"A Lot Can Go Wrong"

First position, shifting to third position. I've been doing that since, what--sixth grade? Seventh grade? I use a first-to-third-on-each-finger-in-turn shifting exercise as a warmup before every practice session. Granted, that exercise is so automatic for me now that I sometimes am focusing on something else--my bow hold, say--while doing it, but I'm shifting in tune.

And double stops. In the Bach, I had to do double stop fingering in a couple of passages even though there weren't actual double stops. Since I've started working on the Haydn, Ms. L. has had me doing double stop exercises of various kinds to prep me for actual double stops there. 

So when I saw this, I wasn't worried. 

However, it seems as though I am spending a disproportionate amount of practice time and lesson time on this, especially the first two sets. (I'm playing the third set on two and four, by the way, not one and three.) That shift from B+G to D+B is killing me. I only get it right about 40% of the time. My usual error is playing both 3rd position notes sharp, but the B is the one most likely to be wrong.

I have practiced it as follows:

• Super slow-mo, fingering and playing both notes 
• Pausing before each shift, fingering and playing both notes
• Fingering both notes, but playing the top note only
• Fingering both notes, but playing the bottom note only

For what it's worth, when the same pattern comes up again a few measures later, I get that one right about 60-70% of the time. It's as though the concept of short-term memory applies to muscle memory as well. It's not really a perfect analogy, but just as I might babble a phone number under my breath for a few seconds until I can dash across the room to a pen and paper and write it down before it vaporizes, my fingers seem to remember what they are supposed to be doing between the first instance and second instance of this pattern. Or else they treat the first instance of the pattern as a rehearsal or "first draft" and make the necessary correction on the second one.

I asked Ms. L. a couple of weeks ago, "Why is this so difficult?" and she shrugged and said, "It's shifting. It's double stops. A lot can go wrong." I guess it just needs more time and (careful) practice.

The Caretaker Role

Here's another sign of the season:

Photo by TR, 27 November 2012

I like taking care of my violin--wiping the rosin dust off after practicing, keeping it at an appropriate temperature, avoiding bumps against door frames, checking the angle of the bridge periodically, all of that. So being sure that it's appropriately "hydrated" in the winter heating season is another part of that routine. 

One reason I am glad to be playing again is that during the 15-18 years when I wasn't playing regularly, I would periodically be guilt-stricken by the thought that my violin was going unused. My overly vivid imagination practically personified the thing, but I was also remembering how the teacher I took private lessons from in high school, Dr. E., had advised my parents that I should upgrade to a reasonably good instrument that I could grow into as a player over the long term. It was a big deal to discuss with my parents how much we could pay as a family, and what share I would be responsible for. I got five or six years of ample use out of my violin in high school and college, but five or six years doesn't really seem like "the long term" after you hit 40 and haven't played regularly since college. 

My violin sat in its case at the end of my bed in three different residences during grad school. I tried initially to maintain the habit of playing scales once per week, as my college violin teacher, Dr. O., had encouraged me to do at a very bare minimum. However, life in an apartment and/or with roommates cramped my style. I tried a nasty metal practice mute and hated it--it made the violin so heavy that I felt like it was throwing off my whole technique. (Come to think of it, that might explain a few things...) 

I took the violin with me on a year overseas, where I had a living situation with more privacy than I'd had in grad school. However, I already felt out of shape and was getting discouraged about my deteriorating skills, so I didn't even try to find a local amateur orchestra to play with even though I had a lot of free time. 

By the time I finished all my post-college moving around and settled--fourteen years ago--in the town where I am now, I seldom even opened the case. At some point, the hair on my bows disintegrated, so playing the occasional creaky scale was not even an option. For years and years I kept a slip of paper tucked away in my desk where an acquaintance had given me the phone number of someone who would re-hair bows.

After all of that, it feels great to have my violin in my life again and give it the attention it deserves!

