Can you spot me? :P
http://youtu.be/NGMQcRLELzk (This was a donor event for the new Performing Arts Centre in St. Catherine’s.)
School's out...
Three hours after my recital ended, I had my first post-school rehearsal :P That week I was playing fourth on the Verdi Requiem with the orchestra of the Société Philharmonique de Montréal. That concert was on Good Friday, and the bassoon section was Marty– my first teacher at McGill– playing principal and two other students from McGill besides me. The next day I took the Montreal-Toronto Megabus hopefully for the last time, and crammed in an Easter party before going to Kitchener to do some school shows with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony the first half of last week. The latter half of the week was Niagara, who had the Sultans of String in, and we performed both a childrens’ show with them and a full pops program. All of the music on those programs was written by the Sultans, and it was really good! Some in the orchestra even went up to the lobby to buy their CDs and get them signed (as band leader Chris McKhool said, “buying our CDs is definitely the safest way to take us home with you tonight!”) So, between travel Montreal-Toronto-Kitchener-Toronto-St. Catherine’s and all the rehearsals and concerts, this is actually the first day I’ve had off after my recital. On Thursday I’m flying to Thunder Bay for their audition, and then have another concert cycle with the NSO (Cosi Fan Tutte overture, Brahms Piano Concerto #1, and Beethoven 7!) while simultaneously chaperoning at the Ontario Student Classics Conference (http://www.classicsconference.org/), which I attended as a high school student and just happens to be 1) the exact same dates as NSO masterworks 5 2) at Brock University, 3) hosted this year by my former high school, and thus 4) provides me with a free room at the Brock residences for this concert cycle. Sweeeet. Then I have to get all my belongings from my soon-to-be-former place in Montreal, find a place in Hamilton and move into it, because I’m going to be playing in the National Academy Orchestra for the summer! I only auditioned for two summer festivals this year (oops!), NAO and the NAC’s Young Artist’s Program, and although I got into both and was hoping to be able to go to both, they ended up conflicting in such a way that I wasn’t able to get a sub for NAO as I was hoping. So, I reluctantly had to pass up the YAP for this year, since NAO is a 9-week orchestral program that pays a minimum of $430 a week to each apprentice. However I’m very happy to be able to participate in that, especially with both Rite of Spring and The Firebird on the program! Happy summer!
Bassoon Day recap
It’s been a while since bassoon day, but I didn’t write about it at the time and I’m on a wifi-enabled bus right now, so why not!
I admit I wasn’t actually there for the whole thing. I ended up working that morning– teaching music classes to small children, in the classroom right beside the one being used as a vendor’s room/general hang-out room for Bassoon Day. So, lots of “Mommy, can we go see the clarinets?” before and after the classes. They haven’t gotten to bassoon yet in the Little Musicians curriculum… I’ll be coming around to the classrooms some time soon to introduce them to it. (Last year, I walked into one class and the teacher said, “Wow! Boys and girls, how do you think you make a sound on THIS instrument?” One perceptive kid raised his hand and shouted “I know! You don’t!”)
So, I only caught the tail end of the masterclass with Mathieu Harel in the morning. However, I have played in his masterclasses in previous years, and he is a very perceptive teacher and entertaining speaker. In the afternoon was the masterclass with Ole Kristian Dahl: Nadia played the 2nd movement of the Mozart, Daniel Weber’s Andante and Hungarian Rondo, I the Prelude from the 2nd Cello Suite, and Mary the Berwald Konzertstuck. None of us actually got very far into our pieces; he didn’t need to hear the whole thing before deciding on a facet of technique that we wanted to work on. He suggested trying to hold pieces of paper against the keys even when the keys are up (“And in my studio, every time it falls, a euro in the jar!”), compared playing your first note slightly out of tune to getting on a train to the wrong city, and demonstrated how he could play the entire Scheherezade solo in one breath (“I won a crate of wine from my colleagues for that.”) somehow he managed to keep the audience actually laughing (with us, not at us!) the whole time.
