Category Archives: Music

Back In The Swing of Orchestra

It was nice to end the day on such a good note. No pun intended.

It felt great to walk into the auditorium and set up, to say hi to people, to catch up a bit. I’m sitting second chair this season (whee!), trading off with another woman concert by concert. For the first performance, we’re playing Beethoven’s Eighth, some Rubenstein, more Brahms Hungarian Dances, the Skaters’ Waltz (I get to play the bass line for this one), and a Schubert overture. As usual, we sight read it all; not quite as usual, I managed to hang on through it all, except during the stupidly easy long runs where I always lose it because I look ahead (the way one does while sight reading) and then lose my place because all the notes look the same. (I’m going to enlarge most of my music this time.That will probably help.)

I noticed that band has really helped me be more confident about where my fingers are on the fingerboard when I change positions. I can’t get away with lazy basic fingering at band the way I can at orchestra because I’m totally exposed, so in order to get the best sound possible I have to use alternate fingering. Last night I found myself automatically using alternate fingering while sight reading. I’m much more confident about jumping into higher positions too (which are technically lower in relation to the floor, but produce a higher sound because they shorten the string). I also discovered that using the heaviest bow I have is great for band, but kills me at orchestra. I’m going to have to remember to switch the bows every time I go to a different rehearsal. Actually, I may just leave my heavy bow at the studio, because I can use my lighter bow at home when working on band stuff as I’m working on technique, not volume.

All in all I was very pleased with how I did after two months off. After all, I’ve been playing Metallica and The Tragically Hip all summer. I think I played some Bach twice.

I called HRH at break to see how the finale of Supernova was going. He told me it was already over and that Lukas had won, which stunned me; I hadn’t expected that at all. But hurrah! They’ll have to add more Canadian tour dates now.

I was very pleased to get a sheet outlining the rehearsal schedule along with my pile of new music. We already have not one but two confirmed concerts this fall. The first one is in mid-November (the date may have to be altered, so it’ll be either the 18th or the 19th of November.). The second is on Saturday December 16, and as I found out at the end of the rehearsal — this is where the night officially made up for the stress of the day — we’re doing The Messiah, with choir.

Eeeeeee!

So when I got home I pulled out my full Messiah score and really looked at the bass parts. The copy I have has the three higher string lines and figured bass for keyboard (organ, ideally) but I can see what should be played by which bass instrument. They’re kind of eep, so this is going to take a lot of work for me. But hey — The Messiah! You’re all coming, right? Of course you are.

I’ve missed orchestra; I started missing it around the beginning of August. It’s good to be back.

ESTC Update

My lower back is killing me, and I now have a sinus cold only days after I kicked the first cold. The only things that got me through today were chatting with t! over email, and a playlist of A-ha and live Metallica from the S&M album (which worked surprisingly well together).

Total word count, ESTC: 23,604
Total words today: 1,601

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
23,604 / 50,000
(47.2%)

Now Chapter Nine has stuff in it too. Both it and Chapter Eight need more, of course, but now they aren’t as lonely and jealous of the other chapters. And I’m nine hundred words away from next Friday’s goal.

I need to go take more sinus medication and lie down on the floor for a while to straighten out my back.

So Not Less The Drama

Liam, of course, had a wonderful afternoon yesterday with his godparents and came home all smiles. Ate like a small horse. Slept for an hour and a half. Bit no one. (Or so I assume, because I didn’t hear about it.) And then he ate a huge bowl of pasta and veggies in homemade cheese sauce for supper, had a fun bath during which he gave us very wet and tender hugs, and went to bed cheerfully. With those damn molars, it’s like Jeckyll and Hyde around here sometimes.

Filling the gas tank to the literal brim gave me an indecent amount of pleasure. Our gas tank hasn’t been full since sometime in late May. I just keep putting five or ten dollars in when gas prices dip down closer to a dollar, or when we need it. Pumping gas doesn’t rank as one of my favorite tasks — I don’t hate it, I’m just neutral about it — but I enjoyed every moment this time. It was extraordinarily satisfying.

HRH and I had a good dinner of leftover ribs and new potatoes drowned in butter with freshly ground sea salt and pepper. Simple, and utterly delicious. We watched a very good PBS program on the making of the Mars Pathfinders, followed by the second-ever RockStar: Supernova episode that I’ve seen, which I somehow feel that I enjoyed much more than I should have. It’s just become appointment television. (Gentle Readers, I am in a band, you know. We do play The Ramones and Metallica. And I’m fascinated by the art of arrangement.)

