Lest semester I wrote a little bit about a conducting class I was taking. In that class, all we got to conduct was a recording. However, this semester I’m in the next class, in which we get to conduct actual people! We get to conduct two different groups: he lab Band and the Wind Symphony. The Lab band is made up of the combined Wind Techniques, Brass Techniques and Percussion Techniques classes– the music education classes where you learn to play every instrument in a family. So, the lab band is made up of very competent musicians, all of whom are playing instruments they don’t know how to play! (Last year I took Brass tech and played French Horn in lab band.) That combination of musical expertise and technical uselessness makes for kind of a unique group, which by the end of the semester usually progresses to the point that it could pass as a reasonably advanced high school band. On Tuesday I conducted the Lab band for the first time, which was my very first experience conducting people! Of course it was rather different from conducting the recordings we’ve been doing in class… for instance, I felt kind of silly even bothering to indicate dynamics at all, since I knew that they knew that their dynamic range consisted of “on” or “off”, and even the “on” option was still a little beyond a few sections. However, there’s no point in just standing there beating time when the experience is supposed to help me improve as a conductor! Later in the semester, we get to try conducting the Wind Symphony, and the members of that group get to vote on which members of the conducting class they would like to conduct a movement each from the Candide Suite in their concert! (The movement I’m preparing is Glitter and be Gay, which was a terrible choice because it’s been stuck in my head for the past month and it’s starting to get irritating.) The Wind Symphony, along with the Contemporary Music Ensemble and the McGill Symphony Orchestra, is one of the credited large ensembles at McGill, and I played in it for the first two years of my degree so I remember this process from the other side! The Wind Symphony conductor, Alain Cazes, is also the conducting teacher, so he prepares the piece with the ensemble before the student conductors get to have a go at it. Although of course I can’t know if I’ll be voted to conduct in the concert, everyone gets to go through their movement with the group at least once, so it’ll be interesting to see the differences between how the lab Band responds to movement and how the Wind Symphony responds. Although we have lots of classes in the undergraduate program that are supposed to somehow improve you as a general musician, and even a series of required classes entitled “musicianship” (it’s solfege, okay, the class is about learning fixed-do solfege) Alain’s conducting classes are the first non-performance classes I’ve taken that I really feel fulfill that purpose. Learning about the intricate connection of movement to sound and expression to technique isn’t something we really spend time on other academic classes. With Alain we watch a lot of videos of great conductors and great orchestras, and he is always telling us stories about the conductors he’s worked with as a tuba player in L’Orchestre Metropolitain and elsewhere. Even though the class is technically supposed to be to train high school band teachers, he makes it relevant and important to all musicians. I’ve found that of a lot of my Music Education classes, actually; although they’re not required or even often allowed for students in the Performance program, they’ve been some of the most worthwhile classes of my degree.
Last week, a violinist in the Mcgill Symphony stood up before rehearsal started an announced that Jennifer Johnson, a body mapping teacher and Andover Educator, would be coming to McGill to do a body mapping workshop on the weekend. I had seen a few of these workshops being advertised: they’re the ones called “What Every Musician Needs to know About the Body”, and are run by an association of hybrid Alexander technique/music teachers who focus on teaching practical anatomy lessons to musicians. Although I have been taking a few lessons in Alexander technique recently, I hadn’t looked into the Andover educators in part because it seemed like a much more, well, commercialized venture. Unlike the Alexander technique, which is simply a discipline of study, “Andover Educators” is a company, and is upfront about selling goods, mostly books with the title “What every (insert instrumentalist here) needs to know About The Body” and “The Breathing Book for (instrument).” So, to be honest, my question about Andover was– are they just taking advantage of musicians’ insecurities about their body-use to sell them stuff? Nope. It’s true that, having decided to try it out, I did spend $140 that weekend– $100 for the workshop fee, and another $40 for a private lesson with Jennifer. But after about fifteen years in music lessons of some kind, most of it being spent being given massively contradictory and often simply untrue information about how a body works and how one might be employed in the service of music-making, I would have been willing to pay pretty much any amount of money for the information Jennifer was selling. Of course, I can’t claim to