Blessing and Honor and Glory and Power

It started two or three weeks ago. I was driving somewhere and felt the urge to dial the MP3 player to Messiah. Because by mid-November, you should be rehearsing Messiah and hearing it in your head all the time, right? I only played in Messiah in college, but those years apparently carved this work so deeply into my brain that November weather and the general November atmosphere stimulate the Messiah response, and I can't do without it.

On one weekend each December for the past hundred years or so, my undergraduate school's choir and orchestra has given three performances of Messiah. Although I loved playing in my college's orchestra, I didn't really embrace the tradition or the oratorio. I enjoyed a few incredibly powerful parts of it, but other parts, frankly, dragged. Then there was the physical aspect. I was used to playing 10-12 hours per week (including practicing, orchestra rehearsals, and my lesson), so playing in three three-hour performances within 48 hours was quite tiring. Plus, the college generally (and the music department specifically) took the Messiah tradition so, so seriously that you couldn't resist making fun of it. 

One year--maybe senior year, when we were rather emboldened--some friends and I wrote a parody of "The Night Before Christmas" with verses pertaining to our Messiah experiences. ("Then what our wandering minds never would guess / All four soloists in tasteful dress!"... "From the back of the stage to the back of the hall / Now rush away, rush away, rush away, all!" ... that sort of thing.) We posted the parody, with festive hand-drawn illustrations, on a bulletin board in the music building in the dark of night. 

At my next lesson, my college violin teacher, Dr. O, asked in a somewhat icy tone, "Do you have any idea who is responsible for that 'Night Before Christmas' thing?" I answered, "Um...I am, among others." "Who else?" she wanted to know. I named four or five names that included other "good kids" like myself from the orchestra and choir, and she changed the subject. In retrospect, I think she probably did not like the idea of orchestra kids making trouble in the eyes of the aging and revered choir conductor, who was the main embodiment and guardian of the Messiah tradition. Our idea of good, clean fun might have been rather unhelpful in relation to some intra-departmental dynamics that we students were blissfully clueless about.

But really, I think we kid(ded) because on some level, we love(d). One of my favorite parts of Messiah was and is the "Worthy is the Lamb/Amen" finale. The video below uses the exact recording I would have worn to shreds by now if such a thing were possible with digital music. Listening to it brings back how my whole being zoomed into focus as the section at 4:09 approached, where the violins get their very exposed turn with the "Amen" riff. I think the Extreme Focus switch still flips at least part of the way in my brain when I hear this. Hear this.

Video via csheff1014 and YouTube

Familiarity...Contempt...

A friend stopped by to see my new house, and during the nickel tour, we paused at my practice area. She is a lapsed violist; when she glanced at the rack of music, she spotted a familiar volume. In the tone of voice Seinfeld used in saying, “Hello, Newman,” she said, “Oh. Kreutzer.”

Video via YouTube and klavye1234

Coffee and Sweets

Having wrapped things up with the Bach A minor violin concerto, I am working on the Haydn G major violin concerto. So far, I am finding it much easier than the Bach. Here is my grand metaphor: the Bach is coffee, and the Haydn is something sweet.

Coffee can be incredibly delicious, but you have to start with first-rate raw materials and really know what you’re doing in order to make it that way. Drinking it in the right atmosphere, with the right company (if only yourself when you want to be by yourself), adds a lot too. (I had the best coffee of my life at the coffeehouse described and pictured here, and will forever aim to recapture that experience.) Yet coffee can easily go wrong. I felt as though the Bach was like that. If I knew anything about music theory, I might be able to explain why I felt like the Bach is uncomplicated on some level, but still has all kinds of expressive potential. On the other hand—in hands like mine—it can sound a bit etude-like on occasion. Luckily, the raw material of good coffee can stand up to a certain amount of workaday sloppiness in its preparation. I could at least perceive great things in the Bach even if I couldn’t bring them out.*

Sweets are harder to mess up. Sweet is sweet. How can you go wrong? At best, sweets have the potential to be gimme-a-cigarette good. At worst, they can taste more chemical than anything—fake sweet. But basically, with a naturally sweet melody and gingerbread rhythms like the first movement of the Haydn, you have a turnkey, plug-and-play operation. Just play it and ride it. That won’t accomplish all that a real musician could accomplish with the Haydn. But it’s harder to mess up than the Bach. It’s less likely to be boring in the hands of an amateur.

