If you ever get too wrapped up in the metaphysics of authenticity, the Dubai Mall Gold Souk wants a word with you. Can a self-conscious recreation of a particular heritage aesthetic, right in the middle of an enormous shopping mall, ever be a “real” example of the kind of thing it’s attempting to recreate?
In North America the answer would be no, go to Tacky Jail for a thousand years. In the Gold Souk, one wonders– okay, if this isn’t the real thing, then what exactly is it? What could possibly make it more “authentic” than it already is? Or rather, what makes things “inauthentic”? If the architecture were made out of cheaper materials than the ones being imitated, perhaps, but clearly no expense has been spared on that front. If it were being used for some purpose other than the one being imitated or by some group other than the ones laying claim to the heritage in question, but in this case it is indeed a place where you can buy gold, precious stones, and perfume for the enrichment of Emirati merchants.
The real purpose of this space seems to be to remind anyone concerned about the authenticity of what they’re viewing: every monument of the ancient world was once an infrastructure project built by a government or individual who wanted to remind you, personally, that sometimes money can in fact buy good taste, or at least buy the ability to determine what good taste is, thank you very much, and hoi polloi are very welcome for the nice place to sit/pray/eat/shop/etc.
Anyway, yesterday we ate breakfast at a place in the middle of it:
And spent a lot of time waiting around in the mall for a place that sold SIM cards to open, before deciding that actually it would be better to just wait out the 24 hour UAE tourist SIM card and then get a longer-term one in Oman. “Waiting around” in the Dubai Mall meant a lot of opportunity to hang out with these guys:
There is an official aquarium tunnel that you can pay to walk through, but the tank is just as visible from the outside of it. We also walked around outside, including to the (outside of the ) opera house; there isn’t anything on at the moment, so this is the closest we could get without paying for a really expensive tour:
Having thoroughly fucked up the get-over-jet-lag-in-Dubai plan by having a four hour nap, we tried to salvage the rest of the day by taking the public transit boat thingy across the creek to Deira:
Dubai was just a short stop on the way to the main purpose of the trip, Oman; we flew to Muscat this morning, then picked up a rental car and drove to Sohar, where we’ll be for the next few days.
Toronto to Dubai is 12 hours; I tried sampling the in-flight entertainment system, which now has a huge number of titles, but many didn’t have subtitles and you can’t hear anything over the airplane itself, so unsure what the point is. Ended up rewatching stuff where I already knew more or less what they were saying, namely the episodes of Succession in which this guy mops the floor with those rich fucks (“You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking a few Gregs?”)
Perhaps this was on the mind because my only previous association with Dubai was also this particular guy being really fed up, namely, in the reboot of Interview with the Vampire:
At the limits of that entertainment I also worked on what I’d meant to be working on for the last year, which was that I’d wanted to at least be able to sound out words in Arabic by the time I spent two weeks in the Middle East. Not exactly for practical purposes– in most of the places we’ll be going, all important signs and directions are transliterated anyway– but it would have been nice to have some mode of interaction with the environment other than wandering around saying “English?” like the north american anglophone tourist I am. However, I spent the past year learning circuit analysis and digital logic, not Arabic, so here we are.
I downloaded an Anki deck for the alphabet, and by the time we got off the plane was able to pan around Oman on OpenStreetMaps (the only one I’d downloaded yet since that’ll be most of the trip) and read the place names with, hmm, perhaps 57% accuracy. Extremely introductory language learners– I have noted many times from the other side– are the absolute worst company, because they are likely to point to any word they recognize in the wild and force a full reckoning of their thought process upon anyone in the vicinity. “Look!” I say, pointing to the sign that also says “Dubai Duty Free” in English right there. “That says ‘Souk Dooty something’!”
The UAE gives all incoming travellers a SIM card that works free for 24 hours, right there when they stamp your passport, which is both a) a thing that the kind of person who prattles about surveillance capitalism and the horrors of the corporate web and uses a VPN and surfs the Fediverse as a primary internet activity would never use, and b) a thing that anyone who has just spent 12 hours on an airplane and was already worrying about having to go find a SIM card first thing is absolutely going to use immediately.
Took the metro (“look! those letters spell ‘metro’!”) to the hotel. Perhaps this is just a function of it being, well, not cold as balls outside, but we were remarking on how the residential area surrounding the hotel, at around 10 PM, had a whole lot of people just hanging around outside in ways that you don’t tend to see in the West; for instance, sitting in circles in the middle of a parking lot outside storefronts selling snacks to fuel your parking-lot-sitting. I got some samosas from one such storefront and brought them back to the hotel to eat while engaging in my usual hotel activity of reading the literature provided beside the bed.
