Tag Archives: Vancouver

If the Muse Should Come to Visit

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Our summer road trip afforded me a few good opportunities for one of my favorite activities: listening during great music rehearsals while drawing and writing. Part of me is fully engaged in the music-making, wanting not to miss a single note or nuance even when it’s truly a working bash through sort of session for the musicians. I learn so much about the pieces in hand, their histories, contexts, technical challenges and all that sort of thing as well as what to expect and what might happen in performance that I always enjoy concerts more deeply after hearing them being developed for the performances. At the same time, if the work in hand is sans text or in a language so unknown to me that I can’t get wrapped up in that aspect beyond whether the ensembles’ vowels and consonants, attacks and diminuendos and cutoffs are, well, ensemble, then I can focus my language centers on writing, sometimes blog post essays and sometimes poetry.

When the text is too enthralling or at least too present in my attentions, I can still indulge in drawing. Either way, it’s not so much dividing my attention as letting one kind of artistry inspire and guide another one. One enriches the other. Especially when the music rolling around me is as rich as, say, that being prepared for performances at the Vancouver Early Music Festival in August. I only wish that the products of my sessions were always as inspired as the music undergirding their inception. But my only chance of getting any better is to keep practicing, isn’t it. And I’m lucky that I like the process more and more as I go along, and yes, the better the music is, the more I enjoy my learning curve. That’s inspiring enough.graphite drawing

It’s All Rehearsal, Really

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Blog.08-30-2013.all-rehearsalWe may look like we’re all geared up and doing important stuff, but mostly, we spend all of our lives practicing, learning and getting ready for one thing or another. Some of those things happen in due course and many more of them either never quite come to fruition, or far more often, change along the way and we end up following along and seeing where it all takes us. All of this is quite normal and perfectly valid.

As a privileged observer and listener in many musical rehearsals long after the years when I was an active amateur participant, I can tell you that I think these more explicit practice sessions can have much the same sorts of both trajectories and outcomes. What anyone not privy to the backstage view of any sort of practice may easily forget, even if they once knew it, is that whether the moment is strictly obligatory, is amateur in the finer sense, or is wholly professional, it can have the same range of characteristics, studious, soulful, playful, predictable, heartrending or hilarious–or some grand combination of them all.

The experience of listening in on the preparations for musical performances is distinct from the performances themselves in a multitude of ways, but perhaps the most striking to a non-participant is arriving at a high-level rehearsal and seeing all and sundry set up camp for it in their work clothes. The star soloist is wearing old jeans. The conductor, who no matter how rigorously the singers and players enact their parts will likely move around and sweat the most, is wearing shorts and a short-sleeved, thin shirt. The players have open cases near their chairs with spare instrument pieces and alternate score parts strewn across them, and the singers, no matter what the temperature, are wearing neck scarves and lugging big containers of fluids to protect their own precious instruments. The rehearsal accompanist at the beat-up old piano is wearing glasses both on the bridge of the nose and the crown of the head, one for the easier to read individual parts and one for the microscopically reduced full score. All of this in a sort of ordered chaos the shows they are all there to Do Things. It’s work. It’s fun. It’s messy, like life.

Our Big Summer Road Trip, a driving circuit of over 6000 miles this July and August, was a multipurpose travel package designed to accomplish a number of ends, not least of them to attend and study and enjoy music-related adventures with friends, colleagues and other musicians and music lovers in several disparate events. First, we went to the Oregon Bach Festival to see the newly anointed Artistic Director make his debut interview marking the occasion, and more importantly to see maestro Helmuth Rilling conduct his grand finale performance as AD in this season when he officially passed the baton to his successor after 44 outstanding years at the Festival’s helm. The Festival is a fine one, Rilling a justly revered conductor and teacher, and many of the singers and players who participate, along with many regular OBF attendees, are longtime friends and colleagues, so it’s always a joy and privilege to go to the Festival ourselves, but particularly meaningful to see Rilling lead the B Minor Mass on his way to Conductor Emeritus status, since my husband Richard had the good fortune to sing the same piece under Rilling during the maestro’s second year at OBF. A great deal of water has gone under the bridge, and though a lot has changed in that flow of time, many things remain the same. Rehearsals and performances, practice and action go on as ever.

