Monthly Archives: July 2006

So I had been looking forward to playing through the piece we were playing yesterday. I brought it out today and looked at it more closely.

The key – it’s in B-flat. I don’t know B-flat. Or E-flat. I’d been playing wrong notes the whole rehearsal! Oh god, how embarassing. But I remember playing as a section a few times and it didn’t sound wrong, was everyone else ignoring the key signature as well?

Thankfully I had bought a chromatic tuner yesterday and was able to puzzle out the fingerings for those two, but there are a couple other combinations I’m sure there are easier ways to do it than what I’m doing, but I have no idea. Or any clue on how to find out. I don’t have my next lesson until the Saturday after next (ie after our next rehearsal) so I’m on my own until then.

So it was one of those moments, staring at the music in front of me, feeling like a chasm is opening between me and my music stand. So frustrated and confused. My left index finger is still aching from rehearsal yesterday.

What am I doing? Am I crazy?

On top of all of that – I hit another language issue. No one says ‘half-note’, ‘quarter-note’ and ‘eighth-note’. No, of course not. It’s all ‘minim’, ‘crotchet’ and ‘quaver’. I had ‘crotchet’ and ‘quaver’ backwards for the whole rehearsal as well because I’ve never really used those terms much.

It’s enough to make you want to curl up inside your cello case and have a good cry.

Yes, so it was good.

It’s a smaller subset of the normal ELLSO orchestra I’m told, and there aren’t the classes you usually take with your section, it was just two hours of working on a piece as a 20-piece group. It was really nice to be back doing that again, and it’s fun sitting in the back. Flutes are always stuck up at the front getting picked on by the conductor.

The poor woman I was sitting next to had her A string break for the first time in the beginning of rehearsal. That’s scary enough the first time, let alone having everyone there to watch you.

I’m even skipping out on the beginning of our picnic next week to attend rehearsal! I’m really excited to play when I’ve had a moment to go over my music… I arrived a bit late and I had no time to tune – nor have I tuned in that situation. Eek, will have to ask my teacher what the hell I should be doing when we’re all sawing away there at the beginning. Our section leader tuned my cello at the break and then I was able to get a bit more into it without feeling like the guy sitting in front of me wanted to turn around and whap me on the head with his bow.

My bowing went all horrible again of course, trying to concentrate on sight reading, playing with a new group and watch the unfamiliar conductor. I really did enjoy it though.

Christopher came to watch and he is still keen to join for September, which is good. I wasn’t sure listening to a bunch of people who haven’t necessarily all played together before sight read was going to give him much confidence.

Rehearsal was totally fine. Everything I remembered playing in a large group to be, so very reassuring and regular. We have a funny, positive yet unrelenting conductor, which I think is the best kind.

More later – must go to music shop now.

I went back to the dark side. Just for a visit – not to stay!

I played my flute tonight and I have to say, god it felt good. Just to whip through some of my Grade 6 pieces, being able to actually execute some runs and produce good tone.

Because I’ve decided to do my theory exams, I figure I’ll force myself with the bass clef. I don’t think the flute playing is going to be a regular thing, who knows. I don’t really have time to find a group to play with as well as cello. It’s handy to have around, and I’m sure at some point some group I’m in will be able to use my woodwind skills.

Tomorrow morning – first rehearsal. My stomach is all over the place.

The only way to get myself to stop
fighting bass clef is to do my theory exams.

I avoided these like the plague when I
did my flute exams – I never even received my certificates for grades 6-8
because I hadn’t completed the theory portion. It kind of falls into that great
vat of fear-inducing things that also includes ‘Maths’ and ‘Budgets’. Which is
a bit silly because I quite like theory when I understand it.

This weekend I’m going to pick up a
metronome (my 20 year old one sounds like it’s been run over by a truck) and
some theory workbooks. I sound like a bundle of fun don’t I?

But I must be fun in cello learning mode
because Christopher, my husband, has decided to join ELLSO with me in the
autumn, also playing cello.

This will be interesting.

Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony – Presto is great for:

• Blocking out jackhammers outside your window on the sidewalk (this afternoon)
• Coming home on the tube after a couple glasses of wine (on a weekday) to really instil in you the idea of teeming (this evening)
• Covering up (and indeed maybe blasting out) irritating Eurotrash house coming from an another flat aross the courtyard
• Explaining what London felt like upon arrival to a native Londoner

I wrote a long post earlier today but
then mashed my keyboard somehow and closed the window.

