, preceded by various seafood hors d’oeuvres courtesy of our mothers, and followed by a chocolate cake with vanilla icing, upon which the boy had scattered sugar dinosaurs. There was a lot of wine consumed. The boy went to bed around nine, two hours later than usual. Yikes.

Sunday: I slept horribly and woke up thoroughly ill. The boy and HRH made the Millennium Falcon while I tried to get some more sleep. We met Mum and Dad at their motel and headed over to Ceri and Scott’s house, because Mum was giving Ceri her old spinning wheel for the sunroom. (An antique great or walking wheel, for those who are interested and wondering why I didn’t jump on it; it’s technically functional, but it’s a Saxony style and I have no room for it, and I’m looking for a modern compact castle-style wheel.) The medication I took for the cold started kicking in and I don’t remember much about the visit other than it was sunny and we were outside for most of it. We stopped at La Belle Province and had hot dogs and french fries for lunch, then went back home and the boy conked out for two hours straight. Mum and Dad joined us later and we had a very pleasant visit. Once the boy was up things moved outside, and I was so out of it I couldn’t drag myself out after them all; I lay down and read. My parents left early, and HRH fed the boy while I went to bed. We ended up having to cancel our late dinner out with friends, because I was non-functional. (I remember hearing HRH call to cancel, and him using the phrase “she has a bit of a cold” and being annoyed, because “she can’t get out of bed” would have been more honest and made the cancellation sound less wishy-washy.

Monday: The boy stayed home from preschool as his cough wasn’t completely gone, thereby annihilating one of my precious work days this week. We got out to wander around and tried to do errands, but were thwarted by lack of stock. I was still dragging myself around with low energy, and cancelled my bi-weekly anime night with Marc. HRH and I ended up watching TV together after the boy went to bed, a very pleasant thing indeed as (a) I don’t get to spend a lot of time alone with HRH these days, (b) I don’t watch TV much but I was curiously in the mood for it last night, and (c) both House and Bones were on back to back, the only two shows I’m even remotely interested in these days, and I had seen neither of the episodes.

Today: Cold mostly gone. Dark and cold and rainy outside. An hour of cello. Baking bread.

And now, to work.

Meandering

I understand now why I’ve been avoiding doing a second draft of Orchestrated. I have to rework the beginning, and I don’t know how to step into it properly. I’m doing a lot of staring at the renamed document on the monitor, the printout in front of me, and feeling like I’m going nowhere.

In other news, there are four more rehearsal till the Canada Day concert, one of which I will be missing as we’re out of town. I need to work on the speed of the Grieg dances, and to smooth out the shifts of the Ralph Vaughn Williams and the Faure Pavane. But really, that’s it. We’re coming together. So long as everyone keeps up their end of the practise-at-home bargain, we’ll be golden. Gods, I love the Vaughn Williams. But that’s just me; I like RVW to begin with. The cellos get to do a lovely stompy theme in the first movement, and a nice lyrical theme in the second. And because I know the piece well, I can play it better.

HRH cleaned out the garage and sorted things into give away/sell/donate piles, and reorganized the storage area. We can all get to the bikes now. I went through the piles of clothing to donate to the local charities. It’s good to have all that out of the way. It was getting very frustrating not being able to find things down there, or easily access the things we needed. I finally saw the water/mold damage to my lovely thick white office carpet Blade gave me as a birthday gift a few years ago, and it’s awful; it was rolled up with one end resting on the floor and got soaked one day. Just one of the irritating reminders of the past downstairs tenant whose washer leaked regularly, flooding the garage floor (and yet she insisted nothing was wrong, argh). I’m pretty sure a thorough steam cleaning will rescue it, and as the upstairs furniture needs that kind of cleaning too we shall rent one of those special vacuums from the grocery store and go to town one day.

Things are ramping up in the family for the boy’s series of birthday celebrations. This Saturday it’s the family thing, with my parents coming in from out of town to join the local grandparents here. Next Wednesday we’ll send cake and possibly balloons to preschool. Thursday is the day itself, and if the weather’s good we may abscond with the boy and take him to the train museum and lunch out. Then next Saturday is the kid party. That’s two cakes and a batch of cupcakes to make, which also means a lot of icing. I hope butter’s on sale somewhere. We asked him what kind of theme he wanted this year, and it wavered between Star Wars and superheroes for a while, before settling on superheroes. Not that we go deep into the theme thing, we just like to have a loose thing to tie colours and cake and invitations together. This is the first year I haven’t done homemade invitations, which makes me slightly sad, but there’s that whole not having colour ink for the printer and money being tight. (Till, well, today, but today would have been too late for the invitations.) It was less expensive to buy them.

I have just discovered Amanda Palmer. I am, as usual, late to the party. I knew about her, but hadn’t actually heard her music till today. I’m currently listening to Who Killed Amanda Palmer, and it’s excellent. Not something one can just throw in the CD player; it’s a very specific sort of music. But very good. Lovely sting arrangements.

HRH got his provincial tax refund today, which means mine is close behind. Hurrah!

Dear 4/4 Cello:

Fifteen years ago I bought you almost new from another student cellist, your only identifying label a small one that says “Made in Hungary.” We’ve seen a lot together, from Twinkle to Scheherazade. I was stunned when luthier after luthier examined you and told me that you were about my age and a high-end intermediate model, not the shlunky new student model I’d been told you were by the previous owner. Over the past fifteen years your sound has developed beautifully, and you’re powerful and strong. Your action is easy. Your only prima donna trait is your tendency to demand a new bridge every eighteen months, and really, when you think of what can otherwise go wrong, that’s pretty reasonable.

