BassGeeks

drop.io: simple private sharing

Originally posted at The Seattle Times, this video shows some footage from the Hammond Ashley Double Bass Workshop, where I played on a faculty recital last Tuesday. Speaking on the audio is workshop organizer Todd Gowers, while my friend Miriam Chong makes a brief appearance around 20 seconds through.

flicks, 'toons and Mario

This afternoon I played a movie-themed concert with the Players Chamber Ensemble -- frequent readers might remember I wasn't going to play this one, but then I ended up playing it after all. Instead of no, I said "Yes I'd love to, but..." which gradually morphed into "yes".

Anyway, it was a fun concert to be involved in. The afternoon began with some Loonie Tunes cartoons on a big screen, with soda and popcorn available in the lobby. Then we came out and played Rossini's Barber of Seville (after a slight delay for me to get my stool untangled from all the power cords.) The most challenging piece came next, music arranged from the 1931 cartoon "The Village Smitty". I've actually always wanted to play cartoon music, but never had before today.

There was the inevitable John Williams (Star Wars and Schindler's List) along with Mascagni's Intermezzo from Cavaleria Rusticana to accompany scenes from The Godfather. The Lily Quartet performed Astor Piazzola's Tango Por una Cabeza as used in Scent of a Woman, which is a really beautiful scene. I suppose playing live music to a pre-recorded film is a bit odd, and has its drawbacks, but it does encourage you to watch with renewed attention.

The concert finished with music to the Super Mario Bros. video game -- the "Overworld" theme described by wikipedia as:

The famous main theme; a Latin jazz score that matches the bright, cheery and fast-paced nature of the majority of the game's levels.

This was also a first-time performance for me, though I played that game enough as a kid that the music was already ingrained in my cortex. Probably much of this afternoon's audience now shares that condition, for better or worse.

tassel-tossing at Epcor

Like a lot of Calgarians, the CPO can't afford to own a home. Instead, we rent space in the Epcor Centre and perform in the Jack Singer Concert Hall. This can lead to some occasional space crunches, when the hall is booked for other things -- last week, for example, we had a cello audition displaced to a nearby church, since the hall was rented for a Tom Jones concert. (Sort of like getting kicked out of your apartment because your roommate has a hot date.)

I tend to practice at the Epcor Centre too, usually downstairs in one of the dressing rooms. The Epcor crew is pretty nice about letting me do this, and only occasionally tell me I have to leave because Queen Noor or the Kids Fest needs the space. Lately, it's been high school graduation season, and my practice sessions have been accompanied by disembodied voices reading off names, following by whooping and applause. All the names seem to get some degree of acclamation, which is nice to hear, though you can easily distinguish the really popular ones.

Hearing these ceremonies makes me remember finishing high school -- how grown up I felt, and how confident I was that I'd soon be far away. When my jazz band director John DePalatis asked me where I'd be in ten years, I think that was my answer: "Somewhere far away." And the week after graduation, I found myself beginning a sentence, "Back when I was in high school..."

I guess in retrospect, I wish I'd enjoyed that time more, and been in less of a rush to get to the next thing. It's now more than ten years, and I'm somewhat far away, but lots of people I knew in high school still matter a great deal to me. Next week I'm going back to visit Tacoma, and playing in a recital at the Hammond Ashley Memorial Double Bass Workshop with my friend Miriam Chong, who was my mentor and stand partner in the Tacoma Symphony. She's now in Victoria, playing bass, teaching, and coaching music and lots of other subjects.

I suppose my cliche commencement speech sermon, if I were asked to give one, is that we can move far away, but we don't really change that much from the people we were in high school. If we were shy and dorky, we'll probably stay that way, just hopefully get more comfortable with ourselves and find people who like us for those qualities.

rained out in the Badlands

Yesterday's concert in Drumheller was cancelled due to the weather -- always a huge disappointment, especially since it was to be the last concert of the season, and the last concert of their CPO careers for retiring violinists Alana Gralen and Susan Light, and cellist Yuri Gindin. Also, Jim Scott was going to perform a trombone concerto by Launy Grondahl -- that will hopefully be rescheduled in the fall. I shot some video while waiting to see if the thunderstorms would clear. Finally, management decided it was unsafe to proceed with the concert, so I also have a shot of some audience members heading home. Hopefully we can make it up to them next season.

correcting Beethoven

Certain composers seem to be more error-prone than others -- lots of missing accidentals, bars with extra beats, etc., whether it's their own fault or the copyist and editors'. Then there are the composers who tend to write notes that look like mistakes but aren't -- I'm thinking of Stravinsky, who made 'wrong notes' part of his style, especially in neo-classical scores like Pulcinella, which he revised from material by Pergolesi and others. If you tried to fix all the wrong notes, you'd be left with nothing nearly as interesting.