Bach and Haydn complement each other like coffee and sweets. You’ve got to have both.  

* And Bach clearly appreciated coffee, too.

Best of both worlds? Video via YouTube and witchcraftlord

Milestone

As of Friday, the Bach A minor violin concerto--the first and third movements, anyway--is in the books. Ms. L had me play the third movement all the way through, and it went pretty well. I maintained a pretty consistent tempo (84 or so), and, she said, played with a nice tone. 

Both of those were mild successes in the big scheme of things, but represented significant improvement over where the piece has been at various times. And no one says that it was an earth-shattering musical interpretation, but learning it to the level that I did has given me a deep sense of accomplishment.

It's quite humbling to realize that I've been working on the Bach since February--nine months for two movements! That's not too impressive, but I have to remind myself that:

• These two movements of this concerto were the first piece(s) that I have learned from scratch since college (i.e., since 1993, for those keeping score at home). 
• In the process of working on this concerto, I (and Ms. L) remade my bow hold and developed some new approaches in other areas of technique (e.g., shifting) that will serve me well for a long time.* 
• Double stops! When I started working on the Bach, I could barely play double stops at all anymore. I just was not in shape for it. I had to be careful not to hurt myself in practicing them. By this past Friday, if I do say myself, I was owning me some double stops.
• In those nine months I also bought a house, moved, hung in there through the annual crazy-making time at work, and navigated a big (unbloggable) transition at work.

It was weird to do my practicing this weekend and not play that third movement. So: one last listen, with a few comments:

• If I could turn back the clock, I would spend more time woodshedding the part from 1:05-1:22 earlier in the process of learning the movement. It didn't intimidate me like some of the rest of the movement did, and I kept thinking it would take care of itself over time. It didn't. It was an area where I always had to slow down. I had to go back and hash it out over these last couple of weeks.
• The part from 1:57-2:17 is still my favorite. I had to do my share of work on it to get it in tune and to make the shifts reasonably smooth, but it was always the part of the third movement that I played the best.
• The part from 2:18-2:26 kicked my butt for months. I had no idea when I listened to the recording how many notes were actually hiding in that part. When reality set in, I doubted I would ever learn it. But: I did. 
• Ditto the part from 2:55-3:12. (And I love what's happening in the orchestra through there. At one low point in my work on this, I comforted myself with the thought that no one should be listening to the soloist there, anyway.)

  Video posted to YouTube by Cleopatra11

* In fact, I have invested enough time and effort into the bow hold, shifting, etc. that I sure as hell will not quit this violin thing again any time soon!

"Don't Force It"

I think my positive attitude from Thursday's practice carried into Friday's lesson. The current double stop exercise went pretty well. That was one that I really dug into the night before. I reminded myself that 1) it's piano, so there's no need to go crashing and crunching through it, and 2) it thus lends itself to being played with the bow away from the bridge--which in turn makes it easier to play on two strings at a time since the strings are closer to each other farther from the bridge. When I played it today, I played through it with only a few stops between measures to reset my fingers. That sounds like faint (self-)praise, but this exercise is a bit of a booger. I don't know the source, but it has some precious finger-twisting moments.

When I finished, Ms. L said, "I bet you're missing Kreutzer now." Heh heh. Actually, I'm not. A lot of Kreutzer stuff deals with tricky bowing, and I will take tricky left hand work over tricky bowing any day. In fact, I've been practicing this exercise with separate bows rather than doing the slurs. Up next: adding in the slurs.

