Category Archives: Cello

In Which She Natters About Cello Stuff, With A Side Of Diary

It’s confirmed: we’re trying out a third conductor tonight! And I am very happy because there was a bit of kerfuffle about memberships dues not covering what this conductor requested as his fee, but the majority of members were okay with paying a supplement to obtain his services for this concert. If we decide he’s the one for us then membership fees will go up, and I’m perfectly fine with that; we pay a ridiculously low fee as it is, and more than doubling it only brings us to ten dollars per month the orchestra plays each year. If he’s as good as his reputation suggests he is, we’d be getting a real deal. Also, audiences would increase because of his affiliation with other musical events and organisations, and our recruiting of new members would also increase. There’s a lot of potential here.

Apparently we are playing Schubert’s third symphony as the main course for the July concert. So naturally, while looking for audio reference, I discovered that I own only the first, second, and fourth symphonies. I went away and thought about it for a while, then remembered that I’d bought a full six-symphony set the last time we did a Schubert symphony (the fifth?), because the set was less expensive than a single CD with the fifth on it. I had to hunt it out, though. It wasn’t with my other Schubert CDs. I blame the boy, who used to pull CDs out and then reshelve them in interesting new places. I checked my records and apparently I’ve played Schubert’s third before. I have no memory of it, but then, it was in 2003, which was six years ago. However I played it then, chances are rather good that I’ll play it much better now.

I am so very excited to be working with this conductor.

I dragged myself out of the maudlin cold-heavy apathy yesterday to go down town for a meeting about this meditation recording gig. I now have the equipment and some reference DVDs to inspire my delivery of the script. It was a beautiful sunny day, and I came home in a better mood than I’d left, and feeling much healthier, too. I practised not once but twice, the second time with a strict metronome set at ruthless performance speed. I uploaded vacation photos. I opened windows (HRH took the plastic off the front living room Wall of Glass, huzzah!). I made a delicious pot of chicken cacciatore (for some reason, there are never any leftovers). And I set up the breadmaker to start its thing at three in the morning so we’d all have fresh bread at breakfast (because I forgot to make it the regular way yesterday and there wasn’t enough time for me to make it last night before I passed out).

Today: Recording, laundry, celloing, doing something with the shoulder roast that’s defrosting. I can’t even remember if it’s beef or pork (it’s from the organic farmers, so doesn’t have a label beyond ‘shoulder roast’), although I suspect it is pork.

And shh, don’t make any sudden moves: I’ve actually been starting to think about Orchestrated with more interest again. The month away from it killed my momentum. I’m not sure whether to print the first draft out and read it while making notes longhand, or just go back to the beginning of the file and start work. I may just print out the first two chapters, as those are the ones that need the most rearranging.

Good Celloing

I just had an hour-long rehearsal with my duet partner that went quite encouragingly well. I recorded the session with the MiniDisc, and have now spent an hour struggling with the transfer. The first time I had the levels set too high so the bass warped everything. The second one I did was too low and had odd clicking/crackly sounds throughout it. Third time’s the charm, yes?

Beyond the somewhat argh-ness of the transfer, the entire experience was great. We bumped up the speed each time we played it through, which I was very thankful to do; I like playing it faster than I do in lessons. When we get it going at 104mm, it’s great. We both seem to have the same instinct of when to bring the pace down a notch and when to reassert the original tempo, too, which is a good thing. Apart from the usual missed notes and wrong fingers, I’m very impressed with the recording. We’re doing a great job. Considering the fact that this is the first time we’ve played it together, I’m all the more encouraged. Listening to the recording is interesting; I can’t tell who is who a lot of the time. I mean, I know what bits I play, but if I’m not concentrating I can’t tell which cello is producing the theme or the accompaniment at any given point. Which means the balance is good. And we had fewer problems than I expected; we listened to one another quite well.

Just before she arrived the postperson dropped off the box of cello goodies I won from Emily and Benning Violins! I had to leave it sitting there on the table while we played. I opened it while I was transferring the recording, and here is a photographic record, as promised to various cello players in the blogosphere!

The box of cello goodies!

The very cute little box! Emily drew little cellos and notes and bass clefs on the other side.

The open box of cello goodies...

The contents!

The contents, unpacked.

The contents, unpacked! There’s peg lubricant, polish, a microfibre cleaning cloth, the Larsen A, and a brand-new cake of Gustave Bernardel rosin. It is perhaps somewhat sad that I am very excited about the microfibre cleaning cloth. I needed a new one. I’m very excited about the rosin too, of course (the idea of spending fifteen dollars to try a new cake of rosin is alien to me), and hey, a Larsen A! But evidently all it takes is a nice blue cloth to make my day. I’m a simple creature. Thank you, Emily! I will think of you every time I swipe my bow with the rosin or clean off the cello.

