Gambatastic!

Today the gambas showed up in a giant box. (Hi Kim!! He's Latana's brother.) I went to the Parcel Force main office in order to get that giant box, and then when they asked me if I had a car- I said, "No, but I've got this nice trolley" and proceeded to wheel it to the bus stop. It wasn't that heavy, just HUGE.

I'm holding the smaller gamba made by Michael Foulds, it has flame f holes and a carved head which is cool, but also creepy with it's carved pupils.

Ella is holding the Chinese Lu Mi viol which she hasn't actually let go of yet. She's just taken it downstairs to find out what notes she was playing so that she can go all composery with them. See? I'm not the only one who thinks tenor viols are *awesome*

I'm an idiot

I wouldn't want all these blogs to make you think that every thing I do comes up roses, that wouldn't do at all. So here is the remarkably idiotic thing that I did today:

So I got this new trolley for my bass, right? People use them to cart around their groceries, large bags attached to wheels with a tall handle. I bought one a while ago after I'd got fed up with carrying my bass everywhere. I went around to various shops that had them sitting out front and measured the depth of the platform above the wheels with my handy tape measure key chain. Eventually I bought one from a guy in a carpet shop who, when I asked for the price, said "eight pounds, but for you I'll go down to seven." I love when people haggle down with no help from me. Anyhow- this trolley has been brilliant and is very useful for hauling my bass around. It has also been handy because when my bass is set on top of it, it tends to stay there- so it has been a trolley/bass stand.

However.

One shouldn't trust a trolley/bass stand to always perform both functions to optimum levels (raise your hand if you see where this is going!) And today, when meeting our new tutor for the "refining workshop skills" class and shaking his hand, my bass toppled forward and fell onto it's bridge....


So that sucked.

Oddly, the front of the bass seems to be totally fine- it's the back that is all shot to hell. Pretty much every seam possible is open back there and the lower left bout as well. I was thinking a week ago that probably some of the seams were open because of the weather, and this pretty much confirms it. Having a bass split along the back when it falls on the front? Weird. They all look like really clean breaks and most, if not all, have hide glue on them which means that none are new breaks. So hopefully it should be easy to repair. I'm taking it to Malcolm Healey, the luthier, this afternoon. Obviously I will keep you posted!

But you can see why I feel like an idiot....

Some Short Notes

1. I went to an English Concert concert last night and they were wonderful. They had this Italian soprano: Anna Caterina Antonacci. This is the first time I've ever considered trying to figure out a singer's discography immediately after the performance. She was amazing, magnetic, riveting. And the group looked like they were having fun as well. Very continuo heavy though, I don't know that I'd ever seen such a pared down orchestra from the English Concert: two violins, one viola, one cello, Peter, a harp, and two theorbos. Good stuff, though. Lovely concert and I ran into a number of people that I know, so that was nice.

2. Transportation with the bass today has been kind of fun- I managed to get rush hour heading to school and away but in so doing ended up having a wonderful chat with a chap carrying a guitar, a stool, and a ukulele. We talked about how much "fun" it is to carry huge musical instruments on public transportation. It turns out we know people in common too! Small world that is. Then on the way home from school I was staring out the window and a man driving a car that was stopped at a red light started having a sign language conversation with me:

"Is that your bass? Do you play?"
"Yup!"
"Cool! I play guitar"
"Neat!"
"bye now,"
"bye"

then the light changed so the conversation was necessarily ended. Also, I'm not sure that we could have communicated much more than that through charades.

3. Composition class has begun! I'm excited to be working with Fraser again. He gave us a brief that we had to write a duet that used two specific notes, two specific rhythms, and was in two sections. Also, the title had to have "two" in some form in the title. It was kind of a geeky assignment, but also cool to have to go from conceiving the piece to writing it, rehearsing it, and performing it all within 3 hours. I think every one's came off pretty well too.

Cornwall: The composition

This trip to Cornwall was our last before the concert which will be at the end of February. Since it was our last real working session, we had to make sure that our pieces were completely written so that next time all we have to do is refresh and rehearse, but not compose anymore.