The Bach still had some of the same issues I've been contending with (uneven tempo, some jerky shifts, a few areas of iffy intonation), but it had some decent moments too. At least we were able to work on some actual playing (using less bow in a few places, shaping a few phrases) rather than forearm/wrist exercises! Using less bow in some places made a big difference--I'd been thinking "bow speed" and just covered too much ground. Ms. L said the mantra with the Bach now should be, "Don't force it." I think I'm on track to have a fairly good sense of accomplishment when I set it aside.

Escape

Much better attitude today. There is so much going on now in my real life that practicing today felt like a total escape. Who cares about dissecting what went well and what didn't? I am playing a few things better than I was earlier this week, and I am much more relaxed than I was an hour ago.

Loosen Up

I am a little bit grumpy about the third movement of the Bach right now. I can play through it all, but not at a consistent tempo. 

Leading up to my last lesson, I was working with the metronome on it to at least get a sense of what would be a realistic tempo for me to maintain for the whole thing. Maybe 84? That feels quite slow for the first half page or so, but for about five lines at the bottom of the first page and top of the second page--I'm too grumpy and lazy to count measures or check where that is on a video of the piece--maintaining that tempo feels like accelerating! 

I stuck with it all week, though, slowing down to where it was comfortable in selected trouble areas and then trying to work the speed back up. I didn't feel like I made much progress, though, and my playing in my last lesson reflected that.

Once again, though, the issue seemed to be tension in my left hand. Ms. L. had me put down my violin and just do wrist/forearm stretches for a little while. She then asked me to play the movement again, and said, "Whatever you were focusing on before when you were playing it--tempo or whatever--think about something different this time." 

I decided to focus just on keeping my sternum out--i.e., standing up straight. Not tempo. Just a backdoor way to facilitate a faster tempo, heh heh. But no worries about actual tempo. That worked for about two thirds of a page. But my internal monologue would not shut off: "Shift fast! Little crescendo! Fast bow speed! Away from the bridge! Don't worry about the sixteenths! Land on the beat! Now!" And as soon as that started, my hand tensed up. 

Maybe I need to practice without music again. Getting away from all my notations and just focusing on sound might help things, and I should probably put the metronome away for a while. Just chill and smooth things out.   

New Practice Space

Pardon the blurry picture--I haven't unpacked [read: found] my real camera yet, so I took this with my poor cell phone camera. I will be putting up a mirror, but other than that, this is it!!!

Photo by TR, 10 October 2012

Holy ****

Speaking of SymphonyCast, this week I happened to catch most of their broadcast of the St. Louis Symphony’s performance at the BBC Proms. I turned on the radio near the end of the cadenza in the first movement of the Beethoven violin concerto, which was being played by Christian Tetzlaff.*

NPR uses the term “driveway moments” to refer to times when you’re listening to an engrossing NPR story, pull into your driveway/workplace/etc., and sit in the parked car to listen to the end of the piece. Well, what do you call it when you drive around with three or four bags of perishable groceries in your trunk for 20-25 minutes for no other reason than being riveted to Tetzlaff’s and the SLSO’s performance of the Beethoven?

I have a recording of the Beethoven. I’ve listened to it a lot. But not like this. So much energy—so much dynamism—so much bite in some places, so lyrical in others (but not schmaltzy)—I never knew quite what was going to happen next. When it came to the rousing finish, I said (aloud, to myself, in the car), “Holy shit!” and had goosebumps. It. Rocked.

And then I kept driving for another 25 minutes or so to hear Tetzlaff’s encore (Bach) and Schoenberg’s “Five Pieces for Orchestra.” I managed to get home between the Schoenberg and Gershwin’s “American in Paris,” so I listened to the Gershwin and the SLSO’s encore at home—still, I lunged to turn on the radio before putting the groceries away.

