Category Archives: Cello

Concert Announcement!

Yes, gentle readers, the time has come again to make plans to attend the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra spring concert! Every spring we present a lively and soul-uplifting concert to celebrate the arrival of the season (or advent, or the invocation of said season in this particular case, ahem).

This year’s concert to celebrate/invoke/present an impassioned petition to spring presents a selection of French dance-themed music, some well-known, others perhaps a delightful discovery for you. The programme includes:

Overture to The Caliph of Baghdad by Boieldieu
Pavane pour une infante défunte by Ravel
Aires de danse dans le style ancien from Le roi s’amuse by Delibes
Pavane, op. 50 by Fauré
Symphony no. 1 by Gounod

The concert takes place on Saturday April 5, 2008 at 19h30, and will be presented at Cedar Park United Church at 204 Lakeview Ave, Pointe-Claire, QC (corner St. John’s Blvd). Admission is $10, children under 18 attend free of charge.

Directions via public transport may be found here. If you’re driving, take St. John’s Blvd south from either autoroute 40 or 20. Lakeview is one street south of autoroute 20; the church is on the south-west corner of the intersection, with a parking lot on the west side. Here’s a map to help you find your way.

Did I mention that we have a guest mandolin player? We have a guest mandolin player. Intriguing, yes?

So mark your calendars, and make a date with friends and family to share a wonderful evening of music and camaraderie. And maybe, just maybe, it will feel a little more like spring when we’re through.

Experiments in Bowmaking

The frog of my main bow cracked last fall as a result of a small boy-related incident. I filled the crack with Krazy Glue and it’s been fine so far. I know, I know; purists are shuddering. I paid about $150 for this bow; it would likely cost me about that much to have the frog replaced. And I love this bow; the balance is perfect, the weight is perfect, and I don’t want to buy a new one.

Except with the spring concert coming up, I’m starting to worry about the crack, and have visions of the thing giving way during performance. My only usable back-up bow is a really heavy one that hurts my hand because the balance is off. Or rather, it was off.

Last night I took it to HRH and asked if he’d be able to shave some of the wood off the head and gradually extend the taper of the upper half of the stick further towards the middle. As it was, the taper went abruptly from a very thick stick to a much thinner section about three inches long at the tip. He said that while he could do it, he’d be uncomfortable because he’d be worried about breaking or ruining it. In return I pointed out that I’d only paid $80 for it, and to have the reshaping done professionally would cost more than that. Also, I still had my main bow, and so if this backup one was to be broken it wouldn’t be a tragedy.

So we took it downstairs and he set up the Dremel. In half an hour we had carefully reshaped the head and upper half of the stick beautifully. It’s lighter and better balanced, and the head is much more elegant than it was originally; it was very blocky before the remodelling. When I was happy with the weight, the balance, and the tapering along to the middle of the stick he buffed it, and I oiled it. Then came the final test: I sat down to try it out on the cello. To my satisfaction it travels well, and the balance is miles and away better than it had been. The fulcrum point is now a third of the way along from the frog end, where it’s supposed to be, instead of halfway along the stick. I no longer feel like my hand is going to fall off or cramp up from fighting gravity when I hold it. I’m going to use it as my primary bow at rehearsal tonight and see what happens.

Daring, but successful. I’d never have tried it with a more expensive or precious bow. It makes me wonder what we could do with a bow blank, a frog, the facings and screws, and a hank of bow hair. It would be interesting to make my own bow.

That Kind Of Day

It is probably a bad thing that I want a glass of red wine this early in the day.

Although I am listening to a recording of Pieter Wispelwey playing the Bach gamba sonatas that a friend of the friends-in-same-circles kind of acquaintance lent to me (among a veritable pile of other recordings), and it is doing wonders to keep me from throwing myself over the edge of the cliff into madness. Thanks, Tina!

Ford Focus Commerical

Remember the post I made a month or so ago about the orchestra made from car parts? Specifically, the parts of a disassembled Ford Focus?

The commercial has been released in several forms. This is the full three-minute version, ‘Ode to a Ford’. (The first thirty-second version I saw had me gnashing my teeth because the musicians’ movements weren’t matching the music they were making, something that always drives me up the wall.)

