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03/31/2006
Governor General's Literary Awards - here I come!
I've decided (likely in a fit of insanity) that I'm going to read, or at least attempt to read, all the books that have won Governor General's Literary Awards in English fiction. They've been awarded continually since 1936, so I have a lot of catching up to do, but I'll give it a shot. The thing is, I'm trying to figure out why these books win the awards they do. Is it because they are actually really that good, or because there's a tight clique of stuffy literary friends that arbitrarily assign these awards to big-name Canadian authors? I'm also wondering, how much in common does Canadian literature have? Is it really all about the universal Canadian theme of "victimization"?
Now for those of you that are puzzled, yes, I'm an engineer, not an English major. And thank goodness for that. I can say, "yep, I liked the book", and leave it at that, and nobody can dock marks. I don't need to worry about who is having Oedipus complexes or god only knows what else. However, sometimes, it's fun to just muse about this sort of stuff. In high school, my grade 11 English teacher told me he thought I'd be getting my PhD in English Literature one day. It really was hard not to laugh my butt off, because it was pretty much the last thing I could imagine myself doing. Growing up, I was HUGE into creative writing. I loved it to pieces, and since English class, early on, involved a lot of creative writing, I loved English class. Then, somewhere around grade 10, English class went from do-your-own-writing to study-someone-else's-to-death, and English class went from my favourite to basically my least favourite. I think high school killed my appreciation for literature for a long time.
So, I've decided to try to revive it. Back in the fall, there was a book sale at UVic, and I picked up a dusty old book from around the turn of the century (1900-ish, that is) called Literary Taste - How to Form It by Arnold Bennett. I thought, now THERE'S a book I can relate to. Reading it, despite the title, age, and subject matter, was actually quite a hoot. It's written in stuffy Victorian language (I can almost feel the corset strings digging into my ribs!) but it's actually almost amusing to read. One funny aspect is how it mentions people would rather read contemporary stuff than classics, and the list of "contemporary" works is basically a list of what we would also consider classics!
Anyway, with the help of this book and some determination, I'd like to get through the GG awards for fiction list. I actually already have a bit of a head start. Quite a few years ago, around the time it came out, I read the 1994 winner A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe, which was indeed an awesome book. Then a couple of years ago I tried to read Elle by Douglas Glover, the 2003 winner. That was a whole other can of worms. The writing was indeed superb, for the most part. It was about a French woman in the late 1500s who got kicked off her ship onto a remote island somewhere off the coast of Labrador. So far so good, and the characters were well-rendered, as was the landscape and so on. But Glover has a very annoying habit of interspersing the beautiful, rich writing with very crude, badmouthed interjections which I can only envision as a sporadic unleashing of a nasty fetish for anything that happens between the legs - sex, pee, poo (and these are all the nice translations of the words he uses). It's almost like listening to a beautiful symphony, but with a 13-year-old pubescent boy screaming toilet talk into a microphone at one-minute intervals during the symphony. I read somewhere (which I can't seem to find now) that this shock factor was intended to shock, to make it more interesting I guess, but for me it was such a turn-off that it turned a book that could have been an all-time favourite into something I just couldn't bear to read beyond page 70 or so. I guess the good news is that with all the potty-mouthed talk in there, it's not likely to be foisted on unsuspecting high school students anytime soon.