The link to the broadcast is still there on the SymphonyCast homepage, but probably won’t be there for much more than a day or so longer. Catch it if you can. The first words out of the BBC host’s mouth amidst the applause at the end of the Beethoven were, “An utterly transporting performance.” Yes.

* From listening to the broadcast again and catching the part I’d missed, I learned that there’s a profile of Teztlaff in a recent issue of The New Yorker. I am not a New Yorker, nor do I subscribe to it, so I hit a subscription wall. Nonetheless, the first few tantalizing paragraphs are here.

Why Practicing at the Office is Kind of a Pain

I close on a house in one week and move in two weeks. I am very excited about this for a multitude of reasons, one of which is that I will no longer have to practice at the office. Practicing at the office means this:

• I carry my violin to the office almost every workday. It’s a hassle in all the ways that moving from point A to point B with an instrument is a hassle. You can’t have it bouncing around in the trunk. You can’t leave it where it’s exposed to extreme temperatures, such as the third hottest summer on record in the contiguous United States. Running errands right before and right after work becomes inconvenient or impossible.
• I have stashed a plastic file container that holds a folding stand and some music between my desk and file cabinet (photo below). That actually works well, but I am looking forward to having all my music in one place.
• At the end of the workday, I keep an eye on our office’s instant messaging program to see who is still left in the building to know if/when I can start to practice. It's a small enough building that if colleagues are working late, I either stay until they leave, or I leave and come back.
• I also check the calendar for a semi-public space in our building that is sometimes used for meetings, receptions, workshops, etc. to make sure no one will be there in the evening.
• On weekends, I drive 15 miles round trip to the office to practice. I can sometimes loop in other errands, but see the first point above about the hassles of running errands with an instrument in tow. This is why I generally only practice on one day of the weekend.
• If I come in on the weekend and no one is there, I turn on my computer, fire up the IM system, unplug my headphones from the computer, and turn up the computer’s volume so that if a colleague does come in while I am there, I will hear the IM noise when they log on and can stop practicing, pack up, and go home.
• If colleagues are working late, or working on weekends, or if there is an event in the building, I can’t/won’t practice at the office. My colleagues have been unanimously curious and encouraging about this violin thing when they see me coming and going with it, but I really do not want to annoy them. People say, “Oh, I would love to hear you play!” and I think, “Scales? Arpeggios? Etudes? Riiiiight.” It’s nice to hear the support, but practicing is not playing, and I do not want to subject anyone to it! 
• Despite these precautions, there have been a couple of occasions when a colleague walked in while I was practicing--returning to the office after an evening meeting or event elsewhere, that sort of thing. Not a huge deal, but not really something I want to repeat. Maybe it's like when a colleague's kid's school is cancelled or child care falls through and we end up with a kid in the office quietly playing Legos or computer games in a corner somewhere. No one seems to mind, but the colleague whose kid it is apologizes and acts like they're imposing.    

Amidst the many lists, timelines, etc. that I am making as I prepare to move, I am definitely finding time to plan my new practice space. I so look forward to using it. 

Evidence in my office of my secret violin life. Only one more week of this! Photo by TR, 17 Sept. 2012.

Good lesson

I played better at Friday’s lesson than I have in a long time.