The tag line is appropriate: ‘The New Ford Focus: Beautifully Arranged.’

Enjoy!

ETA: And here’s an article about some of the musicians who worked with the instruments for various projects.

Irrelevant Photo Post

This is my office. It is currently a mess because I am writing one book to deadline, just finished the copy-edits of another, there is a sick toddler/preschooler in the house, HRH is away at rehearsals or performances most evenings, and I am trying to whack away at Gounod and Faure whenever I have a spare moment. Oh yes, and I am fighting that fibro/chronic fatigue thing that makes me choose between tidying up or writing.

For some reason, I thought a photo essay about the place where I spend a lot of my time might amuse you.

This is the north-east wall, the one that’s on the left as you walk in. Seen here is the mishmash of stuff that collects on my office shelves and on top of the books when I need them out of the way of wherever they were originally put. There are still things I took off the old vertical corner shelf that used to be where my corner desk now stands, from a couple of months ago. Candles, empty picture frames, that sort of thing. As I’m in the middle of writing a book, there are books piled on the front of the shelves that I’ve borrowed from people. Closer to the window you can see my two-tier office altar, where I’m drying rose petals at the moment. The shelf under it holds all the reference books for the book I’m currently working on. Well, most. Some, anyway. I do try to keep them all in one place. The window faces east. There’s another bookcase that size between the door and the one in the picture; this only shows the front half of the room.

Next we have my new-to-me corner desk. It’s not developed a lot of personality yet, as I’m trying to keep it neutral for the moment, and keep it relatively clear to spread books and papers out while I work. At the left are more reference books I’m using immediately for the current project. The walls above it are still bare from having had that vertical shelf there for so long. I still don’t know what to put up. There is a cluster of witch balls hanging from the ceiling at the moment. It’s hard to figure out what to hang in a corner, as the two walls meet and the display space is awfully close. Besides, to my right is…

… the collage wall, where I have hung a collection of various things including a print of the alternate Promethea #1 cover, an original photo of the moon taken by a student, fine art postcards, an original oil painting of a deer by my husband, an original charcoal sketch of a raven woman (also by HRH), a hand-painted Pictish banner, and so forth. You can only see the lower half of it. This collage is fluid, and shifts slowly as I phase things out and include new ones. In the upper left of this photo (and the right of the previous one) is a small creativity shrine that was made to be a salt box/cellar thing. (It currently has a lot of swan representations on it for serenity and insight, and usually a votive candle.) Behold also my pencil cup, various writing notebooks, the external hard drive (love!), a statue of Freyja, various foxy things, various small stuffed talismanic animals (the original Montreal NaNo psychic ferret among them!), my laptop (which doesn’t usually live here, but on the bedroom bookcase), the Chicago Manual of Style and a Webster’s among other reference books. What you can’t see underneath it is a mess of cables, a shredder, and two fourteen-inch piles of books that I have not yet read.

Turning again, we see the closet door swathed in a white sheer curtain (the door is mirrored — shudder), the cello on the floor, the case tossed over the cello stand in the corner, and the music stand bearing the Gounod and Faure. To the right you see my filing cabinet, more books (Is it a flat surface? It’s got books.), my red toolbox, a tote bag, and the carton the hard drive came in. Right at the bottom right-hand corner you can see the edge of the child gate that renders this room the only boy-free zone for the cats, as well as the little cat door we cut in it. That’s the viola case leaning against the wall and the music stand.

And finally, we have the often-present black kitten giving you the “What? I’m allowed to be here” look.

I’m never quite satisfied with my office; I always feel that it’s missing something, or not quite right. It never matches what I visualise it could become. Part of that is the fact that I live in it so much that it never has the chance to rest and become something; I’m always moving things around and reorganizing. It looks and feels quite different at night as well, and when the sun is shining. I would love a comfy chair in which to curl up and read, or even better, a chaise longue! But there’s no room for it.