The 1968 winner, Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro, is a collection of short stories that I ended up studying as an independent study in grade 12. I remember disliking this also. I think the problem in this case was that I felt trapped in sepia-coloured 1960's images of rural Ontario where the fact that nothing ever happened was an event in itself, or that a dandelion sprouting through a crack in the sidewalk was worthy of three pages of text. I have my theories about what makes Can.Lit. what it is, but I'll leave that for another post as it's kind of a humour piece. :-)
The 1971 winner was St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler, which I am not looking forward to reading. I've only read one of Richler's books so far - Son of a Smaller Hero - but that was already enough for me. It's the book that sticks out in my mind as THE most boring book I ever read in my whole entire high school English career. (Well, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway was right up there but at least it was a whole lot shorter than Son of a Smaller Hero.) Son of a Smaller Hero gave new meaning to deathly boring - most of the time I felt it sucked so much energy out of me that I was on the verge of cardiac arrest. Almost like the electrons orbiting my atoms were deciding they can't be bothered to orbit any longer. I could skip twenty pages and still be in the same scene as before. Yes, it was that bad. So as you can imagine, I'm not a big fan of Richler. Let's just hope that either St. Urbain's Horseman was more interesting, or that I've matured with time and somehow what used to be boring isn't so bad anymore. Unfortunately, I think my attention span is even shorter now than it was in high school, so who knows what will happen.
Let the experiment begin! Right after I finish the Wave energy paper, that is. (Yes, Andrew and Peter, it's nearly done and I'm working on it today!!)
13:10 Posted in Books | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
03/30/2006
Oh yeah, the Bartok concert...
For those curious about the Bartok concert, I think it went pretty well. There were a couple of places where the orchestra seemed to be on shaky ground, with the different sections barely holding it together into cohesive music, but we managed to recover. The first movement of the Finta went very very well, thank you very much (to Looney Tunes: HA-HA! *sticks tongue out*). The only obvious mistake in it came not from the cellos but from the section to which Looney Tunes belongs. (There is justice...!) The second movement was superb (it has always been my favourite), but the third movement was sketchy. I thought it was just me having difficulty concentrating, but apparently the whole orchestra was feeling that way so I'm not sure what happened. The Bartok has been better in practice, but then again, this concert is the first time we ever played the whole thing through without stopping! It was OK though, no major catastrophes.
You just wouldn't believe how happy I am that it's all over! :-) Practicing the Hebrides Overture with the Ottawa Chamber Orchestra was a wonderful breath of fresh air!
19:59 Posted in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Aaa! Ottawa is turning into Toronto!
Well, as of June 17 this year, it will be mandatory to do 10-digit dialling any time we call a local Ottawa number, which is what's already happening in the Toronto area. As it turns out, apparently we're running out of 613 numbers, so the plan is to begin borrowing 819 numbers (which currently is the area code for Gatineau, just across the river in Quebec). This'll be a pain... Actually, today I was on the bus and Ottawa is starting to get more and more Toronto-esque the more I look at it!
Bummer #2 of the day - yesterday I applied for what would have been a really really cool job in Victoria at the observatory, and spent eons perfecting a cover letter for it, only to find out today from HR that, oh, by the way, that position was supposed to be advertised internally only, so we can't consider the application. (So if it's supposed to be internal, what the heck is it doing on their public careers site??) Anyway, so that really sucks. I wasted a whole bunch of time and energy on something there was never any hope for. At least the HR lady actually wrote back and was honest. I appreciate that. But this is shades of the "we already have someone in mind" rant I went on earlier.
I don't know about everyone else, but for me, there are two types of the "I'm sick of this" syndrome. The first type is temporary. For example, in high school I was playing a Bach suite for the Kiwanis Music festival, and I must've practiced that stuff a million times. Finally, when the time Kiwanis comp was over with, my cello teacher was flipping through my handy-dandy Six Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach, trying to figure out what I should play next. I said to her, "you know what? I just don't want to play any Bach anymore." To really grasp the seriousness of the situation, this was akin to saying to a priest, "I just don't want to read the Bible anymore." Any cellist worth his or her salt plays these suites - they're pretty much the most famous thing ever written for cello. But, I gave it a break, and sure enough, after a while, I enjoyed dabbling in the suites again.
The second type of "I'm sick of this" syndrome is the permanent type. In other words, if I ever experience this again, EVER, it'll be too soon. It's like a light bulb that's burnt out. It doesn't matter how long you wait before trying to light it again, it's still burnt out. Unfortunately for me, this job hunt "game" fits into this category. Every time I do it, I'm immediately sick of it and it just makes me want to be a humour writer (well, at least during those times when I don't feel like crying and/or beating up punching bags...).