have truly absorbed even a fraction of what was taught in the workshop– that’s the work of a lifetime! But I no longer feel the need to have private lessons that go like this (compiled from the past few years of my life): Me: am I breathing right? Am I doing it right now? I don’t think I’m doing it right. *tries really hard* Teacher: Breathe with your belly! Me: But there are no lungs in my… okay… *tries even harder* Teacher: Yeah. Sure. Good. Watching you breathe is boring, now let’s play bassoon. Me: But every time I try to play bassoon I have to breathe first! Okay my stomach is like poking out now, that’s good right? Only I can’t get through any phrases. Are my shoulders moving? I think my shoulders are moving. That’s bad right? Teacher: Keep your shoulders down. Other Teacher: I don’t know, I think maybe your shoulders can move a little bit? Yet Another teacher: Fill the bottom of your lungs first! Then your shoulders won’t be a problem. Frustrated teacher: I think you’re over-thinking this. Me: The only conclusion I can draw from all of this is that I just don’t know how to breathe. I am bad at breathing. Ben Kamins: you have survived twenty years in planet earth and spent all of it breathing. You are not bad at breathing. You are, by definition, an expert at breathing. Me: okay, then something’s gone wrong. Jennifer: SLOOOOOWWW DOWWWWWWNNNNN (hehe remember this? http://youtu.be/qRuNxHqwazs ) So here are some things I learned: Air comes into your body when your ribs move. Your ribs are like the handle on a bucket: they swing outwards, increasing the volume of the space inside of them. The lungs are connected to the ribs simply because there is nothing in between them: they move with the ribs because of vacuum pressure. Although many people have their torso mapped as essentially square, it’s more beehive-shaped: the top of the beehive is made up of your top ribs, which also open to allow air in– meaning the top portion of the back should expand outwards upon inhalation. The air– as I had always suspected– does indeed go into your lungs, not your stomach, as generations of wind pedagogues seem to think. Because of the bronchial tree leading to the alveoli, the idea that you can fill the bottom of your lungs before the top is a fantasy. And, as Jennifer said, “When you have an inaccurate fantasy about the way your body works, your body will use any kind of tension possible to try to make that fantasy come true.” In my private lesson, Jennifer had me put my hands on her back and shoulders and feel that the top back ribs were expanding outwards quite a bit, and that– the horror!– her shoulders were moving freely with the action of the ribs. She explained that the “don’t move your shoulders” myth takes place because, when people are already using unnecessary tension to try to breathe with their belly or use their diaphragm (a muscle which has no sense receptors) they’ll compensate by using the muscles in their arm region to raise the shoulders. Instead, the solution is to allow the shoulders to ride on the action of the ribs. Likewise, when breathing out, there is no need to push the air out with the muscles of the stomach. This seems to contradict the idea of supporting from your abdomen, and I’m still a little bit confused about how this principle would work when back-pressure is involved, as when playing a wind instrument. Since Jennifer is a violinist (she wrote “What Every Violinist Needs to know About the Body”) she had no specific answer for me on that point, but referred me to oboist Stephen Caplan’s book (titled, unsurprisingly, “Oboemotions: What Every Oboe player Needs to know About the Body”) and encouraged me to email him with any more wind-specific questions. Of course, I have barely even begun to be able to employ all of this in my playing. However, for the past few months, I had been growing increasingly uncomfortable in my daily life about my breathing. Even when not playing bassoon– sitting in class, for example– I would start to worry: am I doing it right? How much air am I taking in now? What’s my belly doing? What are my shoulders doing? After a few minutes of this line of inquiry it would start to feel like I had suddenly developed some kind of lung disease that rendered me completely incapable of breathing in a way that didn’t cause me discomfort! This was one reason that I finally decided to go for the workshop: it’s undesirable to be in discomfort or pain while you’re playing, but completely unacceptable to have it leaking into all other areas of your life. Anyway, I’m happy to report that as I sit here typing this blog post, I can feel the air being transported efficiently and comfortably from the outside world to my lungs and back again. :D Most of the workshop wasn’t spent on breathing, though– the audience was actually all string players except for me and one saxophonist, and there was a large contingent of Suzuki violin teachers, so a lot of the information was tailored for them. I didn’t really mind since everything was transferable (and I was a Suzuki student myself back in the day!) Here are some more items from my notes: - the “body map” is not a metaphor. Jennifer said that she always liked coming to Montreal because everyone recognizes the name of Dr. Wilder Penfield, the Canadian neurosurgeon