A friend told me about this article in the Times today about a giant oboe gathering around Albrecht Mayer. Some quotes:

“Oboists are a peculiar lot: they give the tuning A before performances and often have the most prominent solos in a piece. Their instrument can sound like a singing human voice or squawk like a duck. Half their lives are spent hewing bits of cane to make the double reeds that can produce those gorgeous sounds but also prove cruelly disloyal.”

“The precarious nature of the double-reed existence creates a bond, several of the oboists said.”

“Crowded between the refrigerator and a kitchen island laden with food, [Randall Wolfgang and Albrecht Mayer] traded stories about Marcel Tabuteau, the patriarch of American oboe playing, who died in 1966.”

Of course.

And my favourite parts:

““I’ve seen you on YouTube,” Mr. Killmer told Mr. Mayer. “It’s a great honor to meet you.””

Dick Killmer watches YouTube!

and

“As they headed for the door, Mr. Mayer expressed wonder at the number of oboe players who had been there.

“Just imagine a terrorist bomb,” he said. “So many jobs in this room!” Then he left to take the No. 1 train to his Midtown hotel.”

Edit: Just discovered that Patty got there first. Man! I was all like, “I am on the ball for once!” But no one is more on the ball about oboe news than Patty.

I discovered a few weeks ago that John Adams has a blog. Initially, I was delighted. Delighted! John Adams! One of the Major Musical Influences of “post-minimalist” composers like me! Has a blog! Like me! I can explore his thoughts and get to know him as a person via word choice and sentence structure!

But you guys, the more I read, the more he comes across like a musical version of Michael Moore: disparaging, cynical, snobby, hatin’ on everything except the few things he prescribes as good and true. Check out this entry on going to movies in this day and age. Mr. Adams, sir, I love your music but don’t go to movies if you don’t enjoy them. If you can pick out all the cheesy particulars, and hate doing it, just don’t go.

Or how about this entry about people coughing at concerts. That kind of attitude bothers me so much! I mean, no one does it on purpose. No one. And what is more, every person there just paid good money to hear your piece being played, to hear you play your instrument. Those people who wait to cough between movements? They are doing their best to *not* disrupt the music. And I bet every person who coughs while there is music playing is embarrassed about it.

Well friends, fellow who get dust particles in your throats, who go to concerts even though you have colds because you want to hear the music, who are allergic to the perfume of the lady sitting three rows down, I’m with you on this one. Cough if you need to, I’ll pat you on the back and hand you a proverbial lozenge and tell you it’s okay because I don’t care if you interrupt the still after the end of the first movement. I’m glad you’re here, I’m glad you’re listening, I’m sorry you’re not feeling well! Please enjoy the rest of the show.

And check out those comments! Apart from mine, and one or two others, there is a whole lot of Classical Music Snobbery! Don’t clap between movements, don’t come if you might cough, even one priceless example of The Stigma Surrounding Classical Music: Richard. Here is his comment:

Jesus Christ. I’ve been going to concerts all my life and I’ve been able to control myself. Why can’t everyone else?
Also, as a matter of biology, I have a hard time sitting still. But somehow I manage the discipline to sit still and listen while at a concert.
I have to say the level of offense is different in different cities. New York has to be the worst. Coughing and eating are one thing, but when you pay $65 to have a pretty good balcony seat (which most of us can’t do everyday), you dress appropriately and then you have to sit next to some idiot who is wearing a T-shirt and sneakers.
Decorum demands that if these people don’t correct their behavior, it’s up to you to be the one who communicates to them that they are being rude, inconsiderate, that they look like a slob, or simply that they are assholes.
I have a friend who is a pretty serious concert goer. Watching him deal with them is always funny. He often threatens to have them thrown out as if he has any authority to do so.
Frequently, the alternative of listening to a near perfect performance at home on a recording is preferable to spending money to hang out with these idiots.
However, there is a rare occasion when it goes down correctly. I went to a Mahler 9 at Carnegie with Eschenbach and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The performance was a tedious affair.
However, everything gave way to a feeling of acceptance at the end of the symphony (as tends to happen with this piece even at bad performances; I forgave and accepted Eschenbach for his sins) and he did the mandatory sitting there in silence for a good minute as the 2,500 people in the audience did too. During that minute, all of us in that room shared something truly profound. I’m grateful that for once it wasn’t ruined by one of these troubled people.

Richard, can we talk for a moment? Sir, you clearly regard concerts as a Matter of Status and everyone who goes who does not operate by Your Predefined Standards does not deserve to be there. But really, if the people around you are detracting from your “experience” it isn’t the music that’s defining your experience in the first place, now, is it? Sir? And if your friend who threatens to have people thrown out based on their attire is that bothered by it, maybe he shouldn’t be there either.

