Last Sunday, NYOC 2013 played our final concert in the University of British Columbia’s Chan Center in Vancouver. That was the last stop of the tour that started at Koerner Hall in Toronto; we then went to Ottawa to play in the National Arts Centre, Montreal to record Mahler 9 in the MMR and play at the outdoor Theatre de Verdure (the only venue I’ve ever played where there was a real live moat around the stage…), Calgary in the Jack Singer, Edmonton at the Winspear, and ended in Vancouver. There were chamber concerts throughout, which is new for the NYO; usually the chamber music is finished after the first two weeks of the training session, whereas this year every wind group and a few string groups were asked to play additional concerts in churches or hospitals. Luckily my group played in Cambridge, not far from Kitchener-Waterloo, not too long after the chamber session had ended so we didn’t have to worry about finding space in our brains for chamber music once the tour started.
Here are some videos of our quintet performances:
Our first performance of Tombeau de Couperin: http://youtu.be/O4syGFzOyIs
And again a few weeks later, at the additional concert in Cambridge: http://youtu.be/-GFmcZ4EZ-8
Our second quintet, by Kelsey Jones (a former professor at McGill!) http://youtu.be/l7l5e8o0VZk
The tour started pretty quietly, travel-wise, in Toronto, with a whole free day. We took advantage of some rooms at GGS and U of T to make reeds. Ottawa was next with its endless tourist attractions; I ended up going back to my very favoritest bar ever, the Zaphod Beeblebrox club in Byward Market– where you can get a real live Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster!– to hear a folk band that half the NYOC oboe section went to high school with. Small world… On to Montreal, where Kevin and Bianca discovered the joys of the Oversize Score collection in the library.We then took a plane to Alberta, where we saw some wildlife, some mountains, and took an early morning hike up one of them before finally arriving in Vancouver! Michelle, one of the oboists in the section, invited the whole double-reed section over to her house for dinner in Vancouver. Her mother, as well as being a lecturer in engineering at UBC, also runs Twinklebelle, and had tons of amazing accessories lying around the house waiting for trade shows or to be shipped out. We tested some designs of ornamental flower accessories for her, which she ended up allowing us to wear for the next day’s concert! (Only the black ones, of course…) Now I’m back in Toronto and have two weeks before I hopefully ship out to the Interprovincial Music Camp to work as a Facuty Assistant for a week, and then head straight back to McGill for a new school year!
For the past three days I’ve been at Wilfrid Laurier University in Kitchener-Waterloo, working with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. This is my third year in the orchestra and the first time that the session has been held at Laurier– the previous two years have been at Western University in London, Ontario. The first two weeks of the orchestra are in fact a chamber program, so I’ve been working with a wind quintet. Generally the wind quintets are assigned a simpler, often Classical piece for the first week of the chamber session and a more substantial work for the second week. The second-week pieces are going with somewhat more obscure Canadian music this year, with my group doing a quintet by Kelsey Jones (which in my opinion sounds like a cross between Hetu and Shostakovich) and another group playing Erik Ewazen’s Roaring Fork. However, for the first week were assigned a Haydn divertimento (from which Brahms’ Haydn Variations take their theme) which was quite short, and we ended up visiting the Laurier music library to borrow some other quintets to read. We got a Danzi quintet, the Nielsen, and the wind quintet arrangement of Tombeau de Couperin– and somehow ended up deciding to entirely replace the Haydn with the Ravel for the concert on Friday! Needless to say, there has been and will continue to be quite a bit of woodshedding going on before the concert. At the same time, I’m in the final stages of preparation for the Winnipeg audition. I fly out to Winnipeg after my last rehearsal this Saturday, play the audition Sunday morning (Sunday is a day off at NYO except for a concert in the evening which I have arranged not to play in) and fly back Sunday night. For Saturday night I’m staying it a place from airbnb.com where the host turns out to be a musician who’s been playing with the symphony! Overall I feel pretty good about the excerpts. It’s somewhat difficult that I’m at NYO right now since the amount of playing I’m having to do in a day– with all of the rehearsals, practicing for the Winnipeg audition, learning the part for the Ravel for Friday, and preparing for the placement audition for the orchestral session– is rather more than I would prefer for injury-prevention purposes. Fortunately I only have three more days that I have to worry about the Winnipeg excerpts! In the meantime, in all my obviously plentiful spare time, I started working on a piece of can to be hand shaped and profiled. Also in the bassoon section are two students who both hand shape and profile their cane. Although I certainly wouldn’t switch too that method for all of my reeds (difficult to, as the saying goes, “fill a bucket full of reeds” when each one has to be processed by hand), I’m interested in the hand profiling especially as it seems like it might be very instructive regarding the properties of bassoon cane, and even illustrative on aspects of trimming. After all, the distinction between profiling and scraping a reed is less substantial than it seems. The profiler that we use at school scrapes so thin that it essentially begins the finishing of the reed for you, but I don’t want to be dependant upon one specific profiler to be able to make good reeds. Anyway, so far all I have is a piece of cane left rather lopsided by my clumsy freehand shaping, so we shall see how it progresses.