Later in the afternoon, there was a concert where Ole along with pianist Pamela Reimer and Stephane, Marty, Mathieu, and Michael (Principal, 2nd, Associate, and Contrabassoon of the OSM, respectively) played all sorts of bassoon things in various configurations including the premiere of a new trio for bassoon, contra and piano by Mathieu Lussier, who was also in attendance. Finally, the traditional forest of bassoons where every single person in the audience who has a bassoon (which is most of hem, obviously) gets up on stage for bassoon ensemble works. Kaitlin, a former McGill student who now studies with Ole, was even there via Skype on a music stand in the back row.
If you’d like to be updated about future McGill bassoon days, Stephane usually posts an announcement on the IDRS forum, or join the bassoon newsletter that Pascal Veraquin’s woodwind shop sends out and an announcement will probably be made there.
Happy bassooning!
Bassoon day
I’m playing in the master class with Ole Kristian Dahl at 2 PM, and there’s another masterclass in the morning, a concert in the evening and people will be hanging out in the vendor’s room for the rest of the day. Given the photo, I’m going to be really disappointed if there is not actually a transparent bassoon in attendance… I don’t know where the picture is from, but the only one that I know of is that of Lionel Bord, bassoonist in L’Orchestre de Paris, who demonstrates its many excellent qualities in this video, among others:
More conducting!
Lest semester I wrote a little bit about a conducting class I was taking. In that class, all we got to conduct was a recording. However, this semester I’m in the next class, in which we get to conduct actual people! We get to conduct two different groups: he lab Band and the Wind Symphony. The Lab band is made up of the combined Wind Techniques, Brass Techniques and Percussion Techniques classes– the music education classes where you learn to play every instrument in a family. So, the lab band is made up of very competent musicians, all of whom are playing instruments they don’t know how to play! (Last year I took Brass tech and played French Horn in lab band.) That combination of musical expertise and technical uselessness makes for kind of a unique group, which by the end of the semester usually progresses to the point that it could pass as a reasonably advanced high school band. On Tuesday I conducted the Lab band for the first time, which was my very first experience conducting people! Of course it was rather different from conducting the recordings we’ve been doing in class… for instance, I felt kind of silly even bothering to indicate dynamics at all, since I knew that they knew that their dynamic range consisted of “on” or “off”, and even the “on” option was still a little beyond a few sections. However, there’s no point in just standing there beating time when the experience is supposed to help me improve as a conductor! Later in the semester, we get to try conducting the Wind Symphony, and the members of that group get to vote on which members of the conducting class they would like to conduct a movement each from the Candide Suite in their concert! (The movement I’m preparing is Glitter and be Gay, which was a terrible choice because it’s been stuck in my head for the past month and it’s starting to get irritating.) The Wind Symphony, along with the Contemporary Music Ensemble and the McGill Symphony Orchestra, is one of the credited large ensembles at McGill, and I played in it for the first two years of my degree so I remember this process from the other side! The Wind Symphony conductor, Alain Cazes, is also the conducting teacher, so he prepares the piece with the ensemble before the student conductors get to have a go at it. Although of course I can’t know if I’ll be voted to conduct in the concert, everyone gets to go through their movement with the group at least once, so it’ll be interesting to see the differences between how the lab Band responds to movement and how the Wind Symphony responds. Although we have lots of classes in the undergraduate program that are supposed to somehow improve you as a general musician, and even a series of required classes entitled “musicianship” (it’s solfege, okay, the class is about learning fixed-do solfege) Alain’s conducting classes are the first non-performance classes I’ve taken that I really feel fulfill that purpose. Learning about the intricate connection of movement to sound and expression to technique isn’t something we really spend time on other academic classes. With Alain we watch a lot of videos of great conductors and great orchestras, and he is always telling us stories about the conductors he’s worked with as a tuba player in L’Orchestre Metropolitain and elsewhere. Even though the class is technically supposed to be to train high school band teachers, he makes it relevant and important to all musicians. I’ve found that of a lot of my Music Education classes, actually; although they’re not required or even often allowed for students in the Performance program, they’ve been some of the most worthwhile classes of my degree.
