Now what do I do with myself?

Tada! I am done with my recital! In general, I think it went pretty well. There were some notable slips that will make me wince for years to come, but live performances are like that, and I don't feel too bad about it since the spots where I didn't slip up sound like a cello! Hooray! There were also about 30 people there, a few even who came in from out of town and I am very touched! I'm going to miss that 5 string cello, which my teacher took back (it's hers after all) right after the recital was over. It was easiest for both of us, since then I didn't have to deal with getting it home and getting it back to her later, but it was kind of a "love it and leave it" kind of experience. As my dad said, "it hasn't even cooled off yet!" It is my goal in life to have three cellos: 1) normal, 4 strings, 2) full sized 5 strings, like this one, 3) smaller body, 4/5 strings (violoncello piccolo). Some day I will be rich enough to afford those three, plus the hot tub that has always been my goal as an indicator or being just wealthy enough. Hey, a girl has to have plans, right? Some of my Bostonian friends agreed to help me out by putting together the reception, and did very well by themselves! There was (and still is) SO MUCH FREAKING CHEESE! Seriously, so much cheese. Stiney made wings and pumpkin gooey cake, Digikami made a lovely cake and provided for the baked brie, which E baked, in addition to making her famous spinach dip. E's roommate made mini-muffins, and Roomate provided four different kinds of cheese, with three different kinds of crackers. There was a good deal of wine, too. I've forgotten/left out some things, but I think you get an idea of the spread that we had. Tonight, I've been informed, is to be leftover night. Now that the recital is over, I can begin to get caught up on some things that I've been neglecting, which is good. One of those things is Rock Band.

Recital Week

Way too much to do this week, and a recital at the end of it. I'd be stressed out even if all I had to do were practice, but sadly life won't let me get away with that. We'll see how it goes. A few words of warning to anyone who may be reading this and find themselves in close proximity to me this week. I hate to put it all out here so blatantly, but the thing is, it'd be better to get this in PSA format now than feel like I hurt your feelings later. I get snappy when I'm stressed, please don't take it personally. I don't mean it, but I can't help it. Pointing out that I seem "grumpy, cranky, etc" (rarely very effective anyway) will not earn you any points. Also, PLEASE no unsolicited touching. The best summary of this is that you probably will want to just avoid me this week. Trust me, it'll be the better for both of us. End of PSA. Never fear, I'll be back to my normal, only slightly bristly self by Saturday.

OH HOLY CRAP NOW I CAN DIE HAPPY

Because someone has created this, a catalog of Sesame Street songs and skits from the good old days, complete with LINKS either to sound files or video files on youtube. I realize I am prone to hyperbole. Because this is so incredible and amazing and awesome, I may have found that one thing I've been striving for every time I say something is "the best thing ever." This changes everything.
Relatedly, I can't believe how much Sesame Street shaped my life. No wonder Avenue Q has been so successful!

Random Thoughts of the Day

1) Beets are beautiful and delicious. How did nature create such a perfect color in such an ugly looking little root?

2) The kind of regret one feels about missed chances when one learns a pet has a terminal illness is very similar to the kind of regret one feels upon learning the same information about a loved human.

3) It is not possible to "instant messenge" someone, because "messenge" isn't a word.

Agua bajo el puente (or) A Good Reason to Record Concerts

Likeafox, who is my hero, has done some kind of computer magic and made recordings of our little singing group into a file format that we can actually listen to! This is from our concert of Spanish music that we did on Mother's day in 2006 at Oberlin. The project was plagued with problems, not least my clumsy fumbling of the difficulty of simultaneously 1) singing, 2) running a rehearsal, and most importantly, 3) staying friends with everyone involved. I rubbed people the wrong way, they rubbed me the wrong way, they rubbed each other the wrong way, and all in all there was probably too much music. BUT. In listening to the recordings, I'm still very proud of them, and us as a group! All that crap, and we still make damn good music together. We may not sound like the pristine Tallis Scholars, but we have our moments. Especially because, for most of us, singing is not something we train to do, just something we love. It's nice to have the recording to remind me that, yes, there were issues, and yes there were things I would do differently, but it was worth it! If any of you 4 are reading this, I love you, and I would sing with you any time. Maybe someone else can be in charge this time though?

Recordings of us singing

On Scars (or) Two Random Kind-of-Related Thoughts

1) I watched Red Dragon last night (turned out I had seen quite a bit of it before, although I'm not sure where or when). The score was a bit heavy handed, but otherwise a very good movie! Hannibal Lecter is one of most fascinating villains on film. In his closing voice-over, a letter addressed to the FBI agent who caught him he says, "What a collection of scars you have. Never forget who gave you the best of them, and be grateful, our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real." How interesting! We see our scars as reminders of pain, and focus on the negative. If 'we're lucky, we can learn from our scars (i.e. quit riding motorcycles, stop dating jerks, etc), and focus on the positive. But Lecter suggests that scars are also a neutral and objective proof that, whatever value we assign to an event, at least we're sure that event actually happened if it leaves a scar. One character in the film had extensive tattooing, so it's not so strange that I started thinking about tattooing. What is a tattoo if not a permanent, self-inflicted scar? When an event doesn't leave a visible physical scar, sometimes some of us have to make our own to reassure ourselves that the past actually happened.

