Category Archives: Cello

Weekend Roundup

As much as I would love this to be detailed, point form is the only way I’m going to be able to record it and still have time for, you know, breathing.

FRIDAY:

Morning: Running errands. The boy dawdles and doesn’t listen to repeated instructions, and develops a very annoying pattern of taking six steps then falling to his knees, hanging off my hand. Despite this, he is in a good mood. I carry him bodily out of Sears and give him a sound talking-to back at the car. We do not find the birthday gift we planned to pick up. Also, somewhere during the very first stop I lose the list detailing All The Other Things We’re Supposed To Pick Up. Ergo, I forget them. We do, however, acquire a ball for the boy to bring out to the country with us (see ‘Saturday,’ below).

Afternoon: Arthur comes to visit!!! (And we get to briefly see Curtana too.) For the rest of the day we have two giggly boys who bound through the house, build fantastic train layouts, and make loud but enthusiastic music. Dinner, bath, jammies, then a special treat of curling up on the chesterfield under a throw with bowls of popcorn and a brand new Thomas hour-long film to watch, which means Liam gets to stay up and hour and a bit past his bedtime. (Thank you, Pierce Brosnan, for making the narration not completely irritating to listen to.) Arthur is collected at a quarter to nine. Liam is sad but the fun they had during the day wins out mood-wise. The boy falls dead asleep at nine on the dot. Wow.

SATURDAY:

Morning: HRH heads out to get the oil changed and to pick up the housewarming gift I forgot on Friday. He comes back to collect us, we put a wee bit of gas in the car, and grab breakfast for the trip out to the Coalition Stronghold. I figure out that the reason I’m squinting is because I forgot to put my glasses on before we left, and naturally I don’t carry my extra pair any more. Back home; pick up glasses; hit highway. Liam pulls out his blanket and BunBun, arranges himself, and falls asleep at 10:45. Argh! HRH and I enjoy the drive to Maxville, appreciating the autumn trees and the golden sun. The boy wakes up when we turn onto a gravel road. Well, at least he got about seventy minutes of sleep. Too bad it was two hours early.

Afternoon: We relax at the Coalition Stronghold, the new abode of t! and Jan. We have the place and out hosts to ourselves for a while before the next car shows up. In the meantime the boy’s track is set up and the trains run, and HRH and I are handed bottles of beer that we cannot find in Quebec. Yay, colonial loyalty! More friends show up; there are hugs and news exchanged. HRH, the boy, and I go for a walk into the back forty behind the Coalition Stronghold through mowed and unmowed fields to see the pond. There are no ducks on said pond, which disappoints the boy mightily. When back, I try to get the boy to lie down for a nap. It might have succeeded if someone hadn’t opened the closed door while exploring the house, causing Liam to jump up and greet them enthusiastically. Ah well. There is food that mysteriously aggregates on the dining room table, and an impromptu Scrabble game that Lu wins. More friends show up, just as we leave to be home in time for a proper wind-down, dinner, bath, and bed. We bring our winter order of organic beef home with us; the size of the roasts and hamburger packages are perfect. Our chest freezer is full. We will have to shift things or pack them in canny fashion in order to fit the 15ish pounds of pork we have coming in soonish as well. We also gas up in Ontario. Gas for under a dollar a litre! Whee!

Evening: Coven meeting, at which the ritual we’re leading at next weekend’s all-day retreat is approved by all, and some final questions noted down to pass along to the other participants.

SUNDAY:

