Category Archives: Music

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Another moving update: as of this afternoon, kitchen mostly packed, books mostly packed. Thanks, guys. Fun and productive.

I missed orchestra tonight by a simple miscalculation: my husband had scheduled a box run over to the new apartment with Skippy. As the car cannot be in two places at once, and since we only realised this at 6.30 PM, there wasn’t time to try to find another lift out to the West Island. He loaded up the car and left while I began to pack the bedroom closet. He was back half an hour later. “Done already?” I said. “No,” he replied, “they turned the power off so the electricians could finish rewiring the building, and it hasn’t been turned back on yet so it’s pitch-black and we can’t see to carry boxes up the stairs. They’re still in the car.”

Drat. This means I missed the orchestra ensemble photo for nothing.

Twilight Zone Wednesdays

Sigh.

I’m starting to doubt my sanity. Person after person has asked me if I’m preparing for a book discussion being held on Wednesday night.

It’s nice to be loved. However, I’ve been doing something every Wednesday night for almost two years now. It’s that thing called orchestra. “Nope,” I say when invited to Wednesday events, “no can do – that music thing, you know.”

Except now I’m beginning to feel vaguely Twilight Zone-like. Maybe dimensions have warped, and timelines have crossed, and in this timeline, my orchestra never existed, which would explain why I’m the only one who remembers it.

I’d be more worried if I wasn’t working on a press release announcing the orchestra’s new conductor, and receiving regular e-mails and calls about it. So orchestra exists in at least some other minds.

It’s rather amusing, actually. Maybe aliens have descended and have wiped selected memory banks. Or maybe I should just be more vocal about my extracurricular activities. You know – share openly with confident, voluable enthusiasm. Enough of this self-effacing shyness! I’m a cellist with the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra, and we rehearse every Wednesday night!

Surprised?

Never mind.

Ups and Downs

Seeing the end of October creep up on me, and knowing that the last time I sat down to work on the Great Canadian Novel was about two and a half weeks ago, I threw some Tori Amos in the CD changer yesterday and sat down on the living room floor with my laptop. I wrote three pages and felt really good about myself. I’d stopped being as curious as I had been about my GCN world, and deliberately immersing myself in it again was good – it felt comfortable. I also felt a bit worried, what with NaNoWriMo looming. Having two novels on the go is a bit like having a new child and having to soothe the elder sibling: no, I still love you, I haven’t forgotten you, this new baby just needs so much attention…

Then I amazed myself by getting up and making a wonderful dinner that included baked chicken, and brussels sprouts done in cheese, onions, and lemon butter. (“What are these?” asks my husband. “Baby cabbages,” I answer, unconcerned, as I begin to eat. “Oh,” he says, munches on one, and begins to rave about it. “I didn’t expect you to like brussels sprouts so much,” I remark calmly, reaching for my water glass. He faltered for only an instant, brave man.) After dinner, he asked what he’d done to deserve a big dinner, and I told him that as of Friday, I wouldn’t be able to do things like this, so I thought I’d get one in before I sacrificed my life to NaNoWriMo.

Yesterday was pretty good. Then this morning…

Argh.

I spent two hours setting up Eudora as my mail program, importing my Outlook Express stuff, and generally fumbling around until I can at least use the ruddy thing. I have experience with Eudora; we used it at work once or twice a week to mail out newsletters and such, so it’s not like I’ve never seen it before. Still, I get as frustrated as the next busy human when I can’t grasp things immediately. I also went through a bunch of old e-mail to delete it from OE before I exported stuff to Eudora, simply to save room, and it always takes longer than I expect – click, scan, click to delete; rinse, repeat. Boring. Like housework. Tidy, polish, sweep, dust.

Gods, it’s all so exciting, I think I’ll have to take a break and go lie down.

Gnash

I had a truly horrible rehearsal on Wednesday night.

