The first concert of the 2003-4 season has been scheduled, folks – take a look down the left sidebar for the programme and the pertinent info.
Actually, all four concerts of the season have been scheduled: November 9, 2003; February 8, 2004; April 18; and our (in)famous Canada Day concert in that glorious church down by the lakeside in Pointe-Claire village, July 1. Circle the dates on your calendars; info on where and time of day will be posted as I get the information.
The Congress of Autumn’s Hands will now come to order.
Left Hand: We have several grievances to bring against Autumn. The first is that in a two-month period where she was not required to attend rehearsals for chamber orchestra, being trusted instead to keep up her level of skill independently, she picked up her Violoncello (hereafter “cello”) only twice.
Right Hand: Honestly, is that kind of attitude towards your art going to get you anywhere? I ask you!
Left Hand: As a result of this shameful, neglectful act, the return to the regular orchestral season was fraught with unnecessary difficulty on the part of the hands.
[Exhibit A displayed: a close-up of Autumn’s left fingertips]
Left Hand: Here we see the lamentable state of the fingertip pads. The act of producing a variety of sound from the cello, as with any stringed instrument, naturally involves altering the string length, known as the “stopping” of the string. This “stopping” is achieved by pressing down the string with the fingertip. The deliberate choice to ignore her commitment to practice during the summer session has produced the gradual loss of callouses acquired over the regular season. A callous is formed by repetitive use of the fingertip, enabling the area of flesh to accomplish more without succumbing to pain and inflammation.
Right Hand: Unlike last night, you slacker.
Left Hand: Our second grievance involves the length of the fingernails on the left hand. By not trimming these, efficiency of fingertip use in the act of stopping the string has become severely compromised.
Right Hand: And just let me add that your shabby treatment of the bow hand extended to forgetting to stretch before playing, as well as not trimming the thumbnail so that you could actually grip the bow correctly? Your bowing during the Presto of the Schubert Second Symphony was crap.
Left Hand: Grudgingly, we must admit that your vibrato was pretty good, despite the aforementioned faults. And you were promoted to second chair, so you must be doing something right.
Right Hand: Legs? Lower back? Anything you want to add while we’re here?
Legs: No, we’re good, thanks.
Lower Back: The new chair she sat in really worked for me. Although they were temporarily relocated to another room, so I don’t imagine it will last.
Left Hand: This, then, concludes the Congress of Autumn’s Hands. Please take our grievances under advisement. If matters necessitate, we will be contacting you again later on in the season. By the way, nice sight reading. Although you really ought to recognise a B flat scale when you see one.
My power is about to be turned off for the day due to work on the building, so this needs must be short and sweet.
The concert was a tremendous amount of fun, and all involved appeared to enjoy themselves immensely. The temperature had dropped after a solid rainstorm, there was a lovely breeze (which I hear might be due to a couple of my guests!), and the ambiance, of course, was spectacular as it always is in the St Joachim church.
Many, many heartfelt thanks go out to each and every one who came out to enjoy an evening of live classical music, and who evidently enjoyed themselves enough to rise en masse to give us a standing ovation. It was a wonderful finale to a terrific, though challenging, season. I always deeply appreciate the effort my friends make to attend these evenings.
What am I going to do all summer? (Other than see films on Wednesday nights, and attend book clubs, I mean…)
At last — cooler temperatures. Hurrah! I slept the night through and I’m extremely pleased.
We had a three-hour orchestra dress rehearsal yesterday afternoon, and wow, what a workout. By the end I was making clumsy mistakes in passages that I know I’ve flawlessly played through before. I also know there are a couple of spots that I really ought to practice today until my fingers bleed. Well, maybe not that far, but at least until muscle memory ensures that I can play them without tripping up tomorrow night.
And on the birthday front, I not only have chocolate liqueur (mmm) and a new cyclamen plant, but thanks to a united effort from MLG, Annika and Tara, I am now the proud owner of a Tara Bisset original! It’s a mirror with a wide frame, which features painted owls something like those at the Dance on the Sidewalk! web site, but with colours chosen especially for me. Owlies! Yay! They now hang by my front door, reminding me to smile and dance every time I leave to go out into world, and when I come home, too.
Hot.
Okay, give me a break; I’m not exactly working at full power, here. Sure, Montrealers are used to 35 degree Celsius temperatures that feel like 45 degrees thanks to the humidex factor (for those of you who still work on the Farenheit system, that’s something like 95 degrees and 113 degrees), but we usually work up to it slowly over a month. This week it was bang, suddenly hot and humid, with temperatures ten degrees over the average seasonal. Looks like things will cool off nicely over the next few days, though, with a beautiful clear Canada Day of about 25 degrees.