Aha; on the fourth transfer I have established proper levels and volume, and there are no pops or clicks. A little voice has piped up inside my head and says, You know, the Mac Mini will come with Garage Band! This will be very exciting! I wonder if I can link my microphone directly into the extended-loan iBook to record my part for my partner to practise against, even though it doesn’t have GarageBand on it. Hmm. Worth messing about with next week. If not, the MiniDisc-to-computer it is.

And to top it all off, I have a lesson tonight. I’m looking forward to it, especially now that I’ve listened to the recording (multiple times) and know what bits really need work, and what places my partner and I will have to listen to one another extra-hard.

Brief Weekend Roundup

I am effectively dead. I am calling in Not Living today, because that’s about as useful as I can manage to be. Work will happen tomorrow.

Friday: Excellent day running around with the boy. Dinner with Tal and Kris, which consisted of much laughter, wine, delicious food, and OMG Battenberg cake, which I have not in forever, or at least since Marks and Sparks abandoned the colonials closed their Canadian shops. Awful night of not-exactly-sleep where I am very, very ill for some reason.

Saturday: Resting in bed with tea until I decide I am able to get up and drive safely. Excellent cello lesson. Visit to the mall to pet the Easter farm animals. Scored a secondhand copy of Lego Star Wars for the Xbox, and a secondhand controller which is red so I will play better. Lunch out consisting of hot dogs and fries, as I had promised the boy. After nap, we all head out to the south shore so I can drop by the luthier and renew the rental of the 7/8 cello for two more months. Then all three of us play our new video game, and the boy is quite good at figuring out what’s what. We end the day by watching the Deserts episode of Planet Earth.

Sunday: Summer tires put on the car. I make my first homemade tourtière. After nap we head out to have a home-hosted sugaring off meal with excellent friends and many children. Everyone eats too much breakfast-style food drenched in maple syrup. I think the tourtière is too dry and kind of wishy-washy on the seasoning, but everyone else claims it’s awesome. (Next time I’m doubling the sage and cloves, not boiling off as much of the broth, and using a different pastry recipe.) After the boy’s in bed HRH and I head out for our once-monthly steampunkian-horror game, which was most excellent. I got nine more rows of the lap blanket done. (It’s the only knitting I’m getting done at all, and only during this game.)

Which brings us to today, where I feel lethargic and achy. The damp weather doesn’t help.

My mother has informed me that the FedEx shipment I missed is not in fact my cello goody bag, but a box of photo/scrapbook albums she and my dad shipped to me from my grandmother’s apartment in Vancouver when they went out to visit her last week. I’m looking forward to seeing them.

Figures

The boy’s hair has been cut, I have paid a slew of bills (my poor bank account, at least it was flush for twenty-four hours), we have new books, there is a new Hot Wheels fire truck, and of course I missed a FedEx delivery while we were out. When do I get FedEx deliveries? Never. Well, not entirely true; two of my sets of author’s copies arrived by FedEx in the past. As I’m not expecting anything like that, however, I’m guessing that it’s the cello goody bag I won, but I won’t know till Monday. At least, FedEx says they’ll come back on the next business day, which I am assuming is Monday in their world as in mine. Woe. I would have liked to have opened a parcel today. Especially a parcel with surprises in it.

In half an hour or so I’ll start the dough for the rolls I’m making for tonight. I may make a double batch and freeze one set.

Yes, that’s about as exciting as it gets today. It’s damp. I’m going to go find a cat and an afghan.

And In Completely Unrelated News…

This morning, while I was composing the very-difficult-to-write post about my newfound chocolate sensitivity, I received word that I won a year’s subscription to Strings magazine plus a $100 gift basket from an LA luthier for a 250-word contest entry I wrote on Emily Wright’s online teaching technique via her cello blog.

Whee!

This was especially nice, because I didn’t do it for the prize; I did it because Emily was looking for an idea of how readers interpret her lessons and approach. Of course, the prize is really quite nice too, because who wouldn’t want a goodie bag of cello-related stuff? (Er. Anyone who is a cellist, that is. I have no idea what most of you would do with such a thing. No, wait, yes I do: You’d give it to me!) The subscription is timely because I was going to have to let my subscription to Strings lapse this fall; it’s too expensive for me right now.

So. Yes. What a lovely surprise.

And I really need to get back to the taxes. I hadn’t made much of a start when I came back for a break, and then the chocolate post took longer than I expected.

Hello, Day-After-Deadline

This is the day where I wander around aimlessly because what’s been driving me for however long I’ve been handling the project is gone, but I don’t have the brainpower to start something else up again right away. This time it isn’t so bad, as it’s only been two months, but it’s enough to make me need a bit of a time before jumping into something different. I can’t completely break with the project mentally yet, either, as my editor will be getting back to me today or tomorrow with her initial response.

