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02/27/2006
Concert recap
Well, the two concerts with the Ottawa Chamber Orchestra (OCO) are over. I forgot to get a program the first night and by the time I remembered, at the second concert, they'd run out. Anyway, here is what we performed:
Beethoven - Romanze in G Major for violin and orchestra
Mozart - Clarinet concerto, 1st movement
Mozart - Flute & Harp concerto, 2nd movement
Mozart - Horn concerto in E-flat Major, 3rd movement
Bruch - Kol Nidrei (a cello solo with orchestra)
[intermission]
Beethoven's 8th Symphony - the whole thing!!
[end of concert]
Everything went very well Saturday night. I think we played just about everything better than we ever did in rehearsal. Possibly just the quiet, nighttime mood of the church helped us out, and maybe the not-so-nice weather outside made it that much cozier inside. Anyway, Saturday night's concert went really well, except for one little hitch which affected only me. :-) Since we have so many cellos (9 of us), it's usually too much, especially for some of the "delicate" concertos. So, for all the Mozart concertos, there's always a pair of cellos who don't play, and it's a different pair for each of the concertos. For Kol Nidrei, since our principal cellist happens to be the soloist, the assistant principal cello moves over to the left, and everyone on the right-hand side of a pair moves forward a seat so that there are no empty seats at the front. It's kind of like musical chairs (no pun intended). Anyway, the only problem was that Kirk (our awesome principal cellist) decided, more or less spur of the moment, that he needed to warm up during the Horn concerto, which meant that our little cello-section switcharoo happened before the Horn concerto rather than before the Kol Nidrei as we'd planned. The result of this was that I moved from my pair which doesn't play the horn concerto into a pair that does. I don't even have the music to practice with, so it was more or less akin to sight-reading for that piece! Luckily for Sunday, I knew it was coming and managed to borrow someone's part so that I could practice during the warm-up before the concert.
Sunday's concert was OK, but I thought Saturday's was better. I'm not sure if it's because of the acoustics, which are more "dead" at the new location, or if the daytime just put everyone in a different mood, but even with me, I found it more difficult to focus. Anyway, the concert went without any major problems, so that was good, and I liked the music. I'd never really heard Kol Nidrei before until we started to play it with this orchestra, but now I think I rank it right up there with some of my other all-time favourite pieces! It's the kind of music which sounds like something from a Lord of the Rings soundtrack.
Next up - Bartok with Sinfonia Ottawa! (Lord help us all...) I must say, I haven't heard much of Bartok's music, but from what I have heard, I'm definitely not a big fan. I'll give it a shot though!
14:15 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
02/24/2006
We rocked the church!
Tonight was the dress rehearsal for the Ottawa Chamber Orchestra that I'm part of, and let me tell you, we had the church rocking on its foundations! Actually, we got a little help from an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale. It's kind of funny about the earthquake thing, because I've been living in BC recently, and Victoria is sitting on a huge fault line which is ready to buckle any day, and finally when I do experience a quake, it's in Ontario. :-)
Besides the earthquake, the rehearsal has gone OK. I have some practicing to do still, but after 3.5 hours of rehearsal tonight and some practicing this afternoon, my fingertips are about to fall off. I'll practice tomorrow. Concert at 8:00 pm!
I also recently joined another orchestra, and today I got the music for the Bartok Divertimento for Strings that we'll be playing (among other things). Bartok reminds me of Debussy - time signatures changing every few measures, and accidentals absolutely littering the music. (Who the heck writes stuff in 7/8 or 5/8 time anyway??) The only good news is that the key signature isn't crammed with sharps or flats, so that's one less thing to worry about!
Wish me luck for the two concerts this weekend...
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02/23/2006
My feet hurt but this is fun!
I went to a second Irish dance class this week, to make up for one that I missed at the beginning of the term. Last Monday's class was softshoe, which I typically find more exhausting than hardshoe. The next day, on Tuesday, I actually didn't feel that sore, so I took it upon myself to do some strengthening exercises for my feet and ankles. Bad move. Wednesday (yesterday), I was very sore, and I had dance class that night! Today I'm walking around kind of flat-footed and granny-like because all the muscles in the arches of my feet hurt, and I've bruised the toenails on both my big toes, which is quite painful at the moment. Still, it was worth it. I love irish dance! I think what's causing the problems is that both my hardshoes and softshoes are probably about a half size too small. You kind of have to eyeball it when you buy shoes, because they stretch as you break them in. I think I eyeballed it just a bit too small this time around! ;-) (Last time, they were both way too big, in the order of 1 to 1.5 sizes too big...)
