Been a while since I've been seriously stuck but here I am again, unable to do anything unless there are people around. I tagged along with K this morning to the Arboretum (where he volunteers) and got to help label various plants. Mostly this consists of leisurely driving around the beautiful grounds, talking about the trees, trying to locate specific plants on confusing maps and then switching out the labels because the sub-species name has changed, or the info about where it is isn't actually correct. We relabeled some rhododendrons and some bamboo. Hearing K and the guy who works there rattling off the family names of various trees and shrubs, talking about the "peak" of the various flowers, tasting immature plums and speculating about various fruit. It made me very happy. Why am I always so excited about the things I don't know? Why am I not excited about early music right now?
Heard a fabulous concert last night of mostly Victoria with lots of my friends singing. I loved hearing Renaissance stuff again, it's been a while and I miss singing. There is so much I should do but don't want to. So many primary sources I should really read, so much technique I should rebuild, so much music I should learn. But when I'm here alone, I don't want to do anything. Yes, I know it's just my weird form of depression, but it never fails to confound me that the moments I least want to do anything are also the moments I want the most. I have so many conflicting dreams, I don't know what to follow. I'm not sure if I want to be the person I've been aiming to become anymore.
I'm sure I'll feel better in the morning and maybe I'll start the work of digging myself out of this terrible hole I've fallen into.
Showing posts with label complaining. Show all posts
Showing posts with label complaining. Show all posts
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Sunday, June 8, 2008
One notch above miserable
The very worst part about being an adult is getting sick. When you're young, you get leave to do nothing, others will pick up the slack for you. You have a family to commiserate with, to make you tea. You get to stay home from school, eat whatever you want and watch movies all day. As an adult, there are no perks. The cats still need to be fed, the bills need paying, the only food is what you make yourself and the dishes pile up if you don't do them. Then there's all the anxiety about the things I should be getting done, the grand plans I'm not working on because I'm sitting around being sick and feeling sorry for myself! Ah, self-pity, what a trap you are! My tea, the tissue box and I are going to escape, we'll hide in the livingroom, with a book perhaps and let the day pass quietly. The only thing I got that the germs don't is time, I will patiently outlive them!
Friday, April 11, 2008
Opera
Well, the opera is finally over! Thanks to T for sitting through 2 hours of early music to support J and I! Did it go well? Yes, in the end it did. Ultimately, the music itself was so good that I think we were all able to get beyond the difficulties we had in rehearsing it and really enjoy ourselves. At least, I enjoyed myself (when I wasn't worrying about my d-string going flat or how hot it was under all those lights!). In the end, I'm proud of all the work I put into it and how it came out. I almost wish there had been a reviewer there because I will stand by my performance. It is rare that I feel good enough about a performance to allow it to truly reflect on my abilities and last night was one of those moments. Feel free to judge me by last night, I made mistakes, yes, but musically, I did what I wanted to do.
Of course, after going out for a drink with the cast and orchestra, I left my bag at the bar (but remembered my cello) and only realized it when we'd walked 20 minutes to the T-station. Kindly, J and a musicologist friend walked back with me to get it and then back to the T where we caught one of the last trains that night and took the final 57 bus home. It was past 1:30 when J and I finally arrived home, me weary and with very very unhappy feet from my performing shoes (I have blisters on the bottom of my feet! Ouch!). Despite this, we had lots of fun telling offensive jokes and making fun of musicology, random drunk students, and ourselves. I haven't laughed that hard and that much in a long time and I am in good spirits today because of it.
Alas, no Friday night for me, I've got rehearsals from 4-9:30. If you find yourself doing such things, have a drink for me!
Of course, after going out for a drink with the cast and orchestra, I left my bag at the bar (but remembered my cello) and only realized it when we'd walked 20 minutes to the T-station. Kindly, J and a musicologist friend walked back with me to get it and then back to the T where we caught one of the last trains that night and took the final 57 bus home. It was past 1:30 when J and I finally arrived home, me weary and with very very unhappy feet from my performing shoes (I have blisters on the bottom of my feet! Ouch!). Despite this, we had lots of fun telling offensive jokes and making fun of musicology, random drunk students, and ourselves. I haven't laughed that hard and that much in a long time and I am in good spirits today because of it.
