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05/08/2006
Popcorn, foghorns, and 250-year-old cellos
OK, I've had a night to recover from yesterday's concert. Too bad my brain was too busy to shut down and use the night to rest... Ever had the problem where your body's exhausted but your brain's still frolicking, producing all sorts of hairbrained ideas or worse, stuck in repeat mode on a tune? Or two? Well, that was my night last night. I had Beethoven stuck in my head (see last night's post). I tried thinking of Phantom of the Opera songs to get that out of my head, which has worked in the past, but this time around it resulted in BOTH Beethoven AND the Phantom music stuck in my head. A few notes of one, then a few notes of the other, back and forth ad nauseum. It actually got so bad that at about 1:30 am (2 hours after I'd gone to bed), I turned on the radio to get my brain to at least focus on something non-repetitive. So all in all, I didn't sleep well.
Anyway, today I've decided to add some musical commentary that I wasn't in the mood to type out last night.
Yesterday before the concert I asked my stand partner about his cello - as it turns out, it's a French cello made around 1760. He told me the story about how it got passed to him through the family, which is pretty amazing. Then he asked if I wanted to try it out. (Does the sun shine? Is the Pope a Catholic?) It was awesome - I LOVE that cello!! What a difference it makes to have a well-seasoned, good-sounding, resonant cello. I felt like I suddenly became twice as good a player. The only downside to it all is that eventually I had to give him his cello back and go back to mine, which suddenly sounded like a kid's toy! Unfortunately I'm fairly sure I don't have any old family members with stray 250-year old cellos kicking around. I'll have to do it the hard way and save up enough money to buy a really good cello!
For some reason I seem to be magnetically drawn to older French cellos. I'm not sure what it is about them, since usually the Italian instruments are the ones people swoon over. You do have to be selective though. I once tried out a 100-year-old French cello selling for about $8000 which sounded worse than my 5-year-old $5000 cello. Also, older instruments, which have been around long enough to have been in existence through the world wars, sometimes look like they were right there at the front. You want to avoid those. :-)
That's it for my pontification about cellos for the day. On to.... popcorn and foghorn! These are orchestra terms. Popcorn is when everyone is supposed to play a note (usually pizzicato, or plucking the string) at the same time, but if different people pizz at slightly different times, instead of one unified "poing!" you get "pop-pop-pop-poppity-pop!" Hence the term popcorn. This is usually caused either by musicians not looking at the conductor, or the conductor not being clear about the beat. Popcorn best avoided in orchestra settings, though we had a couple of instances of it last night.
Then there's the foghorn, which is what happens when two or more people are supposed to be playing the same note, but they're not quite in tune with each other. Foghorns also have two main reasons for occurring - either one (or more) musician is having intonation problems, or someone's messed up on accidentals (e.g., sharps, flats, or lack thereof). Intonation problems happen to everyone, but I suspect they're harder to fix for wind instruments and consequently the most obvious foghorns last night seemed to come from the winds. The two oboes, for example, if the conductor calls them on intonation problems, will usually stop what they're doing, take the reed out of their mouth, readjust the reed with their hand, then compare again, until they match (IF they ever match). Trouble is, they can't just stop in the middle of a piece and do this, and I'm not sure how much you can control just with your mouth on an oboe, but... anyway, it's interesting. I always thought winds were lucky because they could just press the right keys and voilà, a ready-made note, but from experience, looks like that's not true. I think foghorns are also more obvious in the winds because they're just so LOUD compared to the rest of the orchestra. Even when the music is marked piano (= soft), they can (and often do) still completely obliterate the strings. I do have to say it's irritating that winds seem to only have two modes (loud, and off), but I think possibly it's just more difficult to play a wind instrument softly. String instruments are pretty adaptable that way.
Then there are foghorns which happen when someone messes up on accidentals. I've had some pretty bad cases of this. Once, the very first time I was playing at church for Christmas, Mom and I were going to do a rendition of Silent Night (Mom plays organ). She was doing a few other songs with the choir before that. Then came my turn, and as I started to play, it sounded awful. And I mean reeeeeaaaaaally, excruciatingly bad. I couldn't figure out how my entire cello could have gotten so out of tune. It was a disaster, and I didn't have the expertise to correct the intonation on the fly. As it turns out, Mom was playing on one of those handy-dandy electronic organs with a "transpose" knob, to make the organ sound lower than what you're actually playing on the keyboard. Mom had used this to bring the previous song down a notch, so that it fit the choir's voices better, but forgot to turn it back to normal when she started Silent Night. It sounded SO bad. I was soooooo embarrassed....
Needless to say, foghorns are best avoided in musical performance!
Anyway, I'm off to go practice some cello, and improve that intonation. :-)
16:00 Posted in Music | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
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u ugly
Posted by: da unkown | 05/08/2006