Did you hear? That creep that everyone knew about, now, like, everyone everyone knows about! In the aftermath of these “revelations,” in all industries, it has become customary for the organization that hired and retained the individual in question to adopt a kind of collective wide-eyed expression, a shocked and innocent “oh goodness, I had no idea!” kind of passive horror.
The first irritating thing about this is how calculated and transparent it is. The second irritating thing is that it’s difficult to prove it actually untrue. Did the CEO or the Board of Directors of an organization know that they were hiring and/or retaining a rapist, a child pornographer, a perpetrator of violent assault— in short, a criminal? Maybe they didn’t. (Maybe they didn’t look all that hard.) In some cases— USA Gymnastics, looking at you— they demonstrably did know, and just cared more about their own paycheques than about the well-being of the members of their organization. However, in some cases, as unlikely as it seems, one has to admit the possibility that they didn’t know. There’s a slim possibility that the bigwigs may not have known they were employing a criminal.
But there’s an easier question to ask these people, and a more difficult one to wiggle out of: did you know he was an asshole? Come on now. Really. Look me in the eye and tell me you had no idea he was an asshole. I double-dog dare you. This isn’t a spurious question. There is a strong correlation, it seems, between a powerful individual being an asshole, and a powerful individual being a criminal asshole. It makes sense that someone who treats people around them with casual disrespect is also likely to show disrespect in more serious ways. This is bad news for the orchestra business. The cult of personality surrounding the idea of the conductor is almost exclusively based on the difficult-to-define but immediately recognizable suite of traits broadly described as assholeishness. It’s such a ubiquitous trait on the podium— even in the leadership styles of people who are not assholes off the podium, and seemed to have specifically acquired the trait as a career-development move—that it’s actually somewhat jarring, as a musician, to encounter a kind, skilled and respectful human who also behaves that way while conducting. (Which jarring feeling, luckily for me, is fresh in my mind from my current gig.)
And look. There are asshole conductors that I like. There are asshole conductors who helped my career, or withheld their wrath from me individually in ways that were confidence-building. (Can anyone who exited the music education system with a modicum of confidence deny that at least some of it was built on a foundation of schadenfreude?) Do I think that everyone who’s rude on the podium is also a criminal? No. I don’t think so. Or at least, I hope not. I just wouldn’t be surprised, is all. It would be disingenuous to act surprised when someone who built their careers publicly terrorizing subordinates turns out to have also been terrorizing subordinates in private.
So what does this mean for musical organizations going forward? Can managers and board members evaluating potential hires start actually prioritizing hiring people who aren’t assholes? Are we finally going to stop saying things like, “yeah, he’s kind of an asshole, but he’s a good conductor…” for that matter, can we retire the term “brasshole” and the indulgent smiles that go with it? Being an asshole isn’t a criminal act. And despite what some suspiciously defensive dudes seem to think, nobody is trying to make it one. It’s just something which will—hopefully, in the future— mean that nobody wants to hire you. So they won’t have to pretend to be surprised by you later.
On my way to Regina, I stopped for a day in Thunder Bay, where I stayed with a friend from the orchestra. Hoping to get some exercise on my one day not spent sitting in a car, I went to the local climbing gym., Boulder Bear.
Climbing gyms are great because the eccentric demographic of people who enjoy climbing mountains (and, although this wasn’t the case in any of the climbing gyms I’ve been to in Southern Ontario, indoor climbing in Thunder Bay really is regarded mostly as a training regimen at best, or at worst a pale imitation of outdoor climbing) also tend to be game for pretty much any type of physical activity that presents itself. Thus, climbing gyms tend to have weight rooms as well as odds and ends of any other pieces of athletic equipment they can get their hands on. (In this case, they had just installed a trampoline, although the lack of safety net meant nobody was allowed to use it sans harness and extra fee.)
I did a quick leg workout and some bouldering, and then the owner of the gym mistook me for someone else and greeted me enthusiastically. Once we had sorted out that we didn’t in fact know each other, he invited me on an outdoor climb that some of the gym members were going on that evening anyway. I’d never been outdoor climbing before, and had actually previousy assumed that you had to be able to lead climb to do it, which I can’t, but he assured me that they would be setting up toprope courses.