I received a deeply appreciated message from one of my oldest friends this morning, pointing out some positive truths that helped reinforce today’s saner perspective for me. I don’t have to always be perky and cheerful and resilient. Stress happens. Nerves understandably fray. And the stress gets worse because I care so much.

Today, I have a stack of Haydn string quartet CDs to rip to my computer as I work, because one can never have enough string quartets in one’s playlists. Then I may move on to ripping my Beethoven quartets. Then Schubert. Who knows? I lead such a wild and crazy life.

Song For Cricket

As part of the August Writing project I’ve been writing poetry each day — some long, some short, some freestyle, some with personally chosen challenges like exactly ten syllables per line, and so forth. (And no, you won’t find them, because they’re all community-locked.) The past two days I have written deliberately bad haiku about Cricket being in heat and yearning for the boy cat love, because it amuses me.

The Baron has taken this and run with it. This is “a Cramps kinda stomper”, as he puts it, raw and raunchy, which incorporates some of the lines and phrases I wrote in the haiku. You can practically hear the grinding punk music thrashing away in your mind as you read the lyrics.

Woe Is We

It’s official: I can’t write this book to The Tragically Hip. Life is unfair.

Current Music: Lake Fever (but not for long, alas)

(Oh, okay, maybe I’ll just switch to a film score after Little Bones, then…)

Grr

I just spent an hour running around not getting the two things I needed to get. No 16-gauge copper wire with which to bribe tonight’s babysitter. Worst of all, no new CD player for the car. Because, you know, a hundred dollars of hidden costs (above and beyond the extra fifty I’d already budgeted to cover such costs, which makes for one hunded fifty over the actual price of the unit) makes for a very cranky me and a very firm “Forget it” to the salesguy. The extra costs — equipment adaptors, installation, blah blah blah — totalled more than the unit itself, by a couple of dollars.

Cranky. Although the salesguy was kind enough to show me an alternate unit that was fifty dollars less, with all the same features and a longer base warranty, made by an equally reliable company. I didn’t ask for a quote on the extra equipment needed to adapt it to our car, which was dumb, but I was too annoyed to hang around, and certainly too cranky to make a split-second decision. I’ll send HRH in at some point instead and he can ask.

Grr.

Now I go to do a final read and polish on my submissions for the local Neopagan journal. I’m hoping I like them enough to avoid serious rewrites.

What We Did On The First Sunday Of August

Ever since I can remember, the first Sunday in August has been the Highland Games.

I’ve remembered it too late to schedule it in over recent years, or we’ve been busy, but this year we made it. We packed up both godfamiles, and off we all went for an afternoon out in the gorgeous sun. There wasn’t a spot of humidity anywhere, and there was a decent breeze, thank goodness.

HRH wore his kilt — of course — and Liam wore the tiny kilt that my grandfather got for me from Edinburgh when I was a wee little thing. They stopped a lot of traffic.

Liam loved the massed bands; he loved the drums and the pipes (not a surprise at all, considering his heritage and the cousins who play both); he loved all the dogs he saw; he smiled at and charmed just about everyone he met. He reached for a total stranger to cuddle with her, but it was fine, because it turned out that she was the wife of one of the members of Salty Dog, a local Celtic band that HRH used to hang out with lo these many years ago. And she was more than happy to cuddle him a bit before heading off to the beer tent where the band was striking up. He absolutely was not interested in napping, or eating that much; too much to see! to do! to hear! The one thing he wasn’t happy about was the cannon that was part of the opening ceremonies. He’d been fine through the display of musketfire, but when they fired the cannon he was looking the other way. The sudden sharp sound surprised him more than anything else, so there was a bit of angry crying. But after he’d cuddled with each of us and had a bit more milk, he was fine and interested in the bands marching onto the field.

I came home with badly sunburned shoulders, despite the amount of sunscreen I slathered on before departure. But apart from that, it was a wonderful wonderful day, one of the best I’ve had in a while. The massed bands at the opening ceremonies were, as always, worth the $10 admission fee alone. And it felt really special to bring my son to his first games, as I’d been brought to too many to count while growing up.