Before the beginning of this movement would be an excellent time to blow out your tone holes.
Mm 30 I found this sextuplet weirdly prone to fumbles for a long time. Used the L only for Eb and R4 for Gb. I struggled for a long time with the last note. Using the D flick key for it makes it super easy, in tune, easy to fade… oh, if it doesn’t have water in it. If it does have water, all that will emerge is a pathetic gurgle. Also, there’s no way to figure out in advance what state the tone hole might be in, and I found mine frequently managed to fill with water— somehow— during the movement, even if I cleared it out beforehand. So about a month before the performance, I finally threw in the towel with it and started using the C key, gradually shading with the L 2nd finger to help with the fade.
Interestingly, much of the concertmaster solo part is marked in various shades of soft. Bassoonists, who are conditioned by Beethoven symphonies to know that “p” stands for “play out” and “f” stands for “fuck it, this is the someone else’s responsibility,” tend to take dynamic markings with a heavy grain of salt, which can be lent to a violinist friend in a time of need.
I don’t know why, but before this movement starts, I constantly have the urge to put the whisper lock on, and need to remind myself to… not.
Mm 12, useful to anchor the mind on the Bs.
Mm 22, it is tempting to get started early on these, but the B and the C take place on the second and fourth eighth notes of the bar, respectively.
Mm 29, I found it helped with overall cleanliness to: 1) out of all the notes that take place on the second eighth note beat, focus on the open F; and 2) on the first eighth note beat, play the E with the overblown single-finger fingering, not the full E fingering, and then flick the A that comes after it. Mm 38, things are getting a bit heated rhythmically, and Chris Millard made the extremely helpful suggestion that, instead of feeling the first half of the bar as a triplet, that you continue feeling it in eighths (ie with the emphasis, internally, on the B.
Mm 39, theoretically the same should apply to the identical figure in he second half of the bar. For some reason, though, I was never able to feel it that way. Go figure.
Mm 43: so, is there a difference, practically, between the rhythm in this bar and in mm 11 et al? Reach for the stars, friend-o! Or don’t. I doubt anyone will notice or care. I think I tried to make a difference between the much more obviously juxtaposed 45 and 46, by which time the bassoon is accompaniment and it doesn’t matter anyway.
Mm 48, I found focusing on the E of the fourth eighth note beat made the thing marginally more likely to happen.
This cantabile section is a memorization nightmare. I went by the rule of thumb that most of the held notes have two beats happen during their tenure— whatever their actual length might be— and memorized specific deviations from that rule. Once I had it in my head, I actually had to look away from the part during the performance, or the visual would cause me to second-guess what I knew was correct.
Mm 101-102 it is very easy for the triplet-sixteenth rests in the middle of the beats to be too long, especially if you are attempting to play the rhythm in the latter half of 100 as a true sixteenth pattern. I found that these two bars had a tendency to drag, but then 103-105 are easy to rush. Neither option is particularly recommended at this point in the shitstorm.
Mm 108 should feel like it is happening in slow motion. The violin shot in the middle of it has nothing to do with anything.
I found it helpful to avoid breathing in the first eighth beat of 109.
Mm 114-116 more slow-mo. If you rush here, you are gonna experience some intense regret real soon.
The most difficult part of the next section is just not letting the excitement get you you. It’s pure movie-star John Williams but for 117-125 I just had to stay on the back of the beat, listen to the bass clarinet and section bassoons during the rests, and focus on anchoring on the G#s in 123 and 125.
The most difficult part of mm 130-131 is literally everything. By the time I performed the piece, I could play these bars correctly. It took two years. Ways that I practiced it, at various points:
Slowly, obviously. Really slowly.
Omitting the entire upwards run, focusing on the interval between the first note of each beat, and the triplet at the beat
Omitting the triplet at the end of the beat, focusing on the septuplets as groupings of 4+3
Focusing on specific notes as anchors: for me, the ones that were most important to concentrate on nailing were the Bb and E in the first septuplet run, the C in the sextuplet, the A in the triplet immediately following the sextuplet, and then the final septuplet isn’t too bad with an emphasis on the octave between the Gs, and aided by the one-finger E and overblown open F.
Don’t let the wizard get you with the broom on your way out.
One week ago today, I played John Williams’s _Five Sacred Trees _with the Niagara Symphony Orchestra.