I need to reinitialise my freelancing gig again, and I have to get back into the headspace to revise Orchestrated. I scheduled collating and calculating all my 2008 receipts for the taxes for this week, so I need to get into the headspace for that, too. Today, however, is my official Do-Nothing Day. Which of course means I’ll do other stuff like wash dishes and empty the dishwasher and make bread and plan out an Actual Meal Of Some Kind for dinner instead of kitbashing an hour before the meal. I should practise, as well. Not that I haven’t played tonnes of cello over Friday/Saturday/Sunday, but there were a couple of new things assigned at my last lesson that I haven’t even looked at yet.

Now I need to select and print some photos to go out with a small package. One of the things I need to do is hit the post office today, so hopefully the sun will come out again because I don’t want to go out into the cold, damp, dark day, even if I’ll be on the bus for a bit of it. I’m tired of being chilled.

(Oh, hell; my colour cartridge is out of one ink, so the colour is totally off. Looks like the yellow, as the resulting test picture is eerily purple. So much for photos. Gnarr.)

Weekend Roundup, Featuring A Concert Review

Fabulous weekend!

I freely and cheerfully admit that I was completely and utterly wrong about the quality of performance at this concert. It was a most excellent evening — it blew us all away, musicians and audience alike. This conductor really knew her stuff; she trusted us more than we trusted ourselves. And what astounds me is that she didn’t know us, beyond observing a rehearsal or two previous to her turn at bat. We pulled it off, thanks to her, to her faith and her leadership and her solid preparation. In the end, this was not in fact the concert to miss if you had to miss one, as most of my regular concertgoers ended up having to do thanks to other responsibilities.

There were over a hundred people in the audience, which was wonderful too. I’m glad so many people got to experience it. My deepest thanks go out to MLG, HRH, and the boy, who were my own personal cheering section in the back corner. I saw the boy standing on his seat to applaud wildly after the first half of the programme, which made me grin so hard I thought I’d strain a muscle. And on the way home he was singing to himself in the back seat. We asked him what he was singing and he said, “I don’t know.” We listened closely and realised that he was singing the bell theme from the Carillon at the end of the L’Arlesienne suite. My heart just about burst. I was extremely proud of him and of how he behaved.

The only mishap on the part of the celli (and the biggest musical mishap concert-wide, I think) was that we completely and utterly missed our cue for the celli treble clef solo in the middle part of the Carillon. We were counting, and then we heard the oboe playing, and I thought, Hmm, I don’t remember the oboe playing here. And then the principal and I suddenly looked at one another out of the corner of our eyes, because we realised that we’d missed our entrance. It would have sounded awful if we’d jumped in, so we all let the oboe have a lovely solo. Who knew they played the same line we did? The conductor laughed about it once we were done, as did all of the celli. No harm done, but terribly amusing after weeks and weeks of work on that line and hitting the entrance every time. I think this version was nicer anyway; much gentler and more nostalgic.

Sunday morning was the monthly meeting of the Pagan playgroup, where they coloured eggs and painted masks. The boy’s egg is blue, although he kept handling it and most of the colour has come off on his hands. His mask is also impressive, with carefully blended colour and sparkles on the nose, feathers over the eyes, and one sparkly jewel just below the right ear with another on the left side of the chin. Oh, and with a riot of blue tinsel hair.

I had a group cello lesson Sunday afternoon, at which some of us incredulously dissected the previous night’s successful concert before settling into the group pieces. It’s nice to have all the heavy orchestral stuff behind me so that I can focus on lesson and recital work now. We got the final lineup for the recital and the official assignment of who’s playing what part in the trios and quartets, and my duo partner and I are making plans to meet to rehearse our piece. I love our group lessons, although I suspect we tax our teacher’s patience when we all get together and there’s variously missing music and giggling and rhythm issues.

Also, Saturday featured the most amazing warm, sunny weather. HRH got the last of the snow out of the shady corner of the yard, the boy got thoroughly muddy, and we went for a walk sprint around the neighbourhood with frequent pauses to examine cracks and leaves. It rained yesterday, but the ground needed a good soaking, and it was a novelty to drive through rain instead of snow on the highway.

Today is anthology d-day. I have already crossed two of the four things on the anthology to-do list off, which means I’m halfway done, right? Never mind the fact that one of the remaining things is ‘read the ms. from beginning to end’ and the other is reorganizing a fiddly Excel spreadsheet that must be legible to my editor. Once that’s gone… well, I don’t know what I’ll do, actually. Probably hibernate for three or four days after having a long bubble bath.

My signing cheque arrived in the mail on Friday, too late for me to actually take it to my bank, so I must sit on it till Thursday. But hurrah for having money again! Of course most of it will go to paying bills, some to renting the cello for another couple of months, and some to the Mac mini (I hope). And there’s definitely a dinner out this month for us in the cards, too.