Body Mapping
Last week, a violinist in the Mcgill Symphony stood up before rehearsal started an announced that Jennifer Johnson, a body mapping teacher and Andover Educator, would be coming to McGill to do a body mapping workshop on the weekend. I had seen a few of these workshops being advertised: they’re the ones called “What Every Musician Needs to know About the Body”, and are run by an association of hybrid Alexander technique/music teachers who focus on teaching practical anatomy lessons to musicians. Although I have been taking a few lessons in Alexander technique recently, I hadn’t looked into the Andover educators in part because it seemed like a much more, well, commercialized venture. Unlike the Alexander technique, which is simply a discipline of study, “Andover Educators” is a company, and is upfront about selling goods, mostly books with the title “What every (insert instrumentalist here) needs to know About The Body” and “The Breathing Book for (instrument).” So, to be honest, my question about Andover was– are they just taking advantage of musicians’ insecurities about their body-use to sell them stuff? Nope. It’s true that, having decided to try it out, I did spend $140 that weekend– $100 for the workshop fee, and another $40 for a private lesson with Jennifer. But after about fifteen years in music lessons of some kind, most of it being spent being given massively contradictory and often simply untrue information about how a body works and how one might be employed in the service of music-making, I would have been willing to pay pretty much any amount of money for the information Jennifer was selling. Of course, I can’t claim to have truly absorbed even a fraction of what was taught in the workshop– that’s the work of a lifetime! But I no longer feel the need to have private lessons that go like this (compiled from the past few years of my life): Me: am I breathing right? Am I doing it right now? I don’t think I’m doing it right. *tries really hard* Teacher: Breathe with your belly! Me: But there are no lungs in my… okay… *tries even harder* Teacher: Yeah. Sure. Good. Watching you breathe is boring, now let’s play bassoon. Me: But every time I try to play bassoon I have to breathe first! Okay my stomach is like poking out now, that’s good right? Only I can’t get through any phrases. Are my shoulders moving? I think my shoulders are moving. That’s bad right? Teacher: Keep your shoulders down. Other Teacher: I don’t know, I think maybe your shoulders can move a little bit? Yet Another teacher: Fill the bottom of your lungs first! Then your shoulders won’t be a problem. Frustrated teacher: I think you’re over-thinking this. Me: The only conclusion I can draw from all of this is that I just don’t know how to breathe. I am bad at breathing. Ben Kamins: you have survived twenty years in planet earth and spent all of it breathing. You are not bad at breathing. You are, by definition, an expert at breathing. Me: okay, then something’s gone wrong. Jennifer: SLOOOOOWWW DOWWWWWWNNNNN (hehe remember this? http://youtu.be/qRuNxHqwazs ) So here are some things I learned: Air comes into your body when your ribs move. Your ribs are like the handle on a bucket: they swing outwards, increasing the volume of the space inside of them. The lungs are connected to the ribs simply because there is nothing in between them: they move with the ribs because of vacuum pressure. Although many people have their torso mapped as essentially square, it’s more beehive-shaped: the top of the beehive is made up of your top ribs, which also open to allow air in– meaning the top portion of the back should expand outwards upon inhalation. The air– as I had always suspected– does indeed go into your lungs, not your stomach, as generations of wind pedagogues seem to think. Because of the bronchial tree leading to the alveoli, the idea that you can fill the bottom of your lungs before the top is a fantasy. And, as Jennifer said, “When you have an inaccurate fantasy about the way your body works, your body will use any kind of tension possible to try to make that fantasy come true.” In my private lesson, Jennifer had me put my hands on her back and shoulders and feel that the top back ribs were expanding outwards quite a bit, and that– the horror!– her shoulders were moving freely with the action of the ribs. She explained that the “don’t move your shoulders” myth takes place because, when people are already using unnecessary tension to try to breathe with their belly or use their diaphragm (a muscle which has no sense receptors) they’ll compensate by using the muscles in their arm region to raise the shoulders. Instead, the solution is to allow the shoulders to ride on the action of the ribs. Likewise, when breathing out, there is no need to push the air out with the muscles of the stomach. This seems to contradict the idea of supporting from your abdomen, and I’m still a little bit confused about how this principle would work when back-pressure is involved, as when playing a wind instrument. Since Jennifer is a violinist (she wrote “What Every Violinist Needs to know About the Body”) she had no specific answer for me on that point, but referred me to oboist Stephen Caplan’s book (titled, unsurprisingly, “Oboemotions: What Every Oboe player Needs to know