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
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 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!
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