I started the month of August feeling somewhat nervous over the fact that I had almost no gigs lined up. Fortunately, it picked up somewhat, and I’ve actually been pretty busy. On the 4th, I played a recital at the Belfountain Music Festival. Belfountain is an area in Caledon, Ontario, where violinist Zachary Ebin has put together an eclectic festival featuring professional concerts in multiple genres of music as well as a student division of Suzuki string students. It all takes place in the Melville White church, one of the few remaining pre-Victorian era timber frame churches in Ontario, which was built in 1837, in active use until 1964 and is now under restoration. I played the 2nd cello suite– turns out it still hurts the face if you’ve been playing it for years, folks– as well as Nussio’s Variations on a Theme by Pergolesi, the Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras No.6 for flute and bassoon, and a Handel sonata fashioned into another flute-and-bassoon duet. Two days after that recital, the Belfountain Music Festival featured a string quartet concert with a professionally-led campfire sing-along out back behind the church afterwards, to give you an idea of the kinds of things going on there! Pretty much immediately afterwards– close enough to the recital that I didn’t feel too guilty about leaving my bassoon at home and calling it “post-recital relaxation,” anyway– I attended as a delegate of the 2015 conference of the Organization of Canadian Symphony Muscians! OCSM is a conference of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada (AFM, aka the musicians’ union) which counts as member orchestras pretty much all the major symphony orchestras in Canada and many of the full- and part-time regional ones. For the first time, the Niagara Symphony was invited to send a delegate, so I hopped in the car and drove past more windmills than I’d ever seen in my life to Windsor, Ontario, where the conference was held this year. I learned a ton about orchestra contracts, negotiating, the AFM, and the way that other orchestras in Canada do things, met some super people from all over Canada, and had a waterfront view of Detroit from my hotel for five days. Creedance Clearwater Revival was playing some sort of reunion concert in Detroit the first night I was there, and there were people lined up all along the Windsor waterfront to listen. When I got back from Windsor, I pretty much just stayed on the road and spent a night in Kitchener before spending two days in Hamilton filling out the section for the final concert of this year’s National Academy Orchestra/Brott Music Festival. (It not even that much closer, but WOW, is it ever more pleasant driving to Hamilton from Kitchener than Toronto…) We played Carmina Burana, which contains my favourite Latin drinking song ever! I have two more one-day gigs and some private lessons to teach in Toronto before I go to the Interprovincial Music Camp to teach as a faculty assistant. And finally, I am moving for September! Into a slightly more expensive ($630 instead of $554– all good prices for downtown Toronto), but disproportionately more pleasant (I anticipate), co-op house. Woo-hoo!
I’ve been living in Toronto for a little over two months now, and we’re well into the “mostly wasps with a 60% chance of stinky garbage” phase of summer. For better or for worse, most of my gigs at this point are either outside or in churches, meaning a trip to the Salvation Army to get some less-hot black clothes is probably in order! Thus far it’s been enjoyable, though, especially since some of the gigs I had in the past few weeks were at Casa Loma. Casa Loma is a large and impressive castle with equally large and impressive gardens built in the early 1900’s but Sir Henry Pellatt, who as far as I can tell (mostly by reading the informational signs inside Casa Loma itself) was kind of a pompous dick. Eventually he couldn’t pay his taxes and the city seized the castle, although not before it was used during World War 2 as a secret Allied research base– the sonar equipment used to detect U-boats was developed in the attic of Casa Loma, hidden from the public (who came to the castle for weekly social dances) by nothing more than a sign that said “Under construction, we apologize for the inconvenience.”
Anyway, Casa Loma has some pretty rad gardens, maintained by a whole army of gardeners, which includes a closed (and air-conditioned!) glass gazebo in which concerts are held every Tuesday. I didn’t take any pictures, but fortunately for once the publicity photo is exactly correct about what it actually looks like.
The music is great; we played an “Opera Hits” show, Beethoven 7, and the most recent Tuesday, a concert of mostly French Impressionism. The place is always packed-- even the Beethoven 7 concert, when it started pouring rain in the middle of the performance, people who were outside of the gazebo stayed to listen!