About the Body”) and encouraged me to email him with any more wind-specific questions. Of course, I have barely even begun to be able to employ all of this in my playing. However, for the past few months, I had been growing increasingly uncomfortable in my daily life about my breathing. Even when not playing bassoon– sitting in class, for example– I would start to worry: am I doing it right? How much air am I taking in now? What’s my belly doing? What are my shoulders doing? After a few minutes of this line of inquiry it would start to feel like I had suddenly developed some kind of lung disease that rendered me completely incapable of breathing in a way that didn’t cause me discomfort! This was one reason that I finally decided to go for the workshop: it’s undesirable to be in discomfort or pain while you’re playing, but completely unacceptable to have it leaking into all other areas of your life. Anyway, I’m happy to report that as I sit here typing this blog post, I can feel the air being transported efficiently and comfortably from the outside world to my lungs and back again. :D Most of the workshop wasn’t spent on breathing, though– the audience was actually all string players except for me and one saxophonist, and there was a large contingent of Suzuki violin teachers, so a lot of the information was tailored for them. I didn’t really mind since everything was transferable (and I was a Suzuki student myself back in the day!) Here are some more items from my notes: - the “body map” is not a metaphor. Jennifer said that she always liked coming to Montreal because everyone recognizes the name of Dr. Wilder Penfield, the Canadian neurosurgeon who developed the first concepts of the cortical homunculus . (The reason his name is recognized among laymen in Montreal is that Avenue Docteur Penfield, named in his honour, runs through the northern portion of the McGill campus.) - the kinaesthetic sense is a real sense, that has been neglected in most education systems and needs to be trained by musicians just as we train our sense of hearing. - 2 cultural diseases affecting the health of our bodies: “Relax” and “Good posture”. - Although we tend to map the spine as something that exists towards the back of the body because that’s where we can see and feel the bumps in out skin, it is actually quite central. It’s also way thicker than you would expect– if I had my own spine out of my body, I wouldn’t be able to wrap my hand all the way around it at its thickest point! - The spine is also longer than we think. It ends at the top with the A.O joint. To find out where that is, put your fingers in the dent under your ears– it’s between them. - when you sit, your weight should be on the thick portion of your rockers (sit bones)– not your thighs. I wonder how this could be better achieved when using a seat strap to hold up this bassoon? -most people lean too far back in a standing posture. To find balance, try walking backwards, and see how your posture shifts. -there is no such things the palm of your hand. If you look at a diagram of the bones in your hand, you will see that this is true. - there is also no such thing as a waist. - when at rest, the tongue should be between the bottom teeth and not touching the top palate. If it is touching the roof of the mouth, it is causing tension farther back in the head And there are a lot more things that I wrote down that I wouldn’t be able to explain, or don’t fully understand myself at this point. And obviously, don’t take it from me– I went to this workshop last weekend, and anything I wrote here could be inaccurate in my own understanding. If you have the opportunity, I definitely recommend seeing an Andover teacher. This information, tailored to musicians in this way, just isn’t available from any other source. I also found the actual demonstrations (which included a lot of hands-on work and use of plastic models to show what different bone structures actually look like in 3D) to be much easier to understand than just reading the literature– but if it’s literature you’re after there’s plenty of it, with a “What Every…” or a Breathing Book for many instruments and more being written right now. Here’s a schedule for all the Andover workshops taking place all over the world, and here is their recommended reading list. That’s all folks!
Agricultural products
Careful everyone. By this logic, all cane reeds are dangerous agricultural products and must be destroyed. http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2013/12/jfk-customs-destroyed-11-of-my-instruments.html
Rest in peace Khloe the hamster
Well, as my mom said, I guess I wrote my annual review too soon. One more thing to add to the negative column…
I’m house-sitting starting today for a family in my neighbourhood that’s on vacation. They have a very needy/affectionate cat who likes to have someone around the house, so they wanted me to stay here to take care of the cat. When I got to the house today, I found a note from the mother explaining everything in the house and also one from the young daughter, asking me if I could also feed her hamster, Khloe. The hamster cage was in the living room; since I had been around the house before and hadn’t met the hamster, I assumed she had brought it down from her room to make sure I would see it.