Morning of cleaning and housework and errands. I roll three balls of yarn, two necessary because Gryffindor weaselled them out of hiding and neutralised the dangerous woolly threats by turning them into hopeless messes. I hem that new pair of pants I got last week. After lunch I head out for a baby shower, which is lovely, but which I have to leave early because I have my first cello lesson to attend. I wear my funky red shoes for confidence at the lesson, and those new pants. I mistime the travel and realize I’ll be half an hour early if I go straight there, so I stop at the needlework shop to buy the needles I need for my next knitting project. (Note: ‘Next’ implies I’ve ever finished one. I have failed miserably at every knitting project I’ve ever tried. But I have begun a new one [armwarmers for me] and have decided to heroically attempt a hat for the newly hairless Mousme.) I go from the needlework shop to my lesson and am ten minutes early anyway. Sigh. I make a critical decision and unpick the new hems on my pants with my Swiss army knife. When someone else shows up for the group lesson I unload the cello and walk into my teacher’s house behind her. I enjoy myself, after the initial ‘oh hell I’m the only one who doesn’t know anyone here’ discomfort. Once the group lesson itself begins, to my surprise I do not suck. (See ‘Expanded Cello Stuff,’ below.) Home for dinner made by HRH, a really awesome steak done on the barbecue. Put boy to bed, then sit down for an hour and hammer out the phrasing for ‘Itsumo Nando Demo’. Go to bed, read, fall asleep.

All in all, a Very Good Weekend.

EXPANDED CELLO STUFF:

It was odd: I was both nervous and not about this lesson. My first lesson was supposed to be a private one last Thursday, but last week was a disaster of sick people and forcing four days of work into two, so it didn’t happen. Instead, the once-a-month group lesson ended up being my first. I am, as I repeatedly point out and people seem to disbelieve because I do an impressive job pretending otherwise, extremely shy, so walking into an established social group of ten people was daunting. What’s the etiquette? Where do I put my stuff? Did I take someone’s parking spot? Am I sitting in someone’s customary seat? At the same time, I knew my teacher and one other student, having played with them in the orchestra for seven and three years respectively, so I had something of a lifeline. The little coffee break between the youngest cellists’ lesson and the group lesson was the most awkward, so awkward for me that I took a cup of coffee to have something to do with my hands (and it was really, really good coffee too, which was nice). Eventually we settled and our teacher put us in various places around the room, we tuned, and started playing.

This is the point where I actually relaxed. I know, I know; normally I’d be tense about playing in a small group with people I don’t know. But somewhere a couple of minutes in, I realised that I didn’t suck. I am used to expecting to be/actually being of a lower technical proficiency than others. Here I was at par with, or even more confident than, others in the group. The beginning was rocky because I was having trouble hearing my intonation, but then something clicked and then it was all okay. There was the disaster of misplacing my hand badly when I had to go really high up while sight-reading an arrangement of Satie’s ‘Gymnopedie’, but hey, sight-reading for fun; no harm, no foul. (Lovely, lovely pieces in that Cellobrations collection for cello quartet, I hope we play lots of them in the future.) I enjoyed it all so much that I played one of the new pieces I was given at the lesson when I got home while the boy was in the bath ( “Is Mama playing her cello for me? While I’m in the bath?” followed by appreciative applause when I’d done), and after I’d put him to bed I sat down for another hour and really worked on bowings and phrasing for the song Sandman7 and I are working on. It took me the whole hour to play bits with different bowings, make a decision one way or the other, and put slurs and bowings in for the entire piece to get it to where I was happy with the phrasing. Next comes recording it while I play it in this version and listening to it to see if it actually works from an audience POV.

Also, my teacher showed us the most adorable Twinkle bow, a fully functional miniature bow used to teach children how to hold it properly and to use the proper wrist and elbow motions. Because it’s so tiny you can’t help but hold it properly in order to get the maximum yield from the hair. We squealed when we saw it.

I think that’s a decent summary of the weekend. We loved having Arthur over. I had a terrific beginning to my first lessons in ten years. I saw people I only get to see once in a while both at the housewarming and at the baby shower (including the mother-to-be!). We really, really enjoyed being out in the country on Saturday. We want to try to visit the Coalition Stronghold at least once a month, but realistically it will likely end up being every six weeks or so.

It was wonderful to have such a positive weekend.

I think that’s about it. The end.

Headaches

Yesterday, not long after I wrote my journal entry about practising, my Internet connection went kablooey and I spent the next couple of hours unsuccessfully trying to fix it. I ended up turning the damn thing off and going to work in the living room. It gave me writing time, but I had tons of Internet-associated research to handle and correspondence to catch up on, and it made me very cranky. Also, I lost an expanded ETA form of that last post in which I rhapsodized about a particular shift that I love doing in one of my lesson pieces. And the post didn’t actually post thanks to the kablooeyness, I discovered this morning. Gnarr.

