Monthly Archives: September 2007

September Twenty-Fifth

I am home alive and rested from camping. It was an incredible weekend weather-wise and otherwise.

Today there are several things to celebrate:

1) The belated birthday of Gmarc! (I will forever remember his birthday one day late.)

2) It’s the 75th anniversary of Glenn Gould’s birth! I am, as some know, a staunch Gould fan and wrote a third of a thesis on his dual modes of expression in performance and written musical analysis. (This was before my advisor vanished into the ether because he was soon retiring, leaving a handful of thesis students hanging because he didn’t care any more.) Coincidentally, next week is also the 25th anniversary of Gould’s death. I shall buy Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould on DVD as a gift to myself tomorrow (Gould’s music! Colm Feore!). The CBC has a week of stuff going on about Gould, and YouTube has tons of clips online as well.

3) Today marks the tenth anniversary of HRH and I doing our first road trip together. We went, appropriately enough, to a Glenn Gould book launch and film festival in Ottawa. (Hey, someone had to drive me, and he was free and willing to learn about one of the things that made me tick, AKA something I wouldn’t stop nattering about because I was in Full! Thesis! Mode! at the time.)

4) It also happens to be our eighth wedding anniversary today. When I realised I’d planned a wedding on the weekend of a bi-annual Gould conference that I really really wanted to attend (I was a member of the GG Foundation at the time) I was not amused. Still, I think I made the right decision, going to the wedding instead of the conference, don’t you?

None of these things were deliberately scheduled thusly because they built on previous events, it just kind of turned out that way. I find that interesting and also mildly disturbing.

Thanks to everyone in the blogosphere who has already wished us well. And thanks again to all the friends who shared our wedding weekend with us: you made it a very special time.

I have a cool anniversary present in mind for him. Muah-hah-hah! (I have to top the Xbox somehow at some point, and it may as well be this year…)

For The Win

How did orchestra go? Well enough for me to walk directly into the bedroom where HRH was reading to say, “I am an orchestral goddess” when I got home.

Which is not the sort of thing I say at all. Ever. But it was entirely suitable to describe the success I experienced. I’ve reached a point where I can play things that would have sent me into a panic a few years ago. And we worked — oh, we worked. Our conductor jumped right in and worked a few passages until they were clean, and told us to focus on dynamics from day one, and I walked out of there happy and feeling like I’d done something, learned something, and it was only the first day of the season. We were sight reading as usual, which meant I made up fingering and shifts on the fly… and I did it more than adequately. I no longer feel like I’m struggling to keep up. Now I’m working on technique and refining a performance that already exists, even if I’m sight-reading something. I’m rather proud of that. This is going to be a wonderful concert. And when this can be said after the very first rehearsal, well, let’s just say it’s a good thing and you should all circle November 24th on your calendars right now.

(Now imagine how good I’d be if I actually practiced on a regular basis instead of when I can fit it in. You know, that whole minimum half-hour a day thing? I’d be lucky if I managed an hour every two days, but maybe if that’s what I can manage, that’s what I’ll aim for.)

(Also: Rehearsal went so well that I forgot I was wearing my red shoes for the first time this fall. Yes. That good.)

In other completely unrelated news, prepping for this weekend’s equinox camping trip retreat has driven me right over the edge. I’m tired of being the responsible one who makes multiple lists and props and plans and chases down equipment and buys supplies. Being the grown-up sucks sometimes.

Orchestra Tonight!

I love the first day of the new season. It’s like going back to school and seeing the new shoes and lunchboxes and catching up on what everyone did on their summer vacation.

No, actually it’s because I miss playing with an ensemble. There is only so far Hans Zimmer, Klaus Badelt and Vivaldi can take me. New music! Hurrah!

Quick Break

Happiest of birthdays to our beloved Rosy! May every year be better than the one that came before.

Ran errands on foot this morning with the boy, more coming this afternoon. I am up to my eyeballs in prep for the camping trip this weekend. Now back to making lists and sorting through boxes looking for equipment, fall clothes, and baby gear for Charlize while he naps!

Il Maestro Update, Etc

I had a lovely surprise visit from Mousme this morning, which shouldn’t have been a surprise because I’d invited her. She arrived with her laptop and I made a pot of tea and we sat down and actually wrote stuff. You know, that thing I do for a living, and have been trying to do for the past couple of weeks and have been getting pretty much nowhere because I keep getting sidetracked by shiny research that really doesn’t need to be done this very second? Yes, that. I fed her leftovers and she asked for seconds, wonderful girl.

Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 48,906
New words today: 1,777

We’re inching towards an end of the first draft. I still don’t know which ending is going to happen. We’ll find out as things develop, I suppose. Once the first draft is complete (how confident I sound) I have a feeling I should go right back to the beginning to polish and expand and fill in the gaps, and attack it with a metaphorical offset spatula to smooth out the continuity. I’m mildly concerned that if I put it away I’ll lose momentum on it. (Momentum? What momentum? The theoretical momentum I’ll have achieved once it’s been finished.) Remember, I put this away last December and only took it out three weeks ago; I don’t want to have to go through all the rereading and reacquainting myself yet again.