Tomorrow I have a different outdoor gig, at the Jackson-Triggs winery. I’ve played there once before, with NYOC in 2012. Jackson-Triggs has its own amphitheatre and puts on an entire summer concert series.
On my way through wine country tomorrow, I’m also planning on stopping at a meadery to buy some mead, which I haven’t been able to find in LCBOs and have been trying to for ever!
I also have some solo stuff going on; last Friday I played a kids’ show of my very own, consisting of the 2nd Cello Suite and Nussio’s Variations on a Theme by Pergolesi, with lots of explanations, jokes and tricks in between the movements of each. One of the teachers at the Niagara Summer Music Camp later told me that she had never seen the campers so attentive before for a single-instrument recital!
I’ll be playing the same rep again, plus the Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras No. 6 (for flute and bassoon) and some Handel duets at the Belfountain Music Festival on August 4th.
Besides all that, I also got a job at a patient transfer company– the non-emergency ambulances that take patients between hospitals and from their homes to hospital appointments– and as a result of the lifting requirements of the job, have finally started lifting weights for real! I have been doing the Stronglifts 5x5 program at the U of T gym. I’ve been meaning to learn how to lift for… like, years, so this job is the kick in the pants I need :D I start my job training at the company in a few weeks!
That’s all, folks. Now, I gotta go work out/warm up/make reeds/ get supplies to make some jam with the huge excess of mulberries on the trees around my house!
I was waitlisted for Rice. Considering I started the process resigned to the idea of not even getting past the prescreening, I feel A-OK about that!
I participated in my very first concerto competition! A few weeks ago I flew to Toronto for a day to play in the finals of the Orchestra Toronto concerto competition. The winner ended up being a flutist that I went to McGill with (3/4 of the finalists were McGill people, interestingly…) but I was still very happy with how I played. Because of the competition, I ended up pulling out of the opera audition I was going to do around the same time after realizing that the job sounded good in theory but would actually be extremely inconvenient in practice. Plus, I could do the competition without missing out on any services in Thunder Bay, whereas for the audition I would have lost a few days worth of pay for an audition that didn’t serve my interests anyway.
I went to a barn dance at a farm in Neebing the other night with some symphony friends! Merrie, our principal trumpet, is also a Ceilidh dance caller, and her husband is a celtic fiddler who was playing with a guitar player visiting from Quebec. It was awwweeesome.
The symphony season ends on the 3rd of May, but I am staying an extra week to play a show with my wind quintet! It will be at 3 PM on May 9th at the Foundry. The title of the show is “Music of the Americas,” despite my mostly-joking suggestion of “Nothing European.” Entrance is by donation.
I guess I technically have two symphony seasons to play the ends of– I haven’t been in St. Catharine’s very much this year, but I’ll be with the Niagara Symphony for the last concert of the season on May 17, in which, bizarrely, we are playing one of the same pieces that we played in my first concert in Thunder Bay– Christos Hatzis’ Lamento, sung by Sarah Slean. This will be our last concert in Sean O’Sullivan theatre at Brock– next season, we will be moving into the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, the new PAC in downtown St. Catherine’s. (FirstOntario is apparently a credit union that made a major donation, but it’s kind of a snazzy name for it, isn’t it?)
For the TBSO’s Music in the Classroom program, today I was in schools with a wind quintet. Among many other things we played the Adagio from Hetu’s wind quintet, and the kids were asked to think during the movement about what kind of scene would belong to that music in a movie. One tiny kid confidently raised his hand and said, “D-Day.” Hear for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CspMEPqJro
Maybe you remember this:Written by former oboist/person-who-tried-to-poison-Bill-Nye-the-Science-Guy’s-garden Blair Tindall, it chronicles how, with diligent use of poor sexual and substance-related choices, any promising young musician can succeed in succumbing to a fate fit for a rock god.
Now, it’s on TV!