However, I managed to play cello for a while longer, and accomplished this as well:

Orchestrated:
New words yesterday: 2,508
Total word count, Orchestrated: 26,246

Uh-oh. The protagonist’s mother came home early and found her with a boy in the house. Alone. Playing music, but still. Also, a date? With someone else? What is this turning into? Where the hell did that come from?

Orchestra last night was good. I don’t know if someone mentioned something about our situation to the guest conductor but he’s really focusing on interpretation and phrasing. Quite nice. And the principal showed me a terrific fingering for the opening phrase of the Wagner clarinet piece we’re accompanying (five flats! dear gods!).

Today I have an awful, awful headache that extra-strength Tylenol is doing nothing to assuage. Thanks to this headache I fell asleep again while the boy was playing this morning and didn’t get him to the caregiver’s till just before ten o’clock, so the day started somewhat later than usual. I did get the Internet connection up and running once more, thanks to an installation CD lent to me by the upstairs neighbours (bless them) so that headache has been taken care of although it took an hour to do. We have groceries for dinner. I have mostly caught up on correspondence and stuff. I have even eaten lunch. There are more errands to run tomorrow morning.

Now I get to do a draft of a ritual, and write some more. My head hurts an awful lot, though. Time to drag out the white flower balm, and hit what I suspect is a baby migraine with some extra-strength Excedrin.

Canny

Yes! The way to successfully avoid work is to practise the cello loudly for an hour!

(I can’t feel my left hand from the wrist to the base of the fingers. It’s a very odd sensation. Or lack of it, I suppose. All that vibrato, you know.)

I am so incredibly pleased with the sweeter tone the luthier coaxed out of this cello with the new strings and the bridge. I noodled about with ‘Itsumo Nando Demo’, trying out different slurs and phrasings, then played through some of my lesson stuff again. All in all I’ve done about an hour. Most excellent.

A Good Thing

It’s a good sign when I listen to an album and want to play my cello. Am already trying to figure out if I could play the bass riff and the mid-song guitar solo from ‘Vengeance Is Mine’.

I am amused by the fact that it has taken a new Alice Cooper album to shake me out of my melancholy. (Although having a sneak peek at Brendan’s upcoming book has helped, too.)

A good Friday to you, world. Let’s see what we can do today.

Melancholy, And The Rosin Story

I keep tearing up at random things. My throat swells shut and I feel the hot prickle of tears in my eyes at the oddest times. I had to turn a CD off in the car last night, and again this morning. I had to put Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist down when the early morning harmony thing happened. I’m just blue, and I don’t know why.

Orchestra was okay. I was so drained, though, that I had trouble summoning up the energy necessary for certain pieces. We sight-read a Hungarian dance and my fingers were like noodles during the pizzicato all over the fingerboard. My section leader, AKA my new teacher, gave me four pieces for the group lesson I’ll be attending later this month, and I played through them today, feeling very… I can’t put a word to it because it wasn’t exciting, really; more like I was quietly pleased that I’ve finally done something about lessons again. This is the first assigned lesson material I’ve worked on in ten years.

And it was mostly easy and pretty, three of the four accompaniment to early Suzuki pieces (some of her other students are very new cellists). Except there’s a set of double stops in the third part of the cello trio arrangement of a Brahms symphony movement that I can’t get to save my life. This is what teachers are for.

Finished The Graveyard Book. Wish I’d written it. This is becoming a more common reaction and I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not.

So very tired. I had a nap around lunchtime, after running around doing errands (my extra driver’s license fee is now paid [stupid retroactive fee increases], I am now registered to vote in my actual riding, we have necessary groceries, banking’s done, bread baked, the only thing I forgot to do was to return the DVD rental).

Oh, I mentioned the rosin thing yesterday. I should elaborate on that.