Alas, no Friday night for me, I've got rehearsals from 4-9:30. If you find yourself doing such things, have a drink for me!
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
The Joys (and Pains) of Consumerism
My roommate, J, and I decided to take yesterday afternoon off from life. After our oft-frustrating Monday class, we went on an MBTA adventure, making our way out to the Chestnut Hill Mall. After determining that the mall was way too upscale and expensive for our tastes, we climbed down a rocky slope (off-roading!) and made our way over to a Macy's where we found lots of things on sale. As usual, we spent most of our time perusing racks of dresses on sale, evaluating the cello-playing possibilities of them all.
Finding things to wear for performances as a cellist is difficult. I envy violinists and singers, the former having only to worry about collars getting in the way and the later entirely free to do anything as long as they look fabulous. The obvious problem with playing the cello is that it requires one's knees to be approximately 2 miles apart from each other. Thus are we ever on the lookout for very full skirts (we can be spotted in dressing rooms as the ones who find a chair to sit in to see if the skirt is wide enough). Additionally, as a Baroque cellist, the lack of endpin means I must be comfortable holding up the instrument with my legs. This is not as difficult as it appears (one gets used to it quickly) but particularly smooth and slippery fabrics make the cello less secure and often distract from the performance. Of course, beads and buttons and other ornaments are problematic because they could scratch the cello or rattle or buzz whilst I'm playing. As if this weren't enough, we must be very careful about straps as the movement of our bow-arm can lead them to fall off our shoulders. This happens to me a lot and at times I've had to resort to taping straps to the back of my shoulder to prevent this (most laughably, I did this with gaff tape at the Kennedy Center to prevent calamity during a performance available by live feed on the internet).
I haven't mentioned shoes yet! The height of them affects how high the cello sits (and thus your intonation) so they must be carefully chosen as well. I also like to test them for "tip-ability," whether they allow me to sit comfortably with my feet tipped at an angle (as I do when I play). Surprisingly, this varies a lot between heels and is impossible to predict. Some thin heels balance very well at an angle while some chunky ones do not.
Despite all these restrictions, I managed to find a lovely black dress that you can see if you come to my performance Wednesday or Thursday night. I'll only wear it one of the nights, so leave a comment to vote which night you want to see it!
Finding things to wear for performances as a cellist is difficult. I envy violinists and singers, the former having only to worry about collars getting in the way and the later entirely free to do anything as long as they look fabulous. The obvious problem with playing the cello is that it requires one's knees to be approximately 2 miles apart from each other. Thus are we ever on the lookout for very full skirts (we can be spotted in dressing rooms as the ones who find a chair to sit in to see if the skirt is wide enough). Additionally, as a Baroque cellist, the lack of endpin means I must be comfortable holding up the instrument with my legs. This is not as difficult as it appears (one gets used to it quickly) but particularly smooth and slippery fabrics make the cello less secure and often distract from the performance. Of course, beads and buttons and other ornaments are problematic because they could scratch the cello or rattle or buzz whilst I'm playing. As if this weren't enough, we must be very careful about straps as the movement of our bow-arm can lead them to fall off our shoulders. This happens to me a lot and at times I've had to resort to taping straps to the back of my shoulder to prevent this (most laughably, I did this with gaff tape at the Kennedy Center to prevent calamity during a performance available by live feed on the internet).
I haven't mentioned shoes yet! The height of them affects how high the cello sits (and thus your intonation) so they must be carefully chosen as well. I also like to test them for "tip-ability," whether they allow me to sit comfortably with my feet tipped at an angle (as I do when I play). Surprisingly, this varies a lot between heels and is impossible to predict. Some thin heels balance very well at an angle while some chunky ones do not.
Despite all these restrictions, I managed to find a lovely black dress that you can see if you come to my performance Wednesday or Thursday night. I'll only wear it one of the nights, so leave a comment to vote which night you want to see it!
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
On Cutting (and Pasting)
Sometimes playing early music consists of actually playing music, but very often it involves a lot of arts and crafts. This comes from one of the hypocrisies of the historical performance movement. We perform at historically approximate pitch, with historically informed techniques and off of facsimiles of manuscripts and historical editions, and yet we hold ourselves to very modern standards of performance.