I’d even practiced that morning. I’d gone through the evil Minuet & Trio from Beethoven’s First Symphony and some of the nasty shifts from the first movement too, and I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Then I got to rehearsal and we began with the Rossini overture, and the substitute director took it at a really fast clip. I lost it. I ended up just sitting and staring at the music, unable to grab an anchor point to pick up again and be in the same place as everyone else.

It got worse: we then moved to the Bizet. (Remember? The tenor clef? The treble clef?) Any progess I’d made on this piece left me, bags and all. They even slammed the door.

It was around this point that I realised the next concert is only four weeks away.

Then we moved to the Beethoven, which should have been my best performance of the night. I was so rattled by this point, though, that I spent a lot of time feeling rather nauseous, staring at the score again, miserable.

I have absolutely no emotional connection to this music. The Mozart symphony we’re doing is easy for me, because it’s so beautiful, so lyrical. These other pieces are technically challenging and very difficult to make sound easy, which is important. Music should sound effortless. Since I have no emotional connection to them (other than the sinking feeling I get when I look at them, which is probably classified by a large percentage of the population as “negative”!) it’s hard to make them sound pretty, let alone care about getting the notes right.

So, I bought a new set of earphones, and batteries for my Walkman, and I’ll just listen to it all over and over until I can sing it in my sleep. That will help.

I was really down Wednesday night when I went home, and Thursday morning wasn’t much better. On the way to work, though, I heard a terrific recording of the overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Tafelmusik on CBC Radio Two, and suddenly, I was reminded why I play the cello, why I joined the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra, and why music is so important to me. When I got to work, I dashed off a quick e-mail to the show’s host Tom Allen, thanking him for helping me out. He e-mailed me later in the day to say that he was “glad to hear your musical cloud has lifted” and telling me to “keep the faith”.

I’m looking forward to working on my music this summer. It’s a pity that my concert will be over just as my time off begins, so I won’t be able to devote the time I’d like to preparing for it, but I’ll choose a piece to really polish up to feel good about before orchestra starts up again next fall.

Music is such a gloriously emotional thing, and it brings such a variety of people together to perform and experience it. I don’t know who invented it, but I think I’d like to shake their hand.

CURRENTLY READING:
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris, which is about a woman returning anonymously to her native village in France to open a restaurant in the house she grew up in. It’s two stories simultaneously: the modern storyline, and the story of when this main character was growing up sixty-odd years ago in German-occupied France. I’m enjoying the war storyline more; the modern story is about her weak nephew and his desperate, food-snobby wife trying to steal her mother’s recipe book to help their own ailing high-class restaurant, which the protagonist has discovered is also a kind of diary in code which her mother kept during the war. I find the modern antagonists pretty lame, although I love the recipe book/journal aspect of it. Harris uses food and wine as a metaphor for everything her characters can’t actually come out and say in all her books; it’s an interesting trope, but it’s becoming predictable.

This is the third Harris novel I’ve read; the first two were Chocolat and Blackberry Wine. So far, Chocolat is still my favourite. Jury’s still out as to where Five Quarters will fall.

Babies

I heard a fantastic rendition of a Beethoven cello sonata on the way home last night, and I said to myself, “I could do that” – the operative word being could, of course, not can. It simultaneously thrills me and depresses me to know that if I practiced, I could be really, really good. If I get this teaching job it will free up a lot of time, which I intend to partially fill with regular practice sessions.

I’m still awed about Devon. What will she look like when she’s six? Thirteen? Twenty-one? What will her first word be? What will be her favourite colour? What will her laugh sound like?

Debra called me the other day and said, “Are you having baby pangs?” Heck, yes. Every time I see her four-month old daughter Elspeth, as a matter of fact. I’m fairly certain it will be the same way with Devon. I even dreamed last night that my oldest friend Annika was pregnant, and she looked fantastic. We used to joke that the three of us (Paze, Annika and myself) would all be pregnant at the same time. I think my subconcious is dredging that up and throwing it at me now that Paze is non-pregnant.