I never knew how huge you were until I handed you to the principal cellist of my chamber orchestra for a moment, and she exclaimed about your width and depth. You were just my cello; that’s the way you were. So when I spoke to my new luthier and he measured you, I was surprised to find out that you are in fact an oversized 4/4. I am petite. I always thought people’s remarks about how amusing it was to see a tiny person playing a large instrument were generic sorts of comments. Now I wondered if there was something else to it.

After much discussion with my new teacher a year ago, we decided to start trying 7/8s; she said that the smaller size and proportion would positively impact my technique. I felt horrible, like I was cheating on you. I felt even worse when I discovered that it actually was physically easier to play a 7/8; I didn’t have a huge chunk of wood in my way when it came to putting my left hand in higher positions and moving my bow arm to play the C string. Even as I searched for a 7/8 whose tone I liked and whose action felt good, I thought I’d never sell you: I would be loyal to the end, whether I bought a second cello or not.

I rented the latest 7/8 for four months to play it exclusively in order to test the playing-better theory. And then last week I brought you upstairs from your lovely exile to play you, to see if there really was a difference. You were almost perfectly in tune, as if you’d been waiting for me.

And you were… harsh. Oh, your action was as easy as I remembered it being — easier than the 7/8, truth be told — but your sound was so bright and cutting that I found myself wincing. I remembered how I searched endlessly for the perfect combination of strings to tone down your brightness, to give you the more mellow sound that I craved. The sound that, I must admit, this 7/8 has in creamy, caramel-y spades. I had no physical problem playing you, but I did notice how large you were and how I had to lift my arms more to get around you, which limits the power I can devote to refining the sound I draw from you. You boomed, you were operatic, and… I cringed a bit. Were I a true soloist, your sound would be perfect for me. But I’m not. I’m a small-ensemble, orchestral-section girl. You’re… big, in every sense of the word. And I’m small.

I know now that keeping you would be sentimentality, pure and simple. While I can physically handle you, it’s just easier with a 7/8. And your sound isn’t what I’m looking for. Now that I know I have other options, I’m a bit sad. It was easier when I didn’t know any better.

You held my hand through pizzicato, my first shaky bow strokes, in-class group recitals, public recitals, joining my first orchestra, and playing bass in an eclectic cover band. We’ve experimented with a wide variety of strings and bows. I’ve given you four new cases over the years. Remember the time I shipped you to Toronto in the baggage car of the train, and the base of the hard case got punched in somehow? I panicked and opened you up right there in the middle of Union Station. And you were fine, laughing at me as if it would take more than whatever happened to hurt you. You have nicks and scratches all over you from minor mishaps over your forty years, and you don’t care. You haven’t a single wolf, and your balance across your strings and throughout your octaves is beautiful. I’ve never found your limits.

Come August, I’ll list you in local classified ads and hope you find someone who will love you as much as I have, someone who needs your size and your beautifully developed, unique sound. I love you. And I release you.

Hmm

I was poky this morning, dragging my metaphorical heels and saying, “I don’t wanna work.” And I spent what I thought was a lot of time kicking around online, hopping through my usual stops of news and journals and Facebook and Twitter and various forums, looking for distraction. I made bread. I don’t think I really settled in to the documents I had open on my desktop till around eleven.

And now? Wow. Freelance assignment finished, half the galleys done, and two hours of cello interspersed throughout. And I thought I was wasting the day. I shall have a glass of wine as a reward!

The Recital Report

A triumph! No screw-ups, secure shifts, solid intonation, some pretty damn fine subtle shaping, and oh look, stable bow weight resulting in nice smooth crescendos! Huzzah! The ensemble pieces were good too. In fact, everyone did very well. And I am very proud of the boy who behaved extremely well, but who, alas, fell asleep right before the Star Wars theme that was the thirteen-year-old’s choice of solo (just past the halfway mark of the recital). He quite enjoyed what he did hear, however. I am told he played air cello and clapped like a mad thing after the duet.

Summer is going to be very long. I will miss cello activites. I have another month of lessons to go and almost six weeks of orchestra, but year-end performances are always tinged with melancholy.

And now, I am going to reward myself with a glass of red wine that I saved from the bottle MLG brought to accompany dinner last night.

Uneven Dress Rehearsal…

… hopefully even recital, right?

This morning we had our dress rehearsal for tomorrow’s recital. The ensemble stuff sounded great, except for one piece, which admittedly did sound better once we’d had a break and retuned. Our duet sounded all right (I know hearing notes slightly out of tune is normal for performance, because one’s hearing goes hyper-critical) except for the bit where I relaxed in the repeat of the A section. I glanced away from my music, and when I looked back I had no idea where we were. I quickly ran out of what I remembered of the two bars following and had to stop playing until I figured out where my partner was. Very embarrassing; thank goodness it happened at the dress, so it won’t happen at the recital itself. We ended up cutting the repeat (which makes sense apart from my gaffe, as the A section is forty bars and quite long enough on its own), which reduces my chances of over-relaxing and losing my place. The other solos sounded terrific. It’s going to be a good recital.

HRH and I did end up going out to see Star Trek yesterday afternoon, and it was quite enjoyable. I’d have sat through the entire thing again if we hadn’t had to go collect the boy.