• The droning double stop exercise went well until the last two lines or so. I groaned at the end because of the halting way I’d played the last two lines, but Ms. L pronounced it “much improved” and is having me move on to another double stop exercise that’s more challenging. Naturally! 
• The Bach double stops went reasonably well. She had me work on speeding them up, and when forced to, I found that I could play them faster than I’d have guessed I could. She suggested that with the second set, I should work on speeding it up measure by measure. That is, play one measure as fast as I can, pause and set my fingers for the next measure, play that measure as fast as I can, etc. until the pause between measures gets shorter. Simple, and yet I really see how it will help.
• Ms. L pointed out that in the second set of double stops, I tend to raise my fingers slightly (not fully pick them up, but displace them) when hitting the open E. I had no idea—I probably was doing it subconsciously to play the open E cleanly, without stray fingers getting in the way. But clearly this creates two or three times as much “work” per measure in terms of placing my fingers accurately.
• I am really enjoying the Haydn. It is falling under my fingers relatively easily—I’m sure that scales and arpeggios have something to do with that, so yay! The rhythms are also coming more easily to me now than they were when I first started on it. Specifically, the constant gear-switching between clusters of notes in multiples of three and clusters of notes in multiples of two is making more sense.
• Toward the end of my lesson, as Ms. L. was having me run through part of the Haydn, Mr. R stuck his head in as he was leaving the shop to nod goodbye. I noticed him out of the corner of my eye but kept playing, then saw Ms. L react to something. When I got to a stopping place, she explained, “Mr. R started to walk away like he was leaving, but then he stopped and listened, and went like this.” She raised her eyebrows and made a face as if to say, “Nice!” So. I’ll take that as a positive review!

Music Education and Elitism

A few days ago, Laurie Niles at Violinist.com, writing about the importance of arts education, gave the most concise and spot-on counterargument I’ve ever seen to the notion that arts education is elitist:

“People need education to appreciate music and art. Some might feel this idea is ‘elitist.’ It's only elitist if music and art education is given to some, and withheld from others.”

EXACTLY. I should probably just stop writing here, because I think those three sentences say it all.

Duh, and Duh!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the epiphany that standing up straighter would put less pressure on my left hand. At Friday’s lesson, Ms. L. noticed something else that’s important.

“Hang on,” she said, or something to that effect. “Are you raising your left shoulder while you play?” She stood behind me and watched as I raised the violin to my shoulder and got set to play. Yes, I was raising my left shoulder and clenching the violin between my shoulder and jaw. It was as though I was shrugging that shoulder upward and holding it there while I played. As soon as she asked me this, and as soon as I paid attention to my own movements, I could see how this could be one more factor contributing to tension in my left hand, jerky shifting, and limited flexibility for maneuvering my left arm. Duh.

Her next question was, “Can we adjust your shoulder rest?” I actually had to take the violin off my shoulder and look.

Duh x 2! That’s what those screws are for. (This shoulder rest is almost the same as mine.)

I felt like a moron. Did I really play with this shoulder rest—which I think I bought early in my college years—for 3-4 years without noticing that the height was adjustable? Or did I adjust it appropriately back then, forget about it, and then lower it to the lowest height for storage when I knew I wouldn’t be playing for a long time, and then did I forget to even check it when I picked the violin up again after 15+ years?

In any case, at my lesson, I raised the shoulder rest almost to its maximum height on the chinrest side (not as high on the other side) and tried playing that way. It actually felt comfortable right away, which tells me that probably scenario #2 above is right. I am hoping that this is one more adjustment that can make a small difference in my left hand issues. 

I can't believe I've been playing for almost a year on a shoulder rest that was adjusted to Munchkin level. 

Mini Rebuilding Mode

This Friday I’ll have my first lesson in almost a month, so I am in a mini rebuilding mode right now. I have to admit, though, given all that I had going on, it was a relief not to also be on my own case about cramming enough practice into the week.

The first thing I had to do in my first practice session since the hiatus was to take stock of where I had left off. Flipping through assorted photocopies* of exercises that are stuffed into my Kreutzer book, I contemplated lines 23-25 of the sixteenth note exercises, the clunky maestoso double stop exercise, and the droning double stop exercise. I remembered where Ms. L said to go next with all of these, but I was not in shape to do so. So, I basically re-practiced some of the material from my last lesson. In the droning double stop exercise referenced here, I had to slowly, slowly go through the first line and a half again and again and again. I was having trouble keeping the bow on both relevant strings at the same time, which is a rather problematic problem to have with double stops.

