more than a piece of wood

I swear, soon I'll go back to movie reviews or something. But gah.
As I was exiting a bus today, the strap on my viola case came unhooked and my viola hit the ground hard. It was 6 PM, and I was en route to making a brief birthday party appearance before heading to an 8 PM concert. As soon as it hit the ground I anticipated trouble, but it's too cold here to open the case outside so I headed over to the party. Inside, I opened the case, and...
A big crack, up the face of my viola at least six or seven inches long. My heart stopped. Thirty seconds later I was outside, coatless, on my phone dialing every violist I knew within easy train access. A friend of mine lives only a few houses away from the party I was at, but he didn't answer. Nobody answered, and I paced. Eventually, I tracked down a viola that I could borrow in Rogers Park (a few miles north) and ran my ass over to the train to head up there ASAP.
Here's where things really went to hell. I got on a train, went two stops, and then my train driver announced that there had been some sort of train-and-person accident farther north and that all the trains both directions were going to be staying where they were and cutting off power. I jumped back off the train.
Luckily, my original hope (the one who lived by where I had just come from) called me back. I took a bus back to his house, swapped violas, and went back to the train station, where the trains were still shut down. I took a cab, played the concert, and took a (mercifully running) train back to my friend's house to swap back.
Now I'm home. Things still haven't hit fully, but I'm becoming a little bit less comatose. I can speak in full sentences, that sort of thing. I was so exhausted by my efforts to get to the concert and by the overwhelming nature of the evening that I was practically incoherent when I was at the show. Now I'm just worried about my viola. It's an object, a thing, but very, very close to my heart. It's hard to describe, but my viola is very like a person to me. We've spent so many thousands of hours together. I've shared at least as many highs and lows with this piece of wood and metal as I have with any single person. My viola has made me cry, and laugh, and go more than a little crazy; I've shed sweat and blood for it. My skin and sweat and fingerprints are literally embedded into the wood. I first saw my viola when I was maybe 12: it was my birthday present, and I was in instant love the first time I saw it. Her. I struggled (vaguely, and not too often) in high school with the fact that my viola felt female to me and that I loved her. (This is funny now :) I'm hoping that they can fix the crack without too many problems, but the damage hurts in some undefinable way. Something constant in my life for well over a decade has sustained damage.
I'm not writing well. Thanks for reading. I'll post something not about me soon.

horns, and not the french kind

Okay, this is completely personal, but I'm falling apart a tiny bit tonight and so... Here's my drama! For the last month or so there has been talk of travelling on a cruise ship for three months this summer playing string quartets. The initial idea was to travel to Europe, and hopefully to have some say as to when we would be leaving. We (or at least I and one other person involved) were also operating under the idea that if for some reason one of the people in the demo dvd we filmed couldn't go, we could find an acceptable substitute and bow out. As of today, all of these ideas are over and done. If we go, it will be to Alaska, with the exact personnel from the dvd, and earlier than anybody really was hoping for.
Here's the issue. While I'd like to take a cruise to Alaska, I don't really want to take the same cruise 15 times and miss the whole summer here doing it. I also don't have any actual schedule conflicts with the dates presented. The money would be nice, but for me this whole endeavor was more about the experience than the six grand or so I'd come back with at the end. For me, that was always a perk, not a reason. The problem is that for the organizer, that six grand is the main reason, and she's heavily implying that it is in fact crucial to her continued financial well-being. I don't have a concrete reason to not go other than the fact that I don't really want to anymore. On top of all of this, I have to give an answer by tomorrow morning.
I have a hard time, an almost impossible time, being selfish even in small matters. This, if I were to make the decision I honestly want to make, would be selfishness on a grand scale that I've never even contemplated before. Does my desire, based on a gut reaction with no concrete factual evidence, outweigh what is being presented as a factual need on the part of another? I might have a fantastic time if I go. I might not. The finances are much more clear-cut. Am I being pressured? In a very nice way, yes. The truth and the presentation are fuzzy, and that is making the decision all the more difficult.
Can I deal with myself if I deny somebody else something this large? Can I deal with myself if I make yet another decision based more around the desires of others than my own desire? My stomach is in knots, and at this point I've made the arguments on both sides to myself so many times that they are starting to lose meaning. I just feel incredibly icky. I know what I should do (not go), but I'm not sure if I can.
If anybody has words of wisdom, this is the time to offer them.