When I originally recounted my wonderful story about receiving the Mystery Cello in trust from my cousin, I mentioned that I’d forgotten a suitcase full of his grandmother’s music. My mother brought it up with her when she and my aunt (the mother of the cousin in question, actually) stopped by on their way to do the driving tour of the Eastern Townships. Monday night while HRH was putting the boy to bed I poured myself a glass of wine, settled myself on the living room floor, and opened it. It was exciting. Anything could lie inside! What kind of music did she like to play? Were there handwritten fingerings, or notes to herself among the pages of a favourite piece? What would I find?

It smelled of dust and damp, the kind of smell one associates with attics and antique stores. The suitcase itself is covered in textured brown leather, peeling away from the wood thanks to use and age. It closes with two clasps in tarnished brass, and her maiden initials were stamped on it in gold under the handle: R. B. B.. I popped open the clasps and lifted the lid.

The lining is that watered silk-looking fabric, possibly once a lovely rose colour, now faded to a tired shade close to that of an old pink school eraser. Inside was a black soft-side leather briefcase. I slipped my hand into the pocket of the lid first and pulled out some sheets of paper, loose photocopied pages of handwritten music copied from somewhere. Slipping my hand in again I found an unused Thomastik Permament cello A string in perfect condition except for the crumpled paper envelope.

I lifted the briefcase out and set it aside. Under it were dozens of partitions, sheet music for popular songs and dances and arrangements of orchestral pieces now forgotten, all for violin. Parlour music, for home music-making. The average price was fifty cents (sixty cents Canadian!) and the store stamps were of shops in Ottawa as well as Montreal. Pretty much the only things I recognized were the Mendelssohn violin concerto and the Beethoven violin concertos. At the bottom was a blue binder containing both violin and cello parts for quartet pieces, some of which I recognized (wedding marches, waltzes, arrangements of arias), some of which I didn’t. The paper was old and crumbling apart, yellowed and stained, and it all smelled like dampness and dust. There were no dates, but I guessed the sheet music dated from around the nineteen thirties, give or take a decade or so.

The briefcase held the cello music. On top was a familiar Suzuki book, the same book and the same edition I’d started with (lots of teachers use the Suzuki books but don’t teach the method). This gave me pause. Why on earth would she have had a Suzuki book? I opened it in hopes of seeing a date inside it. After all, I note down the date I purchase books and music inside the cover, and often note down the date I start or finish working on a piece. She didn’t (much to my frustration when going through the other stuff), but inside the book were two sheets of looseleaf paper, still white, with notes from her teacher written on them, that outlined how to hold the cello and bow, how to place the fingers, and a couple of things to remember along with some homework. And the second of these was dated Aug 31/95.

Nineteen ninety five? Wait — what?

Then I realized that I had no recollection of exactly when she had died. It was when my parents were still in Montreal, but I couldn’t remember if it had been before or after I’d moved out. Evidently, if she had a Suzuki cello book and had been taking her first lessons in the late summer of ’95, she’d died after I moved out. I had assumed that she’d started playing the cello much earlier, that her arthritis had made the violin unplayable at a younger age and she had thus been playing the cello for much longer. If she was still a beginner when she died, that would explain the very old tape on the fingerboard marking finger placement.

The next thing that occurred to me was: I started playing the cello before she did!

And hard on the heels of that thought came: Good gods, she paid her teacher five hundred dollars for the cello no one was using in the mid-nineties! No one knew the worth of the thing!

The rest of the cello music is old and crumbling too, which leads me to believe that her teacher gave it to her along with the cello. There’s nothing I can really use because again it’s all stuff that was popular at the time it was printed, written by composers I’ve never heard of. I suppose I could put some of it up on the stand and play through it to hear what it’s like, but I have enough work right now, thanks.