I love music, Richard. I really do, several different kinds of music, in fact! I go to rock concerts, and I wear jeans and a t-shirt, and I love the music, and I love listening to it live. Why, loving classical music to much the same degree, should I dress differently for it? Why does my attire make me an “idiot”? I’ve got a degree (almost) in this music and I have a pretty good brain, actually, and yes, I like to wear t-shirts and jeans and sometimes even orange sneakers when I go to the Symphony. I go to the shows to enjoy the music being made. I’d like to hope most people do. Somehow it seems that you don’t, though, Richard. Somehow I don’t think we could be friends. And please: if your sense of “decorum” demands that you need to tell me off about it, I might get a bit feisty.

My friend Christopher pointed out to me that there probably wouldn’t be all this outpouring of snobbishness had Mr. Adams posted the alternate point of view on coughing at concerts.

Dear Mr. Adams,
Please use your power for good.

****

“Half-Ass” is my life these days. I am doing a lot of things you guys! I am trying to get a whole song-cycle written before the end of December, along with a horn piece for a friend’s grad recital and a contrabassoon piece for another concert. I am trying to write poetry for my creative writing class, and somehow accumulate enough that is in the vein that my professor likes to put together a 15-20 page manuscript to turn in. I am trying to keep up with my information-classes: Counterpoint and Post Tonal Theory and The Novel After 1900, reading the textbooks, doing the homework, going to class. I am drawing comics and updating the site! I am working two jobs, one of which is Quite Needy (the KWS) and the other of which is Just Inconvenient because I either have to work evenings after a long day at school or early mornings on the weekend. Add in “practice oboe and make reeds” into this mess and you have One Busy Esther add “sleep and eat and maintain contact with your friends and family” and you have Too Busy Esther.

So I’m half-assing things. I’m not reading the textbooks, but I try to go to class; I don’t really do my homework, but I make sure to get my assignments in; I don’t practice, but I…okay, I just don’t practice. I make reeds, but I only make enough to last me for a bit and then stretch them out (although I made two really good reeds early this week, and there are 10 more blanks waiting to be scraped that I have high hopes for; should last me until Christmas at the rate I’m going); I work at my jobs, but I call in sick to one of them if I have a conflict; I draw comics, but don’t update on time; I compose, but not anything like as much as I want to.

And it works, this half-assery, for the most part. I’m paying my rent, I’m making progress in my oboing (though this is mostly thanks to Dick’s uncanny talent of making me learn regardless), I’m making good reeds, I did well on my English midterm, decently well on my Post-Tonal midterm–but there are things, things like Baroque Counterpoint, which don’t lend themselves especially well to my particular system. And what do I do about all this? It’s like asking “What are birds?” We just don’t know.

***

I had a bunch of pieces played in the Student Composer concert (the first of five at the school this year) a few weeks ago, pieces that I wrote last year with Peter but didn’t get played in the concerts. And I was really happy with them! (I also had a piece played in the orchestra concert the weekend preceding, but I was less happy with it.) I want to give you all a taste of who I am as a composer, so here is a piece called “How They Felt About the Balloon”:

How They Felt About the Balloon

I used Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Balloon” as inspiration for form and content, particularly this image from the print form. I drew a graph over the words to set up measures and time, and then interpreted the descriptions into music. I like, though, that it doesn’t sound formalized and strict, that it sounds like a person with ADD, leaping and skipping from idea to idea but each idea adds to the one before, and since it is all done with the same pitch set it is all in the same world.

I play the piano extremely poorly, so hearing my friend Sputnik’s interpretation of the piece for the first time was like hearing someone else’s work that is just weirdly familiar.

It was pretty neat.

So I’ve been reading a bunch of people’s Hourly Comics–I guess the “official” day to do it is February 1st, but I wanted to give it a try now. So here is my day in comic form!

So I went to see the Intersections concert at the Conrad Centre–and actually as a paying patron, can you believe it? And so and so and so I got to see the whole thing and so and so and so I am going to write about it.

This Intersections was “Nico’s Choice” featuring “music that he digs”–he being Nico Muhly whose blog I friggin’ love. And man! Good taste, sir. Proper respect. The first piece was music from a film called “Drowning By Numbers” by Michael Nyman which–get this–was one of the first pieces I ever had on my computer. Before I was in music, before I became obsessed with minimalism, before everything when all else in my collection was Switchfoot and Final Fantasy, I listened to “Fish Beach” and “Knowing the Ropes” kind of obsessively, actually. So when they started playing I got one of those jolts of recognition like “Holy crap!” So knowing those pieces like I do–in a backwards and simple sonic-jacuzzi familiarity kind of way–and then listening to them with my newly trained ears was pretty amazing.
The thing about Michael Nyman’s music, and these pieces in particular, is that it is so ordinary. It’s what we’re expecting, the motives are film-soundtracky and mundane–but it doesn’t resolve, it doesn’t really progress, it just sits in this kind of perpetual motion and then just…stops. It is a piece that gets so much of its substance from how it moves (or how it doesn’t move) and how it ends (or how it doesn’t end). It’s so unsubtle that it’s kind of profound.