who developed the first concepts of the cortical homunculus . (The reason his name is recognized among laymen in Montreal is that Avenue Docteur Penfield, named in his honour, runs through the northern portion of the McGill campus.) - the kinaesthetic sense is a real sense, that has been neglected in most education systems and needs to be trained by musicians just as we train our sense of hearing. - 2 cultural diseases affecting the health of our bodies: “Relax” and “Good posture”. - Although we tend to map the spine as something that exists towards the back of the body because that’s where we can see and feel the bumps in out skin, it is actually quite central. It’s also way thicker than you would expect– if I had my own spine out of my body, I wouldn’t be able to wrap my hand all the way around it at its thickest point! - The spine is also longer than we think. It ends at the top with the A.O joint. To find out where that is, put your fingers in the dent under your ears– it’s between them. - when you sit, your weight should be on the thick portion of your rockers (sit bones)– not your thighs. I wonder how this could be better achieved when using a seat strap to hold up this bassoon? -most people lean too far back in a standing posture. To find balance, try walking backwards, and see how your posture shifts. -there is no such things the palm of your hand. If you look at a diagram of the bones in your hand, you will see that this is true. - there is also no such thing as a waist. - when at rest, the tongue should be between the bottom teeth and not touching the top palate. If it is touching the roof of the mouth, it is causing tension farther back in the head And there are a lot more things that I wrote down that I wouldn’t be able to explain, or don’t fully understand myself at this point. And obviously, don’t take it from me– I went to this workshop last weekend, and anything I wrote here could be inaccurate in my own understanding. If you have the opportunity, I definitely recommend seeing an Andover teacher. This information, tailored to musicians in this way, just isn’t available from any other source. I also found the actual demonstrations (which included a lot of hands-on work and use of plastic models to show what different bone structures actually look like in 3D) to be much easier to understand than just reading the literature– but if it’s literature you’re after there’s plenty of it, with a “What Every…” or a Breathing Book for many instruments and more being written right now. Here’s a schedule for all the Andover workshops taking place all over the world, and here is their recommended reading list. That’s all folks!
Well, as my mom said, I guess I wrote my annual review too soon. One more thing to add to the negative column…
I’m house-sitting starting today for a family in my neighbourhood that’s on vacation. They have a very needy/affectionate cat who likes to have someone around the house, so they wanted me to stay here to take care of the cat. When I got to the house today, I found a note from the mother explaining everything in the house and also one from the young daughter, asking me if I could also feed her hamster, Khloe. The hamster cage was in the living room; since I had been around the house before and hadn’t met the hamster, I assumed she had brought it down from her room to make sure I would see it.
I looked at the hamster; it was tiny and curled up asleep in the spinning wheel at the top of the cage. The cat was asking for food so I fed it (a more involved process than normal cats since it insists on food that is lump-free and warm :P) and then went back to meet the hamster. I touched the ball gently to wake her up. She didn’t move. I rocked it a little more and it was still… asleep? I spun the ball and the obviously dead hamster slid stiffly along the bottom of the wheel. She was cold and rigid, like she had been dead for several hours.
At first I was just kind of disbelieving. I got to my house-sitting job and found a dead hamster waiting for me. it was such a bizarre thing to happen. The family had only left earlier today. There was plenty of food in the cage and the cage was intact. What could have happened between then and now?
The only explanation I can think of is that maybe this was hamster Khloe’s first time in the living room and in close proximity to the cat. I’ve always been a big fan of rabbits (understatement of the century) and I knew already that rabbits have weak hearts and can actually be scared to death by the mere sight of a predator (which is why you should never leave your bunny outside unattended, even if it’s “safe” in a cage.) It would make sense if it were the same for hamsters. Maybe the sight of a fat, hungry cat wandering by her cage was just too much for poor Khloe’s heart.
At first the situation just seemed ridiculous, but it was really sad to have to shake her tiny body out of the tube leading to the wheel into my hand. Although it’s kind of gross to put a rodent body in right on top of the frozen peas– especially someone else’s frozen peas– I couldn’t think of anything to do but put her in a few ziploc bags in the freezer. The family isn’t coming back for almost a week and if I were the girl who was Khloe’s owner, I would want to bury her. So freezer it is.