Well, there you have it: a brief snapshot of my life. It will be different tomorrow, of course, and once the hearthcraft book is done I’ll be changing pictures and books to focus on something different again. And come spring, there will be flowers and boughs of buds, too.

A Quick Link Round-Up

Canadian jazz-and-several-other-genres guitarist Jeff Healy has died at the age of 41.

Forensic experts in Scotland have created a digital reconstruction of JS Bach’s face.

One curved bow, or two straight? Two unique methods of continually playing on more than one cello string.

Philip Glass plus 1620 Amati cello equals much love! (And investment; ouch.) A review of a live presentation of the solo cello piece said that “Songs and Poems,” a tough and yearning work with obvious nods to and borrowings from the solo cello music master Bach, starts out boldly and wanders through varied expressive terrain. From the outset, rolling double stops and harmonic colors alert us to material outside the usual Glass palette, although it is equipped with the familiar Minimalist repetitions and phrase fragmentation. ‘Glass moves beyond Glass’, indeed.

And finally, from The Onion: Idiom Shortage Leaves Nation All Sewed Up In Horse Pies. Since beginning two weeks ago, the deficit in these vernacular phrases has affected nearly every English speaker on the continent, making it virtually impossible to communicate symbolic ideas through a series of words that do not individually share the same meaning as the group of words as a whole. In what many are calling a cast-iron piano tune unlike any on record, idiomatic expression has been devastated nationwide…

Weekend Roundup: HRH’s Birthday Edition, In Which She Mainly Talks About The Jorane Concert

The big event this weekend was HRH’s birthday on Saturday, which unfortunately started out rather roughly with all three of us prickly and getting on one another’s nerves. Things were better by mid-afternoon, though. I made a double chocolate cake while the boy had his nap, and was making the frosting for it when he woke up. Much was the excitement and many were the offers to help, and requests to eat it, but we told him the cake had to wait until his grandparents showed up for the brief birthday party-in-passing that was to happen. So when they pulled up just before five, the boy ran to the front door yelling, “Grandma, Papa! We have cake!”

To save him from bursting with the anticipation we put the candles on the cake, lit them, and sang to HRH as soon as everyone had divested themselves of coats and bags. Liam helped him blow out the candles, of course. The boy was the only one who ate a sliver of cake, as the rest of us knew we were too close to dinner. Then HRH opened his gift, the twenty-inch flat screen computer monitor that his parents, my parents, and I had conspired to buy him. He was absolutely floored and thrilled to bits when he opened it. We win!

Then we left the boy in the hands of his grandparents and went out. I treated HRH to a lovely dinner at Le Biftheque (prime rib all round, preceded by Canadian smoked salmon, mmm), and then to the Jorane concert in our borough. I felt mildly odd about taking HRH to a concert given by a musician of whom I’m the primary fan, but he insisted that it was fine.

Jorane is a Quebecoise singer and cellist. I’ve been trying to see her live since I discovered her in mid-2004. With the launch of her latest album in the fall of 2007 she’s been doing a series of small concerts in and around Montreal, and I was determined to get to one of them. I was concerned that this show might be cancelled because when I bought tickets three days before the date, less than half the house had been sold. It wasn’t, of course, and I think the small audience was one of the keys to the success of the show, which managed to be intimate without being diminished in any way. And it makes sense that she’d expect small audiences; she’s in essence dividing her own audience base by offering so many shows in the same area over a period of three months.

Allow me to say here and now that I finally get it; I completely get the attraction of watching a female cellist playing non-traditional music on stage. My apologies to anyone to whom I ever gave an odd look when they said anything about seeing me on stage.

One cello, two double basses, two sets of percussion… and four people. One of the bassists also played electric guitar, acoustic guitar, keyboards, and the xylophone. And just those four people on stage created a vibrant, dynamic form of music that rolled over and through the audience. Their presence and awareness and connection to one another was phenomenal. Interestingly enough, what I felt were the most powerful and rocking songs were done by just the three string instruments, tossing lead pizzicato and bowing back and forth. Incredible. And the opening piece was done entirely with foot stomps and hand claps; it may have been based on “Elmita”, or maybe it just had a similar beat and rhythm.