We went to Silver Harbour, about 20 minutes outside of Thunder Bay. I’m looking back on the pictures fondly since the enjoying-the-outdoors season is quickly drawing to a close here, and there are no indoor (or, obviously, outdoor) climbing walls in Regina (other than a crossfit gym that costs $170 a month, has a seasonal bouldering wall, and advertises with a big picture of a banana-back handstand on its outside wall… no thanks!!) IIRC, I managed all four of the courses that the more experienced climbers set up for the topropers in the group.
I arrived in Regina, Saskatchewan about two weeks ago, taking 5 days to get here from Kitchener. The first day, I drove to Sault Ste. Marie (stopping at the beach in Parry Sound along the way) and tried Couchsurfing for the first time! The second day is hands-down the best day of driving– between Sault Ste.-Marie and Thunder Bay, along the shore of Lake Superior, through house of provincial park where you can go for quite a while without seeing a single other car. About 40 km outside of Wawa, Ontario (home of the Wawa giant goose; or rather, the lineage of Wawa giant geese) I started thinking about Terry Fox. Terry Fox looms large in the collective consciousness of all Canadians, but particularly those in provinces he actually made it through; and it’s hard to watch the pavement whizzing by underneath your car without imagining what it would have looked like from the perspective of a lopsided jog. Just as I was contemplating this, I saw a man by the side of the road in athletic clothing. And crutches. With one leg. Running. Did I hallucinate him? Where was he going? Who was he? I didn’t see any other vehicles around him, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything– I was in the middle of a park, but there were campsites fairly nearby, and a few small on either side of the large parkland. I considered turning around to go talk to hum, but by the time the thought appeared in my mind, it would have been impractical. He certainly didn’t seem to be in distress, so I figured it would remain forever a mystery, and filed the anecdote away to relate to the friends I was staying with in Thunder Bay that evening. Well, just as I was typing this up, I hopped over to read the news from Northwestern Ontario. And lo and behold, an answer: Guy Amalfitano, a French cancer survivor who watched the Marathon of Hope on TV from his hospital bed as a teenager, arrived in Thunder Bay last week. According to the itinerary on his website, he is planning to arrive in Regina on the 24th of September, and to finish his journey on the 6th of November.
Yep! It’s on the internet, even. With my picture and everything. So that you, too, can be puzzled at the sight of a reed player holding their instrument with a reed on the bocal and also wearing red lipstick for some reason. When Bradley Thachuk, the music director in Niagara, first suggested that I play John Williams’ Five Sacred Trees and I agreed, to be perfectly honest I couldn’t have hummed you a single bar of it. I sent off an email saying yes, that sounds like a good choice, then hopped over to youtube to listen to it. And thought, oh, this sounds kinda hard. Uh-oh. That was about a year and a half ago. That initial listen put the fear of God in me, and I immediately ordered a part and started working on it. Finally, about two weeks ago, I could at last say that I was able to play all the right notes, in the right order, at more or less the right tempo. (Actually, if I had said that two weeks ago, I would have been technically incorrect– I only noticed yesterday that I learned a run in the fourth movement– luckily only a single bar– in the wrong clef. WHOOPS. Fixed now.) Not-so-coincidentally, last week I traveled to Ottawa to have a lesson with Christopher Millard, principal bassoon in NACO, on the piece. Usually, I would prefer to be farther along in the preparation process than just “able to play correct pitches” before traveling for a lesson. But in this instance, I didn’t really have choice. I knew I wanted to play it for someone who had performed it recently, and Chris gave the Canadian premiere of the work. And it needed to be before he left for summer festival work in mid-July, because on August 12th, I’m getting in the car and beginning the drive to Regina for the season. So, that’s just the way it was. And honestly? I needed the deadline of a lesson to make me put my butt in a chair and finish learning the thing. In a sense, the time, expense and general inconvenience involved in going to Ottawa was the whole point. As they say in my current home city of Kitchener-Waterloo: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. As the vast legions of ABD graduate students of the world can tell you, human psychology is uniquely poorly equipped to deal with large projects with definite endpoints but no immediate pressures driving them forward. So, creating a short-term deadline that had meaning and importance suddenly became a much higher priority for me when I won the Regina audition. Prior to that audition, I had been planning on attending the Glenn Gould School for next year. I had decided it was a good time to go back to school because I wanted the structure of school to help me achieve my goals. And mostly what structure is, is small but strategically placed deadlines. Lessons every week, studio recitals every few months, final recital at the end of your degree. (Or something similar to that schedule.) I wasn’t at all worried about learning this enormous concerto, because I would have all the right kinds of pressure to keep me on track with it. I might even have other performance opportunities (recital, concerto competition, etc.) to get it ready. As soon as I got the Regina job, all of that assurance vanished. Not only would I not have any of those same small deadlines looming for the concerto, suddenly I had a whole lot of new deadlines, of a sort I have never really encountered before: namely, preparing and performing an entire, full-time season as a principal player in a professional orchestra. Considering that this time last year I had just been accepted to paramedic college and was seriously considering how relaxing and fun it would be to just play music as an amateur, uh, a principal job and a concerto in the same season is a little bit of a change of pace. (Spoiler alert: I did not end up attending paramedic college this year. I like having hobbies, but I’m not quite at the win-a-bassoon-job-while-in-school-for-a-completely-different-discipline kind of level.) So, that’s what the next six months are going to be about for me: manufacturing deadlines, as well as managing the ones I already have. I’m grateful for my time as a freelancer/underemployed musician (let’s be real here) because it taught me that manufacturing deadlines is a huge part of a life in music. Woohoo! Let’s all make up some arbitrary dates to freak out over!