I put my hand inside the case and slid it along the seams to be sure I’d gotten everything and my fingers bumped into something. I drew out a blue silk cleaning cloth, a Ziplock bag with two used A and D strings, then a wooden contraption made of two foot-long slim pieces of wood an inch wide and a half-inch deep, joined together at one of the narrow ends by a hinge. On one of the pieces of wood opposite the hinge end was a narrow strip of leather in a loop stapled into the wood. I know what this is! It’s a homemade endpin brace! I thought, and opened it up to reveal a line of drilled holes along the unhinged end of the other piece of wood. The leather loop goes around the cellist’s chair leg, the unfolded wooden strips are laid on the ground, and the endpin is inserted in one of the holes so that it doesn’t slip on stone floors or mark hardwood. I ran my hands along the torn lining of the suitcase as well and found a set of violin pitch pipes and a brand new cake of Hidershine rosin. (Brand new in that it had been used maybe twice, not brand new as in purchased last week. The design on the box was decidedly outdated!) I tried the rosin last night and it’s dry, not as sticky as my Hills. My initial impression is that I like it; I’ll use it for a while. I thought I preferred a slightly sticky rosin, but maybe not. We’ll see.

I replaced everything in the suitcase and closed it up. I’m going to have to move it from my office to downstairs because the dust (and likely mold) in it is triggering my asthma.

It was a fascinating exercise to go through every single sheet of music, turning pages carefully so they didn’t crumble, feeling the dampness of the thicker books, breathing in the scent of years of music this woman made. I’m touching history a bit more, learning more about the woman who played the cello before my cousin inherited it, before I was given the wonderful opportunity to play it too.

ETA: It occurs to me now that the Suzuki book may have been my cousin’s, because he eventually took a couple of lessons to see if he’d like it. This would fit in with my vague thought that his grandmother had died before I moved out. Must check this with my mother when she’s back from her trip.

Orchestrated Update

New words today: 2,225
Total word count, Orchestrated: 19,188

So yeah. First challenge/crisis thing has just finished. My protagonist is curiously tired and not as upset about it as I thought she’d be. Aftermath to follow tomorrow or Friday, whenever I next get the chance to write. (Tomorrow is my day with the car and so is filled with errands and stuff, so I’m not scheduling writing in; if it happens, great.)

I’ve had a weird day. It’s been grey out, I can’t find the right kind of music that I want to listen to (this would be much easier of I could figure it out to begin with), and I’ve spent a lot of the day wandering around aimlessly. Read the first chapter of The Graveyard Book. Reread Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Wrote over two thousand words, apparently. Tried to figure out dinner and failed.

I did manage to eat lunch, though, which has to count for something.

Orchestra tonight. Wish I was more enthusiastic about it. I do have new rosin to try, a long story which I haven’t written about either yesterday or today… I’ll get around to it.

I Can Has Cello Lessons!

Starting after Thanksgiving, in fact (which means in three weeks, where did the year go?) and at a surprisingly low fee too. The same hour-long lesson fee I first paid when I started lessons fifteen years ago, actually. That particular lesson fee went up every year until I was paying 30% more in my fourth and final year of lessons. I expected this lesson fee to be somewhat equivalent to the last fee I paid, or to be even higher to reflect the natural economic inflation of ten or so years. I am, of course, very thankful that it’s not bank-breaking, but still, I am astonished at how affordable it is.

I have already been informed that we have a Christmas concert in mid-December. And I’m okay with that. (Wow. Thank you, Random Colour.) Plus there will be a group lesson once a month! I think that’s really neat.

Now I need to sit down and think about my goals so that I can articulate them to my teacher when the time comes, because I’m certain she will ask. Things like becoming more familiar with the geography of the finger board, a more solid foundation in theory (or any foundation at all… it’s embarrassing when a conductor starts using solfege terminology and I, er, can’t follow it *cough* *cough*), intonation… I’m sure there will be more that come to mind. (A better bow hold, more efficient left hand movement, oh, the list will go on… and this sounds like a letter to Santa. Dear Santa, please bring me a better understanding of A flat major and D flat major, an accurate thumb position, and a better vibrato with my fourth finger. Love, Autumn.)

Right; off to work on the iBook away from the siren song of the Internet and e-mail. I’ve been dragging my feet about this evaluation because it’s a rather angry memoir about alleged racial discrimination within a minority religious group. The tone makes makes for uncomfortable reading. I’m trying to see it as a good way to keep my time spent on it focused and brief instead of being overly thorough, as I usually am. I want it done today so I can polish the report and send it off tomorrow by noon, freeing me up to work on Orchestrated in the afternoon.