Babies – wondrous creatures who require much care and feeding. I know darned well that we can’t afford one right now, time-wise or financially. I’m trying to change careers, and my husband Ron has just started work again, after all. People keep telling me that it’s never a “good” time to have a baby with a preachy, syrupy tone, and it irritates the hell out of me. If you can’t approach a life-changing decision like introducing another member into your family unit who will be completely dependent upon you for several years with responsibility (financial or otherwise), then what business do you have doing it? It drives me up the wall that dogs require licenses, but they’ll let anyone have a baby. Anyway, we don’t touch on the subject very often, because it’s a bit sensitive all around. Our own families both have their opinions on the whole idea, and I think we’re both a bit afraid of what it will do to our own relationship (which has taken a beating over the past year anyway what with all the financial trouble and job-less-ness). We’ve made a tentative date to talk about it again at the end of this year. A lot can happen in a year.

Ever seen a pregnant woman play the cello? Probably not. Go ahead, laugh. Most of the people on the cello chat board I frequent who are mothers have said they had to play “side-saddle” for the last few months of their pregancies. Women at the turn of the century used to play like this. Instead of holding the cello between your legs (so unladylike!) you sit sideways in your chair, knees together and to the left, turning your torso to the right while leaning the instrument against your left shoulder as usual. If that sounds uncomfortable it’s because it is, and it plays havoc with the physics of cello-playing as well. If it’s your only solution, though, heck, I’d take it too!

Spring!

Whoa! Somewhere along the past day and a half, this page received its three hundredth hit.

I’m stunned. In just under one month, people have stopped by by three hundred times to see what I’m rambling about. (And yes, I set my counter to ignore my own hits on the page.)

Wow.

In other news, damn it, it’s SPRING! We’ve thrown open all the windows, I’ve gone for a walk to buy orange juice and a paper, and now I’m sitting at the computer in a patch of cosy sunlight, breathing in the warm spring smells, listening to Mozart arias on the radio. Apparently it’s going up to 16 C today. Life is pretty good.

Tonight I’m leading a class on ethics, then I’m off to a good old-fashioned sleepover with four other women. There will be much chocolate in various forms, as all good sleepovers must have. The added bonus of adulthood means daiquiries too. Woo-hoo! Tomorrow morning we shall dawdle over silver dollar pancakes and waffles, then I’ve got a Star Wars game in the afternoon, and a book club soiree in the evening. Needless to say, this does not allow for seeing Men With Brooms, so we have plans to see it next Saturday that shall not be overturned!

CURRENT READING:

Typically, I’ve begun half a dozen things at once:

Witches & Neighbours by Robin Briggs is a socio-politico-cultural examination of the witch hunts in Europe, creating a historical context of the changing face of society in order to further understand the phenomenon of the hunts. Interesting.

Pilgrims of the Night by Lars B. Lindholm is a fun look at the ancestry of modern magical belief, Western mystery schools and esoteric practice. After looking at people like Thomas “Chip” Aquinas (you had to be there) and Agrippa, I’ve learned about John Dee (who had more money than sense, most of it apparently originating with the Philosopher’s Stone and his alchemical experiments) and Albertus Magnus (whose name means “Big Al”, and who was below average height).

Mutts Six: A Little Look-See and Mutts: Sunday Mornings by Patrick McDonnell. No one told me there was a new Mutts collection out!!

Teach Yourself HTML and XHTML. Yep. I’m trying to figure out how to create another table in this template so I can format it to have different fonts and colours so you can actually read it.

And, yes; I found Perdido Street Station, so that’s next…

IN THE DISC DRIVE:

Affairs of the Heart: Music of Marjan Mozetich (and if you don’t recognise it, it’s probably because it’s Canadian and modern).
Classic Yo-Yo: a collection of nifty bits of Ma’s recordings, about half of which I don’t have. The other half is good enough to have twice.
Yo-Yo Ma Plays the Music of John Williams: no, it’s not Star Wars on the cello. I never knew Williams had written a cello concerto, let alone an Elegy (expanded from a musical theme used in Seven Years in Tibet) or Three Pieces for Solo Cello.