Anyway. Now I’m melancholy over a hamster I never knew. I should go cuddle my stuffed rabbits. Goodnight…
One of my favourite blogs on the internet is Cal Newport’s Study Hacks. I’ll write later about the impact of Newport’s ideas on my life (and my struggles adopting a lot of them…) but one of the other blogs that I discovered through Study Hacks was Chris Guillebeau’s The Art of Non-Conformity. Every year, Guillebeau does something called an Annual Review. It’s kind of like doing New Year’s Resolutions, except it’s based on the facts of what actually happened last year and you actually think about how you’re going to carry out your goals for the next year. Wheee!
Guillebeau’s two main review questions are simple: what went well this year, and what did not go well this year?
What went well in 2013?
1. I started doing professional auditions, and won one.
In January, I did my first audition, for the Kitchener-Waterloo symphony. It was my first audition and even though I prepared well for it, I felt a little bit like I had to be unworthy of the process; after all, I was only in the third year of my undergrad, and most of the people there had been out of school for at least a few years (some for many, many years…) and/or had way more degrees than me. However, I advanced the the second round in the audition! So that gave me a pretty good feeling about auditions in general. The next one I did was for the Winnipeg Symphony, over the summer; I wrote about that process on this blog, and it was another positive audition experience. Then, in September, I auditioned for he Niagara symphony, with whom am now playing principal bassoon.
I’m now preparing for the Toronto Symphony associate principal audition in January. Considering this time last year I had no audition experience whatsoever, I feel good about having the confidence to apply for an audition at that level.
3. Completed my third and probably final summer with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. NYO was as integral a part of my musical education as university was, and now that my time at McGill is drawing to a close I feel that it’s time to move on from NYO as well. I look forward to coming back to hear their concerts every summer!
4. Although technically the first post on this blog was December 30, 2012, really 2013 was the first year I had a blog. During that time I have had no Facebook, twitter, tumblr, or internet in my apartment. Recently I also reduced my phone bill by more than half by negotiating a different plan on my phone which doesn’t have any data. I have definitely found that it is easier to go to bed on time and I read more books when I’m at home without the distraction of an internet connection. Cal Newport has written a lot about the connection between being deliberately un-connected and productivity; I have found this to be true for me.
5. Started going to the gym! Although a lot of people seem to hate the gym– and who knows, maybe this is just honeymoon period between me and the McGill Fitness Centre– for me it has actually been both fun and improved my lifestyle overall. I tend to be more productive in the morning, and I like to get to school as early as possible to start practicing. Unfortunately I also like to have long showers, and have long/thick hair that takes a long time to dry, so having a shower in the morning before school holds me up by quite a bit. So my new routine is this: I go to the gym around 7, after everything is wrapped up at school. When I get home I shower and have plenty of time to read/let my hair dry before bed. Then in the morning I can get up and go straight to school!
It seems like a trivial change, but making the most of my peak productivity hours– and getting more exercise while I’m at it– has made a big difference. (I could do this without the gym, of course, but it seems to fit into the schedule well. And obviously if I have a rehearsal at night I just have a shower before bed.)
What did not go well in 2013?
Honestly… the entire past month of my life didn’t really go as planned. Going into the end of November/beginning of December, I knew it would be more hectic than usual: I had three programs with Niagara, an MGSO concert, three chamber performances with two different groups, a few different gigs and substitute teaching jobs, a trip to Houston for which I wanted to be at the top of my game, and finals for more academic courses than I would have liked to be taking. But I thought I had it planned out. Then, one night as I was tidying up the reed room and about to go home for the night, I got a call from my former roommate, Sara, conveying news she had just seen on Facebook (which I don’t have, thus the call.) One of my most special friends from high school had just died. Monica was an amazing person and my high school years–and my life– would have been very different without her. We had drifted apart in the years after I graduated, and reconnected just two weeks before her death. I was shocked. Sara said that her funeral was that week, in Toronto. At first I panicked. There was no way I could make it to Toronto for the funeral; my schedule said it simply wasn’t possible. The next day I decided it didn’t matter; none of the things I had in my schedule would matter in fifty years, but I would always regret it if I chose not to go to Monica’s funeral. So I cancelled two gigs, miraculously re-scheduled an audition, got an extension on a paper, tried and failed to find a sub for an MGSO rehearsal, and tried to forget about everything else that I didn’t have time to figure out. I got back to Montreal from the funeral an hour before my dress rehearsal for the Poulenc sextet, played a sextet concert that night, played another sextet concert the next day, left for a Niagara masterworks show the next day, came back just in time to play Till Eulenspiegal Einmal Anders (like… at three in the morning the day of he concert), turned in three final assignments, played two MGSO concerts, played the ensemble re-audition, had a lesson, went to Houston, came back to Montreal, spent 12 hours in Montreal before taking the bus to Toronto, spent the weekend playing Christmas music and being snowed into St. Catherine’s, and got back to Montreal an hour before I was scheduled to write the theory exam that I had missed at some point during all of this. Finally, I took the bus one more time to Toronto for the holidays.