I made a lot of orchestration notes at this concert–the first one I made, during the Nyman, was this moment in the winds where something about the blend of trumpet and flute and something else sounded MIDI-like.

Then Edwin and Nico chatted to us for a while and my notes are all things like “I totally have a shirt like that except I wear it partially buttoned” and quotes like “I don’t want to sound like a big gay muppet,” and “Piles of things that are the same” which is what this concert was programmed around (not the muppet thing, the piles thing). And there was Powerpoint, making it seem like the most charming lecture ever.
“Piles of things that are the same” refers to the repeating bassline (passacaglia) idea that pervaded the whole concert. People’s different concepts of time–Nico showed us a bunch of different calendars–was also a part of it, how everyone divides things differently.

We heard a Philip Glass piece next–the third movement of his third symphony which was on my listening tests in high school music! MORE jolts of recognition. (What was this, Esther’s musical subconscious night or what?) There was some fantastic segmentation happening (I think I’m going to have to spend some time with the score to figure it all out), but you know, I’d never thought of Glass as a brilliant orchestrator before, but he did things in the strings that I admire: breaking them down so that everyone is a soloist. I loved too how every so often I’d become aware of the bass–that repeating thing–in the stereo effect of listening to one thing which is multiple things.

I still have no idea how Nico’s father’s turkey fryer fit into this concert, but we spent a few minutes on it after the Glass. It was kind of fun, though, you know? Endearing.

Then there was a snippet of Purcell (which would’ve been better at the beginning of the show I think Nico was right), followed by Richard Reed Parry’s piece, “For Heart Breath and Orchestra”! The musicians had stethoscopes and Edwin barely conducted–the idea was that each musician used their own heartbeat for a pulse (get it get it) and the result was shattered and individual and cascading and I felt that everything made sense, but there were dozens of senses. It was contemplative and sparkling at the same time.
In FIRE (the student improv group at WLU), we spend a lot of time focusing on deep listening to the ensemble. This was more about deep listening to oneself. It was so good, though. I could listen to that all day.

One thing I was upset about: they played the David Lang chamber piece during intermission! What Is Up With That, I would like to know. I would’ve liked to hear it while everything was quiet, where I could see the musicians, and where I would’ve known to listen from the beginning. It was wonderful anyway, pointillistic and shifting. Edwin said it is called “Sweet Air” and is what Lang thought his son was feeling during a visit to the dentist which involved laughing gas.

What followed intermission was arrangements of Byrd pieces “Miserere mei, deus” and “Bow thine ear, o Lord”, both arranged for chamber orchestra by Nico. The orchestration was simple, it made sense, there was some neat instrument-coupling-timbres which I made note of for future reference (trumpet and viola, trombone and violin, violin and clarinet), but the coolest colour was the piano! Way up in its high register plinking along under the broad strings! It shook it out of its comfort zone a little (and speaking of comfort zones and not being in them, Jim was playing English Horn. Since when does that ever happen?).

And then and then: “From Here on Out,” Nico’s piece, originally the score for a ballet, and fit with the passacaglia theme; it was so, so great. Edwin said a while ago in a talk at the school that good music expresses emotion, and I love when it’s the complicated emotions that are explored, and that is what I got from this piece. The beginning sounds like quiet wonder feels: not “Wow!” but that feeling that comes when you can see the curvature of the earth in the sky, when something huge just clicks. I got impending excitement later: that tense feeling in your stomach when you’re excited and worried, and later the disconnected feeling that comes when something bad has happened but not yet sunk in, that “I should be sad but I can’t feel anything”.
I expect I’m crazy for getting all this, but even the title says it: “From Here on Out” is one of Nico’s usual idiomatic titles, but it makes *sense* because the thing is a journey. And the orchestration! It was “section” orchestration (strings/winds/brass), but like…SO much colour. I felt like I’d fallen into a bucket of paint. Like it should be a Sony Bravia ad, or something. There was so much happening, and yet somehow the texture was transparent; the changes were sudden, but they felt organic.

Okay, so this is more a “HOLY CRAP AMAZING” entry rather than serious criticism (I’ll leave that to Marcia), but I do have one crit: Jim’s oboing in “From Here on Out”. It was out of place, it stuck out, it was too Strauss and not enough Muhly, and the tone was pointy where it needed to be round and warm and blendy. I am disappointed!