The pilot episode came out in the summer, and the 6 of us at the Brott Qvintetthaus (we had a full woodwind quintet, plus another horn) proooobably watched it… about five times. Every time someone came over to our house, they would have to sit down and watch it: the young oboe student texting his friend that “I wish my dick was a woodwind,” actual Joshua Bell playing with the not-so-actual New York Symphony, the young and ambitious Maestro Rodrigo (take a guess), and a party featuring some kind of excerpt spin-the-bottle game and a device called the “ganjanome” (it’s one of them old-fashioned metronomes with a joint tied to the arm). When we left our heroine, the young oboist Hayley, she had just rushed to a surprise New York Symphony audition on a rickshaw (making a reed on the way– hey, nice Landwell.) The audition ends before she gets there, but she decides to play to the empty hall, where Rodrigo is still lurking, making out with his assistant. The episode ends with him in awe of her amazing oboe skillz.
I am going to have to watch the rest of the episodes. It’s gonna happen. No turning back.
So, what happens in the next one?
Coming back to reality somewhat, Gloria– the NYS’s head honcho who seems to be simultaneously all administrative positions at once– remembers that musicians are unionized, and you can’t just replace oboists at random. Dudamel Rodrigo says fine, we’ll just play Mahler 8, and hires Hayley as fifth oboe. She skips down the street, which is also what I would do if I were playing Mahler 8, so +1 realism point. -1 that same realism point for the fact that Mahler 8 has no 5th oboe part.
Hayley’s roommate has a somewhat flawed understanding of what practicing entails, and is irritated that hearing the same passage of Mahler over and over distracts her from her extremely important bong hits. (Hayley is practicing oboe, not English horn… the plot thickens!) So Hayley goes to make out with a dancer she met in the last episode instead.
The all-important first rehearsal! Hayley’s cellist friend (the principal cellist in the prestigious New York Symphony who inexplicably has to take weird off-Broadway musical gigs after symphony concerts, which appears to be how she met Hayley) introduces her to various characters, such as the dudes effectuating drug transactions backstage (the seller offers her propranolol “on the house”, how nice!) and a guy who complains about the change in repertoire and worries that opening the season with “a composer suppressed by the Nazis” sends the wrong message. Oookay then. Yes. That is the only relevant piece of information about Mahler.
Hayley meets the principal oboe, who informs her that “I had tits once, I just didn’t play my oboe with them.” Buuuurn.
Ah yes, and here is Hayley sitting in her 5th oboe chair, which is located somewhat suspiciously right next to the principal oboe.
Then the concertmaster stands up and for some reason the rest of the orchestra does too. Then a parrot appears and poops on Rodrigo’s shoe. Then the 2nd/5th oboe gives the A while the 1st makes a masturbatory motion with her oboe, and rehearsal can start. Seems legit.
Due to sweaty hands (WIPE THEM ON YOUR PANTS, GURL) Hayley manages to throw her oboe on the floor and yell “motherfucker!” Yeah, I hate when that happens. The episode ends with our heroine packing up her oboe on the steps of the hall while mouthing swearwords.
