Update!

Oops… I haven’t written here in a while. In that time, things have happened! First, the last week of the summer I went to camp! The Interprovincial Music Camp is a terrific camp outside of Parry Sound which I attended as a student in high school. Fraser Jackson, the contrabassoonist of the Toronto Symphony, was on faculty there, and after my first year at the camp I became his student and stayed in his studio until I left for university. Then, last year, Fraser emailed me and asked if I would like to come back to camp as his Faculty Assistant. Every faculty member is allowed to choose an assistant, usually a university-aged student of theirs or a young professional player, to teach with them at camp. So this was my second year doing that and it was awesome! As well as being a great experience teaching, it’s also lots of fun because all of the faculty assistants, many of us who know each other from school or summer festivals, live together in two big cabins near the entrance to the camp, with our own fire pit and easy access to the lake. Unlike the camp councillors, who are usually similar in age, the faculty assistants have no responsibilities to deal with the campers other than in strictly musical contexts, whereas the councillors have to take care of a cabin full of kids and– having been a camper, I can imagine how difficult and frustrating this must be– keep them quiet at night. Because there aren’t usually too many bassoon students, I also get lots of time to practice at camp, which is awesome since the camp takes place the week before the return to school and thus the auditions for the university ensembles. One of my favourite things to do at camp is practice outside, which you sure can’t do in Montreal for most of the year! I was happy with how the audition at school went, and although this concert I’m only playing one piece (principal on the Ginastera Harp concerto) next concert I get to play principal on Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2– and at Maison Symphonnique, instead of McGill’s Pollack Hall where the McGill Symphony Orchestra usually plays! Then, two days ago, I did another audition, for the Niagara Symphony Orchestra in St. Catherine’s, for whom I’m happy to say I am now principal bassoon! The audition day was a doubleheader in which they hired for both principal oboe and bassoon, and I’m really excited to play my first concert with them in almost exactly a month (they had already hired a bassoon and oboe for the first concert, so myself and the winner of the oboe audition are playing our first show on the second concert of the season.) However, I don’t have a contract or a detailed rehearsal schedule yet, so it remains to be seen how much I’m going to have to wiggle out of McGill obligations for Niagara stuff! Now I can finally take a break from practicing excerpts (except for Rite of Spring– since the MGSO is playing it on the last concert of the first semester, the McGill bassoon studio is holding a separate audition for the principal part that will take place some time later in the semester) and focus on Bach’s 2nd cello suite, which I will play in a masterclass for Nadina Mackie Jackson next week. She is coming to perform the bassoon sequenza in an enormous Berio extravaganza concert next Friday. I actually love Berio, so I’m really excited to hear it! (Check out my colleague from this summer, Sam Fraser, performing a hilarious comedy act entitled “The Lost Berio Sequenza” at the NYO talent show this summer: http://youtu.be/DMUoqpLzqJU )

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tags: music, bassoon, imc, nyo"
rn 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.

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tags: music, bassoon, nyo

CIYO 2013

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.

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tags: bassoon, music, NYO

India!

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!

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tags: music, bassoon, NYO