Needless to say, some things (a lot of things) fell by the wayside. I didn’t feel particularly proud of any of my performances during that period; I didn’t even have time to practice the most urgent music, let alone get the early start I wanted on the TSO audition excerpts. Almost all of my assignments were handed in at the exact last moment before he due date; I hardly studied for the theory exam at all and was amazed to get a B in the course after I did things like answer a question on the structure of Stockhausen’s In Freundschaft with “I don’t know, but the bassoon version of In Freundschaft is to be played while wearing a teddy bear costume!” Basically, it was just a long period of time where I wasn’t exactly embarrassing myself, everything went sort of acceptably, but I just wasn’t really putting my best foot forward.
So… what went wrong? I think probably Study Hacks would say that it was a lack of planning that made it so that one disaster could throw off the whole period of time. If I had already finished my paper, model composition, combo chart, and conducting analysis a few weeks before the deadline– or at least had them started– it wouldn’t have been such a big crunch. If I had been studying every week’s material after each theory lecture, it wouldn’t have mattered that I didn’t have time to study before the exam. If I kept a large enough stockpile of blanks at all times, being constantly on the road wouldn’t throw off my reedmaking and thus my overall playing too much.
How to make all those things happen? (AKA, Goals for 2014)
One way I definitely want to implement is Cal Newport’s Sunday Ritual. The idea of the Sunday Ritual is that you need to put aside time each week (Newport suggests Sunday morning) where you look everything you have to do square in the eye. To me this is related to the idea of full capture. It’s scary to hold every single thing you have to do in every area of your life in your brain at the same time. It’s way easier to just think about the most urgent things, and forget about the less urgent things until they become more urgent. Except it’s not actually easier, because then your entire life can be knocked off balance by one urgent necessity. The Sunday ritual ensures that even if you have one hectic week, you can still get back on track. And if you realize that you have an extra-light week, maybe even use it to get ahead on work and give yourself some leeway later.
Another thing I want to get better at is budgeting. This year, I finally learned how to make a budget (as in, how to actually put numbers into a spreadsheet such that you can change a number and the number projected for the future changes.) I admit this is a pretty basic financial skill to be making a resolution about, but I didn’t have it before. So. I leaned how to actually make the budget, but never quite got the hang of being really consistent about updating it. In 2014, I want to not only keep the budget absolutely up to date with every purchase and bit of income, decide where to put savings money in advance, and also put aside money specifically for unplanned really bad things happening. I will make this a part of my routine every night: before I go to bed (or more likely before I leave school for the day, since I don’t have internet at home or data on my phone) I’ll look at the budget, update it with any purchases or income, and even if I don’t have anything to update just look at the numbers and make sure everything’s in order and everything is planned for.
My last goal for 2014 is to really get it together with my sleep schedule. I tend to fluctuate between two different attitudes towards bedtime: getting eight hours of sleep no matter what time I go to bed, and getting up at a fixed time no matter what time I go to bed. The problem is I never stick with either for long enough to really get into the rhythm of it. I think the latter is probably a better plan– I’m pretty good at getting to bed on time when I can, so after a while I think I would be able to get used to getting up at, say, 7 am even on weekends. I used to try to get up at 6, but somehow the difference between getting up at 6 every day and getting up at 7 every day seems larger than just an hour, and the 6 am wake-up routine never worked out for longer than a month or so. 7 is more reasonable but still early enough to make it on time for almost any regularly scheduled activity.
Three is probably a good number of goals, and although I guess this isn’t a long post by the standards of blog-land I’m pretty sure it’s the longest one on this blog…. so, that’s all, folks! Best of luck in 2014!