So, I didn’t exactly post all the time from India as I had planned. We only had internet some of the time, my bluetooth keyboard ran out of batteries, and, well, I didn’t feel like it. So here’s a few things, although by no means an exhaustive discussion, of the NYOC’s time in India. The Good Last Saturday, the Canada-India youth orchestra played in Chowdiah Memorial Hall in Bangalore, the culmination of a week of rehearsals. The first item on the program was the Bach Double violin concerto with the solos played by Mark Fewer, the Canadian violin faculty, and Ashley Rego, a student from the Indian National Youth Orchestra who also taught and mentored many of the other students in the orchestra from his hometown, Goa. The second item was the Pulcinella Suite, performed by the Canadian contingent. The third was a piece basis heavily on improvisation on traditional Indian tunes and songs written by some of the Indian students, with several soloists from the orchestra as well as a fantastic tabla player as a soloist. Finally, we played Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Chowdiah Memorial was perhaps one of the most interesting spaces I’ve ever played in, if not the most acoustically luxurious; it is shaped like a six-string violin, with the main hall residing in the body of the instrument, the fingerboard stretching above as an entrance, and even a scaled-up replica of Carnatic violinist Tirumakudalu Chowdiah’s bow. You can even see this from satellite pictures by searching for the hall on Google Maps! I was lucky to have two roommates for the trip in the club where we stayed: a flutist from my school from the Canadian orchestra, and a violinist from Pune from the Indian orchestra. I feel incredibly fortunate in this regard as my room was one of the very few rooms which had both Canadian and Indian students, as many of the Indian students weren’t staying at the club with the Canadians. There were very few Indian wind players, and even many of the Canadian string players to whom I spoke said that they wished there had been more opportunities for connection between the two sides of the orchestra, so my roommate was the one Indian student with whom I was really able to forge a lasting friendship. Our discussions covered subjects as wide as our musical beginnings in our respective Suzuki violin programs, the new Star Trek movie, the effect of British colonialism in India, violin hickeys, and differences in the style of dress between generations of Indian women. She took us on a terrifying auto-rickshaw drive to the movies and led us back walking through the streets of Bangalore at night-time (repeatedly reminding us hapless Canadians who naturally gravitated towards walking on the sidewalk to please come back onto the road, it is really much safer…) Overall, my friendship with her was the most worthwhile and rewarding part of the trip, and I am incredibly grateful to have had that opportunity. The Bad Playing-wise, this was probably the least intensive summer program I’ve ever attended. It had to be: after a few rehearsals, the Canadian side of the orchestra started dropping like flies and rehearsals had to be cut down to only a few hours a day. Traveler’s diarrhea, unexplained vomiting, heat exhaustion, food poisoning– almost everyone came down with something at least once during the trip. The lucky ones got it over with in the first few days of the trip, while a large group of people (including myself) somehow managed to put off falling ill… until the morning of the concert. This kind of thing was pretty much inevitable. The food was a constant source of worry for everyone. Of course, being in a foreign country, one wants to jump right into the local cuisine; and the meals we were served indeed gave us the chance to do that. However, in a setting where we had more demanding tasks to perform than sightseeing, we also all knew that being sick would be highly inconvenient. Most of the food we were given was some variation on the theme of “white rice with sauce.” Any raw vegetables or fruits were out of the question due to the fear of e. coli, so a strange paradigm began to emerge in which salad is unacceptably bad for you whereas soda, seeing as it contains calories and is guaranteed not to poison you, is health food. Of course, this kind of eating led to a state of affairs in which constantly feeling lethargic and unwell was the norm, even when not officially sick. I happened to get sickest right in time for the final concert, but since there wasn’t really anyone else available to replace me, it didn’t really matter.
For the past two years I have been playing in the summer with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, a summer program running about a month and a half in length and including a chamber session, orchestral training session, and tour (usually to mostly cities in Canada and one or two in the US.) I will be playing in the orchestra again this summer, but before the session itself starts in June there is another fantastic thing that I get to do as a result of this program– the CIYO, Canada-India Youth Orchestra. This is a collaboration between the NYOC and the Indian National Youth Orchestra, and involves two phases. Last summer, four string players from the INYO came to London, Ontario to train and tour with us in the NYOC. This summer, about 30 Canadians pulled from the past 3 or so years of NYOC rosters, including myself, will be traveling to India to join with the INYO for two weeks of rehearsal and concerts. Tonight the orchestra members, staff, and donors attended a reception hosted at the Toronto Dominion Centre, and tomorrow we leave from Toronto and travel for nearly a full day, including a layover at Heathrow, landing in Bangalore to begin probably the most exciting orchestral adventure that any of us have ever been a part of! Happy summer!
