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.