So last night there was a huge ice storm in Ontario. It made everything look very festive! Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of people don’t have power now, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting it back for a few days. Although our street is out, Bloor street has power, so my brother and I are up at Starbucks right now, sitting next to a gaggle of desperate folk who hauled in their printer from home and set it up here… hey, when ya gotta print, ya gotta print. Maybe when I get home I’ll borrow my dad’s head lamp to practice excerpts… Update: scruffy dude across the room shouting, “He’s not stealing money! He’s using his OWN money to smoke crack! So who cares! If he really is a crackhead…. WHERE IS THE VIDEO?”
Check out the pictures from the NSO’s holiday pops and family concerts on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbabij/sets/72157638763933986/http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbabij/sets/72157638765859823/http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbabij/sets/72157638765363575/ I especially like the angle on the tinsel and light-up icicles that Cathi brought as decorations for our bells. :P And the maestro’s spiffy guitar and guitar-playing jacket. A few days ago my family also played a concert/sing-along at the Runnymede hospital. My dad played piano, my mom flute, my brother viola and obviously I played bassoon. (Perhaps not so obviously… my mom suggested that I go play Christmas carols at my brother’s school on violin… an instrument I haven’t practiced for about five years.) It seemed like the patients enjoyed it, although my dad’s jazz-inspired improvisational wanderings based on popular Christmas carols certainly confused a few who were expecting a simple sing-along! Now that (most of) the crazy travelling is done I can finally focus just on the Toronto Symphony audition, which is coming up in less than a month! Also learning my parts for the next MGSO concert– principal on Bruckner’s 2nd symphony and Janacek’s From The House of the Dead overture. My recital is also coming up next semester, which will be my last semester at McGill! Aaa! (Yesssssssssss…..) I have the program mostly planned, and have already performed half of the repertoire and started working on some of the rest. Still– at McGill you only have one official recital during your degree (as well as two juries performed just for a panel of professors) so this will be my first time doing an entire recital all by myself. So I’m sure I’ll be writing more about that as the time approaches…
Coming to your from a megabus somewhere in between Kingston and Toronto… I just got back from Houston, Texas! My hotel wasn’t that close to Rice, but I decided to walk it anyway. Google directed me to a route almost entirely on residential streets with huge, nice houses and PALM TREES where I felt very safe (except for the omnipresent Canadian semi-disbelief at the idea that at least some of the houses I was walking past probably contained guns.) I also had my final chamber music performances of the semester last week. My quintet– by quintet, I mean violin, clarinet, horn, bassoon and double bass!– performed an arrangement/parody of Till Eulenspiegel entitled Till Eulenspiegel Einmal Anders (Another Way), and my sextet performed the Poulenc two nights in a row on different concerts. The last concert of the Poulenc was also my last time playing chamber music at McGill with our oboist, Alana Henkel. Alana is an amazing oboist and equally good English horn player who just graduated from her Masters’ and left this weekend to start the next phase of her life in Minnesota with her husband. You can find her at http://alanahenkel.com –she is an excellent musician and a wonderful person and I highly recommend her if you need an oboist in her area! This week I have family and pops concerts in Niagara, go back to Montreal to make up the theory exam I’m missing the day after tomorrow, and then finally back to Toronto for the holidays!
I just got my copy of the CD that the NYOC recorded this summer, and am very excited to listen to it! We spent two days recording in the Multi-Media Room at McGill, and the CD includes Mahler’s Ninth symphony and the commissioned work for this year, which was written by McGill student James O’Callaghan. It doesn’t seem to be up on iTunes yet bu you can buy a physical copy here !
Yesterday, the musicians of the McGill Symphony orchestra (well over a hundred of us!) played to a nearly full house at Maison Symphonique, the home of the OSM in Montreal’s place Des Arts. Here is some media coverage of the event– Claude Gingras says it best in his last paragraph: Année après année, Hauser anime avec la même passion cet orchestre constamment renouvelé. Les effectifs changent, forcément, mais le résultat demeure toujours du plus haut niveau. On ne voit vraiment pas qui pourrait remplacer Alexis Hauser à McGill! (Year after year, Hauser animates the constantly renewed orchestra with the same passion. The players change, but the result is always at the highest level. It is difficult to see who could ever replace Alexis Hauser at McGill!) I feel incredibly grateful to have been able to play in Hauser’s orchestra for the last two years of my time at McGill. His energy, musical intelligence and kindness are inspirational to all the students he conducts, and I look forward to another semester-and-one-third of music-making at McGill!