2) Today's topic of deep, showertime thought is the nature of regret. It's such a negative emotion, and it really doesn't serve any purpose. Once a thing is done, it's done, and no amount of wishing things had happened differently can actually change anything. And yet regret is a common and central human emotion that causes us no end of pain, frustration, and generally oogy feelings. So why do humans keep feeling it after all these years of evolution? The only reason I can come up with is that regret teaches us about poor decisions we made, or that other people made, and help us to learn from the past. Memories are faulty, but we tend to remember the things we feel badly about very vividly. Most of us have memories of breaking something when we were little, accidentally hurting someone we cared about, and the like, and usually those memories are sort of burned into our psyches. Like a scar. Either that, or our super-egos are a lot more sadistic than we think, and just delight in rubbing our our ego's nose in its failures.

Pro(vocation) Seminar, Part ?

You may have noticed, dear reader, that I never posted the aforementioned rant about the other thing in proseminar that drove me crazy. This is because every time I sat down to do it, I would start feeling angry and frustrated again. I didn't want to get all grumpy, so I figured it was better to ignore it. The basics of it were: Technology in classroom=good, but a challenge. If technology is not used efficiently, things rapidly deteriorate into "Hey, check out this useful website! Hey check this out, it's cool!" and that's just not a very good learning environment. I have been referring to that particular class session as ADD class. All things considered, there were some interesting things discussed, and I did learn about some good websites that I didn't know about before. But there has to be a better way than having a computer hooked up to both the internet AND a projector, while most of us have our own computers, also hooked up to the internet, as well. Information overload! I had a headache after that.

Handbells (or) Topics Shamelessly Ripped From Other Blogs

The always inspiring Anne recently posted some reflections on handbells. I started to leave a comment, but then I got overly wordy, as I am wont to do, so I moved the comment on over here where it would have some room to stretch. I have some experience with handbells. I hid in the bell cupboards under the table during rehearsal all through my childhood, and then played as a substitute when I was more or less able to read music and my dad was desperate for someone to play high C other than himself from the conductor's podium. The thing about handbells is that, yes, they're so weird. It's easier than playing a whole instrument in some ways, because you're only responsible for usually 2 and sometimes 4 notes at a time (counting your accidentals!) In other ways, it's so much harder than "normal" music making, because as Anne points out, you split the music up into little chunks and then expect it to sound just as musical as if one person were playing everything. I've heard amazing, professional type choirs, and you might be fooled into thinking they had perfected a hive mentality, but the other thing about handbells is that most people's experience with them is Sunday morning at church when the regular choir has the day off. And they end up with bad reputation because 1) everybody thinks they can play the handbells, because hey, it's only one note at a time (this is so very misguided) and 2) because there are so many amateur choirs, there is a lot of music that is geared toward them. Consequently, there is a huge body of easily played but mediocre or downright terrible music floating around thanks to Agape Press et al. But there's also some really bizarre and insanely difficult stuff out there, a lot of orchestral arrangements and the like. I heard a recording of a handbell choir doing Flight of the Bumblebee once. Handbells tend to be the butt of a lot of jokes, and probably most choirs deserve those jokes (as long as they take them in good humor). All the handbell choirs I have known have been...well a little neurotic, on the whole. They're like all the fun of church choir, plus the difficulty of cooperating with your fellow musicians (because, as we all know, regular choir involves very little of that on a regular basis. Zing!) All in all, I think handbell choirs are pretty cool! When you play well, it's pretty neat! When you play less well, it's pretty hilarious, so it's a win/win situation for listeners! But don't get me started on choir chimes.

(Pro)vocation Seminar, an interlude

I looked at my title to the last blog post and was struck by the idea of this seminar being pro-vocation. The idea of studying music as being analogous to being called to ministry or some such is interesting, I think. The depth of this thought was immediately countered by a Twainian thought that convocation must naturally then be the opposite of provocation.