I actually didn’t choose this piece. Bradley Thachuck, the music director of the NSO, asked if I wanted to play it; I had heard of it, of course, and said yes… and then listened to it. That was in February of 2016; I ordered the part right away and started practicing it. And continued practicing it, pretty consistently, for the next two years. This turned out to be a little bit overkill, but actually… not all that much.
Over the course of the two years that I invested in it, I learned, re-learned, memorized, and agonized over every bar in the piece, so now that it’s all over, it seems like it would be worthwhile to write it all down in the form of detailed notes about how I played it. These are not, of course, instructions to be followed; what worked for me may not be best for someone else, and some of these decisions were only arrived at after a practicing process that was in itself valuable. They are, though, the kind of thing that I think I would have appreciated reading two years ago; just a list of issues and how one person chose to work through them. With a standard like the Mozart concerto, you already begin work on it with an idea of what the issues and choices are, bar-by-bar. Here are some ideas about Five Sacred Trees.
A note on memorization: I did memorize it, and made a video recording with piano for memory, both for rehearsal and archival purposes. When I mentioned to Stephane Levesque, who played the piece with the OSM, that I was hoping to perform from memory, his horrified reaction made me reconsider. Stephane rarely forbade me from or forced me to do anything, as a student, but when he did there was usually a very good reason, so a strong reaction from him, based on performance experience with the piece in question, seemed worth paying attention to. I ended up having the music in front of me in performance and found some parts of it– like the opening cadenza, and much of Dathi– easier with my eyes closed, while some parts, like Tortan and Craeb Uisnig, were easier with eyes open (but I was still very glad I didn’t need my eyes glued to the part, and could swivel to communicate easily with the conductor and concertmaster.)
I’ll post these by movement, so here are my notes on Eo Mugna.
Opening: Big breath out, empty lungs. Small breath in and out at the bottom. Big breath in. There’s a crescendo on the first note, but leaving too much room for it makes the entrance sound timid.
Mm 4, whisper lock on.
Mm 5, eighth notes long to contrast with the accents on many of the other eighths in the opening.
Mm 7, there is a decrescendo on the low C in the 1st edition, removed in the 2nd. I settled on a slight decrescendo but still an emphatic vibrato and ending to the note.
Mm 8-9, I chose to take a large pause and then play this section with all legato eighth notes.
Mm 10, long low C and then accelerated up the run, using the R4 F# and found that anchoring my attention on the Bb ensured it emerged cleanly. I probably worked this run up from quarter=20 about fifteen separate times, and it stuck a little more each time.
Mm 11, started extremely slowly and sped up, with the last two eights aided by the L-only Eb fingering.
Mm 12 aided by a firm grip on the low G. The final D of the bar is, for some reason, extremely intuitive to play as an eighth note in the tempo of the new section, which it is not. The conductor requested that I elongate it, so I did, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me to just play it as a quarter in the new tempo, which would be an excellent length.
My tempo for the main section was intentionally rather fast: more like 85 (to the marked 72-76.) I like this tempo because it allows the entire theme to be played comfortably in one breath, and because the marked tempo sounds draggy to me, but maybe I’m just young and impatient.
So, what’s the difference between a grace note and a thirty-second in this passage? I have been reliably informed that John Williams, when asked this question, had no strong opinion on the matter. One could make a case that, in the interest of not confusing the cello section, who unlike the bassoonist are individually tasked with playing this theme in unison with other people, the second quarter beat of mm 13 should be deliberately placed on the beat and not a moment before, whereas the second quarter beat of mm 16 should have the grace note placed slightly ahead of it.
Mm 19, I rather enjoy that the first half of the bar contains a sixteenth note instead of the expected thirty-second, and make possibly an inappropriately big deal of it.
Mm 21 could be interpreted as a change of character and a bouncier articulation, and I was planning on doing so, but once I was actually standing beside the cello section taking their shot at the theme, it suddenly seemed a little obnoxious, and I smoothed it out.
Memorization-wise, mm 27 and 36 are easy to mix up and end up in the wrong place. My mnemonic was that the first time is fancier (grace note before the 2nd big beat of 27, omitted in 36) and started higher, and the second time around I just want to get it over with (no grace note) and end lower (the downwards run starts on G in 37, E in 28.)
Mm 29, the low D looks like it should have to be quiet. It doesn’t; it will be swallowed by the bass clarinet and the wind section anyway, so whatever volume will be best in tune is fine.