Anyway. Well, for good news, looks like spring is officially here! Today was really gorgeous, with the sun shining and the temperature hitting a whole 19 degrees! Wooohoooooo!! :-)
19:50 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
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
03/23/2006
The Sally Ann burned down...
Yep, like the title says, the Orleans Salvation Army Thrift shop burned down! That happened on March 18, which is unfortunately before I got around to visiting it. Despite its proximity to where I live (all things relative), I never actually got around to visiting it. We did, however, donate whole pile of stuff there just after Christmas when Mom and I cleaned out the kitchen, so probably a bunch of our old kitchen stuff burned with the place. Apparently they suspect arson, so all in all it just doesn't seem to have been a good day! I'll have to keep going to the other side of the city for my thrift shop treasure hunting! (Despite Orleans' size, there are almost no thrift shops, as the whole community is composed of residential sprawl, big-box stores, and gas stations.)
Today is a glorious day - the first day where it actually feels like spring, at a balmy 9 degrees! There is still lots of snow left, and it will take a while for all that to melt, but hey, at least the air temperature is reasonable, and I've got the window open in my room. It's great, and the sun is shining to boot! I was beginning to wonder when spring would come, but now, as my grandfather used to say:
Spring is sprung,
the grass is ris',
Now I know where the birdies is.
Look way up there, in the sky -
Ooh! I got a bird dirt in my eye!
But I'm a big boy, I don't cry.
I'm just glad that cows don't fly.
Speaking of birdies, we haven't had that many birds at our feeder all winter. I suspect that the new houses they're putting up on this side of Orleans drove a hawk out of its natural territory and into a territory which includes my house. (And therefore, our local sparrows and finches relocated in a hurry...) I think the same thing happened a couple of years ago when they drained the Mer Bleue swamp to build the new Avalon community (with streets named "Chardonnay" and "Esprit" and so on... pass the barf bag please...). Anyway, two cardinals suddenly appeared at our feeder, which we had never seen before, so I suspect they we refugees from their home-turned-construction site.
Two more days til the Bartok concert - yesterday we had a rehearsal which wasn't our best, and I think I must've left my brain at home or something! Also yesterday I did actually sit down and practice, practice, practice a passage of the Bartok which is best played in thumb position (which, for those non-cellists, is what we usually use when we play high up on the fingerboard; since we can't leave the thumb behind the neck of the cello because of the distance, we bring it up onto the fingerboard). Soooo, I got the fingerings all worked out and it was sounding nice in practice. The only problem was that when we play it as an orchestra, the tempo is so fast that the whole thing goes by in a blur. By the time I registered "oh yeah, this is the thumb-position bit starting on F#", basically 3/4 of the passage had already swept by! Moral of the story, I need to practice more to speed it up. :-) Boy I'm going to be glad when this concert is all over!
15:45 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
03/18/2006
The cello is the tenor voice...
The other day I mentioned that I went shopping for cello music. Luckily I already had in mind what I wanted, and in general it was fairly easy to select the music. There was a bit of a trend going, though, in some of the other music. That trend seeming to be, of course, that a cello piece isn't worth playing if the cellist can't exhibit some virtuoso technique. 98% of the time, this means playing really really high. Sometimes I come across a piece of music written almost entirely in treble clef. First I flip to the cover to make sure it's not a violin piece, despite all appearances. Once the cover confirms it's a cello piece, then I wonder if the composer is aware of what exactly a cello is.
A cello has four strings: from high to low, they are A, D, G, and C, starting with the A just below middle C and going down in fifths. When we write out these open strings, they are invariably written in bass clef. That low C is two ledger lines below the staff in bass clef. So, a piece written almost entirely in treble clef will, therefore, be played almost entirely on the A string, sometimes going way the heck up the fingerboard to the point where you run out of fingerboard. Meanwhile, three other strings are just sitting there. It makes me wonder how many songs for tenors (people, that is) are written to make them sound like 6-year-old girls...