Then there's Beethoven, who was famously sloppy (and deaf), but he was such a genius that it seems almost sacrilegious to tamper with his scores. We're playing his 2nd Symphony today, using the new Barenreiter 'Urtext' by Jonathan Del Mar, which still has a lot of problems and questionable stuff. My stand partner Graeme Mudd pointed out a whole slew of inconsistencies in the second movement: repeating figures with different note lengths and articulations, dynamics apparently displaced by a measure, or just missing entirely. Two hundred years after he wrote this symphony, Beethoven may be our most famous and universally admired composer, but we still have to spend a lot of rehearsal time correcting him. Or did he mean to write it like that?

My teacher at NEC, Donald Palma, made a very memorable argument one day that he did mean exactly what he wrote, at least in terms of the cello-bass octave transpositions. Beethoven's cello and bass parts are traditionally printed together -- a tradition broken by that new Barenreiter edition -- and a lot of bass players will jump down an octave when they see the cellos are playing in our register, figuring that Beethoven wrote for instruments that either didn't have the low C or weren't able to use it with much facility. There's a long passage like this in the first movement of the 7th Symphony, and also in the 9th. Don's argument was that deaf or not, Beethoven was an extremely precise orchestrator, who never cared much about the technical limitations of the instruments of his day. When played in a true unison, with the basses and cellos at the same octave, those passages have an eerie, spectral quality that may have been exactly what he was going for.

Rossini in the rain?

"Dress for tomorrow's concert will be white jacket, black bow tie, for men; white blouse for women; rain jackets, and umbrellas. And bring a sweater, and some extra warm clothing,"

orchestra manager Tim Rawlings said at the beginning of the rehearsal this morning. Tomorrow the CPO plays the annual "Beethoven in the Badlands" concert in Drumheller, and the forecast calls for rain, cold, and bluster.

The weather in Alberta rarely seems to cooperate with outdoor concerts -- already this season, we had a "Mozart on the Mountain" concert which was freezing and dismal, with a huddled mass of patrons likely yearning to go home. This past Wednesday the clouds stayed away miraculously, and we had a beautiful evening for Pops in the Park -- too bad I forgot my camera -- reminding me how glorious an outdoor concert can be. (Or semi-outdoor, since this one was under a tent in the middle of the park.)

Outdoor concerts might not be among orchestral musicians' favorite things, generally -- even when it's dry, there's often wind to contend with, or bugs, or seam-busting heat and sunshine. During my summer at the NRO in Breckenridge I learned to be very adept at securing the music to the stand with clothes-pins, since a gust of Colorado wind might easily blow the whole folder off the stand. At Spoleto Festival USA, there's an annual finale concert, loved by audiences and dreaded by musicians -- it's outside Charleston in a swampy plantation site, with enormous mosquitoes swarming and occasionally crawling onto music, clothing, and instruments. That one's coming up soon too -- it's this Sunday, June 8th.

For all their horrors and discomforts, outdoor concerts still can be sensational -- think of the Boston Pops on the Esplanade, the New York Phil playing Central Park, or the LA Phil at the Hollywood Bowl, all of which attract larger and more diverse audiences than any of their indoor concerts. Calgary has a great outdoor performance site too: Prince's Island Park, which is right in the center of the city. But the CPO hasn't played there in a while, mostly due to complications of weather and scheduling. In a town hall meeting this past week, violinist Steve Lubiarz suggested we should give that venue another try, now that "Mozart on the Mountain" has been shelved and "Beethoven" will likely get poured on as well. At least on Prince's Island, no one would have far to go to get away from the rain.

bread and butter Beethoven

This Saturday's Beethoven in the Badlands concert in being conducted by CPO resident conductor Pierre Simard -- but the parts for the main piece on the program, Beethoven's 2nd Symphony, were heavily edited by our baroque series conductor, Ivars Taurins. I've written about Ivars' markings before -- some might criticize him as overly fussy, but they tend to get him what he wants, right away. The main ones are as follows:

/ -- Ivars calls this one a stress
u -- a 'de-stress', a saucer shape often confused for an up-bow
^^^^ -- a squiggly line meaning 'do something interesting'; I like to call it a schmearando

After reading through the first movement, Pierre quickly realized that he was working with a pre-installed interpretation, and a bit of rehearsal time was spent cleaning up some of the squiggles and dashes. Most of them make sense musically -- a lot of them would probably be done automatically, without being marked. But having them in the part leads to a bit of an exaggerated effect, as though I were to write my BLOG with all the IMPORTANT words marked for EMPHASIS!!

Pierre remarked that he was going for more of a 'bread and butter' Beethoven, which quickly got turned back at him with all sorts of variations -- after he suggested some ornamentation in the opening Adagio, a bassoonist said, "I thought you wanted meat and potatoes," then others suggested rice and beans, beer and pretzels, black and tan, etc. I would have preferred lox and schmear, though that might be the Ivars markings talking.