Category Archives: Music

Morning Links

Someone woke up at four-thirty, and I didn’t get back to my bed till five-twenty… and didn’t fall asleep till six-thirty. And then someone woke up again at seven. Did I mention I only got to sleep at one? And that my damn MP3 player was discovered to be dead after only four hours of use so I couldn’t use it to fall asleep?

Needless to say, I am not firing on all cylinders this morning.

We were hoping Sparky would sleep in, so HRH took the bus to work and I’ll be dropping the boy off with the caregiver. If I’d known he was going to wake up at his usual time I’d have told HRH to carry out the usual plan, and stayed in bed. But he was gone before the boy awoke.

Apart from that, here are two links, one amusing, one interesting:

The amusing: Princess Leia’s plea to Kenobi, cast as an e-mail scam:

[…] Our Bank Accounts both Here and Abroad are being Frozen by the Imperial Senate. Furthermore, we are Under Threat of Detention by the Grand Moff for Interrogation about my Father’s Assets and some Vital Documents.

By Virtue of our Position as Civil Servants and Members of the Royal House of Alderaan, we Cannot Regain this Money Under our own Names.

I have therefore been Delegated to look for an Overseas Partner into whose Account we would Transfer the sum of Twenty-Six Million, Four Hundred Thousand Galactic Standard Credits (26,400,000.00) for Safekeeping. Hence we are Sending you this Message in the Memory Systems of This R2 Unit. […]

The interesting: Cellist and teacher Emily Wright talks about the obsession with performing perfectly, and suggests instead that a public performance is a chance to show people where you are at that moment, not your ultimate level of perfection:

Perfection is important in aircraft engines, prescription doses and shark cages. What makes art great is that perfection can actually detract from our visceral enjoyment of it. Vibrato mars pitch, and we love it. Van Gogh skewed his room, and it speaks to something profound inside of us. Gil Shaham’s skittering spiccato bow is thrilling, and he risks everything in each performance, and most of the time, it pays a very precise dividend. But even when a note or two escapes him it is well worth it, because he makes himself so vulnerable to (and is at peace with) the possibility of catastrophe.

Thoughts On Orchestra And The Upcoming Concert

Augh.

Did I say the church was on the corner of St John’s and Lakeview? I misremembered. It’s about three or four houses along Lakeview. I’m so used to churches being on corners that I neatly edited my memory of Cedar Park United. So if you’re driving down St John’s this Saturday looking for a church, just turn west on Lakeview. No, really. Trust me.

I had a really bad fibro day yesterday; not only was the body clunky but I spent two hours after I submitted the proofs staring at a computer screen and I don’t remember any of it. I started waking up around the time I brought the boy home, and was in great form when I left (so I thought). Loved the drive to rehearsal, which was at the church, but took the northbound exit at St John’s instead of the southbound, which I do every other time I drive to this church because I am a creature of habit and nine times out of ten when I take St John’s I’m going north. There was a beautiful fiery coral sunset to admire along the way. I cannot express how much I love this time of year, with dry roads and crystal-clear nights.

When I got there I discovered that the church had invested in new folding chairs that are not only padded but feature straight seats, for which all the cellists were thankful as most folding chairs slant backwards and create nasty stress on the lower back. These chairs are the perfect height and enable my knees to be at ninety-degree angles. They were set up on a grey-blue runner, so I didn’t need to pull out the leather belt I use to stabilize my endpin on stone floors. Excellent! As a bonus, the ambient light was good enough that I didn’t need my stand light. (This was a mistake, but more on that later.)

We shifted the order of two small pieces within the suite: the chanson now comes before all the airs and dances instead of after the finale, which makes me very happy because now everything resolves nicely. Before the shift there was the massive pounding finale followed by a very gentle song, which, while lovely, kind of robbed the suite of its oomph. We had our guest mandolinist there again as well as the guest vocalist there for the first time, and the balance is lovely. I’m really enjoying this suite, the damned Passepied aside. (Although last night it worked for me — I kept up and only lost my place once instead of every three bars.)