Then again, lots of male cellists seem to think of their cellos as being female. (Tenor voice = female?) I guess I shouldn't be slamming weird associations like that, because a few years ago I tried to imagine what my cello would be like as a human being and after a while, ka-blam! A vision! It was a man who turned into the main character of my novel-in-progress. A man who is... a violinist. Go figure.
Anyway!
Lately I've been on a scottish music binge, I guess as a natural extension of my irish music fixation. Actually I think I'm beginning to even prefer the scottish music, though often they're so similar as to be indistinguishable. I've put together a massive list of CDs I would love to get sometime, most of them by people nobody has ever heard of. I'd also like to learn to fiddle! However, since cello fiddle teachers are probably quite hard to come by, I think it would be cool to learn to fiddle on the violin and then transfer what I learn to the cello.
My other idea a while ago was to get my Royal Conservatory ARCT in cello performance by 2015. Mainly this would be something to get me to practice scales and etudes and all that stuff I usually don't bother with (and usually comes back to bite me at some point, such as in this Bartok stuff). In the Royal Conservatory there are 10 grades followed by the ARCT, which can be either in performance or in teaching. The idea is basically, if you have your ARCT, you can play pretty much anything that's written for cello. Last time I was studying with a cello teacher, back in high school, I was generally working on pieces at the grade 9 or 10 level, so to shoot for ARCT by 2015 seems reasonable. Now that I've got my senses back, though, I'm not sure I want to bother with all the exams, the theory, the history, etc.... so we'll see! :-) Playing celtic music just seems a whole lot more fun. We'll see what happens! For now, I have a lot of Bartok to practice. *groan* One more week...
12:45 Posted in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
03/17/2006
Shopping Spree! (sort of...)
Well, today I decided to get a daypass for the bus and did all my shopping in one fell swoop. The whole thing was triggered last night, when I was at a Sinfonia Ottawa rehearsal. I don't have a "real" orchestra-style mute for my cello (which is typically a small rubber thingy that attaches to the strings between the bridge and the tailpiece, and can be slid up onto the bridge when needed). So, as a stand-in, I was using my heavy-duty stainless steel practice mute, which you just manually stick onto the bridge. At the time I wasn't using it so I put it on my chair. However, at one point, I had to turn the page, and since it's a bit of a reach, I slid forward in my chair and turned the page, forgetting the mute was there. It fell off the chair and hit the hardwood floor with a huge bang, nearly giving the conductor a heart attack and attracting EVERYONE's attention. OK, I said to myself, definitely time for a proper orchestra mute!
Sooooo, I hit the sheet music store, the violin shop, Value Village, the CD exchange, and Chapters all in one go. Oh, and I went out to dinner afterwards so I had to make sure it all fit in my little blue bag. :-) I've been having a lucky day so far though! I bought the sheet music to Kol Nidrei (by Max Bruch - it's a very beautiful piece), the Requiem by Popper, which is for three cellos and piano, but I just love the music to pieces, and then I also bought the cello music to Les Folies d'Espagne, by Marin Marais, which I mentioned in my last post.
At the violin shop, a pretty funny scene was playing out when I walked in. So there's a mother with her small children, getting a 1/8th size violin for her son, who looked to be about 4. However, since the little guy doesn't play violin yet, the different models were being demo'ed by the salesman, who seemed to be quite a good violinist. But remember, we're talking about itty-bitty 1/8 size violins, so it was quite entertaining to watch this full-grown man playing this tiny little violin. I wish I had a camera!