triumphal

Wow, here's a review of the Civic concert. Apparently we did a good job :) That's making my somewhat angsty day better...
Also, an article on the mythical cello scrotum. At least the internet is good for something.

romancing myself into a tired Finn

The craziness of the past few weeks is mostly over, at least in terms of music. I survived, and came out with little more injury than some sore (and calloused, my god) fingertips and a painful twitch in my back. Not bad, considering some of the possibilities I considered.

Interesting fact: of the three concerts that I performed in or saw this week, all of them involved Finnish people. Odd? Yes. Does it mean anything? No, except it reminded me of the Sandra Cisneros poem I misquoted for the title (Small Madness, from Loose Woman)and gave a me a reason to cover all three performances at once.

The first concert was with dal niente, the new music ensemble that I play with on a semi-regular basis. Our January 20th concert consisted of music entirely by one composer, Kaija Saariaho. A local college had, apparently, flown her in from Finland for some sort of residency and we timed our concert so that she would be able to attend. Playing a piece for the person who actually wrote it can be thrilling and alarming in equal parts, especially when that person is fairly famous within their circle. There was a little tension when she entered during our dress rehearsal, but she seemed (calmly) happy with our interpretation of her 20-year-old piece, Lichtbogen, as well as the other solo and smaller ensemble pieces that made up the program. She was actually supposed to be a participant in the Lichtbogen performance, manipulating an electronic patch and various sorts of amplification (we were mic-ed to the teeth), but unfortunately the publishers had neglected to send the patch and subsequent efforts to retrieve it electronically were not terribly successful. Luckily, the piece stands more or less on its own.

It's an intense thing to play; Saariaho creates so many different sound qualities for each instrument that the texture is amazing, but that effect requires the instrumentalists to follow at least five different directions for nearly every note played. Here's how I described my part in an email to a friend: "How loud? Is there a crescendo or decrescendo? Where on the string is my bow? (By placing the bow near the bridge, the piece of wood that holds the strings up, you get a kind of glassy whistling sound; by going the other way, far away from the bridge, you get a kind of hollow fuzzy sound.) Is there overpressure? (By pressing with more force than the string needs, you get a kind of creaking sound. this piece had a lot of that.) Am I vibrating, or not, or more than normal?" On top of that, I'm trying to count evenly to seven over a four pattern, or whatever. Whew! I was really glad that I managed to do the right thing for as much of the piece as I did, but I certainly was holding my breath through much of it. She was apparently quite happy with the performance, which was a really great feeling.

My second Finnish experience took place as an audience member, not a performer, at a CSO concert. At this point, I think I'm going to use initials to avoid the inevitable google of "CSO+"conductor's name"" just because I'll feel more comfortable writing freely in a somewhat more anonymous manner and because he's fairly famous. So anyway, I saw the CSO, conducted by a Finnish conductor and composer, E-P S. Part of my interest was personal, as I was going to be playing under this conductor's baton with the Civic Orchestra in just a few days. My impression? Dancey. A lot of movement. For players, that can go either way in terms of clarity, and so my initial (mean-spirited?) impression was that I was watching somebody who played primarily (or at least more than was strictly necessary) to the audience, not the orchestra. But I tried to reserve my judgement and enjoy the show and wait for my own personal experience with E-P S before I decided anything.

Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste was my favorite piece on the program. I'd never heard much of it on recording, and never live, and it's quite an experience. The string section is split in half and kind of arranged in a mirror image on the stage around a central piano and celeste. The first movement is fairly dynamically flat and smoothly seamless, but ooooohhh so full of tension. Harmonic tension, dissonance, and a quiet sort of menace that put me on the edge of my seat. The instruments enter one by one, forming a sort of fugue that just blew me away. The rest of the program did less for me: Arvo Paart's fourth symphony, and Debussy's La Mer, a tone poem about the sea. For me, it's kind of all flash, but I also haven't played it well personally and that tends to influence my evaluation. I'm very much a performer when I listen to classical music.