The first time I saw Into The Woods was at the very first production put on by Music Theatre Montreal. It was late 2011 and a strike of the unionized support workers at McGill meant that all of the campus groups that had bookings at Moyse Hall– the main theatre in the Arts building– were out in the cold as far as spaces for their shows went. Since I was on the executive of such a group– The McGill Savoy Society, which usually books Moyse for a two-week run of Gilbert and Sullivan in February– this was obviously concerning. MTM was the first theatre group to have to face the problem, and despite every expectation that the show would be canceled, everyone involved in the production pulled together and managed to book a different venue and put on the show, a great success. I remember wishing that I was playing it, but since I was doing both Sweeney Todd and The Gondoliers that year, I wasn’t too deprived on the musical theatre front. The second time I saw Into The Woods was a few days ago, a Disney blockbuster with actors so famous, even I had heard of some of them! Okay, two– Anna Kendrick, who might as well have been filming an audition for the role of Cinderella with the music video for “Cups” (aka the Carter Family’s “When I’m Gone”), and, of course, Johnny Depp. My dad said that he thought Johnny Depp was becoming a caricature of himself: possibly true, but I don’t know what else can be expected of him from the role of pedophilic forest animal. The best thing about this movie, I think, is that it exists. Although it might seems a little bit pessimistic to say, I think it’s true that a lot of people who would never buy a ticket to a production of a Sondheim musical will see this movie. And that’s not necessarily because of any antipathy in modern culture for live music; it could be just price. Pretty much the only way to mount a top-notch production of a show and sell the vast majority (IDK, possibly excepting IMAX or whatever premium movie theatre tickets some people might buy) of the tickets for $10 or less is to make it a movie. There were some parts of the movie, too, that not only did the musical justice but actually improved on anything that could be done in a theatre: probably the highlight of the entire movie for me was the song “Agony,” in which Cinderella’s and Rapunzel’s princes compare their hardships as the true loves and saviors of their respective difficult women. The song is over-the-top and ridiculous, and the ability to make it ridiculous in a cinematic way only improved on the humour. (They splash around in a waterfall overlooking the kingdom, striking poses and ignoring the water damage to their presumably expensive riding boots.) The main problem with Into The Woods as a movie, then, was that it was just too damn long. Or rather, too damn long to not have an intermission. The structure of the acts in the show basically demands an intermission: at the end of the first act the characters all get their wishes and everyone lives happily ever after. Applaud, go buy a $6 Häagen-Dazs bar from the concession stand, and rally for the next act, which has a lot more weirdness and body count (which was diminished by one for the movie: Rapunzel lives.) With both acts run together, I was wishing it was over about 45 minutes before it actually was. With both Into the Woods and Mr. Turner-- a movie about British artist J. M. W. Turner– in theatres now, I eagerly await Hollywood’s take on Sunday in the Park with George.
The Walleye, Thunder Bay’s arts and culture newspaper, wrote a review of our Nutcracker here! Fun for me to see a picture of it, since I couldn’t see anything from the back of the pit…
Right now I am in the middle of getting familiar with some music that comes in chunks larger than I’ve ever played before. The first one is the Nutcracker, which the TBSO is performing with the Minnesota Ballet soon; 34 pages, all of it… well, written by Tchaikovsky. I went back and read Barry Stees’ post on the subject, where he says:
This juggernaut of a piece for the orchestra confronts many musicians at this time of year. If it were played just occasionally it would be universally hailed by musicians as one of the greatest pieces of ballet music. Instead, many musicians look upon it as a chore.
This strikes me as incredibly true. This performance will be my first time paying the piece, so I don’t feel any of the “ugh, this again” that lots of people seem to feel. That response seems to be pretty much the standard from musicians to the Nutcracker, which objectively doesn’t make a lot of sense. This is a piece that demands to be taken seriously; it’s difficult, long, written by a famous and well-loved composer, and performed every single year– what other piece of music gets to be performed on that kind of a schedule? But familiarity breeds contempt, of course, and for people with permanent positions in ballet orchestras… well, I would imagine they get pretty darn familiar with it. I’m also working slowly but steadily on an entirely new set of repertoire: my first opera audition! Opera, and opera auditions, seem to occupy a somewhat unusual space in the lives of orchestral musicians, especially younger ones. For some reason, the orchestral excerpts one is expected to learn at music school rarely include opera excerpts. Thus, whereas at this point in my life I generally expect one or two new-to-me excerpts on a list for a major orchestra, this, my first opera audition, features a whopping nine new excerpts to learn (and a few more that I’m only vaguely familiar with.) Then, of course, there’s the issue of listening to recordings of the excerpts. Thus far, the only