I had been reminded of all of this, of course, by the opportunity to attend the Boston Early Music Festival and see my spouse conduct and his Collegium Singers and the university’s Baroque Orchestra in June, along with admiring all of the other marvelous artists and events at BEMF. So many wonderful concerts and recitals; so much hard and happy work to prepare them! And how quickly June disappears into the mists of memory as the summer rolls forward. Thus, a long road trip seemingly becomes an amazingly fresh outing to experience more variations on this theme.

The second of the trio of musical events we attended on the road trip was the regional gathering of choral conductors in our former home area, a great opportunity to renew ties with longtime fellow conductors, teachers and friends over grilled wild salmon and to revisit musical literature options, audition processes, mull over the usual academic topics, share hints about favorite new compositions and gossip about who is the up-and-coming hottest new choir or conductor in anyone’s neighborhood. Driving up to the chapel that serves as the main conference space, whom should we see sitting visiting on the porch but a man who was the excellent recording engineer serving in that artistic task for many of my husband’s choirs’ recordings over the years, and with him, the teacher-conductor-mentor who led Richard to music as a vocation and profession in the first place and so became not only his ‘choral father’ but a lifelong dear friend. To follow this greeting with collegial renewal among many other fellow musical artists, from colleagues and collaborators to singers and students, composers and coordinators of conferences and musical programs at all levels, and then to have dinner a week later with both of those two first friends we’d spotted, was rich beyond words.

Third on our list and rounding out the road trip with our stop in Vancouver, BC, was the Vancouver Early Music Festival. A perfect bookend to starting the trip with OBF in Eugene, VEMF attendance had much the same purpose for us as the Oregon visit: see and hear good friends and other artists at work, and attend the events honoring the longtime AD’s retirement. While Jose Verstappen has served a mere 34 years in Vancouver, he has had as much impact of his own on the Festival there as Rilling has in Oregon, just a very different sort. Jose is a modest and self-effacing man, but as warm and as hardworking and dedicated, and certainly as hard for donors and supporters to say No to, as Rilling, and so both have created environments of commitment and excellence that will thrive long after both have abdicated their thrones. Matthew Halls, Rilling’s successor, and Matthew White, Verstappen’s, are both bright, gifted and able men and I expect to enjoy attending both festivals with as much outstanding artistry on display as ever in years to come.

While in Vancouver, besides the great fun of attending Verstappen’s farewell party, seeing many dear friends, meeting Bruce Dickey–the leading light of cornettists nowadays, he will be playing in the production of the Monteverdi Vespers Richard’s conducting in October–and hearing some terrific music of various kinds in concert, the highlight was sitting in during rehearsals for Händel’s ‘Israel in Egypt’. It was there that I was most struck by this lovely interweaving of labor and lightness that can happen when the people at practice are fully engaged in their work and love what they do. The piece itself is a marvel, full of potent and piquant and even picaresque melodies and moments, and those singing and playing it made the most of these riches. When Tyler Duncan and Sumner Thompson started singing the bass duet ‘The Lord is a Man of War‘, not only was the music and text mesmerizing (never mind my personal feelings about the story’s theology) but their obvious pleasure in exploring the expressive potential in the piece together with the players and conductor (the impressively sensitive and dramatic Alexander Weimann) moved me to pay special attention to this juxtaposition of the remarkable and the workaday, the plain and the powerful. So to all of you out there who sing, play, work, rehearse, prepare and perform, and especially to the players, singers, composers, conductors, administrators and Artistic Directors encountered on this summer tour of ours, I dedicate this poem.digital illustrationNumber Thirty-Eight

Strike, then carry on, and so the sound

Belies in beauty such a martial start,

When ragtag troops in everyday are found

To sing and play at battle from the heart–

Who seemed so simply destined for the soil

As laborers in neither art nor war

But some plebeian, plodding sort of toil,

Then strike, and decimate what came before–

Show the illusion is not acted out

Through violence or merely artifice,

But rather, note by note dispelling doubt

That mystery’s all quite undone by this–

Where love and war are mingled in their way

By songs more eloquent than words can say.

Run for Your Lives! I Feel an Adventure Coming On

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EM & CD's shoes

Pull up your socks and grab your shoes, it's time to get a move on!