Take intonation for example, I find it likely that standards for intonation were very different in the Baroque. In string playing, eighteenth-century musicians would not have had access to as reliable strings as we do, they couldn't control the temperature or humidity of their environments as well as we do, they didn't have electric tuners (or even tuning forks until 1711) as we do. There are treatises that complain about poor intonation which I read as proof that musicians were often out of tune. They may have wanted perfect intonation (as we aim for) but I doubt it was possible, especially in large ensembles.
Another example is the Baroque trumpet. During the early music revival when pioneers were first exploring valveless trumpets (which are limited in range to the natural harmonic series) they deemed them "impossible" to play well and added holes to improve the intonation. Even the best and most famous historical trumpet players today all have these holes because it's agreed that without them, too many "mistakes" occur for modern audiences (and conductors!) to accept.
This brings me to my current peeve in early music, the fable of unity and continuity throughout a larger work. I think this notion was probably born in the mid-19th century (does anyone actually know the history of this?) when "music-as-high-art" really got going. If you go to the symphony today you will be looked at derisively if you are so uncouth and unknowledgeable as to clap between movements. This wasn't always the case. People used to clap after every movement and if there was enough applause, the movement would be played again (remember, there were no recordings). This practice holds over in opera where people clap after arias despite the interruption of the plot.
Music in the Baroque was entertainment (and I don't mean this pejoratively at all!), whether it was music for dinner or dancing or for the stage, it was functional. We have copies of the scores people performed off of and there are page turns in the middle of movements (!) marked, "turn quickly." No one had page turners, they didn't line up four stands in a row so that they wouldn't have to pause to turn a page. So it seems to me that our modern aesthetic of continuity is behind the hours I spend cutting and pasting parts together for myself to eliminate or abbreviate all page turns.
I played a recital last week where I taped four or five sheets of paper to each side of a large piece of cardboard in order to avoid disrupting the flow of a cantata by shuffling my pages. I routinely turn pages while playing an open string (a good trick!) and toss them on the floor because I have no time to place them elsewhere. As a 20th-century being, I appreciate dramatic flow in a work, unencumbered by the often messy reality of playing it. But I don't think this was a priority in the Baroque. Surely they turned pages, surely they tuned between movements. In a rehearsal yesterday, I had to keep tuning between movements (in a rehearsal!) and the conductor asked me why I had to tune so much. I told him I had put on a new string (which was true) but I wanted to say, "Does it matter why? Would you rather I play out of tune? This is the reality of playing on temperamental gut strings during the lurching forward of Spring weather!" But if we want to appeal to a modern audience, we must perform up to modern standards and make compromises in our historical accuracy. At what point are we compromising too much? When do we lose sight of the point of what we do?
Take intonation for example, I find it likely that standards for intonation were very different in the Baroque. In string playing, eighteenth-century musicians would not have had access to as reliable strings as we do, they couldn't control the temperature or humidity of their environments as well as we do, they didn't have electric tuners (or even tuning forks until 1711) as we do. There are treatises that complain about poor intonation which I read as proof that musicians were often out of tune. They may have wanted perfect intonation (as we aim for) but I doubt it was possible, especially in large ensembles.
Another example is the Baroque trumpet. During the early music revival when pioneers were first exploring valveless trumpets (which are limited in range to the natural harmonic series) they deemed them "impossible" to play well and added holes to improve the intonation. Even the best and most famous historical trumpet players today all have these holes because it's agreed that without them, too many "mistakes" occur for modern audiences (and conductors!) to accept.
This brings me to my current peeve in early music, the fable of unity and continuity throughout a larger work. I think this notion was probably born in the mid-19th century (does anyone actually know the history of this?) when "music-as-high-art" really got going. If you go to the symphony today you will be looked at derisively if you are so uncouth and unknowledgeable as to clap between movements. This wasn't always the case. People used to clap after every movement and if there was enough applause, the movement would be played again (remember, there were no recordings). This practice holds over in opera where people clap after arias despite the interruption of the plot.
Music in the Baroque was entertainment (and I don't mean this pejoratively at all!), whether it was music for dinner or dancing or for the stage, it was functional. We have copies of the scores people performed off of and there are page turns in the middle of movements (!) marked, "turn quickly." No one had page turners, they didn't line up four stands in a row so that they wouldn't have to pause to turn a page. So it seems to me that our modern aesthetic of continuity is behind the hours I spend cutting and pasting parts together for myself to eliminate or abbreviate all page turns.