From the first few sections of the English Quran, I remarked in even more irritating fashion that a lot of Arabic words are recognizably, and understandably, derived from ancient Phoenician: for instance بَيت bayt, “house”, which corresponds to the (indeterminately vowelled since the Phoenician writing system was an abjad that only included consonant sounds) “BT” listed in the Xeroxed 1974 dissertation on the Phoenician and Punic languages lying around on my computer somewhere. Similarly, the Gideon Quran’s footnote on the use of the word رب rab, “lord/master,” which made me suddenly remember that that was the title applied to Carthaginian political leaders. Which is practically the only words I know in either of those languages, so not exactly conclusive, but (doofenshmirtz voice) it’s weird that it’s happened twice!
I arrived in Regina, Saskatchewan about two weeks ago, taking 5 days to get here from Kitchener. The first day, I drove to Sault Ste. Marie (stopping at the beach in Parry Sound along the way) and tried Couchsurfing for the first time! The second day is hands-down the best day of driving– between Sault Ste.-Marie and Thunder Bay, along the shore of Lake Superior, through house of provincial park where you can go for quite a while without seeing a single other car. About 40 km outside of Wawa, Ontario (home of the Wawa giant goose; or rather, the lineage of Wawa giant geese) I started thinking about Terry Fox. Terry Fox looms large in the collective consciousness of all Canadians, but particularly those in provinces he actually made it through; and it’s hard to watch the pavement whizzing by underneath your car without imagining what it would have looked like from the perspective of a lopsided jog. Just as I was contemplating this, I saw a man by the side of the road in athletic clothing. And crutches. With one leg. Running. Did I hallucinate him? Where was he going? Who was he? I didn’t see any other vehicles around him, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything– I was in the middle of a park, but there were campsites fairly nearby, and a few small on either side of the large parkland. I considered turning around to go talk to hum, but by the time the thought appeared in my mind, it would have been impractical. He certainly didn’t seem to be in distress, so I figured it would remain forever a mystery, and filed the anecdote away to relate to the friends I was staying with in Thunder Bay that evening. Well, just as I was typing this up, I hopped over to read the news from Northwestern Ontario. And lo and behold, an answer: Guy Amalfitano, a French cancer survivor who watched the Marathon of Hope on TV from his hospital bed as a teenager, arrived in Thunder Bay last week. According to the itinerary on his website, he is planning to arrive in Regina on the 24th of September, and to finish his journey on the 6th of November.
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!
When I was in Chicago, I stayed with a flutist that I met at a summer festival. Her roommates were another Canadian flutist, and the other flutists’ boyfriend, a violinist playing in Chicago Civic. Civic were having an open rehearsal, so in the evening after the audition he got me ticket for that. it was a very neat idea– when I heard it was an open rehearsal I assumed it was just a normal rehearsal that the public was allowed to come to, but in reality it was more in the vein of a performance, but with a lot more talking. Riccardo Muti is utterly charming to the audience and he spoke for a long time about the piece, both for the benefit of the audience and the orchestra, and rehearsed very thoroughly for about an hour and a half before doing final “performance” run and calling it a night. It was clearly intended to be educational programming, but never felt patronizing the way some “inside the orchestra”-type concerts can be.
I stayed an extra day after the concert, figuring it would be silly to go all the way to Chicago and not hear the CSO play. Luckily there was a concert on the day after– Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest, La Mer and Tchaik 4. The performance got me thinking about aspects of concert hall design besides acoustics. I had been warned before the audition that the acoustics in the hall were fairly dry– not really a problem for this orchestra, who of course have no problem making themselves heard and understood. (But annoying for some auditionees, including one player I spoke to who said it came as a shock to him since he owns, lives and practices in a church!) However, my assigned seat was on the right side of the floor, very close to the stage, meaning I had an excellent view of a few bass players’ legs, but not much else. Although I could still hear the rest of the orchestra, if not see them, it was undeniably not a good listening experience. Why? Why is it so important to see the people making the music at a concert? Is it just because that’s all that separates the experience from staying home and listening to a recording? Hilary Hahn recently wrote a post suggesting “Things to Watch in an Orchestra Concert”– one example being brass players’ eyebrows! Often orchestral concerts choose to ignore or deride the visual element of music, possibly to our detriment. As if, if you need a visual element to appreciate the music, you must not be truly appreciating it. Well, I like to watch real human beings play, with my eyes. I moved to a balcony for the second half where I had spotted some empty seats.
The rest of that day I also did some touristy things– the house I was staying in was near a little neighbourhood where I went walking a few times.