It’s a bit difficult, as a freelancer, to separate “season” and “summer” in the way that someone with a job, or even a student, can. However, it’s probably safe to say that it’s now the summer for me: I played my last concert with the Niagara Symphony for the time being two weeks ago– I am going to be on leave from the NSO next year as I start my new job as principal of the Regina Symphony, and couldn’t have asked for a better ending to my time with the NSO than playing Mahler’s 2nd symphony, with my partner playing beside me.
The week after, we were going to work together again as I came to visit him at his job, and I played 3rd and contra on– I am not making this up– Mahler 1. Yes, two Mahler symphonies in as many weeks: I’m pretty sure this is what I imagined being a professional musician would be like in my first year of music school.
That concert was particularly special because it was Music Director Edwin Outwater’s final farewell to the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. During the many bars of rests I had the privilege and pleasure of counting during that concert, I also had the opportunity to reflect on this crazy profession; after ten years– a decent amount of time, in MD terms– here’s a guy choosing to move on from his job in part because that’s simply what’s done, not to mention the fact that he also lives and works in a different country. This is normal for a conductor. And to a lesser extent it’s normal for musicians, too.
In the past two years of “being a freelancer,” I’ve worked in three of the four farthest practicable corners of the province– Windsor in the west, Niagara in the south, and Thunder Bay in the north. (The farthest east I’ve been is Oshawa with the Ontario Philharmonic, and while I hear the Kingston Symphony is a nice band, I don’t exactly regret missing the opportunity to have driven the three and a half hours it would take to get to a gig in Kingston from Kitchener…) There are really great, fun things about doing this. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I have a decent understanding of the geography and transportation systems of the entire province. And, by and large, I’ve been lucky that so many of the places I work are beautiful. St. Catharine’s is one of the most astoundingly quick-growing cities I’ve ever been in – it seems like every concert cycle, there are three or four new businesses on St. Paul street alone. Thunder Bay has some of the most stunning views from inside any city, ever. I’ve played pops tunes beside Niagara Falls underneath fireworks displays, I’ve stood on the bank of the Detroit River and listened to a Creedence Clearwater Revival reunion concert being played in another country, I’ve gotten to live and work in places like Dundas and Ancaster which, as a Torontonian, would have remained in the category of “places vaguely near here that aren’t” if I hadn’t discovered how gorgeous and special they were. I’ve played on the rooftop of a condo in downtown Toronto while being filmed by a helicopter. My job, such as it is, for the past few years has been really exciting, and when I attempt to describe what I do to people, they invariably seem intrigued and somewhat envious. But also confused.
Because it’s hard to explain to people in other industries why this– where by “this,” I really mean this much gorram driving-- seems like a reasonable thing to do as some semblance of a regular job. And to a large extent, it’s not. It’s a totally ridiculous way to make a living that is wearing on me after only two years, and while there are some people who manage to sustain it long-term, I suspect I would opt-out if it started to seem like I might have to be one of them.
But at the moment, the pendulum is swinging the other way: In mid-August, I’ll load the car up and drive for four days, to Regina, where for the first time in my life I’ll be making all (or most) of my income from a single source, an employer who provides me with benefits and, following the tenure process, the guarantee of a job to come back to.
So, that’s different. It’s also eerily familiar: get in the car, drive, play. The timelines are just extended.