I put the lock on during the low G in 28 and remove it after the D just for peace of mind.
Mm 34, I play the first A of the run long and the high A with the L hand only. Mm 36-37 is conspicuously lacking in dynamic guidance, but with aggressive section that comes after it, I decided to go for loud.
Mm 52-53: should the first bassoon note have a clearly audible attack, or should it start in the ring of the orchestra’s final chord? I’ve heard it both ways, but chose to observe the accent and make sure by attack was heard.
Mm 55 whisper lock on in caesura.
Mm 55-56, all the eighths have legato markings, which makes a nice contrast with 53-54 and also with the sfz in 57, where I took Chris Millard’s suggestion to conceive of it “like a frog burping.”
Mm 57-58: are the eighth notes grouped six and three, or do the slurs stand in contrast to the emphasis that is properly place on the first and second quarter beats of 58? After all, this section is essentially meterless, yet he still put a bar line in the middle of this ascending line and chose the vehicle of eighth notes to convey the desired pitches. There’s a strong argument for the latter, but I chose to phrase with the slurs.
Unlock before mm 59. 59, grouped the run 3-3-4 to accelerate.
If memorizing, I implore you to not play mm 16 where mm 62 should be.
Mm 64, I like the sfz interpreted as a lift before the downbeat of the next measure.
Starting mm 66, it’s easy to get too soft, too fast. The dim only starts in mm 70.
Because there seem to still be spots left, and I’m feeling sad that I have to miss both the winter version of the camp and the World Masters’ Championships this season, I guess I must be overdue for an endorsement post about Adult Gymnastics Camp!
I first heard about camp on the Gymcastic podcast. It didn’t seem like something I would ever do, but it sounded cool.
When I first met Emily, I knew her as jumping_ginger. Yes, it happened to me: I accidentally met in real life someone that I followed on Instagram. I was at an adult open gym night at the Kitchener-Waterloo Gymnastics Club, and kept glancing across the room at a tall ginger woman who I felt like I recognized. Apparently the recognition was mutual, because a while later she came over and said, “Do we follow each other on Instagram?”
I was lucky, that year at KWGC, to meet a ton of adult gymnastics of all levels. They have three adult classes a week, plus a Coach’s Night, and it was amazing to find myself squarely in the middle in terms of ability—there were plenty of beginners, but also plenty of former competitive athletes and, most exciting of all for me, people who were going buying the gymnastics they had learned as a child. It wasn’t just KWGC, either: there are actually a lot of gymnastics clubs in the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge area, and KWGC, Revolution Gymnastics in North Waterloo, and Cambridge Kips in Cambridge all offer adult open gym. (Supposedly Dynamo Gymnastics also has some sort of registered adult class, which was sold out the time that Emily and I tried to go, but as the head coach there occupies a rarefied position in the hierarchy of Canadian gymnastics and quite a few elites and high-level athletes train there, I would really like to check it out some time!) The same constellation of people show up frequently at all of the open gyms, and I even sometimes found myself spending a few hours coaching at KWGC, then driving over to a different gym to train for the rest of the evening. The gymnastics-adjacent activities are also well-represented in the Tri-Cities; Grand River Rocks is a fabulous rock-climbing gym that also offers yoga and martial arts, and one of my colleagues at KWGC was deeply ensconced in the apparently thriving local parkour scene. Overall, it’s a great place to be a slightly physically reckless so-called adult.
When I attended my second Masters’ Championships, it was as part of a team. Emily and I both competed level 6, and Laura level… 7 or 8? And Josh in the general Men’s Competitive category that they do for WMGC, and competing a double back on floor—as far as I can recall, the first time I’ve seen one in person.
Shortly after the meet, we started talking about camp. It’s frequently brought up in the Adult Gymnastics Facebook group, and along with another woman from the Tri-City area open gyms, Corina, we decided to bite the bullet and sign up. We drove down together and stayed in a motel 6 where the room key stopped working every time we exited the room.
The camp is in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, from which Maine is just a stroll over a picturesque bridge. The first day, we went to the beach and ate a lot of lobster.
Seafood, unsurprisingly, was a culinary theme of the trip. Now that I think about it, probably next time I could go a little easier on the fried fish and lobster in the interest of getting the most out of the Gymnastics portion of the event
The camp was divided into three groups, based on a survey we filled out beforehand. Me, Emily and Corina are all around the same level, with different strengths and weaknesses, but I’m the only one who’s been training all 4 events (including tumbling on the real floor, which many adults skip altogether for obvious reasons) so I assume that’s how I ended up separated from them and in with the top group. Which at first I was going to ask to just be with my friends, but decided not to be a weenie and stick with the group I started with.