I went to the Art Institute of Chicago during the day, and although I don’t know a lot about vidaul art I did recognize one painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, the subject of the Sondheim musical Sunday in the Park with George.
Noe that that’s done, I’m leaving for Thunder Bay in just under a week! I went to a University of Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert last night, and will go to some masterclasses and Nuit Blanche before leaving.
Two weeks ago I was away teaching the bassoon students of a private French high school in Saint- Jacques, at the school’s annual band retreat. The retreat takes place at the Abestos Music Camp, which is not a thing I would have ever guessed existed in Asbestos (yes, Asbestos: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/as-asbestos-industry-collapses-a-towns-fibre-is-torn/article4560402/") However, air quality issues aside, it’s a very nice site, although the “camp” atmosphere was diminished slightly by the fact that there were a few too many feet of snow for, say, marshmallow roasting.
I was there for two camp session, the first being Secondaire 1 and 2 (equivalent to grades 7 and 8) and the second being secondaire 5 (equivalent to grade 11, the last year of high school in Quebec before CEGEP.) Sec 3 and 4 also had a camp, which was the very first camp which I wasn’t teaching at. At both of the camps I only had one student, as bassoon tends to not be a very popular instrument for high schoolers. It doesn’t take a huge amount of thought to figure out why. Even in high schools with a large music program, there aren’t often very many actual instruments, which means that whatever kid chooses to play the bassoon probably won’t be able to play in a section with their best friend, unlike the “let’s play clarinet together!” kids. The bassoon looks large and intimidating and, frankly, uncool. Band teachers generally know more about the more common band instruments (as they should!) so the bassoon doesn’t get as much attention as the others.
My sec 1 student was an example of an excellent instrument assignment decision on the part of her teacher (a McGill grad that I worked on oprettas in the McGill Savoy Society with!) She was tall and looked natural holding the instrument, and at her first lesson gave me a long list of instruments that she had played before the bassoon. She had picked up the bassoon because she wanted a challenge, and wanted to prove herself equal to this “next level” instrument. She had only been playing the bassoon for eight months but was playing in both the sec 1 and sec 2 bands. The first lesson I introduced her to the concept of flicking, and the next morning in band rehearsal, although she hadn’t quite absorbed which key was for which note, I saw her thumb moving around with definite intent to flick! No matter what she sounded like– probably worse than before, since she was distracted with trying to integrate a new concept into her playing– the fact that she immediately starts working on integrating a new habit into her playing, even if it makes things harder at first, makes me believe that she will have an excellent prospects with any instrument– and indeed any pursuit of any kind– that she wants to get good at.
All of the teachers at the camp said that sec 5 is generally more difficult to teach than sec 1, which makes sense. Beginners have no established habits and will try new ways of doing things, and are enjoying the rewarding learning curve that comes from the first year of playing an instrument. It’s thrilling to go from not being able to make a sound to being able to play music together with other people, and the sec 1 players are still in the middle of that exhilarating feeling. By sec 5 they’ve discovered that music takes just as much work to get good at as anything else, and are getting ready to move on to CEGEP so it may not be foremost in their minds any more. My sec 5 student had been playing for 5 years, since sec 1, which I realized was only a year less than I’ve been playing. The first lesson was more or less the same in that I introduced her to flicking. “Yeah,” she said, “someone told me about that before, but I’ve been doing it this way for a long time so I didn’t change it.” I couldn’t really blame her. If I had been playing an instrument for five years and was suddenly told that there was a whole other category of keys on my instrument that I had to start using on notes I thought I already knew how to play (even if they usually weren’t in the right octave)– I wouldn’t want to change, either! Over the course of the sec 5 session I got used to reminding her to flick whenever she was struggling to put her tenor notes in the right octave, and to her credit she did seem to be trying. However, the music she was playing in band was quite demanding, so there were a lot of things for her to be thinking about at once.
Her rhythm also seemed to be a little off– not surprising since she seemed quite confused about the purpose and function of a metronome when I took mine out– so at one point I asked her to simply clap her rhythm with the metronome. After several unsuccessful attempts, I put the metronome on 60 to the quarter note and asked her to simply clap eighth notes. She couldn’t do it. The division of the beat simply refused to settle in. The next day, I asked her to sing her line. “Oh, I can’t sing.” she pronounced decisively. “Sure you can,” I said, “Let’s just find that first F.” I played the F, sang it, and asked her to sing it too. But even when I tried to direct her to it – “a little higher! Not quite that high!” she couldn’t find it, and seemed to have no idea when she was even getting closer.