I was a little nervous about this because I felt like I hadn't done enough work or put enough thought into it on my own time, and also because I haven't written that much music (nor been the leader for many composition projects)- so: nervous.

A few days before the trip I decided that I really ought to listen to the recordings I made before Christmas break to see where we were and what needed doing- lo and behold, it turned out that we had already structured and rehearsed most of the piece and really only needed to write the ending and perhaps one more section. Turns out I was way more on the ball than I thought...

So we rehearsed and reviewed and tried to remember how we had played the piece the last time. We were handicapped in this process as our principal violinist was gone and I only had one pair of headphones for the recording. John came in just before suppertime and said that it sounded a bit disjointed and maybe we wanted to cut out a section or perhaps make it a set of miniatures? So that made me nervous again, but I shouldn't have worried! Because the kids are fabulous and the piece was sound and coherent and really all we needed to do was make the ending I had already planned, rehearse a bunch, and play a few games wherein we wiggled a lot in order to wake up.

I was so proud of them because they really pulled it together and because the principal violinist was gone a lot of them had to take on more leader-y roles than they had in the past and they all TOTALLY stepped up to the plate.

I was particularly impressed with my youngest violinist who was struggling with our melody that opens and closes the piece. Everyone else has it down, and while I knew she still wasn't solid- I wasn't sure how to help her out without making the rest of the group stop and re-learn the melody as well. She, however, was brave and stubborn enough to make it clear that she needed individual help- so the two of us went to the hallway to work on learning it by ear and I left the rest of the group to figure out which kind of entrances for the final cannon they preferred (one whole iteration before the next entrance, or just one bar?). In 3 minutes she had it down pat and the rest of the group had not only decided which entrances they liked better (whole iteration) they had also added a chord to end the piece. How clever are my kids?!

Suffice to say the final piece was awesome, the students all liked it, and it is going to sound totally cool in the atrium of the gallery in St. Ives. I have an mp3 of it on my computer if anyone would like to listen to it- email me and I'll forward it to you.

Also- somewhat unrelated- we each have a composer who is working on pieces that will be played at the end of the year by the CYO that are supposed to be inspired by the pieces that we write with the students. Mine is named Eseld, and she is wonderful. The first time we went to Cornwall she was very pregnant, the second time she was gone, and this time she brought her two month old baby boy with her. He is totally adorable and I held him a bunch because baby time is almost always good.

St. Ives

St. Ives is ridiculously pretty, and I will tell you more shortly about how the most recent Cornwall expedition went (in a word: Good!). But for now I would just like you to know that I have put up a BUNCH of new photos over on flickr and nearly all of them have notes on them as well- so it's pretty much like a blog entry. So please do go check it out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10933141@N07/

The new photos are in the sets "MapMaking" and "UK Adventures"

Baroque Basseybye

Recently I have been having trouble tuning up my E string because the gear on the tuning mechanism had sort of, um, popped out? Like, you could force the gear to turn, but when it got to a certain point it would pop out of the grooves of the gear and you'd be back down a third or something like that. Basically it totally didn't work.

So I called Peter, and he thought that it was probably because there was too much string in the gear box and since the string is SO thick, it was probably pushing the peg out of place. So I had to take off the string, cut of the top of it, and then re-string it.

Not so bad, right? And it wasn't really-except do you know how difficult it is to try and convince a half centimeter thick piece of dried out intestine that it wants to be straight instead of curled like it has been for who knows how long? It's tough!

Anyhow, here is a picture so you can get a feeling for how thick this string is. Long story short- I totally fixed it and am awesome.

Gamba Goodness

When I was home in Seattle for Christmas break I had the good fortune to get to play around with a tenor gamba that was lent to me. It was terrific fun and I've been looking in to buying one in this country. So, to that end, when Peter went up to the Early Music Shop's main shop near Leeds he checked out what they had and narrowed it down to two. These two are now on their way to my house where I get to play with both of them for a period of 10 days in order to make a decision. So many riches! Two tenors at once!


I'm a little excited.