How does she manage to play cello? You’d
be forgiven for asking right about now.

I had been talking about how my recent
commitment to practising every day has yielded impressive results. I often go
for about fifteen minutes, stop and wander around, talk to the dog, get a glass
of water or make some tea, and then come back for about ten minutes. This has
been making a massive difference in my playing – especially in the
hard-to-quantify area of ‘feeling more comfortable’. My tone is a bit better I
think as my arms get stronger and I understand how my instrument responds. I’m
a bit short, but blessed with long limbs, so getting around the cello isn’t too
much of an issue. I also had the opportunity to buy a very nice instrument and
a lovely bow, so I’m not being held back by any instrument-related issues.

It sounds like a bit of virtuoso
silliness at this stage, but I wonder if it’s possible that I’m getting to know
my instrument at a gut level. Maybe it’s the wood? I had a relationship with my
flute, but not like this.

Maybe it’s heatstroke?

Do you sometimes wish you had started your instrument earlier in life? Or had
continued on professionally the one you played in school? I think about it
sometimes, as I sit at my desk on the third floor of an old Victorian warehouse
remodelled (sort of) into an office building, steaming gently in the
ineffectual air conditioning.

There were very good reasons for not going on to classical music as a career choice
when I was 16, and had to make the decision. I wasn’t driven enough, I hated
theory and technical work with a passion, I’m not a particularly competitive
person for competition’s sake. I saw my teachers’ lifestyles – making ends meet
(mostly) by performing in three different orchestral groups, teaching 30
private students each, touring constantly, hardly seeing your children.

How grown up was I weighing all these things? But maybe I was being too grown-up –
I went to journalism school and followed ‘the family skillset’ as we termed it,
which is copywriting, speechwriting, editing, graphics, art direction – any of
that was completely doable in my mind. But a traditional career in classical
music was something I didn’t understand and maybe it scared me a bit?

I think the B flat minor scale scared me more, to be honest, and having to know
crap like that was just something I couldn’t visualise ever enjoying. Not for a
four year university programme, and as for unending years of teaching music; I’d
already had one too many bratty flute students for my taste.

In my last years at university I had switched to media theory and wrote several
papers equating semiotics in language and literature to similar themes,
instrumentation and motifs in opera. At that point I started to be interested
in theory, and I could see the joy of it. But it was a bit late.

Which brings me to now, ten years after university, sitting at my desk as a web
content manager doing my version of the family skillset, and thinking about all
the reasons I chose writing over music.

The important thing now is the fact that I am choosing music again. Here and now.

Being a Canadian transplant here in London, I’m used to stopping conversation mid-stream when I get that glazed look for using a word a local doesn’t know. Then we start the list of nouns game until I hit on one they know. Sometimes we get all the way to miming if there’s no shared word for what I’m trying to explain. It’s sort of like backwards charades.

I’ve been here two years now, so it doesn’t happen nearly as often, but with my cello teacher, there’s a whole new batch of words I don’t know. ‘Manuscript’ was one – we always said ‘staff paper’, or the not very succinct ‘blank music paper with staffs on it’. But because I’ve always been a woodwind player, I don’t know a lot of the strings vocabulary, Canadian or otherwise. Whenever I was lent to the orchestra in school for concerts I just tuned out when the director was berating the strings for something in rehearsal.

My cello teacher also has a just-outside-London accent with some funny East Anglian twists to it (where he went to university) so occasionally I just don’t know what he’s saying at all. When he was explaining the concept of wolfs, I thought he was saying ‘woofs’ until about three days ago.

I practised tonight, despite the heat and my grumpiness.

I’m getting a bit nervous. I’m meant to be playing with a small ensemble type thing next week – part of ELLSO (East London Late Starters Orchestra). They’ve decided I’m a stage above an absolute beginner, which is probably true, but I’m not feeling very above anything these days.

The new bowing idea is going well, I think I’m getting right idea. Everything feels freer. I’m still whacking other strings all over the place though, as I figure out this being freer idea. Two out of three times I’m pinging my A string at the beginning of a note on my D string. It’s frustrating. I’m not concentrating on where my bow is as much as I think, as I am about nine million other things.

I probably shouldn’t have, still sorting out my bowing and all, but I took a stab at the slurring exercises in my book. I’m so impatient to play something, anything, that resembles ‘real music’.

I itch to bring out my flute again. Must. Resist.