With the third movement of the Bach, I feel as though I have lost all the speed that I painstakingly gained over the summer. So far this week I have played slowly through all of the movement. I worked a bit on small things scattered throughout the movement—even trilling, dynamics, areas where I need a quick burst of bow speed or a quick bit of bow pressure to emphasize something. I have one more practice session tomorrow to introduce a little speed back into things.

Of course, I have worked on the double stop sections (2:18-2:25 and 2:55-3:12 on this recording), which constituted almost the only repertoire work I did for my last two lessons as things at work ramped up.  

To my dismay, I’ve noticed on more than one recording that all you can really hear of these two sections are the top notes or repeated notes. In a non-top-notch orchestra, stuff like this can be faked. It could be muddled through by a brazen/incompetent soloist. In a lesson, of course, playing without an orchestra as camouflage, this stuff cannot be faked.

Ms. L told me at my last lesson before the hiatus that these sections were sounding a lot better. I didn’t disbelieve her, but I really wasn’t hearing improvement. Weirdly, this week, after not playing those sections for weeks, I did finally hear improvement. I can get through them relatively smoothly, though definitely not up to full speed. I can play them in tune, though playing them in tune was actually the first thing I worked on and got somewhat comfortable with. The smoothness that’s there now, though, feels rather miraculous.   

* I should know what these are, but I don't.

On Hearing Live Music

I've had three cool opportunities in the past couple of weeks* to hear some live music: a musical, a symphony broadcast, and an opera. It’s gotten me thinking about what’s special about hearing live music as opposed to a studio recording.

One point of excitement/suspense with a live performance, I have to admit, is the chance for something to go wrong. Schadenfreude, right? But when I’m watching or listening to a studio recording, I know that I won’t hear some brass instrument gizmo being dropped onto the stage in a quiet moment. I won’t see the male lead struggling to subdue his giggles as the female lead continues singing while trying to cope with a wig malfunction (as happened in an operetta I saw years ago). I know the performance won’t be interrupted due to an unwelcome critter flitting around the auditorium (as happened recently at a show where an acquaintance was playing in the pit). Something about that is a tad boring.

Mistakes and snafus signal the presence of real, live people. So that’s one appealing thing about a live performance—the unmistakable presence of people and the sense that anything can happen.

Of course, people are not always a good thing. I have a low tolerance for audience felonies, misdemeanors, and technical fouls. I get annoyed by the cacophony of coughs that ring out between movements at concerts by the local symphony—it’s as if 19^th century music transmits tuberculosis. And at the musical I attended recently, I was disproportionately annoyed by the jangling bracelets of a woman one section over and (worse!) the piercing light of a cell phone from someone in the section in front of me who just HAD to text or email two or three times during the two-hour show. I had to remind myself that formulating withering one-liners for a bolder self to deliver to Mr. Cell Phone at intermission was a bigger distraction from the performance than the glowing, bobbing screen itself. Yes, I get annoyed, and yes, I need to get over myself. In any case, people always make things…interesting.

Another great thing about a live performance is the context. I like dressing up a bit, going out. Perhaps on some level I love overpaying for parking in a well-lit, guarded lot in a neighborhood that’s a little iffy. I love sitting in a venue fitted or retrofitted for music, reading program notes (though they usually contain far too much info to absorb on the spot), hearing the hush when the lights go down. I love meandering through the crowd at intermission, talking over impressions of the music and the performance. I love bundling up in the winter for the walk back to the car. I have so many awesome memories of evenings like that—they all reinforce each other.

And when I listen to a symphony broadcast by myself at home on the couch in PJs with my cat and a pot of hot tea, I love that too. I still have some context in the sense of making sure I’m home from the grocery store on time, making sure my tea is done, and more. Listening to a studio recording just doesn’t (normally) do the same thing for me. 

* To state the obvious, I have been offline for quite a while. This was due to 1) this being the busiest time of year at work, and 2) computer issues. To some extent I got back in the saddle, violin-wise, this past weekend. I hope that my real life, including my blog quasi-routine, will resume soon.