Best Day Ever!

Good food, good friends, good weather.

Except for getting up early for a 9:30am jury, today was perfect. Boston was warm and sunny today and I wore a dress and sandals to celebrate! Got my plane ticket for Taiwan and had lunch in Chinatown with friends. Spent the afternoon in the sun on the porch cutting and pasting and writing out music for my recital. Practiced (!!!). Cooked delicious coconut rice and Thai curry and even made Thai tea. L came over and we ate and talked about all sorts of things, it was great. Then T (Baroque violinist) came over and I got to feed her too! We all listened to the recording of us from Sunday while sipping scotch and then devoured a mango while listening to all the pieces we want to learn together. It was everything I could ever ask for. And now I get to curl up in my warm comfy bed with a cat or three and tomorrow I get to eat leftovers!

I am a very happy and content Zoe.

Aftermath

I seem to have survived last week and come crashing into this week, which I plan to conquer as well!

I had a very strange experience on Sunday. I am a veteran procrastinator and under-practicer, I rarely get pieces as polished as I wish they would be. However, I don't think I've ever played a real concert (with audience and everything) feeling vastly unprepared before. And yet, despite messing up tons of things I know I can play and not knowing what was coming next, I played extremely well on Leon's recital. It was bizarre. I missed shifts, I flubbed runs, I played the wrong strings, and yet, I was musical and created the beauty I hoped to create. And the audience heard it too. They congratulated me with real sincerity, they truly enjoyed it. It makes me both chagrined and elated. I never want to be that unprepared again for a concert and yet, maybe this marks a new era in my performing life, actually being able to express my ideas on an instrument effectively. I hope so.

J left for Texas at early-as-hell-o-clock this morning and she'll be gone a whole week! I'm not sure what I'll do with myself and the emptiness of our house. I hope to practice a lot but I'll try not to become a recluse. Come over for dinner! Watch a movie with me!

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!

Acting Professional

I try to do this sometimes and usually fail. More often, it just happens without my knowing it. Last night, I played an opera. It was exhausting, mentally, physically (what circulation to my legs?), emotionally. Tonight, I do it again. There's a masochistic pleasure in putting oneself through such a thing to entertain and share music with others. It's satisfying and the exhaustion after validates how much effort you really put in. Saturday night, I play a recital. Sunday afternoon, I audition for a professional Baroque orchestra on cello and Sunday night, I play a huge concert on both six and seven-string gamba. I'm dealing with the details of going to Taiwan this summer to play concerts and give a masterclass. I just try to get through one day at a time and struggle to do everything I want to and maintain health and sanity. But on paper, here I am being a young professional musician. Very few people in the audience know I'm going to go home and bake cookies while dancing around to Klezmer or Celtic music in my pajamas and singing to the cats. Even fewer know what a struggle it is for me just to practice the instruments I love to play. And that's the rub, isn't it? Even the most elegant and "professional" among us are just people and those of us who are the least organized and competent can appear "professional" to those who don't know us.

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!

Another Monday

Well, here we are again, back at the beginning of another busy week. I'm playing in an opera (concert version), a recorder recital and L's harpsichord recital (don't be deceived, I'm playing some really hard solo rep on it!). I've also decided to take an audition for Boston Baroque. I have very little time to prepare and I don't really expect to make their sub-list but I haven't played many auditions in my life (I hate them!) and it will be good practice for me. To pre-reward myself for all this, I've decided to take the afternoon off and go shopping. Silly as it is, having something new to wear to one of these events will motivate me to practice more.

I made rosemary focaccia and lasagne last night for a bunch of friends and L came over too. It was fun to watch people I love who don't know each other enjoy themselves together. I also got to play with construction paper and make posters for L's upcoming recital (for which T miraculously created an origami harpsichord!).

See you at the end of the madness!

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?