way I’ve found to reliably locate an excerpt in the middle of a recording is to listen to the whole opera with a score. So, I figured that as long as I’m doing that, I might as well be organized about it. For each opera, I am going to choose a video reference and an online score (oh god, I hope I can find scores online for all of them) and take notes on the recording; where various landmarks in the score happen, and so on, so that I can easily come back to the excerpts later, and also locate other parts in the opera more easily, if I ever need to play an excerpt from the same opera, but in a different place. Ideally, I will end up with a collection of easily navigable video references for operas with common bassoon excerpts, that will also be useful to me if I have to actually learn the whole opera. So far, I am almost done with Cavalleria Rusticana. As well as timing notes, my document on it also contains a lot of notes about cuts the recording takes (which takes an extreeeemely long time to figure out, when you’re going along merrily and all of a sudden the recording is somewhere else…) and also errors in the score, such as pages being omitted or uploaded twice. So, a large part of the difficulty is dealing with the pedagogical shortcomings of the available materials. But, since The Orchestral Bassoon website doesn’t have most of these opera excerpts yet, someone’s gotta do it! Of course, it will also pay off in that I’ll be better prepared for an opera audition the more thoroughly I know the repertoire. And, of course, better prepared should I get an actual opera job! Basically, it seems like opera auditions have a higher barrier to entry than symphony auditions, because not all of the people who are familiar with symphony lists are familiar with opera lists. So I want to use this audition as an opportunity to break into the “people who can comfortably do opera auditions” club, and after having done the huge amount of initial work on this one, every opera list after this will have fewer and fewer new excerpts to learn from scratch. Perhaps after this I should get familiar with some ballet excerpts too… although, it seems like I’m doing that now– the only list turned up through a google search for “ballet bassoon audition” is all standard symphony stuff, plus generous helpings of the Nutcracker!
Over the weekend, I went on a roadtrip to Minnesota! I had a lesson with John Miller Jr, principal of the Minnesota orchestra, on the rep I will shortly be recording for a prescreening, and heard the Minnesota Orchestra play in the evening. I also got to stay with a friend from McGill, Alana, who lives with her husband about an hour each way in between Duluth and Minneapolis.
It was cooooold in Minnesota– Saturday morning it was -22 when I woke up, but only -11 in Thunder Bay. Now it’s starting to get colder here as well. I’m half-doing nanowrimo--I’m not going to get to 50 000 words by the end of the month, especially since I didn’t write anything on the trip. But I’m still going to meet-ups and writing words occasionally, so there’s that!
I occasionally like to watch live feeds of various space exploration-related things– I follow NASA and the Canadian Space Agency on Twitter and they often post live videos of launches, various craft docking at the ISS and so on. So I was actually watching the live feed of the Antares lifting off tonight, expecting to watch a little-heralded, unmanned supply rocket take off, think “cool!” and be on my way. I didn’t actually realize what was happening at first– I thought to myself, “gee, is there always that much fire on the ground? Are there trees or something on fire?” Nope: it exploded, which is pretty obvious upon a re-watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHMmMgdcOSU By far the most affecting video, though, is this one, taken at the press site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ0SgAU9LXI It’s odd; it feels very different to have watched this happen in real time than it would to just find out about it afterwards. Ultimately, although this was a failure, it was also a success. According to reports, a person with the title of “flight termination officer” performed their job admirably, and triggered the self-destruct before the rocket actually hit the ground. How incredible: a rocket ship turned into a giant fireball, and nobody was even injured (although I would expect some ringing in the ears tomorrow for those press guys… hope they were wearing earplugs.) In a gratifying gesture of transparency, the live feed was left running long after the explosion and a press conference scheduled a few hours later– not that there was much information available, since there’s still burning rocket fuel on the ground and thus not much opportunity to collect data. But the data will be collected, and space flights will be made safer because of this incident. I was reminded tonight of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, which I read a few months ago. He discusses extensively the way that NASA learns from its mistakes almost obsessively, debriefing and improving upon every detail of even a seemingly successful operation. So, in a way, the Antares explosion is a gift. It has pointed out a fatal flaw in, well, something, which can now be investigated and fixed, all with no loss of life. Perhaps it would even be accurate to say that the Antares explosion saved lives, if they can now prevent whatever happened today from happening on manned flights. So, congratulations to Orbital Sciences Corporation and NASA on an unsuccessful, but necessary, launch. I look forward to watching more launches in the future.