Yesterday I went to Kitchener to hear the Kitchener-Waterloo symphony play Symphonie Fantastique. The orchestra sounded great and Center in the Square is a really fun hall to go to– it has beautiful acoustics, seems to always be well-attended and also somehow cultivates the kind of community vibe that you feel walking into a summer show at Tanglewood or similar. Since NYO is training at Laurier this summer, it was nice to see the city of Kitchener-Waterloo as well. Dinner before the show came from Imbibe,the bar/restaurant beside the Conrad Center, and this morning was Matter of Taste, followed by brunch at Rise and Shine, a diner on the Waterloo side of the city divide. I briefly got to see the Laurier music building, from the outside, and am excited to hang out there this summer! I have actually been there before; in my last year of high school I visited the school and did a mock audition, which was an incredibly nice thing for the music school to do– give potential students the opportunity to see the school and practice auditioning there. I was even met and shown around by two bassoon students there. This was, in fact, the only school visit I did, and only because it was close. I was a somewhat negligent Gr. 12 student, in comparison with some of my friends who were doing university tours all over the country in the 11th and even 10th grades, and I actually never set foot in the McGill music building before my audition. In fact I didn’t end up going to the real Laurier audition, but it was fun to look around. It was good to hear the Berlioz live this weekend since I’ve even practicing the excerpts from it. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid having to learn Symphonie Fantastique properly until now, but I’m preparing for the Winnipeg Symphony second bassoon audition and the excerpts have finally caught up to me. The audition itself I’m not 100% sure about yet– it’s on June 30, which is a week after NYO starts but on a day which when I checked last was tentatively scheduled as a day off. It also means that I have exactly a month to prepare for this one, whereas for KW I had three months and definitely needed all of them. However, this time I have done one audition that I had a good experience at, and although there are more pieces listed for Winnipeg than KW there are bar numbers instead of whole movements given, which is nice. The other pieces on the program at KW last night were a Beethoven piano concerto– played by the boyfriend of a violist on the India trip, whaddaya know?– and an orchestral arrangement of Vivier’s Pulau Duwata_._
So, I didn’t exactly post all the time from India as I had planned. We only had internet some of the time, my bluetooth keyboard ran out of batteries, and, well, I didn’t feel like it. So here’s a few things, although by no means an exhaustive discussion, of the NYOC’s time in India. The Good Last Saturday, the Canada-India youth orchestra played in Chowdiah Memorial Hall in Bangalore, the culmination of a week of rehearsals. The first item on the program was the Bach Double violin concerto with the solos played by Mark Fewer, the Canadian violin faculty, and Ashley Rego, a student from the Indian National Youth Orchestra who also taught and mentored many of the other students in the orchestra from his hometown, Goa. The second item was the Pulcinella Suite, performed by the Canadian contingent. The third was a piece basis heavily on improvisation on traditional Indian tunes and songs written by some of the Indian students, with several soloists from the orchestra as well as a fantastic tabla player as a soloist. Finally, we played Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Chowdiah Memorial was perhaps one of the most interesting spaces I’ve ever played in, if not the most acoustically luxurious; it is shaped like a six-string violin, with the main hall residing in the body of the instrument, the fingerboard stretching above as an entrance, and even a scaled-up replica of Carnatic violinist Tirumakudalu Chowdiah’s bow. You can even see this from satellite pictures by searching for the hall on Google Maps! I was lucky to have two roommates for the trip in the club where we stayed: a flutist from my school from the Canadian orchestra, and a violinist from Pune from the Indian orchestra. I feel incredibly fortunate in this regard as my room was one of the very few rooms which had both Canadian and Indian students, as many of the Indian students weren’t staying at the club with the Canadians. There were very few Indian wind players, and even many of the Canadian string players to whom I spoke said that they wished there had been more opportunities for connection between the two sides of the orchestra, so my roommate was the one Indian student with whom I was really able to forge a lasting friendship. Our discussions covered subjects as wide as our musical beginnings in our respective Suzuki violin programs, the new Star Trek movie, the effect of British colonialism in India, violin hickeys, and differences in the style of dress between generations of Indian women. She took us on a terrifying auto-rickshaw drive to the movies and led us back walking through the streets of Bangalore at night-time (repeatedly reminding us hapless Canadians who naturally gravitated towards walking on the sidewalk to please come back onto the road, it is really much safer…) Overall, my friendship with her was the most worthwhile and rewarding part of the trip, and I am incredibly grateful to have had that opportunity. The Bad Playing-wise, this was probably the least intensive summer program I’ve ever attended. It had to be: after a few rehearsals, the Canadian side of the orchestra started dropping like flies and rehearsals had to be cut down to only a few hours a day. Traveler’s diarrhea, unexplained vomiting, heat exhaustion, food poisoning– almost everyone came down with something at least once during the trip. The lucky ones got it over with in the first few days of the trip, while a large group of people (including myself) somehow managed to put off falling ill… until the morning of the concert. This kind of thing was pretty much inevitable. The food was a constant source of worry for everyone. Of course, being in a foreign country, one wants to jump right into the local cuisine; and the meals we were served indeed gave us the chance to do that. However, in a setting where we had more demanding tasks to perform than sightseeing, we also all knew that being sick would be highly inconvenient. Most of the food we were given was some variation on the theme of “white rice with sauce.” Any raw vegetables or fruits were out of the question due to the fear of e. coli, so a strange paradigm began to emerge in which salad is unacceptably bad for you whereas soda, seeing as it contains calories and is guaranteed not to poison you, is health food. Of course, this kind of eating led to a state of affairs in which constantly feeling lethargic and unwell was the norm, even when not officially sick. I happened to get sickest right in time for the final concert, but since there wasn’t really anyone else available to replace me, it didn’t really matter.
