I’m tired, but there are things worthy of noting.
Invisible completely and totally rocked the house on Friday night, with a double set and a terrific cohesive sound. Every one of them keeps getting better and better. There was much dancing, and I don’t normally dance. There was much singing as well, and I hope I didn’t drive Jan too crazy with it. It was terrific to see people I haven’t seen in forever, too. Also, I had a very good margarita. “You really seemed to be enjoying yourself,” HRH said on the way home. “I think it’s important to obviously demonstrate to a performer that you appreciate what they’re doing,” I said. “There’s nothing worse than being on stage and seeing a sea of dead expressions in front of you, applause or not.” Sure, I could have sat there unmoving and enjoyed myself just as much, but the music was good and it moved and what the guys were doing on stage for us moved me.
Did I miss being on stage? Yes. But not enough to throw myself back into band. I miss the times when it was going well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go well most of the time. I miss it when we’re actually making music, not talking about unrelated things or wasting time. I certainly don’t miss the amount of energy that went into it. Or rather, I prefer to have that energy to put into other things, like living my day to day life (thank you so very much, FMS). I’d like to get back into band someday. Someday is not soon, however. We’ll all be different people somewhere down the line and that will make a positive difference as well. I’d like to explore other kinds of music in a small ensemble too, at some point, with different people.
The evening before I enjoyed Marc’s vocal recital, presented by all his teacher’s students. (Live music two nights in a row! I don’t think I’m greedy, just starved for culture.) There were about half a dozen of them and they all sang three songs, ranging from Broadway to pop to chamber songs and opera arias. It was great, and I saw a handful of the people who I would see again the next night, but in an even more relaxed atmosphere. We kibbutzed outside for an hour after the show was over, and that was just as wonderful as the recital itself, in a different way. I took a moment to look around both on Thursday and Friday night, and saw people with whom I’d stayed in touch for fifteen to twenty years as well as those I’d met within the last ten or so. I really miss my friends, and it was felt really, really good to be with them.
There’s this quirk that I have: My eyes tear up suddenly when I’m really enjoying something musical. It doesn’t mean I’m particularly sad or happy or overcome by what the music is communicating. It actually has more to do with appreciating the fact that the performer is offering something, similar to what I outlined above. Marc was the first one up at the recital, a position that carries a lot of responsibility, and he sang “On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady. About a third of the way through the first verse I had that tearing-up response, and I thought about what was happening. I was experiencing a surge of emotion, not as a response to the music but a response to what Marc was doing: he was reaching out to his listeners and offering them something, and I was moved by it. It seems to be an empathic response. It’s not in response to the words, or the music itself. It’s in response to the performer. It does have an emotional connection, of course, but it’s not primarily an emotional reaction.
This happens when I imagine performing myself. It doesn’t happen while I’m actually performing (or it does, but extremely rarely); rather, it happens when I visualise performing certain pieces of music. I have a very strong ability to visualise, and I invest a lot of emotion into it. It’s one of the ways I practise when I can’t be at my instrument. I’m also very good at imagining several different lines of music simultaneously, including my own line. (I think this is one of the reasons why I love working in an orchestral setting so much, and also one of the reasons why I get frustrated very easily in small ensembles without a coach; it’s hard for real performers to live up to what’s happening in my head.) In these cases, my response seems to be connected to the visualisation of the joint act of the performers in the ensemble reaching out to the audience. And this too may be one of the reasons I was dissatisfied with band: I very rarely felt that reaching out-ness happening, or a sense of the audience being moved by what we were offering. There was a lot of struggle that never felt like it resolved or settled into an actual delivery of something.
I’ve thought about this response a lot, and I still can’t quite put it into the right words. There’s something about the simultaneous identification with the performer as well as being an audience too, but I can’t pin it down yet. There’s also something about receiving and returning energy, which I know I’ve talked about before in lectures and discussion and very likely at some point in this journal as well.
I don’t have the opportunity to experience live music as an audience member very much, so this past week has been extremely precious to me. I’m very proud of everyone who performed, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I hope they all know that. And I hope that somehow I managed to communicate that I appreciated what they offered.
I just got a phone call.
We had a guest conductor in to handle the first half of Wednesday’s rehearsal, as our conductor was off at his own retirement dinner. (Or I may have misunderstood and it was someone else’s retirement. Whatever: he was not there, being otherwise engaged in dining to celebrate someone’s retirement.) The guest conductor’s first name was Peter, although I missed his last name.
Having finished my work assignment by noon, then having handled a bunch of lingering accounting stuff, I read a book and then sat down to mess about with the cello.
This is your two-week warning, faithful orchestra groupies. July 1 is coming up, which means that the annual Canada Day concert presented by the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra is also nigh!
If there’s one thing that playing medleys of musicals for the Canada Day concert does for me, it’s reawaken my interest in musicals. On one hand the medleys are frustrating: they’re all arrangements and never exactly the same as the original song, which makes playing them somewhat counter-intuitive (there’s lots of but but but that’s NOT the rhythm of the song! when one begins playing a theme, and I have to try to not think about the original and play what’s in front of me). Plus they require several lightning-fast changes of key and time signatures, and challenge me to think fast.