They didn’t play anything the way she’d recorded it, which really impressed me. Every single song was stretched, folded, reinterpreted to such an extent that sometimes it took me a few bars or longer before I recognized it. As is often the case in live shows, they were mostly sharper, rougher, and more… well… alive than the recorded versions. The back of my mind was making periodic technical notes, too, about how the music was put together. One of the “aha” moments I had was realizing that almost all the time, the cello work was doubled by a double bass, which gives the line an added richness that you can’t get on the cello alone. This explains why I get frustrated when listening to my cello work in an ensemble, and think it sounds thin. Other observations included gawking at her lighting-fast triple-stops flying all over the fingerboard, trying to figure out her strumming method, and trying to identify the percussive stick with which one of the double bassists was playing his upright bass (metal? just a regular tipper?). At one point HRH asked me if I could play my cello standing up like Jorane does, and I found myself discussing the shifted centre of gravity when the end pin is extended that far, the tendency of the instrument to spin when you put pressure on it by bowing or fingering if you’re not bracing it with the legs (which of course she does, in a way, by bending a knee somewhat), and the bad stress on the bottom of the instrument when you do any of the above. I suspect the area around her end pin must be reinforced. I also seem to remember reading somewhere that she uses a particular model of cello that can be replaced, which makes a lot of sense; you’re not going to gig something priceless in that way.

I can’t remember the entire set list, but they played “Ineffable”, “Comme avant”, “Stay”, “The Cave”, and “Pour ton sourire”. The only disappointment (and it’s such a minor one in light of how intensely awesome the night was) was that she didn’t play “Dit-elle”, which is my favourite piece of hers; but of my other favourites they did play “Film III”, “Pour Gabrielle”, and “Battayum”. Naturally a lot of the show was given over to most of the latest album Vers a soi. It’s taken me a while to warm up to this album because it really has a different feel from her earlier work, but hearing it live has helped a lot. Her encore was a song I didn’t recognize (I believe it was a cover), played on acoustic guitar, followed by a fully acoustic version of another song I wasn’t familiar with (possibly from her first album, the only one I don’t own) — and when I say fully acoustic, I mean she and the double bassist took off their pick-ups, pushed away the microphones, and played, which was a daring and confident way to end the show. (And that’s where I heard the familiar thin sound of the cello line… which means the amplification was also altering the sound — in a good way for the music, of course).

It wasn’t just the music that made the night a success. Her presence was riveting. The way she communicated with the audience was terrific, too. She took the time to ground between songs, but never lost her connection to those listening, and never lost the thread of the show as a whole. Her patter was calm and well-delivered, introspective and thought-provoking. It felt like she was taking the time to communicate what moved her about life, what prompted her to write the songs, what made her sing them. Motivation, almost. (If you’re familiar with her live album, all of her spoken communication was very much like the beginning of “Intro”.)

And an aside: I nearly gave HRH a heart attack during the second song of the night by gripping his arm upon seeing a tech run out from stage right to fix a boom mic that was slipping in front of the second bassist, and hissing “That’s Perry!” — Perry being the Sound Guy of Awesome Excellence with whom we worked last May at Clyde’s.

I have forgotten how much I absolutely love live music, especially live music that somehow incorporates my instrument. Two minutes into the show I was wishing that band was actually feasible, because feeling how great everything can be when it works was inspiring.

HRH and I had a wonderful evening together. I have to honestly say that we haven’t been that relaxed together and enjoyed ourselves to that extent in a very, very long time. We spent Valentine’s Day night at home together eating fabulous sushi and watching Stardust, which was a really fantastic evening the likes of which we hadn’t enjoyed in a while too, but it was good to get out together.

ETA: Gah, I see that I didn’t babble on about her use of pedals, or her Zoe Keating-like real-time self-recording of cello lines and layering and looping them via footpedals, too. At one point she had recorded and looped six lines and was soloing over them, along with the two bassists (or one bassist and the other at keyboards? I forget) and the percussionist. Incredible. There was a moment when I wished I wasn’t as principled as I am, so that I could have thought of bringing my MiniDisc recorder and made a bootleg for my own reference.