(These groups are not strictly enforced, just to be clear. You can pretty much do what you want, since it’s acknowledged that adult gymnasts tend to have less well-rounded skill sets than children who are forced to follow a rotation schedule for their training. Also— for anyone who might be reading this and wondering if camp is for them— yes! The first group is absolutely appropriate for beginners. You should go. Do it.)
It turned out to be a ton of fun squeaking into the top group, because I’ve never been around so many gymnasts of that level before. Plenty were former competitors of the level 8-10 variety, and some had competed in college. My gymnastics background is purely recreational: I started in regular-flavor rec, then “advanced rec” when my gym started offering it, and finally “interclub,” which permits rec kids and broken and/or inadequately enthusiastic former competitive types go to a few invitational competitions a year. So being around athletes with a completely different background was at once inspiring and encouraging. Because I could see real grown-up bodies in the flesh doing things I wanted to be able to do; and because every so often it seemed like the gap between us wasn’t so gaping after all: cast handstands on bars, layout fulls off the tumble track, tsuk drills on vault; there were skills that we were all working on together, albeit as gleaming new, edge-of-my-ability skills for me and basics for them.
The camp itself is run by Gina and Brian Pulhaus. Gina is an adult gymnast and coach who trains with the young’uns and is a huge advocate for adults in competitive gymnastics. She and her husband Brian started the camp a few years ago, at her home gym of Atlantic Gymnastics in Portsmouth.
They’re both incredibly motivated, enthusiastic and bright, and it turned out that they had been watching every single attendee of the camp the whole time so that, at the very end, we could do an “awards ceremony” where everyone got to climb up on a box and present, red-report-card-style, and receive an adorable medal with a title awarded to each athlete personally. (Mine was “hula queen.” Don’t ask.) Then, we had to tell the assembly what we were most proud of from the week.
What I said was: I’m most proud of how amazed my thirteen-year old self would be, at the point that she quit gymnastics and figured she would never achieve what she wanted to in the sport, at the skills that I’m training today.
Two in particular stood out from camp, things that I don’t think I’d even know were like, options, physically. The first was giants on strap bars. As I’ve blogged about before, I never got my kip as a kid. So obviously, my hopes and dreams on bars were somewhat stunted, and I’d never imagined that I would be able to start training giants. Of course, I’m still nowhere near being able to do them on the wooden bar, unassisted and unsecured, but they have improved since the first time at camp.
The second is a tsuk into the pit. Okay, so as a compete-able vault it’s, optimistically, several years away. But like… I don’t think I even knew other vaults existed, as a kid? I mean, I knew that there was a difference between the handspring with a mini-tramp that I was doing, and what I saw on TV. But that was as far as my analysis of the situation went.
I don’t think I’d have considered trying either of these for a long time if it hadn’t been for camp.
Another amazing moment at camp was a revelation about that humblest of elements, the cartwheel. Even knowing, intellectually, that gymnastics is all about basics, it can still bowl me over the extent to which it is true that the best gymnasts are the ones with the best handstands, cartwheels, and roundoffs, the best applications of the hollow and arch positions in their skills— I remember being maniacally focused, as a kid, on all the stuff I couldn’t do, and all the skills that seemed beyond my reach. When it turns out the important stuff is all right at the beginning, and you just keep learning it over and over again.
Some of the women in my group— who were, needless to say, capable of doing much more difficult elements— were working on cartwheels on a beam rotation. Working really hard, and struggling with something. I asked what was up, and it was explained to me that they were trying to fix their dropping arms. My mind boggled as I realized that I had been missing, for all of the time that I thought I knew how to do a decent cartwheel, a key cue. It’s natural, as you bring your hands towards the ground to begin your cartwheel, to let your first arm drop away from your head, I.e. if your shoulders start glued to your ears— which they should— by the time your first hand touches the ground, the shoulder of that arm will no longer be touching your ear. Whereas really, it should be— your upper body should be a perfect see-saw with your back leg, such that by the time your first hand touches the ground, your back leg should be almost vertical. And your head squeezed between both your arms the entire time.