In all seriousness, though, I am really looking forward to this drive in the way that I don’t look forward to driving, say, in rush hour on the 403. I’ve done about half of it before– the bit between Toronto and Sault St. Marie, and then the Soo to Thunder Bay– and then the next two legs (Thunder Bay to Winnipeg, Winnipeg to Regina) are new to me (except I have been a passenger in a bus going Thunder Bay to Kenora… so yes, I will probably stop at Egli’s on my way by.)
I’m spending the summer, in chronological order: coaching gymnastics, going to Ottawa to have a lesson on Five Sacred Trees with Chris Millard, having a pre-party in Toronto for my wedding, going to ADULT GYMNASTICS CAMP WITH MY ADULT GYMNASTICS FRIENDS OMG THIS IS A REAL THING THAT EXISTS AND I AM GOING, getting married in Calgary, going on a honeymoon-type hiking adventure, possibly coaching some more gymnastics, and then… leaving.
My second year as an adult gymnast; my second World Masters’ Gymnastics Championships! If you want to compare to last year (hint: it compares favourably! Grown-ups can improve at stuff! :D) that post is here. We’ll go in Olympic order because why the heck not. Vault: Well hey, this is a big improvement in that I actually trained vault this year! Vault was my worst event of a not-very-impressive all-around lineup as a kid. As far as I recall, it usually consisted of me running, putting my hands down at the front of the table, piking up to handstand, walking on my hands across the table so as not to smash my spine on the back edge of it, and flopping off onto my feet. It was SUPER IMPRESSIVE. So anyway, in the past year I’ve figured out how to get over the thing successfully at competition height, which is a win! I still pike up a bit, and my elbows bend to propel me off, but these two were good vaults for me and I was happy! Bars: This was the event I was most proud of. Not because it actually met the requirements for the level I was competing in (it didn’t.) But what you just watched was the fulfillment of probably the most epic struggle of my entire young life… THE KIP. For the uninitiated, the kip is the movement by which gymnasts, from moderately skilled recreational athletes all the way up to the Olympics, get from hanging beneath a bar to supporting the body on top of the bar. The specialness of this particular movement, as physics professor Rhett Allain wrote for Wired, is that “the gymnast starts in a position with low potential energy and ends at a higher potential energy (here I mean gravitational potential energy in the Earth-gymnast system). How does this work? Clearly the gymnast must do some work, but her arms don’t even bend.” Indeed! And not only is the kip an fascinating, beautiful and elegantly simple movement, it’s also one that’s pretty damn hard to learn if you’re a jiggly, uncoordinated goober, like like my thirteen-year-old self, and not a wiry, obedient six-year-old. And having gone through the recreational, not competitive stream of gymnastics as a child, as a young teenager I found it to be simply beyond my abilities, physically and intellectually. So when I quit gymnastics at fourteen, despite many years and countless times of being told I was “so close!” to finally ending up on top of the damn bar, I never did get my kip. I finally did get it, about ten years after my supposedly-final Kip Defeat, at an adult open gym practice at the Thunder Bay Gymnastics Association:
I almost didn’t go to gymnastics tonight– I was at the Thunder Bay Symphony Youth Orchetra concert, had to take a bus across town, forgot a sports bra, was late, blah blah blah– but I’m glad I went because GUESS WHAT? I GOT MY KIP!!!!!!!!!!!! For more than a decade this skill was my major regret about this sport. When I started again in January, I wanted to take care of some unfinished business with bars, which were always my favourite event but the one preventing me from progressing because of THIS. ONE. SKILL. I would go into the gym every class my last year of gymnastics as a kid and my coach would tell me confidently that today was the day I was going to get it… I was so close… well, she was wrong, because TODAY was the day. #levelup #gymnastics #adultgymnastics #bars #kip #progress #fitness #xxfitness #nerdfitness
It took me almost another full year to get my other kip– it turns out the same skill on the high bar feels vastly different from the low bar version– but at WMGC I finally fulfilled a long-held dream of having a bar routine with no pullovers in it. The other new skill in my bar routine is the dismount, acquired this summer; flyaway was a skill that seemed impossibly far away as a kid, and turned out to be relatively easy for me to learn now. (Shout-out to the parkour dudes at open gym who effectively taught me a flyaway with the following advice: “It’s easy, yo, that’s like, the first gymnastics trick I leaned. Just let go of the bar and flip.”) Beam: Beam is the one event where I haven’t caught up to where I was as a kid, only because I used to have more back flexibility and thus back walkover on the beam came fairly easily to me in ye olden days. Still, I thought this was pretty solid (and the dismount was new!) Floor: I am a terrible choreographer, wow. But my choreography was marginally better than last