I tried playing with a shorter pin last night, which made the cello more vertical, and there’s not as much body in the way as when the cello is more horizontal as a result of the longer endpin. It’s comfortable (at least with these particular chairs). I also played with the yet-again-remodelled bow (HRH took more off the body of the stick for me this week so it’s nice and light, although the frog is still chunkier than I’d like, not that we can do anything about it) and I was impressed by the quality of sound I was producing. Every church has really different acoustics and affects how we hear our instruments and the ensemble; this one is pleasant, but overall the orchestra has problems hearing the other sections because the strings are on two different levels. It never ceases to amaze me that it takes moving out of the cavernous auditorium in which we regularly rehearse to remind me of how badly it swallows sound.

I was the only inside cellist there last night so I was playing the lower cello line alone in one of the pieces, as compared to the three outside cellists playing the upper line. I wondered why it sounded so thin. And my cello’s nasal A string is really starting to hold me back; I have to constantly pull my weight and stroke when I use the open string, which is more work than I need to be doing. Maybe I’ll try a wolf eliminator. It can’t hurt, and it’s under ten dollars. I wonder if I can get one before dress rehearsal Friday night. Maybe I’ll go downtown tomorrow morning to my regular luthier and pick one up. I could ask them about 7/8s, too. If I get there when they open at 9h30 then I can be home by noon. Too bad I didn’t think of this before; I could have gone out this morning instead, because it’s beautifully sunny. Or maybe I’ll try the new luthier; it would take about the same amount of time to get there by public transport. I don’t know if I’m relaxed enough to try to travel somewhere new and head into an environment I know nothing about right now, though. After the book is handed in, I think.

Not only was the body clunky and fine motor control was pretty much absent (not a good thing when you have to make minute changes to balance in the right hand, although the left hand seemed to be just fine), but my body temperature plummeted about half an hour after arriving and thought processes slowed down too. By the time we got through most of the smaller pieces, I was fading fast. As a result I was only partially present for the symphony, which engendered interesting results. I managed to sail through places where I’d stumbled every single time in rehearsal, and messed up perfectly simple things. I have got to remind myself to get up and walk around at half-time. It would help give my mind a break. It’s just that I like to use the time to run through tricky bits on what we’re going to do next. (Also, as I am shyness incarnate, this way I don’t have to mingle and chat.) I strongly suspect that the ambient light, while adequate to see by, affected my not-wholly-thereness.

It really felt like I was woolly, or part of me was missing. It was slightly alarming when it came to the drive home. I was determined that the I-lost-two-hours-staring-at-a-monitor thing of the afternoon was not going to happen to me on the way home, thank you very much, so I turned the music up, held the wheel with both hands, and stared at the road directly ahead of me. Once upon a time I could drive home from t!’s house and not remember any of it, but that was okay because I was nineteen, it was the West Island, and it was around one in the morning so the roads were deserted. Highways are bad. Then of course, when I got home, I couldn’t fall asleep until midnight-thirty.

I’ll say one thing for being slightly out of it: I was much better at moving past being anxious about small mistakes. But I was so exhausted by the end of the evening that I wonder how I’ll handle Saturday night. It’s a really long programme. I’m still not convinced by the opening of the Ravel, we didn’t get to the Faure, and no matter how I angle my chair I can’t quite see the conductor, and I’m sitting in front of him. I’ll try the old raise-the-stand-an-inch trick and see if that helps. Proof that I was out of it last night: that didn’t even occur to me.

On the other hand, I really liked the tone I was producing last night. I was hitting a few strings during crossings (thanks, stupid clunky right hand), but aside from that and the nasal A string I could actually appreciate the sound. You have no idea how happy that makes me.

Waves Hello

Hello internet-world. There hasn’t been much going on, other than trying to keep up with the same old same old.

I can tell you with great joy and pride that Misspelled, the anthology in which not one but two of my dearest friends have had short stories published, is now available for purchase and consumption. Apparently they have a copy for me as thanks for editing the stories, but I’m going to go out and buy one anyway, because buying stuff your friends have written is cool. Heaven knows enough people have done it for me.