For the past two years I have been playing in the summer with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, a summer program running about a month and a half in length and including a chamber session, orchestral training session, and tour (usually to mostly cities in Canada and one or two in the US.) I will be playing in the orchestra again this summer, but before the session itself starts in June there is another fantastic thing that I get to do as a result of this program– the CIYO, Canada-India Youth Orchestra. This is a collaboration between the NYOC and the Indian National Youth Orchestra, and involves two phases. Last summer, four string players from the INYO came to London, Ontario to train and tour with us in the NYOC. This summer, about 30 Canadians pulled from the past 3 or so years of NYOC rosters, including myself, will be traveling to India to join with the INYO for two weeks of rehearsal and concerts. Tonight the orchestra members, staff, and donors attended a reception hosted at the Toronto Dominion Centre, and tomorrow we leave from Toronto and travel for nearly a full day, including a layover at Heathrow, landing in Bangalore to begin probably the most exciting orchestral adventure that any of us have ever been a part of! Happy summer!
My jury is played, final assignment turned in, and I’m back at my parents’ house in Toronto learning to drive and practicing the rep that I’ll be playing for the rest of the summer. So, here’s a partial (I’ve probably forgotten things…) list of repertoire I played this school year. In no particular order, and with a varied assortment of ensembles:
Berlioz: Corsair Overture (1st)
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto #1 (2nd)
Scheherazade (1st) -Beethoven 3 (2nd)
Stravinsky: Symphonies D’Instruments a Vents (2nd)
Stravinsky: Mass (1st)
Nielsen: Wind Quintet
Debussy: Nocturnes (2nd)
Petrushka (1st)
Tchaik 5, only the 3rd and 4th movements (1st)
Gounod: Petite Symphonie (1st)
D’Indy: Symphony on a French Mountain Air (1st)
The Miraculous Mandarin Suite (2nd)
Jennifer Higdon: Percussion Concerto (1st)
Claude Vivier: Orion (3rd)
Mozart Requiem (1st)
Parsifal: An Orchestral Quest (2nd) (a Canadian work, an hour-long orchestral arrangement of music from Parsifal which was utterly wonderful)
Paquito D’Riviera: Aires Tropicales for woodwind quintet
My big project for the first semester was the KW audition and for the second was my jury, for which I played the Osborne rhapsody, Saent-Saens Sonata, a Vivaldi concerto, and the Tansman Sonatine.
Tonight I was practicing a passage in the Saint-Saens Sonata that I was having trouble with; I thought I had worked it out a few weeks ago, but somehow the sloppiness had crept back in. I was frustrated with how I was practicing it– a few boring rhythms, inching the metronome up by a number of clicks that always either seemed so slow as to be agonizing or too fast to be doing much good– had had been thinking recently (prompted by overdosing on The Bulletproof Musician and Study Hacks blogs) about how to improve my use of my time in my practice. After reading a few trumpet player’s obituaries and remembrances of great CSO trumpeter Bud Herseth, I had been reading over recently a page called “Bud Herseth Lesson Notes”, and noticed that he emphasized playing only on the mouthpiece quite a bit. I began to wonder what the woodwind equivalent would be. I know that I can’t play the Saent-Saens sonata only on my reed, but– doh– I can play it only on my mouth! Singing your part is something that everyone, including me, knows you should do, but I rarely hear people singing their music in the practice rooms at school– sometimes brass players, but never woodwinds, and I had certainly never done it. Sure enough, when I tried to sing the line, it came out a jumbled mess. So I practiced singing it slowly, while watching the music and playing the notes with my fingers. I discovered I could even sing wrong notes when watching the music– many of the middle Gs often came out as an A! Once I had corrected this, and gotten my singing up to a reasonable tempo (not quite the final tempo, which is a little past the limits of my vocal technique…) I found I was able to put the run together on bassoon with much more ease. I wonder how much easier the movement would be if I had learned to sing the whole thing before ever putting it on the bassoon… I guess the moral of the story is, those things that everyone knows you should do? I should do them.