year’s! Part of my problem is inordinately ambitious music… this years’ was heavy metal Shostakovich, last years’ was the Stranglers’ Golden Brown, and for next year I am terribly tempted by Tanya Tagaq’s Uja. Perhaps a dance class should be part of my activity schedule next season! I did the same back tumbling (roundoff back handspring back tuck) but it was much less terrifying than it was last year, and I can now do it out of two steps, not two million, so I fit it in vertically across the floor just to be weird. The front tuck is new but I landed on my ass. But I also landed on my ass in last years’ front handspring, so… yeah. The final “events” at WMGC are the extras: the timed rope climb, and the (this is the real name) Back Tuck Circle of Rainbows and Happiness. I didn’t compete in either of these last year. This year, I actually got up the rope (and am now working on my foot-less rope climb as a goal for next year) and I DID THE BACK TUCK CIRCLE, because I learned a standing back tuck this year! Another new, not re-acquired, skill. I only got five rounds in before landing on straight knees and bouncing onto my hands– disappointing since I wasn’t even tired! Just means there’s lots of room for improvement. “Lots of room for improvement” sums up my gymnastics pretty well; and I mean that in a joyous way. How would my frustrated, ineffective pre-teen self have felt about the idea that she would finally start improving at the rate she had been waiting for long after she had aged out of “normal” gymnastics classes? And who cares about her opinion, anyway? Just like fine wine… the adult gymnastics facebook group
I have no idea. Yeah, I won one last week, but I still exited with a longer “to improve in my preparation process” list than a “things I did awesome on” list. I’m still gonna write down everything I know about auditions, though, because the one thing I do know is: you have to go to them. ~Winning my job~ was not the surreal, magical experience I imagined it would be while I was in school. There’s a mythology about that idea, and that phrase, at music schools. “She won a job!” “Back when my teacher won his job…” “If I win a job…” or, for the cockier, “When I win my job…” We spend years imagining how we’re going to feel on that day. Winning my job felt normal. I started taking auditions in third year of undergrad, which was the first point at which I had even a basic level of control over the instrument. In my final year of school, I won a tenure-track position in a small regional orchestra– where only two people showed up to the audition. I didn’t win because I was an super-duper player and totally ready, I won because, on that specific day, to that specific committee, I was preferred over the other candidate. That’s it; a relatively small thing, but it had an outsize effect. Besides a lot of street cred back at school, I suddenly had a small foothold in the freelance scene, a calling card of “I play here.” I had a window into the lives of working musicians, the kind who aren’t in the Montreal Symphony. Two years later, that orchestra moved from playing in a university lecture hall to a brand-new, gorgeous, city-owned performing arts center that rivals the best in the province. I’ve played principal parts with that orchestra that I would never have had the chance to do, as an out-of school freelancer: Tchaik 6, Don Juan, Bolero. We once played every single Beethoven piano concerto in the same concert. Next month, we’re doing Mahler 2. Beyond the playing, I ended up on the Player’s Committee; through the PC, I attended the annual conference of the Organization of Canadian Symphony Musicians, and became the delegate for my orchestra. A year after that, I became a member of the committee to re-negotiate our collective bargaining agreement. This is not exactly standard fare for the first few years after graduating from an undergrad in music. In the middle of that, I won an audition where I WAS THE ONLY PERSON WHO SHOWED UP, for a one-year position in a small but full-time orchestra. Because I was the only person who bothered to do the audition, I ended up with the immense advantage of having the experience of doing a whole season, full-time, with a professional orchestra, straight out of my undergrad. What I learned is that the difference between being a freelancer, and being a musician with a pile of folders on the stand from the same orchestra, is HUGE. I also learned that the things that seem easy in music school become not-so-easy as soon as you’re not in music school. At McGill, I took for granted that I would practice at least 3 hours a day or so. Why on earth wouldn’t I? All my friends were doing it. The practice hallway was the social and community hub of the school. I would arrive there around eight in the morning and start warming up. As people arrived, they’d check in on their colleagues– you have a lesson today? What are you going to play? How’s the face feeling? K, have a good warm up. Skipping classes to practice was de rigueur. The cafeteria would clear out at around 1 or 2 PM when stragglers finally managed to convince each other to get get back up the stairs to the practice wing. If I ever felt bored in the evenings, I knew I could walk the two blocks back to school, noodle around a bit on the