I finally got the new MP3 player yesterday, so I can distract my mind enough to fall asleep promptly again. I loaded it up with the scores I would wear out if they were on cassette or LP, and a bunch of different versions of the Bach solo cello suites. Because I am lame and predictable, that’s why. (My falling-asleep music, my playlists.) I wanted one in blue, but all they had in stock at the time was black and pink. I did not get the pink.

First thing this morning, Sparky trotted into my office to grab the metronome. He wanted to bring it to the potty with him. If I thought it was loud in my office yesterday, it was a hundred times worse in the tiled echo-chamber known as the bathroom.

We had our annual toy-themed vernal equinox ritual led by the inimitable t! Monday night, and it was terrific as always. This one featured a sandbag toss after a snow-melting/spring-coming meditation. Tuesday’s weather was stupefyingly warm, almost seasonal, and scads of snow melted. Sparky, HRH, and I were on the back deck without coats playing in the sun before dinner and HRH said, “Geez, we should have had t! do that ritual weeks ago!”

On Monday I proofread the pregnancy book from the intro through to the end of Chapter Seven. Stetted a bunch of my punctuation edits, left others in (I opted for consistency within the same invocation, as opposed to consistency throughout all invocations. You will never know the difference, gentle readers.), found more errors, changed my mind about others. I even edited my comments (yes! because I need more work!). The proofs will go back today come what may, hopefully by lunch so that I can sit down and go through the printout of the hearthcraft book and start scribbling all over it. Because that deadline is coming ever-closer, and I’m very uncomfortable/unhappy with where things stand. And I’ve been away from it for a week doing the proofs, and there was the Easter trip to see the parental units. Maybe that will help; a bit of distance is usually a good thing.

Bad fibro day so far, though. I can’t feel or control my hands and feet very well. So of course I want fondant Easter eggs and a latte, which will only make things worse with the sugar and caffeine.

Such A Monday

This morning, I drove home from dropping the boy off in white-out conditions. It’s cruel, after a lovely warm and sunny weekend. Wasn’t this supposed to be rain? The first few flakes began falling and the boy said, “Why the snow?” “I don’t know,” I replied. “I think we should tell it to go away.” From the back seat there came a very clear and deliberate, “SNOW, GO AWAY!”

Thank goodness for a lovely recording of The Lark Ascending on CBC that played on my way home. I always think of Pasley when I hear it. Otherwise I’m so irritated by the CBC these days. They’re disbanding the CBC Radio Orchestra — the last surviving radio orchestra in North America — and they’re changing the Radio 2 format yet again so that it’s no longer going to be a mainly classical station. Over the past few years they’ve slowly revamped it to feature more jazz and folk and so forth, with which I’ve not been thrilled but have tolerated (although the radio gets turned off at 6 on the dot because I cannot stand what the evening programming has become). Now, however, they’re formally announcing that they’re going to go more mainstream, and cancelling the existing shows. This was done to net a larger audience, but it’s backfiring already: the backlash has been dreadful, and they’re going to lose droves of current listeners (like me, hello, who’s been a faithful listener for decades). If they did market research, they certainly didn’t think of asking their current audience what they thought of the idea. I’ve been meaning to write about this since they announced it and I just haven’t been able to bring myself to put my resentment about this dilution of content and commitment to culture into words. This isn’t what I wanted to say, either, but I have to say something at some point.

I am stiff and achy and want to be in the better mood I was in this past weekend.

Joy!

Hullo world; just a brief drop-in to say that we have our new-to-us stove, and indeed had it in place and functional by ten-fifteen this morning. It is shiny and hot and boils water in no time flat, as well as crisping a pan of granola bars rather quicker than I expected. When I saw the words ‘Self-Cleaning’ before some fine print on the manual (the sellers had kept it, bless them, and also passed along all the pans that had come with it) my heart leapt, but alas, this is a basic model and it does not have the option. Still, it is very impressive. Our old stove was whisked off the curb before we blinked.

And here is a heads-up for anyone local looking for a lute: I was skimming the local Craigslist and found this ad. So if you’ve ever dreamed of becoming a lutenist but despaired at the thought of ever finding an instrument, now’s your chance. (Me? I have more than enough instruments, thanks.)

Back into the cheerful fray of Saturday.