I had simply never considered that this was a factor in a cartwheel— despite the fact that your head should be squeezed tight between your shoulders during pretty much every single skill in gymnastics that involves your arms going overhead. This whole sport is deducible from first principles… most of us just don’t have the brainpower.
So that’s where the real meat of gymnastics— and of any pursuit worth doing— lies: in the basics. True to that principle, we spent a lot of time at camp on stuff that it would sure be nice to have time to do in the gym, but most of us on he open gym circuit don’t have time for: beam complexes, drills involving complicated arrangements of mats, warming up in a leisurely fashion and not “what is the absolute minimum of warm-up I can do to be able to train safely,” etc.
I really wish I could go back this winter; the problem with the concept of Adult Gymnastics Camp, of course, being that adults tend to have pesky things like jobs. Thanks to my not-really-too-pesky job, I’ll have to miss both the winter camp and the Masters’ meet in March; I’m hoping to line up another meet for slightly later, but hat remains to be seen.
Unrelated to gymnastics, as well as eating a stomach-turning amount of fish, I also had the best salad I’ve ever eaten at The Oar House in downtown Portsmouth. It is called grilled romaine salad, and it was the holy grail of restaurant meals that is too good to even attempt to recreate or even like pay homage to at home; better to just let it be a memory.
I am back in Regina as of today! My first port of call for this holiday break, immediately following the Messiah, was Calgary, where Mike and I spent the first part of the holiday with his parents. For the past few years we’ve been there just before Christmas, so they usually pick a date to call “Christmas” and celebrate Christmas Eve and morning accordingly. I was introduced to The Shepherd radio play, which I hadn’t heard before, as well as the supposedly French-Canadian tradition of tortiere as a Christmas Eve dish.
Then, on actual Christmas Eve, we went to see my parents, just in time for a family meal. After a few days in Toronto, we headed back to Kitchener for the rest of the break (we’ll, break for me, Nutcracker for Mike.)
I have two Masterworks concerts left with Regina before heading back to Ontario for Five Sacred Trees. I’ve been debating the best way to deal with the issue of music for the performance. I have memorized it, and have been doing memorized runs of the entire work almost every day for about a month already. However, pretty much everyone who has played it has advised me to play it with the music onstage. As a wind player, I don’t have a lot of experience with playing solo repertoire, well, at all, compared to string and piano players; and memorization isn’t expected of wind players the way it is of other families of instruments. So I will have the part onstage with me.
However, it’s complicated to arrange the page turns so that they work out well; and even once photocopied, the pages require folding over and under each other in a way that would look awkward to do between movements. I don’t want to have to be shuffling around with pages between every movement, especially if I have it memorized anyway. I even, if it turns out to be possible for all relevant parties in the orchestra, would like to do almost all of it attaca from movement to movement— excepting the break between Tortan and Eo Rossa, which requires vigorous tone hole-blowing and prayers to the gods of gurgling water incidents :P
I considered getting a foot pedal and playing it off of tablet; but that then adds in the potential for technological malfunction; and since there are electronic components in concert halls that could interfere with the Bluetooth that connects the pedal to the tablet, a successful run at home doesn’t guarantee success in concert.
I still have a little bit of time to figure something out…
One of the things I decided to accomplish this winter (or rather, have someone else accomplish while I sat around and watched) was having my bassoon tuned up. Since there are, shockingly, no dedicated bassoon repair professionals in Saskatchewan, I made an appointment to go see Frank Marcus in Wasaga Beach while I was in Ontario for the holidays.
I was mainly concerned about my wing joint; I had been having more trouble than I thought was entirely fair with my high B and C. Both reassuringly and somewhat disappointingly, there was nothing massively wrong with the area that, once fixed, could cause the entire high range of the bassoon to suddenly become easy. (How unfair!) However he did adjust the B resonance so that there is no delay in it coming up, which should remove some uncertainty. He also added some (clear) paint to some parts, explaining that the wood of a bassoon is also sometimes a source of leaks, which I had had no idea of.
When he got to the long joint, though, he stared at the pressure gauge in surprise, and said, “maybe it’s wrong.” It wasn’t sealing at all, and when he removed the keywork, it was obvious why: one of the holes underneath was neither uniformly flush with the pad, nor even circular. “It looks like a beaver gnawed on it,” Frank commented. “Benson didn’t do this.”
I am pleased to report that it is indeed much easier to play low notes… an inability I seem to have not noticed too much during the past few months. Whoops!
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!