My jury is played, final assignment turned in, and I’m back at my parents’ house in Toronto learning to drive and practicing the rep that I’ll be playing for the rest of the summer. So, here’s a partial (I’ve probably forgotten things…) list of repertoire I played this school year. In no particular order, and with a varied assortment of ensembles:
- Berlioz: Corsair Overture (1st)
- Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto #1 (2nd)
- Scheherazade (1st) -Beethoven 3 (2nd)
- Stravinsky: Symphonies D’Instruments a Vents (2nd)
- Stravinsky: Mass (1st)
- Nielsen: Wind Quintet
- Debussy: Nocturnes (2nd)
- Petrushka (1st)
- Tchaik 5, only the 3rd and 4th movements (1st)
- Gounod: Petite Symphonie (1st)
- D’Indy: Symphony on a French Mountain Air (1st)
- The Miraculous Mandarin Suite (2nd)
- Jennifer Higdon: Percussion Concerto (1st)
- Claude Vivier: Orion (3rd)
- Mozart Requiem (1st)
- Parsifal: An Orchestral Quest (2nd) (a Canadian work, an hour-long orchestral arrangement of music from Parsifal which was utterly wonderful)
- Wagner: Wesendonck Leider (1st) (orchestral arrangement)
- Paquito D’Riviera: Aires Tropicales for woodwind quintet
- My big project for the first semester was the KW audition and for the second was my jury, for which I played the Osborne rhapsody, Saent-Saens Sonata, a Vivaldi concerto, and the Tansman Sonatine.
On to the summer!
Tonight I was practicing a passage in the Saint-Saens Sonata that I was having trouble with; I thought I had worked it out a few weeks ago, but somehow the sloppiness had crept back in. I was frustrated with how I was practicing it– a few boring rhythms, inching the metronome up by a number of clicks that always either seemed so slow as to be agonizing or too fast to be doing much good– had had been thinking recently (prompted by overdosing on The Bulletproof Musician and Study Hacks blogs) about how to improve my use of my time in my practice. After reading a few trumpet player’s obituaries and remembrances of great CSO trumpeter Bud Herseth, I had been reading over recently a page called “Bud Herseth Lesson Notes”, and noticed that he emphasized playing only on the mouthpiece quite a bit. I began to wonder what the woodwind equivalent would be. I know that I can’t play the Saent-Saens sonata only on my reed, but– doh– I can play it only on my mouth! Singing your part is something that everyone, including me, knows you should do, but I rarely hear people singing their music in the practice rooms at school– sometimes brass players, but never woodwinds, and I had certainly never done it. Sure enough, when I tried to sing the line, it came out a jumbled mess. So I practiced singing it slowly, while watching the music and playing the notes with my fingers. I discovered I could even sing wrong notes when watching the music– many of the middle Gs often came out as an A! Once I had corrected this, and gotten my singing up to a reasonable tempo (not quite the final tempo, which is a little past the limits of my vocal technique…) I found I was able to put the run together on bassoon with much more ease. I wonder how much easier the movement would be if I had learned to sing the whole thing before ever putting it on the bassoon… I guess the moral of the story is, those things that everyone knows you should do? I should do them.
About a month ago, I did my first professional audition, for the 2nd bassoon of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. All in all, it was not so different from an audition here at school. For the ensemble auditions in the bassoon studio at McGill, there are two rounds. In general, those who make it to the second round will be in the McGill Symphony Orchestra, and those who get cut after the first will be in the Wind Symphony or Contemporary Music Ensemble. For my first two auditions, I didn’t make it past the first round. So, when I made it into the second round for the first time, I was so pleased that I allowed my concentration to slip while playing the second round (which, I rationalized, didn’t matter since I had already made it into orchestra.) The next time, however, I was prepared to concentrate through both rounds and aim to win the audition or improve my standing instead of just being content with being in orchestra. In the KW audition, I made it into the second round and then got cut before the finals. I found much the same thing happened– since I didn’t want/feel prepared to take the job anyway, and since I hadn’t even really expected to make it into the semis, I wasn’t particularly concentrated while playing them and made some stupid mistakes. Of course, it’s impossible to say whether avoiding making those mistakes would have gotten me into the finals, but at least it would have been more because of the panel’s preferences and less a matter of having to cut me by default because I made an unacceptable number of mistakes. However, all in all it was a very positive experience, and left me wanting to do it again, with higher aspirations. The one thing I will do next time that I should have this time was to check my hotel room for anything that might keep me awake and get a room change as soon as possible if there are any problems. When I arrived it was extremely cold outside, and I was so glad to be a room with a heater that I didn’t think about the fact that the heater was extremely noisy and came on and off according to the temperature in the room with a clunk which, as I discovered when I went to bed, was loud enough to wake me up every time. At midnight I finally called the front desk and asked to be moved to a room with a different type of heater. I was settled in the new room at 12:30, asleep by 1… and slept through my alarm, waking up half an hour before my time slot in the audition began. Whoops! Luckily I played third in the time slot, so I actually had exactly the right amount of time to warm up and not enough to hang around getting nervous. I’ll hopefully be doing a similar audition next year…