Anyway, like I said, despite the problems, it's great to be back in dance class. I'm re-learning all the steps I used to know, which are actually coming back surprisingly fast. I can't wait to learn new dances!
Oh, and I decided the Feis in two weeks is a no-go. I might as well not spend $60 when I have no dress, a shaky memory of the dances, no stamina (yet!), and no other adults likely to be dancing with me. :-) Next time, I might give it a shot!
14:30 Posted in Irish Dancing | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
02/21/2006
To dance, or not to dance...
Well, I just got back from Irish Dance class, which was fun (ooh, I'm going to be sore tomorrow). I asked my teacher whether adults compete around here, and got handed a flyer for the school feis, which is pretty much the first I'd heard of it. (For you non-dancers, an irish dance competition is called a feis, pronounced "fesh". And the plural is feisanna, not feises.) Anyway, so that would be good practice! When I heard about the feis, I thought, hey, here's my chance to prove that adults actually CAN dance at a competitive level. However, there are two hitches as far as my situation goes.
1. The feis is in 2 weeks, so I need to learn/remember all this school's steps (6 dances' worth + the treble reel, possibly, to make 7) in, well, 2 weeks. This might be tricky, as I've only had 2 classes since coming back. Also, I hadn't danced at all between mid-November and mid-February, and classes for adults are only once a week for an hour (kids usually have more than one class a week, and usually for longer than an hour). In other words, I'm kind of out of shape and having memory problems!
2. There are no adult categories. Usually when this happens at a feis, adults can drop down to the oldest kids category available. This is usually 16 & over, 18 & over if we're lucky. At this feis, it's a whopping 13 & over. I'd be competing against kids half my age, even though I'm on the young side when compared to other adults in my class. This otta be interesting. The parents will likely be up in arms if I win anything...! (Which, chances are, won't happen anyway given hitch #1. ;-))
Still, it's appealing. :-) I told you I might be crazy, deep down inside!
Oh, and the other problem is, I have to decide in the next 2 days, or I incur a late fee. I'm not sure what I'll decide. Any input is welcome!
00:35 Posted in Irish Dancing | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
02/20/2006
Olympic Fever - The Skeleton in the Closet
I'm supposed to be writing a paper for my master's supervisors, at UVic. They were kind enough to pay a stipend which allowed me to do my master's without incurring a huge debt, so my end of the bargain is to write a paper for the school to promote to the academic community all that hard work we've been doing. So far so good.
Enter the Olympics.
LAST time the Olympics hit, the Athens 2004 games, I was house-sitting for one of my supervisors for the first week of it, and got myself nice and addicted to watching the Olympics on TV. However, after the first week, my supervisor came back and I was back at my little ol' apartment, which doesn't have cable TV (I'm a cheapskate). The only problem is, in Victoria, unless you have cable, you're generally only able to pick up one TV channel with the rabbit ears, and CBC is not the lucky channel. I could watch reruns of Friends ad nauseum, but no Olympics! I moved the TV all over the apartment and found that in my bedroom, I could actually just barely pick up the CBC. In other words, if I was lucky, and squinted through all the "snow", I could vaguely tell what sport they were covering. Fun times. :-)
This time around, I'm at my parents' place and we have cable. I am also still job hunting, so I have lots of time to watch the Olympics. You'd think with all the time in the world I could squeeze in the writing of a paper! But hey, at least I can tell you which bobsleigh teams bounced off which corners in which runs, and I'm in the process of learning the difference between a double-full-full-full-double twist-god-knows-what-else and a double-double. (Aerial ski jumping, Tim Horton's, same thing). The only reason I'm sitting here in front of the computer right now is that the Canadian women are playing the Swedes in the gold-medal hockey match, and I can't bear to watch!!
GO CANADA!
Anyway, the other day I was watching the skeleton races. In the space of 24 hours, I went through 4 stages.
1. OMG I can't watch! These people are crazy!
2. Riveted to the screen, I watched and cheered and prayed our Canadians wouldn't bounce off corner 3. These people are crazy!
3. Hey, this is like tobogganing except better! I wanna do that!!
4. I need to find something other than training 12 hours a day to shave hundredths of a second off a breakneck-speed run on a piece of sheet metal in a track of sheer ice. I'd be crazy!!
And since I've never, ever, EVER been known among my peers as a good athlete, I might as well just stay off the international sports scene and stick with what I know.
Hop, hop, hop 1-2-3 (R)
Hop, hop, hop 1-2-3 (L)
Hop, hop, hop 1-2-3 (R)
Hop, hop back, hop 1-2-3-4...