I played a recital last week where I taped four or five sheets of paper to each side of a large piece of cardboard in order to avoid disrupting the flow of a cantata by shuffling my pages. I routinely turn pages while playing an open string (a good trick!) and toss them on the floor because I have no time to place them elsewhere. As a 20th-century being, I appreciate dramatic flow in a work, unencumbered by the often messy reality of playing it. But I don't think this was a priority in the Baroque. Surely they turned pages, surely they tuned between movements. In a rehearsal yesterday, I had to keep tuning between movements (in a rehearsal!) and the conductor asked me why I had to tune so much. I told him I had put on a new string (which was true) but I wanted to say, "Does it matter why? Would you rather I play out of tune? This is the reality of playing on temperamental gut strings during the lurching forward of Spring weather!" But if we want to appeal to a modern audience, we must perform up to modern standards and make compromises in our historical accuracy. At what point are we compromising too much? When do we lose sight of the point of what we do?
Monday, March 24, 2008
Too Many Rehearsals!
I love my chosen profession. I even love rehearsals. But I don't love these long days of running from one rehearsal to the next with hardly time to eat and certainly no time to learn the music.
I don't like the way I'm playing, it's sloppy and not nearly as good as I know I can play. Also, I'm not prepared for any of my rehearsals, I don't have time to warm-up or to look at the music beforehand. I scramble my way through trying to hit all the notes and hardly bothering to be musical.
I like being busy, I am happier when I've got projects and deadlines. But this week is insanity. I left the house this morning at 10:30 and got home 12 hours later having done nothing but attend class, rehearse, and grab some food. Tomorrow involves only 5 hours of playing spread over 7 hours, although four of those hours will be spent being told what to do by someone I usually disagree with.
Lest I spend an entire post complaining, here are a few upcoming concerts (all free!) with my parenthetical commentary:
--Thursday, 6:30pm at First Church Cambridge: Sarah Bellott's Recital.
(she's a really good soprano and is singing a lot (a lot!) of wonderful French Baroque stuff, the music is great but hard for me and is exhausting)
--Friday, 7:30pm at Beacon Hill Friends' House: Janey's Recital.
(come see my brilliant and intrepid roommate tackle the hardest Bach cello suite on a five-string-baroque-cello-beast and win! she also will play a sonata and some cantata arias for which I play accompaniment)
--Sunday, 3:00pm at First Church Cambridge: Cambridge Concentus
(this is going to be an amazing concert, we're playing Brandenburg 2, the one with the crazy hard trumpet part, and another concerto grosso by a guy named Heinichen, both have hard but awesome cello parts that I will be rocking out to)
That's it (it!) for this week, tune in next week for more crazy Baroque adventures!
I don't like the way I'm playing, it's sloppy and not nearly as good as I know I can play. Also, I'm not prepared for any of my rehearsals, I don't have time to warm-up or to look at the music beforehand. I scramble my way through trying to hit all the notes and hardly bothering to be musical.
I like being busy, I am happier when I've got projects and deadlines. But this week is insanity. I left the house this morning at 10:30 and got home 12 hours later having done nothing but attend class, rehearse, and grab some food. Tomorrow involves only 5 hours of playing spread over 7 hours, although four of those hours will be spent being told what to do by someone I usually disagree with.
Lest I spend an entire post complaining, here are a few upcoming concerts (all free!) with my parenthetical commentary:
--Thursday, 6:30pm at First Church Cambridge: Sarah Bellott's Recital.
(she's a really good soprano and is singing a lot (a lot!) of wonderful French Baroque stuff, the music is great but hard for me and is exhausting)
--Friday, 7:30pm at Beacon Hill Friends' House: Janey's Recital.
(come see my brilliant and intrepid roommate tackle the hardest Bach cello suite on a five-string-baroque-cello-beast and win! she also will play a sonata and some cantata arias for which I play accompaniment)
--Sunday, 3:00pm at First Church Cambridge: Cambridge Concentus
(this is going to be an amazing concert, we're playing Brandenburg 2, the one with the crazy hard trumpet part, and another concerto grosso by a guy named Heinichen, both have hard but awesome cello parts that I will be rocking out to)
That's it (it!) for this week, tune in next week for more crazy Baroque adventures!
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