Speaking of Canada Day, yes, it’s concert-plugging time! Please note that the concert actually begins at 8 PM, and yes, it’s free. It’s being held at St Joachim Church in Pointe-Claire Village, below the Lakeshore, right on the waterfront; you can take the 211 bus from Lionel-Groulx metro. Free classical music! Culture! And as a bonus, the fireworks are scheduled for ten PM, right after we finish, and the church steps are a glorious spot from which to watch them.
I found a lovely black linen sleeveless dress for summer concerts on sale yesterday. I might have confused the salesgirl by scouting around for a small stool while I had it on. What’s the point of buying a concert dress if you’re not certain it will allow you to hold the cello between your legs? The one I really liked, with a woven linen design along the v-neck and the hem, I had to put back because I couldn’t set my feet far enough apart. The one I ended up with runs a close second, though, and is elegant and understated. Now, of course, since I have a new black linen dress, I need dressy black sandals to go with it. I sense a trip to Angrignon Mall tomorrow…
Orchestra last night was like a train wreck. We all should have just stayed home; I mean, for goodness’ sake, we played the Grieg better the very first time when we were sight-reading it. Collectively, we appear to be at the stage where we know a bit, but not enough, so it’s falling apart. The only thing more dangerous than not knowing anything about a subject is knowing a bit about it.
And, on a completely different topic, here’s an example of why I love the English language:
Verse feet in the romances are predominantly iambic, but anapests and trochees that appear should often be taken as welcome prosodic variations.
And this morning I found this in the writing diary of Virginia Woolf:
Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither.
And that’s it, really; when you think about it, and conceive of the finished product, it seems a piece of cake. Actually doing it, though; wrestling the language into some semblance of gawky order… now, that’s anything but cake. More like cement and traffic-light brownies or something. Or whatever you can think of that describes hard and heavy and not what you were expecting when you put it in the oven at all.
Oh, and I saw the four Animatrix shorts plus Final Flight of the Osiris last night; a colleague of my husband’s recorded them for us. I enjoyed them all for different reasons. I already had every intention to pick up the compilation DVD next week, but now I have even more motivation to do so.
Well, when I said last week that the cello section was getting smaller but better, I didn’t mean to suggest that even less was more. Tonight we only had two celli present – myself, and one other. And of course, we sight-read completely new music: Bizet, Sibelius, and that odd Overture for an Unwritten Comedy which was written by a Canadian in the 1950s, and sounds like it. (No value judgement implied; I quite like some of the Canadian compositions from the latter half of the last century. It’s just that this piece is going to contrast sharply with the others on the program.) None of us had heard it before, so we had no clue what we were aiming for.
On the other hand, the Sibelius was divine: slightly melancholy, slight macabre (even more so when Douglas gave us the story in a nutshell: a dying old woman, mistaking Death standing in the doorway for her long dead husband, rises and dances with him), and of course, in waltz time, my favourite. The Bizet was, well, Bizet. I have a love-hate relationship with Bizet. I like him sometimes; I hate him sometimes, usually when I’m playing his music. The rest of the time I’m terribly neutral about him.
A couple of people stopped by as we were packing up our instruments, and said that the celli had sounded quite good tonight. My fellow cellist looked at me after one such comment and said wryly, “Why do these compliments sound like condolences?” Okay, so we two aren’t necessarily the strongest among the section, but we were sight-reading new music, after all, and apart from losing our place for a bit here and there, we didn’t make any horrible mistakes.
In fact, I felt so good about what I did tonight that, as I did last week, I left rehearsal wanting to race home and play some more. The drive took all the wind out of my sails, though, and now I just want to soak in a bath and read, except that I’ve finished Lincoln’s Dreams and I don’t want to read the non-fiction I have on the go. I’ve recently re-read all the other Connie Willis in the house, so I suppose I’ll wander around my shelves and pull something off at random.
Before I left tonight, my husband asked to read the two bonus chapters I wrote earlier this year to tie up loose ends in my NaNoWriMo novel. As I printed them out for him, I re-read bits and pieces of it. Damn, it’s good. When I feel uninspired, I really ought to read my own work more often to get myself back in the mood. I’ve been dragging my feet about getting back to work on the Great Canadian Novel because I don’t know enough about my protagonist’s choice of action. I discovered the skeleton of a fantasy novel on my laptop last week that I’d forgotten I transcribed a year ago, so I could work on that as well. I also have a non-fiction book drafted out, so I can’t even try to dodge writing by claiming that I have nothing different to work on. A young adult novel, a romantic comedy, a fantasy, and a non-fiction book; no matter how I feel when I get up in the mornings, I ought to be able to work on at least one of my projects. My reluctance to plunge into the GCN is colouring my whole writing approach, though, I think. I don’t want to keep going until I know more, otherwise it just won’t ring true. Sending a protagonist overseas when you don’t know the city she’s headed to is dicey.
Of course, this means I have to travel to France. Just for research, you understand.