15:07 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
02/15/2006
Architecture... in the Clouds!
Well, tonight I went to the National Gallery of Canada to go see a talk by Michael Sorkin, an architect working out of New York City. I hadn't heard of him til 12:30 am last night (well, this morning, officially), when I spotted an article written about him in a newspaper. In the article it says that he opposes New Urbanism's supposed design that everything all looks the same, but supports the idea of multifunctional communities. I thought, this sounds cool, I'll go see his talk.
Well.
Let's just say I came out of there feeling like I'd just seen a Stanley Kubrick movie. His community "designs" were basically abstract art, and when he did actually show elevations or perspective drawings of proposed buildings, they usually looked either like termite mounds, or like tall buildings that had been hit by hurricanes and twisted all around. Then there was Bubble-ville (that's my terminology - all the buildings are bubble-esque. Even the cars were supposed to be bubbles on wheels). I think the overall style was the Borg meet the Smurfs. Either that or, cities are like bodies. Let's model the designs on cancerous tumours..... Chaos reigned, and even he didn't have any idea what purposes the different multipurpose buildings served - only that they should be different. He hoped to create "accidents" (read: happy accidents, I guess) by creating quite organic community layouts, somewhere where people can either get lost and discover new things, or learn about their city and the curious "juxtaposition" of new and exciting things... and all I could think was, this guy is definitely smoking something. He even designed a hypothetical town named "Weed, Arizona" and another community called Shroom. Hmmm! I'd say the names are fitting, no doubt about that. :-)
Overall, the designs were so weird that it would probably give me nightmares if I ever moved into a place that looked like any of those. I like my house to look like a house, not like a chromosome (or worse, a chromosome on crack).
The question period was pretty funny too. The first guy more or less didn't have much of a question - just wanted to brown-nose. Then came a question about what process Sorkin used to come up with these designs, and the answer was quite short, when it came down to it: The process I use is the one which results in this design. I might be paraphrasing a teeny bit, but I swear that's pretty much what he said and he couldn't really elaborate on it. (And if you don't believe me, they videotaped the whole thing so I'm sure you can look it up somewhere.) I should have asked what the process is to get from these funky abstract designs to actual real buildings, but nowhere in the whole slide show did I see any photos of any of his projects actually built. This probably means nothing of his has ever been built (thank goodness...).
No wonder architects come up with some pretty weird stuff, if guys like this are their genius role models. Then again, Le Corbusier seems to be a perpetual role model, even though I personally think that the only good thing that comes from Le Corbusier is the excellent set of examples of how NOT to design buildings... (I can just hear all the architects out there screaming, blasphemy!!) :-) Anyway, it boggles my mind to think that he can make a living doing this sort of stuff. Wow. Gotta love academia...
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02/14/2006
Back to Irish Dancing... Thank Goodness!
Well, last night I went to my first Irish dance class here in Ottawa, and it was great. I'd forgotten how much I like dancing! Even better, it happened to be hardshoe night - a whole hour of hardshoe! Woohoo! I like hardshoe because it's where I can make lots of noise. :-) The only downside to hardshoes is that they are, well, hard, so that if you miss clicking your heels, for example, you click a heel against an anklebone and it REALLY hurts! But in this case, no bruised anklebones, only one blister, and life's good! I guess next week will be softshoe night. Anyway, it feels great to be doing this kind of exercise again!
22:40 Posted in Irish Dancing | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
02/07/2006
New Strings for My Cello!
A couple of weeks ago, I ordered new strings for my cello. I was beginning to wonder when they'd finally show up, but today they arrived! Yesss! Three (of the four) strings on my cello were about 3 years old, while the highest string (A) is six months old. (I had to replace it because the old one broke.) Six months is supposed to be the lifetime of a cello string, so you can see why the 3-year-old ones should really be replaced! :-)
The trouble with cello strings is that they are expensive - a good set can cost $150 to $200. The corollary to this is that it is expensive to experiment. There are dozens of different brands of strings, and figuring out which one works best on your cello is mainly a trial-and-error process. To further complicate the issue, cellists will often combine different brands on the same cello rather than buying a whole set of the same brand. I tend not to do this, but once in a while it happens that I'll have one string of one brand and three of another.
So right now, I put all 4 of my sparkly new Evah Pirazzi cello strings on my cello. The three highest sound really good (that's A, D, and G). The lowest (C), however, sounds really tinny and buzzes when I play it. It's not buzzing against the fingerboard (which would be bad since I would have to take the cello in and get the fingerboard planed, or get a higher bridge). It's the string itself which seems to be buzzing, as if the steel wrap was somehow loose. Not good. Usually the C string is supposed to be the least tinny of them all. The other downside is that if I decide I really don't like this Evah Pirazzi C, I need to buy another C string, which is typically in the range of about $60.
Previously to these Evah Pirazzi strings, I used Flexocor Permanents (which are also manufactured by Pirastro, the makers of Evah Pirazzi). When I first installed those 3 years ago, the G (second lowest) was the one that sounded really horrible and tinny. I bought a couple of other brands of G's to see if I could get one that sounded better, but ultimately I put the Flexocor Permanent back on and toughed it out. Lo and behold, over time, the sound got better and it became one of my favourites!
So, to save on cash (for now anyway), I'm going to try toughing out this C string and see if it gets better once it settles. We'll see how it goes!
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02/01/2006
The Job Hunting Circus: Part 1
I've been looking for a job for about a month or so, and even then, not too seriously. (Living with my parents has its merits!) The more I look though, the more I feel like standing back and watching the show rather than actually participating. Gone are the days where you go to school, learn about something specific, and then get a job doing that something specific. These days, it seems, I not only have to be an engineer, but have five years' experience in this, that, the other thing, as well as proficiency in about 20 different software packages, only about 3 of which the university can actually afford, and less than half of which any reasonable person might even have heard of. Then you must be an all-round individual so you need to be outgoing, über-motivated, willing to work long hours (including evenings, weekends, and holidays), serve on the board of no less than three committees, be president of a club (two is better), have international experience, and last but not least, play a musical instrument and participate in a variety of rewarding leisure activities such as golf, tennis, sailing, and/or mountain climbing (a successful Everest climb is an asset). And this is all for an entry-level position which pays peanuts, and is not likely very interesting in the first place. True, there are exceptions to this, but I see enough of these types of job ads that it has actually become funny rather than depressing. When I see some job ads like this I'll try to post on this blog in the "Job Hunting" category, as is this particular blog entry.
The above requirements, however, really only matter if there actually is a competition for a particular job, which is surprisingly, not necessarily the case when a job ad is posted. Three recent situations stick out in my mind.
1. My boyfriend, through contacts, was about to be appointed to a job for which he was highly qualified. Being a government job, the union wouldn't allow appointments to a job, so they set up a competition and posted the job so others could apply. The idea was, if he was that skilled, he'd have no problems jumping through all the hoops, and end up with the job anyway. (A huge waste of time, but OK.) The only problem with the theory was that they included geographical restrictions to the job, which disqualified him from the position. It's a wonder it's legal to do that, since both he and the job are Canadian.
2. Another friend was also almost appointed to a government position because she was already working in exactly the field they needed, and was very qualified. Once again, she had to go through all this bureacratic nonsense of creating a job description, posting it, waiting for applications, interview (when the interviewers basically already know everything they need to know, since they nearly appointed her), and get hired anyway. Of course, well over half a year has gone by in the process...
3. Yet another friend of mine was on the other side of the coin. She saw a job ad that she thought would be perfect, and went to the trouble of sending in her application. She never heard anything back, and later found out (through someone else working there) that they never looked at any of the applications; they already had someone in mind and the whole job ad was just for show. This friend has been making ends meet by working at a deli in a small grocery store for years, a job which she hates and can't wait to quit. She really had her hopes up for this new job. It isn't fair to do this to her. If her application was considered but wasn't as good as someone else's, fine. Life's like that. But to get her hopes up when she never had a chance in the first place? Not fine.
4. The best example I've ever seen though, was a job ad which just made me shake my head. It had all the typical information about the responsibilities of the position, the required experience and education, and so on. At the bottom there was room for notes, and the note read something like: We already have a candidate in mind for this position; her name is [full name of candidate was given right there in the ad]. (I have to paraphrase because the closing date of the position has gone by and the ad is no longer online. I should've copied it when I had the chance, because it was just such a jewel.) For heaven's sake, why bother posting the ad??
All this headache stems from the rule that you have to have a fair competition for every job. I guess the idea was to prevent friends from giving jobs to other friends who weren't necessarily qualified, but were just appointed as a friend-to-friend favour. Fair enough. The current "adaptation" of this rule is just ridiculous though. I didn't have to look very far to find these examples, and they all happened within this past year, so I wonder how rampant this really is! If you want to appoint someone because they're qualified, just make sure they have the qualifications and are suitable for the job, then hire them. Don't put them (or other hopefuls who really don't have a hope) through all this misery. I've seen enough of this for my liking...
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