bassoon, and chat with whoever else was still hanging around. Life was good– practicing itself was never easy, but the idea of needing motivation to practice was laughable. HA. HA. HA. Living in a basement apartment, playing second bassoon to a level that was pleasing to the people around me and thus mostly uncommented-on, suddenly I found myself struggling to sit down and get in an hour a day of focused practice. It turns out that, just like the act of practicing is a skill, the act of planting your butt in a chair with the intention of practicing is also a skill, and one that atrophies fast. I’m still not up to the same level of consistent, quality practice that I was at McGill– but if I’m being honest, I think it’s probably pretty universal feeling among professionals about their student days. And I do regret all the lost practice time in the past few years, especially when I contemplate how most of the people who show up to the same auditions as me went to grad school, and thus have at least two more years of intensive practicing than I do under their belts. But I also have the experience of making the transition, and having it be shitty at first, and then gradually better. That, too, was an education. To a certain, still small extent, I know how to transition into a job. So when I won this audition (which had a regular number of people at it, for once! :P) it felt totally natural– as if there is such a thing as a career path, and this was the logical next step in mine. I didn’t freak out. I just did what I had learned in Gabe Radford’s audition seminar, way back in NYOC 2011, to do in the event of a successful audition, and what I had practiced twice before– smile, say thank you, and shake hands with your new colleagues. Realistically, my A+ audition advice of “just make sure to show up to really sparsely populated auditions!” isn’t exactly practical for the vast majority. Especially those that play instruments more popular than the bassoon, and people who aren’t Canadians with the benefit of national auditions. SO while you can’t control the second part– “sparsely populated auditions”– you can control the first. JUST MAKE SURE TO SHOW UP. How many people could have snatched my first two, crucial jobs out from under me if they had bothered to try? Honestly, probably a lot. They just didn’t. So there, that’s my audition advice. JUST GO. Even if you think you suck, even if you’re not sure you want the job, even if one of your keys starts making a weird buzzing sound two days before that might have been all in your head (*raises hand*), even if your Tchaik 6 reeds develops a crack the day before (*raises hand again*), even if you have to fly back the day of the audition to be at an 8 AM madrigal-learning session the next day (*bangs head against desk*), even if you have to fly to the audition the morning of (actually not me, but MAJOR kudos to one hugely determined candidate at the audition last week for getting up at 3 AM after a gig the night before to fly across the country and play an audition.) JUST GO.
The thing about playing in a symphony orchestra, which fact is so obvious as to barely even need stating, is that often you’re playing music written a long time ago. Something I do often, especially while playing music that I’m somewhat in awe of, is to imagine the circumstances and feelings of the person who must have played the part I am playing for the first time. Some are fairly mysterious; but some pieces allow for a decent amount of extrapolation just based on the context of the piece. It’s safe to assume, for instance, that the bassoonist playing in the orchestra at La Scala for the first performance of La Gazza Ladra was feeling something in between annoyance and panic, seeing as, according to legend, the overture was only completed in time for the performance when the producer locked Rossini in a room and forced him to write, handing pages out the window to the copyists. (I know I certainly was the time that I had to play the principal part of that on ten minutes’ notice.)
Others are more mysterious, but intriguing. Consider the bassoon solo in Shostakovich’s 9th symphony.
The 9th symphony is, for the most part, a light and cheerful work, with the bassoon solo as the glaring exception to the mood of the piece. In the Bulletin of the Moscow State Philharmonic for 1945, Shostakovich is quoted mentioning (and complimenting) the bassoonist by name: one Vorobyov. How did Vorobyov feel, in the hanging moments of silence before the beginning of the fourth movement began, knowing that he was about to play not only probably the biggest orchestral solo of his life (there are, indeed, very few bigger orchestral solos available) but one that– at least in the interpretation of most modern bassoonists– carries dangerous political undertones? David McGill, in his “Orchestral Excerpts for Bassoon” CD, ascribes the text “Free-dom!” to the first two notes of the solo, and describes later motifs as “fooling the authorities” and “a strong undercurrent of pointed sarcasm.” Stephane Levesque, when giving a short class on his interpretation of the piece when I was at McGill, described his imagination of an individual alternately speaking out against injustice, then being cowed at the dangers of doing so and retreating.