Mousme and I now have a casual regular writing date. If it works, don’t mess with it. It’s been ages since we’ve just chatted so we did a lot of that too, catching up and talking about books. Imagine how productive we will be when we don’t have to do as much catching up.

I know I wrote on Friday, but for some reason I didn’t record it. The day’s total was around eight hundred words, I know that, and there was an extra three-hundred-word character file that I finally had to draw up because I could no longer remember the specifics of the dozen or so orphans and several adults I’d created a hundred pages and ten months ago.

This post launches the new Il Maestro-associated icon, from one of Chris Van Allsburg’s breathtaking illustrations for Swan Lake. (No, there are no swans in this novel. Swans elsewhere in my other novels and novellas, yes, but not this one. Are there swans in Venice at all? Other than on crests?)

Saturday we postponed an Ecomuseum trip we’d planned with the Preston-Leblancs due to inclement weather, and had brunch out instead. Then we took the kids to an indoor playcentre and the boy had a rip-roaring time in the three-and-under room of slides and lookouts and big foam blocks. We will absolutely return, and return often, I think. On our way out I spied a kitchen supply shop that had Bundt pans in the windows, and suddenly I was coveting Bundt pans I’d never seen but only heard tell of: cathedral pans! castle pans! rose pans! And not only in the regular large size, but miniature fantasy Bundt pans too!

Sunday we wandered about shops doing errands, and after the boy’s nap we had a birthday visit with HRH’s mother. All in all a lovely weekend.

Today I also applied for a posted freelance job, doing the whole tweaking of CV and creating the perfect cover letter thing — only to have an automated return reply to my email saying that the employer receives so many applications that they’d get back to me in four weeks. Ah well; all that angst, gone in an instantaneous email poof.

Jam Sessions!

Three days after I bought my first new DS game, I have bought my second. Now I, too, can make music on my DS!

Jam Sessions was worth my money for the ear training exercises and the free play mode alone. I only know two of the twenty songs included in the game (non-game? bah) so the playing-along mode is pretty useless to me, unless I use it for ear training as well. If I used effects more than I do in real life I’d be more excited about the wide variety of sound alteration available to the player. The basic guitar sound is fine on its own for me. All in all, this is pretty flexible for messing about with. The recording option is convenient and I’m looking forward to using it, although at the moment I don’t know how much music it will hold. Have I already composed original chord sequences for verses and bridges? Yes. Do any of them match the three sets of lyrics I have written within the past eighteen months? No. Of course not.

I have discovered one drawback so far. The way the DS has to be held and the buttons pressed and the stylus moved all at once means my hands get tired from supporting the weight and stretching, as the original DS is a hefty little thing. Makes one wish for a DS Lite. In candy apple red, of course (or what they’re calling crimson in the new limited edition bundle).

ETA: I should clarify something lest someone leap to an incorrect conclusion. Yes, I have a couple of perfectly good instruments, and yes, I make up music with them, and yes, this program is but a hollow shade of what a real guitar would be like. My problem is that my instruments play only one or two notes at once, and thus I can’t get the subtle colour difference that (for example) a Cm versus a Cm7 chord can provide. If I’m writing an ensemble piece it’s easier for my brain to begin with a chord that sounds right for the rhythm guitar, which I can then break down into its key component notes and pass them to different melodic lines. And I don’t know what chord is going to sound right unless I hear it, and as I don’t own a chord instrument or have the time to learn one, this works pretty well for me. It saves a time, and a lot of calls and repetitive questions fielded by my guitarist. Also, it’s fun. I like it when learning tools are fun.

Score!

Some day my postman is going to ask me what the heck I do for a living, that I have so many padded envelopes of books coming to my door, some of them quite bulky. And I will say that I am a writer, and I research a lot, and nine times out of ten the perfect book I need is out of print or unavailable at an easily-reached library or too damned expensive to buy new, and so I order them secondhand on-line. I prefer to have my own copy of something I’m likely to use extensively for research, as it eliminates the renewal issue and the losing-the-book-to-a-reserve possibility, and I can plaster it with sticky-notes to my heart’s content.

I have scored a copy of Barbier’s Vivaldi’s Venice, for which I paid $6 CDN. Huzzah!

(This means nothing to most of you, I know. It’s not like it’s a popular book. It just happens to be exactly what I needed.)

This book still has the original shipping slip inside the front cover. It was a comp copy for a Toronto newspaper editor in 2004. The book then somehow found its way down to Georgia to the secondhand retailer from whom I purchased it. I love finding notes or shopping lists or train tickets or boarding passes in secondhand books. It makes the person who owned them so real, and yet so mysterious. Who were they? Did the book make their trip from Oslo more enjoyable? What was their relationship to the Marie about whom they made a note on this scrap of paper, and what did they buy her for her birthday in the end? What did this journalist think of the book? Was it read for a review (unlikely, as the book doesn’t feel as if it’s ever been opened) or was it requested out of personal interest?

I like knowing that human beings still read, that books play a role in their lives. And I like to imagine the journeys that books have made.