You know how there are some books that you walk out of totally convinced that if only everyone read that book, maybe the world and all of humanity could be saved from itself? The kind of book that makes you want to drop everything and become a high school English teacher just so that you can make the greatest number of people possible to take a crack at it? I finished one such book recently, which I picked up in the second-hand bookstore across from the Conrad Centre in KW. Freeman Dyson’s Disturbing The Universe is the kind of book that defies explanation. It isn’t about anything, really. Well, it’s autobiographical, but only in the sense that Dyson’s life has encompassed so many experiences and thoughts that it is the best springboard he has for a general discussion of all of the things that are. I first heard of the Dyson family through George Dyson, Freeman’s son, who wrote a book (which I read on the recommendation found in an article by Neal Stephenson) called Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. This book is in part based on the experiences of his father, who worked on the project, and is fascinating in a “how on earth have I never heard of this before????” kind of way. Disturbing the Universe touches on Orion, as well as Freeman Dyson’s work during the second world war (not on the Manhattan Project, although he fell in with that crowd very shortly afterwards), space travel in general, the implications of advances in biology, and many more subjects which are always treated in discussion with reference to objects of art, which is unusual and refreshing for a book written by a physicist. This is perhaps not surprising, though, for Freeman Dyson’s father– also named George– was a composer and the Director of the Royal College of Music during the war (and responsible for keeping it open for the duration of the war, against the wishes of the government.) Although I admit I haven’t made a thorough study of his music, I was quite struck by his Concerto da Chiesa for string orchestra, which opens with a fantasy on the chant Veni, Veni Emmanuel. So much for the background. There is very little to say about the actual content of Disturbing theUniverse save that, as with all great books, you have to read it if you actually want to know what it’s about; if it could be summarized efficiently what need would one have for the whole book? Perhaps you could have some use for this mystifying tidbit from it, typical of Dyson’s accounts of his interactions with his fellow distinguished physicists: “The first time I met Teller was in March 1949, when I talked to the physicists at the University of Chicago about the radiation theories of Schwinger and Feynman. I diplomatically gave high praise to Schwinger and then explained why Feynman’s methods were more useful and more illuminating. At the end of the lecture, the chairman called for questions from the audience. Teller asked the first question: ‘What would you think of a man who cried “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”, and then at once drank down a great tankard of wine?’ Since I remained speechless, Teller answered the question himself: ‘I would consider the man a very sensible fellow’.” Can’t argue with that kinda logic. Happy Easter!
About a month ago, I did my first professional audition, for the 2nd bassoon of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. All in all, it was not so different from an audition here at school. For the ensemble auditions in the bassoon studio at McGill, there are two rounds. In general, those who make it to the second round will be in the McGill Symphony Orchestra, and those who get cut after the first will be in the Wind Symphony or Contemporary Music Ensemble. For my first two auditions, I didn’t make it past the first round. So, when I made it into the second round for the first time, I was so pleased that I allowed my concentration to slip while playing the second round (which, I rationalized, didn’t matter since I had already made it into orchestra.) The next time, however, I was prepared to concentrate through both rounds and aim to win the audition or improve my standing instead of just being content with being in orchestra. In the KW audition, I made it into the second round and then got cut before the finals. I found much the same thing happened– since I didn’t want/feel prepared to take the job anyway, and since I hadn’t even really expected to make it into the semis, I wasn’t particularly concentrated while playing them and made some stupid mistakes. Of course, it’s impossible to say whether avoiding making those mistakes would have gotten me into the finals, but at least it would have been more because of the panel’s preferences and less a matter of having to cut me by default because I made an unacceptable number of mistakes. However, all in all it was a very positive experience, and left me wanting to do it again, with higher aspirations. The one thing I will do next time that I should have this time was to check my hotel room for anything that might keep me awake and get a room change as soon as possible if there are any problems. When I arrived it was extremely cold outside, and I was so glad to be a room with a heater that I didn’t think about the fact that the heater was extremely noisy and came on and off according to the temperature in the room with a clunk which, as I discovered when I went to bed, was loud enough to wake me up every time. At midnight I finally called the front desk and asked to be moved to a room with a different type of heater. I was settled in the new room at 12:30, asleep by 1… and slept through my alarm, waking up half an hour before my time slot in the audition began. Whoops! Luckily I played third in the time slot, so I actually had exactly the right amount of time to warm up and not enough to hang around getting nervous. I’ll hopefully be doing a similar audition next year…