It’s difficult to imagine that this interpretation hadn’t occurred to Vorobyov. Was the thinking about totalitarianism and dissidence, as he took a breath for that first F? Or was he only thinking about the hope that his embouchure wouldn’t tire before the end of the movement?
This line of enquiry is a preamble, basically, to the point that it’s easy for modern musicians to imagine that we have lost something that previous generations once had. The vast majority of modern musicians, if asked who their favourite composer is, will name someone whose music they will never premiere, for obvious reasons. When mainstream orchestral musicians do give a premiere, often we’re not too happy about it. There are two possible reasons for this. The first is a kind of time-based quality bias: if “good” music is music that has stood the test of time, then every generation is going to end up premiering a relatively large proportion of total garbage, of which only the cream of the crop will ever be heard by subsequent generations. The second possible explanation is that music has simply gotten weirder and less fun to play over the past hundred years. I will leave the merits of that theory up to people who have the energy for spirited debates about the essence of contemporary music.
The point is– it is a rare and unusual thing, to give a premiere which makes you think, “this must be how it felt to play [other piece that I like] for the first time.” To play music that is a) good, b) situated unmistakeably in the sound world of the present day, and c) likely to receive repeat performances and become part of an actual body of repertoire, is a very unusual thing.
I had the opportunity to play such a piece the other night. The piece was Ecstasy by Christos Hatzis, with text composed and performed by Sarah Slean. If these names sound familiar together, it’s because Ecstasy is a companion piece to the first collaboration between Hatzis and Slean, _Lamento. _I actually had the opportunity to play Lamento twice, first with the Niagara Symphony and then with Thunder Bay, and it is a piece with an enormous emotional impact and an incredible musical inventiveness. You can watch the premiere of that piece, with Symphony Nova Scotia, on CBC:
The TBSO commissioned Ecstasy as a kind of counterpoint to Lamento, as the names would suggest. They also commissioned another piece from Hatzis, which they will perform in October 2016.
Although it would be rude of me to say I hope to be there– since my being there would require someone else’s getting sick– the impact of Hatzis’ music, and the experience of being the first person to get a part, hear it in the context of the whole, and be present for the creation of something both new and lasting, is almost enough to make me want to say it.
By now, most of the people who care have heard about the accident at the Toronto Symphony Cirque de la Symphonie performance on Tuesday. For the uninformed– and anyone who didn’t see the youtube video of the incident before it was pulled down by a copyright claim (I’m sure they were reeeeal worried about the copyrighted material in that video)– a circus performer crashed into a cellist in the middle of an act. Nobody was injured (and no instruments harmed), but it has set off some debate about the amount of acceptable risk for musical performers. (Warning: link contains Slipped Disc comments section, proceed with extreme caution :P) The TSO has this to say for itself:
We put the safety of all artists first and foremost. Cirque has an excellent safety track record. And today a safety review was also conducted post incident and their performance was altered to ensure no future potential risk to the audience, musicians, performers or instruments.
This is a pretty disappointing statement coming from a group of people who supposedly know something about music and art. “No future potential risk” is not a thing. Ever. People make mistakes. Musicians know that; no matter how good the player, sometimes something happens that wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes you go to the Toronto Symphony and someone misses a note. It’s not a big deal; nobody is hurt and the sun rises the next morning. The acrobat made a mistake equivalent to a musician making an embarrassing cack: he misjudged, and a noticeable mistake followed. Not because he’s incompetent; because he’s human. Any group of people doing difficult things with their bodies is going to have this happen every so often. If you’re lucky, all that results is a shaken cellist. If you’re unlucky, someone dies. The TSO statement is disingenuous because it doesn’t recognize this reality. When you sign up to be an acrobat, you accept a certain amount of physical risk. Circus performers know this, and their management knows this. Cirque du Soleil, for instance, has three levels of insurance on the performers in each show: their own extensive corporate liability policy, the required liability policy of every Cirque venue, and the organization also covers life insurance for all performers. (Source) Risk exists. It’s up to every individual to decide the level of risk they’re comfortable with before signing on to a risky job– and, crucially, it’s the responsibility of the employer to inform the employee of the level of risk. So the problem is not that an acrobat made a mistake. That’s fine and normal. The problem is that the people affected by the mistake never agreed to the level of risk they were being exposed to. “Be hit by flying limbs every so often” is in the job description of an acrobat, and it is not in the job description of a cellist. Apparently, nobody on the management level of the orchestras booking this show have ever considered that mounting an acrobatic production in a space not built to accommodate acrobatics is going to involve an increased level of risk to workers who normally do not experience that particular level of risk. Which brings us to questions of responsibility moving forward. What does the AFM think of all this? Health and safety is a traditional part of the interests of many unions, but seeing as musical venues tend not to be the sort of workplace where, for instance, WHMIS regulations apply, it’s probably safe to assume they’re a little rusty on that function. And it’s not exactly the kind of situation that’s made provisions for in the Occupational Health and Safety Act, as far as I could tell from a casual browse of the document, which I have to say is not exactly light bedtime reading. Finally, it’s also pretty unlikely that any orchestra would have specific enough contract language to have any sort of a basis for dealing with this kind of issue. So… should they? Brave new world, that has such contracts in it!