My final Finnish experience came when I finally played under E-P S himself. We played Mahler 9, the piece that has been killing me for upwards of two weeks. It's very difficult work, in terms of notes and also because, honestly, I just didn't understand it all that well. It's complex, and it requires so much concentration and for such an extended period of time (an hour and twenty minutes) that I frankly didn't have much brain left over to analyze structure or much of anything else. Every page has at least one "oh shit" moment, and some (like large portions of the second movement) are some of the most ridiculous orchestral parts I've ever seen. But after all that, it's actually pretty awesome. It was Mahler's last completed orchestra work, and it ends with this heartbreaking slow movement that finally, reluctantly, dies away with a repeated figure in (!!!) the violas. It's beautiful. And for all that my overall opinion of E-P S is still quite mixed (I'm highly skeptical of his rehearsal technique, but he's funny and charming and conveyed some passion during at least parts of the performance, which redeems him somewhat, at least as a person), I enjoyed playing. It was nice to feel moved by something. It was a good way to (kind of) end my Civic career (again) (maybe).

And now I'm done! Time to eat a mocha ricotta muffin and enjoy a cup of coffee before something else starts up. It's a dinner party kind of week, and I have to take my moments of freedom where I can find them.

were it not for the rain

I've been re-reading Li-Young Lee lately, discovering that there are beautiful poems that I glossed over before. This is part of one of my current favorites.

from The Weepers

I'd lean against this tree, and admire the beauty
of the weeping girls, the marble
twins who kneel together above a grave,
their white backs bent
in grief, their draped clothing conforming
here and there to the curve
of a breast, a thigh, while live
roses lie in their laps.

There have been times when I
was the one on the left,
hands folded between her knees,
withdrawn, almost inconsolable,
and times when I was the other,
who embraces her sister, kisses her
on the round shoulder.
At any time, both
live in me,
like sister branches of one tree,
the comforter and the comforted.
I am the father who comforts
his son, and I am the son
who returns in later years to give succor
to his father. I am the one
who walks among the dead,
and the one who waits
at home with warm bread and milk,
the way, I know, someone waits for me.

the future and the past are equally tiring

A list of things I have done this week:
-Slept six hours or less pretty much every damn night
-Painted swirly abstract blobs on walls for 4-5 hours
-Cooked and/or eaten teriyaki fish, brussels sprouts, spicy rice, smoky pumpkin soup, soy chorizo-potato turnovers, fantastic tofu scramble, and goat cheese-olive empanadas (again)
-Baked and/or eaten two types of muffins (banana blueberry and apple ginger) and two types of cookies (orange shortbread with chocolate chips and butter cookies with apricots and thyme)
-Had a platonic cookie date (a highly recommended way to spend an evening) and a not-so-platonic first cooking experience with my new ladyfriend :)
-Rehearsed with three different musical groups
-Travelled to Evanston and Hyde Park
-Performed a piece for its somewhat famous composer and gotten a good response
-Taken a pet to the vet for the first time (he's fine!)
-Gone to the doctor myself (I'm also fine! They told me to sleep more. Thanks, doctors.)

And I'm freaking exhausted. I feel tired in a way that is new to me, where I actually feel like I could fall asleep right now if I laid down. I've gotten nauseous from lack of sleep before, or gone a little crazy, or just cried a lot, but this exhaustion feels bone-deep. I'm going to sleep in just slightly tomorrow to see if I can catch up enough to prevent myself from passing over into actual illness.
But tonight I'm seeing the CSO, tomorrow night I will be happily stuffing myself at Rose-Anne's late birthday dinner, and on Sunday I will rehearse Mahler 9 for 6 hours. Oy. My brains are already leaking out of my ears just thinking about it. In other words, this is the last time I expect to be relatively articulate for a few days (most likely until Tuesday) so I opted to make the most out of it by making a list for you instead of practicing Mahler. Wish me luck.

new days

Also this, my favorite postsecret from this week:



When i saved it onto my computer, the file title was "makesureyoucallhimmrpresident". Nice.