At Value Village I hit the jackpot. I bought a beautiful yellow gown. It was one of those things I wasn't looking for, but when I saw it, it was as though light shone down from heaven and angels began singing. I was thinking, naaaaah, I don't need a dress, I shouldn't try it on... and for those of you that know me, two things are usually pretty obvious:
1. I don't wear dresses very often, and consequently don't own much in the way of skirts and dresses.
2. I hate trying on clothes.
Anyway, the magnetic pull to this dress was strong enough that I just gave in and said, well, I guess it can't hurt to try it on. So I tried it on - and go figure, it fits as if it were custom-made for me!! Unbelievable. Today I also got a wedding invitation to the wedding of two good friends of mine. I think God was telling me something! So, $20 later, I have a beatiful yellow dress I can wear to their wedding. :-)
Complementing this with a cool Mendelssohn & Lalo CD for $5.50, The Secret Lives of Bees (a book I've been wanting to read for a while) for $2.99, and a few other assorted cheap little finds (most notably a $0.99 pin from the Guides Franco-Canadiennes, for my girl guide memorabilia collection), I've done pretty good today. Gotta love those second-hand shops!
[ARRRGGGHHHHH.... BlogSpirit just had a big hiccup and lost a big chunk of this post. I'm not in the mood to rewrite it all again right now, so I'll do that tomorrow.]
00:10 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
03/12/2006
Viola da Gamba revisited
Last night I came across a recording of a viola da gamba piece which is incredibly beautiful. You can find it online
here. It's played by Claas B. Harders, and it's amazing. It's a piece called Prélude en harpégement, by Marin Marais.
When I listened to this piece of music, it brought back a few memories. First off, is the recollection of a CD which I haven't listened to in a while - the soundtrack to the movie "Tous les matins du monde". I didn't really like the movie all that much, mainly because it features Gérard Dépardieu, an actor I don't really care for, and also because I hate it when an actor is playing a musical instrument and the fingers are doing something completely different from what you can hear in the music. Anyway, despite the movie, the soundtrack is full of incredible music, much of it by that same composer, Marin Marais. A few clips are available on this website. In particular I like the Sonnerie de Ste Geneviève (Track 16) and the Improvisations sur les folies d'Espagne (Track 2). Jordi Savall is the gamba player and he's simply amazing.
The other memories it brought back were my days of playing the viola da gamba in the Early Music ensemble at Carleton back in my undergrad days. I did this for a year and it was definitely interesting. The viola da gamba is roughly the same size as a cello, though it's different in quite a lot of ways. First, it has six strings instead of four, with entirely different tuning (there's only one note which is an open string on both the gamba and the cello - everything else required a mental shift). The gamba also has frets, whereas a cello doesn't. The first time I picked up the gamba and saw the frets, I thought, uh-oh, frets, I have no idea how to use frets!! Then there's the bow hold which is entirely different; cello bowing is done with an overhand grip on the bow (i.e., your palm faces down), while gamba bowing is done with an underhand grip (palm facing up). And if that wasn't enough to screw me over, all the gamba music is written in alto clef, which cellists never use. What cellists do sometimes use is tenor clef, which is exactly like alto clef, but one line up! All this to say, it really can mess with your mind to switch between cello and gamba. (Still it was fun anyway!)
The cello as we know it these days is modernized, with the neck set at an angle relative to the body, so that it won't break with the high tension strings we use nowadays. Typically we use synthetic cores wrapped with metals like steel or tungsten. The gamba, however, still uses gut strings, and a correspondingly lower tension. The sound of the two instruments is very different. The gamba is more nasal, and quieter, kind of like a cello with a head cold. (Actually, kind of similar to a cello with a heavy mute in place.) The good viola da gambas, like you hear in these recordings, do "ring" somewhat and have nice sounds, particularly on the bass side. The gamba I was using, however, was a basic beginner model, and sounded like a gamba with a head cold! (Maybe it's related to the fact that I didn't really know much about how to play it. That could have something to do with it too. :-)) Anyway, the nasal sound, I could get used to. What used to bug me was my inability to make lots of noise with it. Cellos are quite powerful instruments and you can really make the windowpanes rattle, which is especially good for playing through a foul mood. Viola da Gamba, not so much. :-) So after a few months of focusing on the gamba, I'd go after my cello feeling like Tim the Tool Man: More Power!!!! Har har har!!!!
Anyway, listening to great gamba music (and seeing the awesome workmanship of gambas at Violworks) suddenly makes me want to play some gamba again!
