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!
Recently, I got a new toy! It’s an MD Reeds profiler, which I ordered at the end of last school year after a period of some, although by no means exhaustive, research of the profiler market. I admit I was partly lured in my the shiny price tag– at $600, it’s less than half the price of a lot of the other models I was looking at. Since it seems to be getting generally good reviews from the bassoon community and some people are even saying the design is an improvement on existing models, I decided to give it a go. I’m only just in the process of finishing my first batch of reeds with the new profiler, and since I’ve only ever used two profilers before (the Ben Bell profiler we have at school and a borrowed Popkin to top off my cane supply this summer) I’m probably not in the best position go give a comprehensive review. However, it seems top be working great for me so far. Since I had never set up a profiler on my own before, I definitely appreciated how easy the MD model is to adjust– for instance, I didn’t know where I would want the ramp to be, so I just made a bunch of cane of a few different settings, changing them quickly and easily using the click-wheel underneath the ramp. Now I just need to buy a shaper and then I can make reeds completely independently of the school’s equipment, which will be nice since they have pretty strict rules about when you can sign it out and bring it back. Yay!
I played my first concert with the Niagara Symphony Orchestra last over the weekend. Here’s some local news coverage of the show: http://youtu.be/QnWJrB93auw
As well as going to school for bassoon, I am also doing a minor in the Music Education program at McGill. Due to extremely poor course planning on my own part, I only officially added the minor to my program this year. However, I had taken music education courses in the past, played in shows conducted by an excellent conductor in the education program who recruited mostly education students for his pit orchestras (well, no bassoonists in the education program anyway), attended workshops hosted by the music education council (there was an awesome one last year where some drumline guys came in and taught a bunch of us simple drumline patterns, an activity which due to the sheer amount of noise involved I suspect is probably better suited to a football field than a classroom) and went to the parties and events hosted by the music ed council. However, now that its actually on my transcript I have quite a few music ed classes to finish up this year before I graduate. Among them are two conducting classes: Basic conducting this semester, which is exactly as the name would suggest, and Instrumental conducting next semester, which is where you get to conduct the “lab band” made up of the students learning secondary instruments in the wind, brass and percussion techniques classes. (I played french horn in the lab band last year while I was taking Brass tech! :P ) I’m preparing for the first practical test in Basic conducting this week, and I have to say it’s kind of kicking my ass. The simplest thing, such as making it clear in advance that the next beat will be legato and not marcato like the previous beats, looks awkward and completely unfollowable when I conduct the test material in front of a mirror. Even the beat patterns, which I hardly had to think about when we did conduct + sing assignments in musicianship/aural skills class, just don’t look quite good enough when I have a baton in my hand. (Also, I already broke my baton. Oops. I was very disappointed to find that there was in fact no unicorn hair inside of it, or indeed any other magical object appropriate to a wand core. That’s what you get for $10 I suppose. It is now sporting some classy yellow electrical tape.) I’m trying to approach the 5-10 bar fragments that we have to conduct for our test like I would prepare an excerpt. First I need to think of the tempo that’s indicated based on a melody I know I can call to mind in the correct tempo. I’m using the opening of the Mozart concerto for the two fragments that are around 60, the opening of the Poulenc sextet for the one that’s around 132, and Beethoven 4 for the one that’s at 80. None of these are entirely satisfactory since the tempi are all a tiny (hopefully unnoticeably) bit off from the indicated tempi and none of the moods or time signatures match up to what I have to then conduct based on their tempo. However, I would rather use slightly less accurate pieces of which I’m used to having to remember the tempo than pieces that match exactly in metronome marking, character and meter but that I have to search for and call to mind with more difficulty. Then I have to remember to breathe! When I played in lab band, it always seemed like the silliest thing that none of the student conductors could ever remember to breathe with the ensemble. Now I understand that it’s actually hard to get used to breathing as if with the intention of making sound, and then… not producing any sound with the air you’ve taken in. After that, what I find most difficult about the actual conducting is being able to prepare character the next beat without taking over the character of the previous one. Fortunately, since I’m taking this class later in my degree than I would have if I had planned to do the minor from the start, I know lots of other students who have finished that class and gone on to more conducting classes. I’m meeting with a friend tomorrow night to conduct for her. Hopefully I’ll feel comfortable with the basics soon! In other news, this weekend was the first MGSO concert of the year. The program was Verdi’s Forza del Destino, the Ginastera Harp Concerto, and Dvorak 8. My only part for that concert was principal in the harp concerto, which was awesome since it was a unique piece to get to play and the schedule gave me lots of free time. However, today we had out first rehearsal for the next concert, including an initial run through of Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2. This concert I’m playing principal on that and on a piece by Kaija Saariaho which involves quite a lot of spoken German in the wind parts, and third on the overture to the third act of Lohengrin. So I have more work in orchestra this semester, but that’s okay since this concert will be at Maison Symphonique! Okay… now back to trying to figure out how to conduct fermatas.