Now, I can’t back this up with any particular empirical data, but I think it’s fair to say that I get a hankering to travel, to be in favorite Other places, about as often as a teenaged boy thinks about sex. It’s pretty rare that I’m not mentally meandering in München, Vancouver, Boquete, London, Veszprém, Stockholm, Prague, Chicago, Toronto, Wexford . . . no matter what else I’m ostensibly occupied with doing. It’s not that I never want to be where I am or doing what I’m genuinely supposed to do, it’s just . . . .

I blame my sister. Aren’t eldest siblings supposed to carry the burden of blame for all their successors’ lives, deeds and foolishness anyway? It was she who first infected me with the travel virus when we were in college and her senior year concluded with her in a study-abroad program in London, from whence she had written me innumerable tantalizing letters and tortured me with promises of every kind of impossible delight if I’d only join her for travel after the school year ended. She was so unrelentingly and unreasonably picturesque and dramatic in her enticements that another of our sisters hastened over with two cousins to join her for a couple weeks’ gallivant before I could even gather up passport and toothbrush, as soon as her own school duties were wrapped up for the year. But yes, I too succumbed to big sister’s blandishments and by the first week in September of that year had effectively crammed all of the next semester’s monies, my other puny savings, a couple pair of jeans and several sweaters and a ‘space blanket’ into a big fat backpack and joined her in London almost as soon as our other relatives had returned stateside.

Of course, our parents bear some guilt in my infection too, having permitted me to squander college time and money (on the tacit understanding that I would still graduate on time, however I should manage that–and I did) and dodge my worldly responsibilities for a semester like that. Perhaps it was good parental medical wisdom, knowing that a semester of autodidactic meandering in Europe would likely do more to cure my sophomore blues than hunkering down in the familiar trenches of the university might. Still, letting your kids wander the Continent incontinently–no, not in that way, just somewhat at random and on our varying whims–takes a certain amount of parental fortitude and perhaps a smidgen of cheerful insanity.

Our younger sisters share in the fault for poisoning me against staying safely home: here a sibling younger than me successfully and rather fearlessly went off on just such a jaunt before I even dared. And our youngest sister was already past-master at asking all of the questions we elder three dared not, convincing Mom and Dad of her or our suitability for all manner of things they’d surely have been perfectly within their parental parameters to deny us, and otherwise paved the way for us older girls in numerous ways uncommon among the Baby Sister set. So I guessed I’d damn well better yank up my bootstraps and steel my one non-gelatinous nerve and get on over the pond too. Can’t be shown up by the young’uns.

Of course, as some of the worst offenders when it came to creating the monster of travel-lust that I became, the record must clearly indict all of those unnaturally great and groovy people that greeted, enveloped, adopted, fed, housed, tour-guided, coddled and otherwise ruined for any normal and useful life my sister/travel companion and me. In three and a half months, about thirteen countries, and countless escapades large and small, I gained memories and insights and skills and joys enough to fuel an entire lifetime–and also to infest my soul with burgeoning urges for more.

It’s not that I can’t ever sit still or love where I am or what I’m doing. At times I am the world’s champion homebody and love nothing nearly so dearly as to hole up in a soft blanket in a deep chair safely at home with my constant companion and current fellow-traveler, my spouse. But honey, he’s just as dangerous when it comes to feeding my need to wander and indulge in any road trip, voyage, or other traveling enterprise that might come into view. Once bitten and all of that, yes, but I’m only that much more itchy-footed since he and I ganged up, he having been just as deeply intoxicated as I before we ever joined expeditionary forces. At least it’s mighty handy that not only is he a suitcase-silly hit-the-road guy just as I am but is also a devoted fantasist in the same vein. So whether we’re in our own living room or circling the globe at 30,000 feet, it’s safe to say there won’t be much time when we’re not plotting the next trip and dreaming up what to do in the new town or country we’re about to discover. Real or otherwise. After all, even the most tangible and widely-known places have their mysteries, and that, my dears, is yet another reason I can’t be blamed for this my infirmity.

I won’t see all of the world in my lifetime, am not even sure if that matters, and it’s highly dubious at best that I will change the world. But I sure do love living in the world, and seeing how it changes me. Mostly for the better, I’ll wager. Now, where is that train ticket?