Here’s the thing about freelancing. In music school, you learn how to do auditions. You learn how to do auditions because you do a lot of them; at least one a year, maybe two, just to be ranked in your core ensembles, plus plenty of others; youth orchestras, summer festivals, big solos, professional orchestras. If you do it right, you get pretty good at auditions. You acquire an internal locus of control vis a vis auditions, and maybe even start to enjoy them. By the end of music school, though, you’ve acquired not just an aptitude for auditions, but some specific ideas about their outcomes. Because school auditions aren’t like other auditions. One person doesn’t win and the others walk away with nothing. One person wins, more or less, and the next few people still get something pretty good, and the rest get a place at the bottom of the totem pole. If you school experience works for you, it’s likely that you start right at the bottom, and work your way up to the top, or near the top, as you advance. It’s a real good feeling. Having a hierarchy can be scary— but it can also be comforting. For the duration of your time in music school, you can point to a list of names on the wall and say “look! This is me. This is where I fit. I am better than these people, and these other people are better than me. If I keep working, I will keep rising. Life is fair.” The real world doesn’t work that way. First of all, obviously, that’s not how professional auditions work. The bottom 90% of candidates aren’t ranked; they’re just told to go home. The top 10% may well fall into a ranking (who got to the semis/finals/got a trial) but only one positions really matters, and it’s #1. Freelancing also doesn’t work like that, because not only is there no ranking, there’s no winner at all. Sure, there are people who get more gigs than other people. But how do you decide who wins? Is it the person who makes the most money? (Are they allowed to have a day job?) The person first on the sub list for the most prestigious ensemble? (Who decides what’s most prestigious? Does a symphony orchestra beat out an opera orchestra?) The person with the most students? (Are they actually a good teacher, or just enterprising?) There’s no way to decide. The ranking simply doesn’t exist. Everyone is just humans, trying to strike a balance between survival and artistic fulfillment. For a recent graduate of a music school with a defined system of ranking, this isn’t the relief one might think it would be. It’s like having the carpet yanked out from under your feet. Suddenly, you’re not owed anything. There’s not even anything you can do to become owed anything. And if you don’t wise up to that fact, things can get ugly. Instead of focusing on your own improvement, it’s easy to become subconsciously obsessed with reconstructing a ranking that never existed. Who’s in town? What gigs are they getting? Should I have gotten that gig? Wow, that person has a damn fine-lookin’ website. That person went to a better school than me, so they win over me. I once played with that person while they were having a bad day, so I win over them. Am I winning as much as I should be? How can I win more? A preoccupation with winning a nonexistent competition can be paralysing. When abstract victory is more important than concrete self-improvement, practice suffers. And when practice suffers, you guessed it… it sure don’t feel like winning. Is this music school’s fault? Nah. The system by which most schools rank and place students in ensembles is fair, and for many people, effectively motivates improvement. It’s just one of those many ways in which school can’t, and maybe shouldn’t prepare you for the real world. So, folks, time to log off and go practice.
I almost didn’t go to gymnastics tonight– I was at the Thunder Bay Symphony Youth Orchetra concert, had to take a bus across town, forgot a sports bra, was late, blah blah blah– but I’m glad I went because GUESS WHAT? I GOT MY KIP!!!!!!!!!!!! For more than a decade this skill was my major regret about this sport. When I started again in January, I wanted to take care of some unfinished business with bars, which were always my favourite event but the one preventing me from progressing because of THIS. ONE. SKILL. I would go into the gym every class my last year of gymnastics as a kid and my coach would tell me confidently that today was the day I was going to get it… I was so close… well, she was wrong, because TODAY was the day. #levelup #gymnastics #adultgymnastics #bars #kip #progress #fitness #xxfitness #nerdfitness