So, I had been spending my time trying to adjust her embouchure, increase her air support, improve her tuning and bothering her about flicking all when she basically had no concept of rhythm or pitch! It simply hadn’t occurred to me at first that these elements might be missing, but thinking about it it makes sense. This student had an excellent band teacher who set the kids up very well and concentrated on scales, good rhythm and tuning in class. However, I think it has to do with the nature of teaching the bassoon in these settings that she had been left behind on essential elements of musicianship. I’m sure simple rhythms were drilled a lot when she was in sec 1, however, it seems like once she was given a bassoon to try to figure out, the sheer mechanical challenge and confusion of the instrument pushed all other thoughts out of her mind. Rhythm became someone else’s problem, and pitch was a toss-up determined by whether she happened to put down the right fingers or not.
I felt sorry for her, because I can’t imagine she was having very much fun in band class. For me, at least, it would be incredibly stressful to be trying to play complex music, and being surrounded by people who seem to know what they’re doing, while lacking the fundamental skills to even really understand what’s going on rhythmically, melodically or harmonically, and having to just follow along blindly and hope it works out. I believe that all humans are fundamentally capable of learning music, and I think if she had been placed on another instrument maybe she would have fared better. However, of course I also think it’s wonderful that the school is teaching bassoon in the first place! I would never want a school to stop teaching bassoon just because it’s difficult for band students to learn.
So, I think what I learned about teaching bassoon is this:
1. Potential bassoonists need a strong base of general musicianship skills before picking up the bassoon– probably stronger than would be needed for other woodwind instruments, where the initial technical demands on the student would be reasonable enough for them to be able to keep filling in the gaps in their skills while learning the instrument. In my case, I had played violin for ten years as a kid, and had experimented with plenty of other instruments before settling on the bassoon. Obviously that’s not the path that every new band student will be coming from, but spending a lot of time listening too classical music, singing, clapping rhythms and using methods such as Orff and Kodaly before touching a bassoon would make sure that the fundamentals are set down. Another alternative in a band context would be to simply assign future bassoonists to a different instrument for a year or two. (Flute seems like a good option since it would teach them good breathing habits without giving them any preconceived notions of reed embouchure.)
2. Bassoonists need private teachers. All players do better with private teachers, of course, but with most other woodwinds it’s easy for the band teacher to notice how they’re doing and direct them appropriately. Bassoonists tend to get ignored, firstly because the teacher probably isn’t as knowledgeable about the instrument and also because the teacher doesn’t want to put too much pressure on a kid who’s taken on a complicated challenge. This particular school actually has private teachers for the rest of the instruments who visit the school every so often to give lessons, which is probably part of the reasons their bands are so good! However unfortunately they’re the only school in that area that teaches bassoon, and since the school is quite remote they’ve been having trouble finding a bassoon teacher able to drive out there.
I think this can be applied in private teaching, as well. Of course, it doesn’t make sense to turn away a student who wants to learn bassoon just because they don’t have another instrument under their belt already. However, a heightened focus on listening, singing and speaking/tapping rhythm could be useful to set students up on the instrument. Of course, this isn’t as exciting for the students themselves– they want to play! But hey– I started in Suzuki and spent my first lessons on the violin playing on a souped-up cereal box. (It’s a good idea: http://teachsuzuki.blogspot.ca/2011/04/why-use-box-violin.html) They can handle it.
Coming to your from a megabus somewhere in between Kingston and Toronto… I just got back from Houston, Texas! My hotel wasn’t that close to Rice, but I decided to walk it anyway. Google directed me to a route almost entirely on residential streets with huge, nice houses and PALM TREES where I felt very safe (except for the omnipresent Canadian semi-disbelief at the idea that at least some of the houses I was walking past probably contained guns.) I also had my final chamber music performances of the semester last week. My quintet– by quintet, I mean violin, clarinet, horn, bassoon and double bass!– performed an arrangement/parody of Till Eulenspiegel entitled Till Eulenspiegel Einmal Anders (Another Way), and my sextet performed the Poulenc two nights in a row on different concerts. The last concert of the Poulenc was also my last time playing chamber music at McGill with our oboist, Alana Henkel. Alana is an amazing oboist and equally good English horn player who just graduated from her Masters’ and left this weekend to start the next phase of her life in Minnesota with her husband. You can find her at http://alanahenkel.com –she is an excellent musician and a wonderful person and I highly recommend her if you need an oboist in her area! This week I have family and pops concerts in Niagara, go back to Montreal to make up the theory exam I’m missing the day after tomorrow, and then finally back to Toronto for the holidays!
Perhaps this was on the mind because my only previous association with Dubai was also this particular guy being really fed up, namely, in the reboot of Interview with the Vampire:
