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03/25/2006
Coming from Behind: the Rant
Oh, I'm mad!!
It's definitely an overreaction - I've been simmering ever since some guy made a comment at the end of tonight's Sinfonia Ottawa rehearsal (tonight = Friday night, though this post will show up as "Saturday"). I'm not sure why I even care about what he said because I think he's a bit loopy in the head. He reminds me of someone but I can't quite figure out who. Kramer from Seinfeld (only older) comes to mind, but that's not quite it. Anyway, he basically came up to me and asked me if I would practice the first movement of the Finta Sinfonietta we're doing. At the time, I didn't know what exactly was going on. I was thinking, well, isn't EVERYbody going to be practicing the first movement of the Finta? The concert's tomorrow, after all... and then, why only the first movement? There are three movements in this thing and we're playing them all...
Then, the more I thought about it, the more insulted I became. Does he mean that he thinks I'm such a bad player that he felt the need to go out of his way and ask me to practice more? Does he think he'd better remind me, otherwise I will continue to think I'm God's gift to cello and don't need to practice this mere mortal music? I've been busting my butt over this *^$# Sinfonia music (and the Bartok especially, which is music I don't even really like), trying to get back up to speed after a 7-year cello hiatus.
It occurred to me though, as I tried to defuse the situation for myself, that we cellos did make, among us, 3 fairly noticeable boo-boos along the way as we played the first movement of the Finta Sinfonietta tonight. However, these 3 noticeable boo-boos were made by 3 different cellists. Yes, one of the boo-boos was mine, but the other two weren't. We also made some smaller boo-boos which shouldn't be too noticeable. In particular, we all seem to have a bad case of backwards-bow-itis, which means that the section isn't uniform at all times in the direction the bow is going. However, this guy who commented to me, I guess he mustn't have much to play in his part if he was so busy checking to make sure the cellists were up to snuff. And hey, since I'm the newbie, why not pin all mistakes on me?
Don't get me wrong, I do make my fair share of mistakes, and I do recognize that I'm the least experienced of the cellists. However, I am not oblivious to this, nor am I just letting my music collect dust at home. To make matters worse, in orchestra, my stand partner decided she wants to use her copy of the music, so while I can help myself at home by putting in clever fingerings and markings in my part, I can't benefit from them when I'm playing with the orchestra (which is when it counts). So, not only do I have to figure out fingerings and practice them, but I also have to memorize them, and then figure out when to ignore my stand partner's fingerings, which are sometimes different! All this while trying to follow bowing patterns which change at basically every rehearsal. I'm not sure what to compare this to if you're not a string player, but maybe for a dancer it's like deciding that steps which used to be with the right foot are now with the left, and vice versa. If you're like me and you need to practice it a million times to get it "automatic", switching the bowing around all the time is not helpful because then I need to unlearn that automatic stuff and re-learn the new bowings. Bowings were still changing tonight, and it's the day before the concert!!
The only saving grace in this whole cellist-in-an-orchestra situation is that I am somehow, by nature, very good at coming from behind. I seem to end up in this situation relatively frequently. When I joined my first serious orchestra, the Philharmonie des Jeunes d'Ottawa-Carleton, the audition was such a flop that they told me, well, we'll let you in, but the music is probably a bit too advanced for you and you're going to have to work reeeeaaaally hard. So I did, and the next year we all re-auditioned and I became principal cellist.
While it's great to have that inside you, sometimes you're just not helped along by people who should be supportive. For example, luthiers (the people who make/repair stringed instruments). The people who are good at what they do also have an annoying tendancy to be snooty. I'm not blanketing every good luthier with this judgement, but so far that's been the pattern among the ones I've met, which is unfortunate. When I was in high school (same time as I was doing the Philharmonie gig), I had a basic student cello which cost $1200, which is on the low end for a cello. I took it to a luthier in Montreal that my teacher recommended, because it had developed a crack on the front, under the tailpiece (this is Bad News for a cello). The idea was, well, to get the crack fixed. The proper way to do this is to take the top off the cello and fix it from the inside with little stabilizer strips to prevent the crack from re-opening, then put the cello back together again. So we left it at the shop and came back for it a week later. The luthier said that the cello wasn't worth fixing properly, so he just slupped a bit of glue into the crack and gave me a new bridge, which was so wrong that it caused the strings to buzz against the fingerboard (also Bad News). Seeing that we weren't about to get good service from these people, we took it to a local guy, who promptly decided the fingerboard needed planing and did that right in front of us. But since the fingerboard on this cello isn't ebony, the black colour came from paint, a large section of which had just been planed off. Rather than redo it so that it looked like a proper fingerboard, he just applied some black ink, which not only didn't make it the same black as the rest of the fingerboard, but came off on my fingertips for months afterwards!
About 4 years ago I went to yet another luthier looking for a cello bow, but was basically given a box of bows to try out and ignored. (Of course, Amanada Forsyth, our infamous NAC principal cellist, was in there for an "emergency" which is a whoooooole other story. Let's just say that my version of an emergency is a cello reduced to kindling; for pros like Amanda, far more minor things trigger apoplexies much more readily! :-)) ANYway, what this boils down to is, unless you're lucky, if you're not a pro, and not a butt-kisser, good luck on the luthier front. You'll need it.
All this to say, if I can make it from hot cross buns to principal cellist of a youth orchestra in a year, with a patched-up cello that nobody would take seriously, by golly this first movement of the Finta is going to sound good tomorrow. Mark my words. And it won't even take a $30,000 cello or Looney Tunes telling me to practice.
01:35 Posted in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this