23:00 Posted in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Mildew and other nasties
Victoria gets very damp, humid, and clammy in the winter, and consequently, when I lived there, I had a bit of a mildew problem mainly in the window frames and windowsills. Wipe it up with a little TSP, problem solved. That was the worst case of mildew I'd ever come across, right up until a couple of days ago right here in our house in Ottawa. A couple of days ago, it got sunny and relatively warm, meaning that all the snow and ice on the roof has begun melting. Unfortunately, we have a bit of a problem - there's a leak in the roof. It's not just any old leak either, where water drips from the ceiling and you can put a bucket underneath. We've got water running inside the wall and soaking into the carpet of one corner of the family room - from underneath! This happened about three years ago as well, and it was a pain too because I had a stack of library books on the floor at the time. Despite my efforts to dry the books as best I could, I still had to fork over some cash to pay for the damage. This time around, I didn't have any library books (just boxes of pots and pans and things like that, left over from my move out of my apartment!). Soooooooo, we moved all that out of there, and Dad had the clever idea to rip up the carpet just in that corner and see what's going on.
Well, it's pretty nasty. There's mildew and mold and a few odd spiders, and a stench that I suspect is created by all sorts of things we're not supposed to inhale. We used some absorbent shammies to soak up some of the water, and when we wrung it out into a bucket, the water was the colour of strong tea. On top of it all, we've left the carpet ripped up, with the fan running, to try to dry it out quicker. I'm not sure I'm keen on this method because I think it's blowing mildew spores all over the place, and since it's still winter, we can't just throw open all the doors and windows. (Warmer outside, yes. Spring, not quite.) I'd hate to see what an air quality inspection in our house would yield right now!
Luckily my parents were already talking about replacing the dingy carpet before all this happened, but now we need to add some roofing to the to-do list!
18:12 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
03/09/2006
Everything is relative
Well, I just got back from a rehearsal with Sinfonia Ottawa. Someone kick me before I do silly things like this again! I've spent hours and hours and hours transcribing the cello part for Bartok's Divertimento for String Orchestra (the copy we were given was a photocopy of a photocopy of the score pieced together into a cello part). And as of 1 am (-ish) this morning, it's all finally done. Today was the first rehearsal where all four of us cellists are present, and my goodness, the others are such good players! I can be playing at home and it sounds pretty good (to me), but then when I get to orchestra, my playing sounds like a child sawing away on an instrument! (Our principal cellist, Anne Davison, is a-maz-ing. I don't think she ever gets any notes wrong.) And speaking of relativity and wrong notes, Bartok seems to be a fan of using every possible combination of flats and sharps to make things look as complicated as possible. So, instead of just writing a C, he'll usually write a B#. People like me aren't used to seeing B# (or E#), because they're just C and F (respectively), and normal people will just write C or F when they mean C or F. But nooooooooo, not Bartok. Then, there's things like double-flats and double-sharps, so Bartok will sometimes write a Cx (C double sharp) when he really just wants you to play a D. Sheesh. As a result, the sheet music for the Divertimento looks really nasty because it's crammed with as many flats and sharps as humanly possible. When played (and I should add the caveat, when played *correctly*), it's actually not so bad. Bartok's music can be a bit dissonant at times, but it's not as bad as it looks on paper.
Still, I think Bartok is not my cup of tea. Let's say I won't be rushing out to buy recordings of his stuff! Sunday night with the other orchestra (the OCO), we read through Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture. It's sooooo beautiful. One of the ones that gives you goosebumps when you play through certain passages! I just bought a recording of that music, and it's just great. I love it to pieces!
Tomorrow, I practice like crazy, because the next Sinfonia rehearsal is Friday. We'll be rehearsing something by a contemporary composer named Finta, and his music is based on Canadian folk songs. I'm always leery of modern composers because the music can be really really weird, but for now I'll give him the benefit of the doubt because I just received the music tonight and haven't actually sat down to look at it. I'll let you know how that goes!
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