Oops… I haven’t written here in a while. In that time, things have happened! First, the last week of the summer I went to camp! The Interprovincial Music Camp is a terrific camp outside of Parry Sound which I attended as a student in high school. Fraser Jackson, the contrabassoonist of the Toronto Symphony, was on faculty there, and after my first year at the camp I became his student and stayed in his studio until I left for university. Then, last year, Fraser emailed me and asked if I would like to come back to camp as his Faculty Assistant. Every faculty member is allowed to choose an assistant, usually a university-aged student of theirs or a young professional player, to teach with them at camp. So this was my second year doing that and it was awesome! As well as being a great experience teaching, it’s also lots of fun because all of the faculty assistants, many of us who know each other from school or summer festivals, live together in two big cabins near the entrance to the camp, with our own fire pit and easy access to the lake. Unlike the camp councillors, who are usually similar in age, the faculty assistants have no responsibilities to deal with the campers other than in strictly musical contexts, whereas the councillors have to take care of a cabin full of kids and– having been a camper, I can imagine how difficult and frustrating this must be– keep them quiet at night. Because there aren’t usually too many bassoon students, I also get lots of time to practice at camp, which is awesome since the camp takes place the week before the return to school and thus the auditions for the university ensembles. One of my favourite things to do at camp is practice outside, which you sure can’t do in Montreal for most of the year! I was happy with how the audition at school went, and although this concert I’m only playing one piece (principal on the Ginastera Harp concerto) next concert I get to play principal on Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2– and at Maison Symphonnique, instead of McGill’s Pollack Hall where the McGill Symphony Orchestra usually plays! Then, two days ago, I did another audition, for the Niagara Symphony Orchestra in St. Catherine’s, for whom I’m happy to say I am now principal bassoon! The audition day was a doubleheader in which they hired for both principal oboe and bassoon, and I’m really excited to play my first concert with them in almost exactly a month (they had already hired a bassoon and oboe for the first concert, so myself and the winner of the oboe audition are playing our first show on the second concert of the season.) However, I don’t have a contract or a detailed rehearsal schedule yet, so it remains to be seen how much I’m going to have to wiggle out of McGill obligations for Niagara stuff! Now I can finally take a break from practicing excerpts (except for Rite of Spring– since the MGSO is playing it on the last concert of the first semester, the McGill bassoon studio is holding a separate audition for the principal part that will take place some time later in the semester) and focus on Bach’s 2nd cello suite, which I will play in a masterclass for Nadina Mackie Jackson next week. She is coming to perform the bassoon sequenza in an enormous Berio extravaganza concert next Friday. I actually love Berio, so I’m really excited to hear it! (Check out my colleague from this summer, Sam Fraser, performing a hilarious comedy act entitled “The Lost Berio Sequenza” at the NYO talent show this summer: http://youtu.be/DMUoqpLzqJU )