I looked at the hamster; it was tiny and curled up asleep in the spinning wheel at the top of the cage. The cat was asking for food so I fed it (a more involved process than normal cats since it insists on food that is lump-free and warm :P) and then went back to meet the hamster. I touched the ball gently to wake her up. She didn’t move. I rocked it a little more and it was still… asleep? I spun the ball and the obviously dead hamster slid stiffly along the bottom of the wheel. She was cold and rigid, like she had been dead for several hours.
At first I was just kind of disbelieving. I got to my house-sitting job and found a dead hamster waiting for me. it was such a bizarre thing to happen. The family had only left earlier today. There was plenty of food in the cage and the cage was intact. What could have happened between then and now?
The only explanation I can think of is that maybe this was hamster Khloe’s first time in the living room and in close proximity to the cat. I’ve always been a big fan of rabbits (understatement of the century) and I knew already that rabbits have weak hearts and can actually be scared to death by the mere sight of a predator (which is why you should never leave your bunny outside unattended, even if it’s “safe” in a cage.) It would make sense if it were the same for hamsters. Maybe the sight of a fat, hungry cat wandering by her cage was just too much for poor Khloe’s heart.
At first the situation just seemed ridiculous, but it was really sad to have to shake her tiny body out of the tube leading to the wheel into my hand. Although it’s kind of gross to put a rodent body in right on top of the frozen peas– especially someone else’s frozen peas– I couldn’t think of anything to do but put her in a few ziploc bags in the freezer. The family isn’t coming back for almost a week and if I were the girl who was Khloe’s owner, I would want to bury her. So freezer it is.
Anyway. Now I’m melancholy over a hamster I never knew. I should go cuddle my stuffed rabbits. Goodnight…
Apocalypppppssseeeeeee
So last night there was a huge ice storm in Ontario. It made everything look very festive! Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of people don’t have power now, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting it back for a few days. Although our street is out, Bloor street has power, so my brother and I are up at Starbucks right now, sitting next to a gaggle of desperate folk who hauled in their printer from home and set it up here… hey, when ya gotta print, ya gotta print. Maybe when I get home I’ll borrow my dad’s head lamp to practice excerpts… Update: scruffy dude across the room shouting, “He’s not stealing money! He’s using his OWN money to smoke crack! So who cares! If he really is a crackhead…. WHERE IS THE VIDEO?”
Holiday pops
Check out the pictures from the NSO’s holiday pops and family concerts on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbabij/sets/72157638763933986/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbabij/sets/72157638765859823/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/tbabij/sets/72157638765363575/ I especially like the angle on the tinsel and light-up icicles that Cathi brought as decorations for our bells. :P And the maestro’s spiffy guitar and guitar-playing jacket. A few days ago my family also played a concert/sing-along at the Runnymede hospital. My dad played piano, my mom flute, my brother viola and obviously I played bassoon. (Perhaps not so obviously… my mom suggested that I go play Christmas carols at my brother’s school on violin… an instrument I haven’t practiced for about five years.) It seemed like the patients enjoyed it, although my dad’s jazz-inspired improvisational wanderings based on popular Christmas carols certainly confused a few who were expecting a simple sing-along! Now that (most of) the crazy travelling is done I can finally focus just on the Toronto Symphony audition, which is coming up in less than a month! Also learning my parts for the next MGSO concert– principal on Bruckner’s 2nd symphony and Janacek’s From The House of the Dead overture. My recital is also coming up next semester, which will be my last semester at McGill! Aaa! (Yesssssssssss…..) I have the program mostly planned, and have already performed half of the repertoire and started working on some of the rest. Still– at McGill you only have one official recital during your degree (as well as two juries performed just for a panel of professors) so this will be my first time doing an entire recital all by myself. So I’m sure I’ll be writing more about that as the time approaches…