Pro(vocation) Seminar in Musicology, part I

My Tuesday morning class is Pro Seminar in Musicology, and it's all about "the business and practice of musicology." We've had classes on various techniques of research as well as the more fundamental question of what the heck musicology is anyway. Up until the last two weeks, I enjoyed this class. Sure, it was an excuse for musicologists to get together and egg each other on in some sense, but that's an inevitable and actually quite useful part of academic professional development. Without those sessions, it's much more difficult to expand one's personal and professional horizons, to engage face to face with people in your field, and to bounce your own ideas off of people who both care and have similar background knowledge. Unfortunately, while some people are open-minded, there are many others who claim to be and aren't, and still others who make no such pretenses. These past two class sessions have given some "insight" into all of the above. A certain opera scholar (a "theorist") came into to guest lecture last week. This is a person who is widely respected and published, although is known to be a bit caustic in criticism of others. Now, the thing that bothered me most about this particular class session was the completely irrelevant and illogical (I believe) divide between "musicologists," meaning those who deal in history, and "theorists," those who deal in theory. Why there should be this distinction is a complicated issue, that goes back a couple decades, and is fully understandable and perhaps even necessary in its own time. Quite frankly, I think this distinction should stay in the past where it was spawned. I wasn't around, I don't know what it was like when theorists were ignored in favor of purely "circumstantial" discussion of music's history to the detriment of studying the work for itself. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't there. But I am HERE, and I see that it doesn't matter any more. Or, more realistically, I see that we, the music-studiers (to translate "musicologists" literally, and in the way I would like to see it taken) have reached a point in our collective development where we can begin to reconcile the divides of the past. More and more music historians incorporate theoretical analysis into their writings. More and more theorists keep sociohistorical concerns in mind when analyzing music. I really, truly, honestly do not understand why we are "musicologists" (in the traditional HISTORY way) and "theorists" and "ethnomusicologists" and not "musicologists" in the literal sense of studiers of music who specialize in history, theory, gender studies, musical anthropology, etc. All researchers need an identity, perhaps even a label to feel legitimate, or for purposes of tenure, publishing, conferences and the like. But when it comes down to it, when it comes to relating to others who, in the end are really only interested in the same thing we ourselves are which is namely a deeper understanding of music, do we really have to behave as though we fit only into one small box? How very counterproductive is this us-them mentality that I had thought was already waning! Perhaps it is waning and those who still follow it are just particularly vocal. I really don't know. If anyone out there has two or more cents on this issue, I'd appreciate a discussion.

Accuracy vs Precision (or) My Creative License is Expired

I don't usually listen to recordings of the Bach cello suites. I think mostly it's because of that thing that cellists say, "the only recording of Bach that you'll like is your own." The fact that these are among the few pieces that everybody plays means that they have been both the beneficiaries and the victims of changing attitudes toward performance over the years. And even within any one era or aesthetic, the interpretive possibilities are endless. Add to that the fact that there is no score in Bach's own hand, and suddenly all compositional authority is also thrown into question by Anna Magdalena's sloppy slurring. The net result of all this is that the cellist is left very much to his or her own devices when approaching this music. Teachers and pedagogical traditions weigh in, personal taste and maturity weigh in. and in the end, everybody comes up with something slightly different than everyone else who has ever played a suite. Clearly, this is part of their beauty, for who can fault music that can stand up to such abuse and inspiration and remain fundamentally unchanged? For us cellists, this flexibility can often seem to be more of a curse, for reasons that should be readily apparent. Especially after one is "out in the world," by which I essentially mean having studied with more than one teacher, it becomes expected that everyone of us becomes a specialist in source study. Many of us dutifully and with varying degrees of interest and dedication, gather up our Barenreiter Urtext edition with sources A-E and hop to. Some cellists just give up and do what they feel like, which is in many ways even more historically informed than poring over manuscripts. However we go about it, we do our best with bowings, articulations, dynamics, all the vitals of interpretation. The only thing we aren't allowed to change are the notes themselves. At least in the suites, to the best of my knowledge, there aren't any places where we can say "Bach didn't actually mean that note, he meant this one" as occasionally happens in cantatas and the like. So I was alarmed today when, upon listening to three different recordings of the suite I am currently working on, all of those recordings were in agreement about notes that I was certain were not what I was playing. Running to my Barenreiter upon returning home, I was shocked and displeased to discover that it was NOT in fact I who had made the discovery that all these venerable cellists had missed, but rather that I have just learned at least five wrong notes in the sixth suite. There are an awful lot of notes in it, but sadly I am not allowed to claim this as an excuse. Having found not one but five different things I have learned wrong, I am faced with the task tomorrow of going through note by note and discovering for myself what, if any, other mistakes I may have learned. I believe that relearning music one has already conquered wrong is harder than conquering it in the first place, although that may just be me. It suffices to say that this should serve as a warning to any musicians reading this that it pays to be sure that the notes you are playing are actually what are on the page to begin with. Either that or maintain your blissful ignorance and never listen to any recordings.

Fame or Infamy?

I just linked to my own blog from someone else's blog! Does this mean I am famous? Thanks, David! I am pleased to be listed between Hal Gober and something in Japanese, even if I am an archenemy rather than an archbishop like Alex Ross.