But not really because I am much too happy about music right now to be disappointed.

(SPEAKING OF WHICH I had like 20 pieces played in concerts last week and now have a Giant Pile of recordings, so maybe my next blog will explore those a little.)

Making
music ought
not to be
agony:
semantics
sixteenth notes
studies

This was brought to my attention by Rachael Rosenthal:

You guys, I am trying out a new style! With REAL PEOPLE and REAL FEATURES and not just stick people anymore! I might fall back into the lazy glory of stick people when I am really busy.  I finally got my Photoshop up and running, so now there will be regular comics again! HOORAY!

I am pretty excited about the next few I’ve got for you.

Here are some Art Samples that I doodled in the New Style.

Jim is HARDEST to draw. There’s something about his face and beard that I just can’t get. There will be some changes gradually until I can handle it! He does sit like that, though.

I was messing around and drew some familiar faces!

Cooper and Patty!

And me! Something I drew in composition seminar.

First: excuses.

My laptop was recently overhauled–it is basically a whole new computer, but with the same hard drive I had before. I am so pleased, because it means I can actually carry it places without fear that it will fall apart! The only downside is that all of my software needs me to re-register it. This works out fine for a few things, but I can’t for the life of me find the registration for my copy of Photoshop CS2. I have a keygen, but it only runs on Windows, and I keep forgetting to borrow my housemate’s laptop. The POINT of the excuse is: I use Photoshop to edit my comics. Therefore: no comics until I get it all taken care of. I have a whole bunch scanned and sitting in a folder on my desktop! Unable to be seen because they are huge and scratchy and unpresentable.

Now: stories!

I have begun school, you guys, and there is News! First off, I am taking an overload this term – for good or bad – but I am ‘termined to get my English minor and this is the only way I can see to do it. I got into Creative Writing (hooray!) which is going to be more like Creative Editing (hooray!) and seems like it is going to be a smashing course.

I am studying with Dick Dorsey (former principal of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra) this year.  I told Dick, when he asked me what I wanted out of the year, that I want to learn to be a flexible, jack-of-all-trades oboist.  I still want to play when I’m done school, but I’m not stupid: I haven’t the discipline to be a professional symphonic player. What I’d really like to do is play in new music ensembles and improvise, and fill in for people when they can’t make it to rehearsals and stuff. So Dick said, “we will look hard at the basics and make you into an oboist lots of people will want to play with.” The one lesson I have had was great; I felt like I was sounding and playing better by the end. Dick has a much different teaching style than Jim, mostly in that he breaks things down into sections and makes you play them in different ways.  For example: I played a two bar section of Barret Study 6 with HUGE dynamic changes, and Grand Study 1 all tongued, and then all slurred and then the way it’s written.  What’s more, Dick always has his oboe in his hands while he’s teaching, and he will play what he has in mind. This works tremendously well for me, because I like to match tone and pitch, and when I hear something played in a certain way it is much easier to make those sounds.  So I am enthusiastic about it! And Dick has a phenomenal list of oboe students: Sarah Jeffrey, Lief Mosbaugh…and Lief has done a lot of the stuff I’d like to do, so it could happen to me!

Thirdly, I have a new, second job.  I’m still working at Chapters (which I love most of the time even though it has a sorry habit of making Final-Fantasy-Concert-Attendance impossible), but I am also working at the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony! I am doing Patron Services at concerts, which means setting up outside and helping people with their ticketing issues.  I’m also running a Street Team for the Symphony, and doing some marketing stuff on the side. It promises to be intense (like camping), but also great experience in the arts that will prove valuable later on in my life.

Finally, I started at this job officially on Friday night which was the Frederica von Stade concert! It was not *nearly* as chaotic as the entire staff of the symphony thought it would be, they loved my student volunteer team, and the music was beautiful, sweet, and delicious.  Much like dessert. When I write a for real review, I am going to say, “Friday’s concert was three courses of dessert, but absolutely delicious dessert, with no regrets after.” Sometimes it is nice to have cake for dinner. By that I mean all the music was sweet and delicate, the arrangements were saucy and intricate, there was nothing meaty on the concert. Lots of oboe excerpts though! Jim did a great job on Carmen and Saint-Säens’ Bacchanale. (Although I have finally come to a realization about why all of Jim’s other students think he is a god among oboists and I do not – he has a super-refined sound, and it is lovely and perfect for things like Mozart, but like Mozart has no soul – and I like voices and sounds that have a little quirk to them, personality and emotion and maybe even imperfection and this is why I prefer Chad Van Gaalen (who had better win the Polaris Prize or I will bust a cap woo nested quotes) to Josh Groban. RUN-ON SENTENCES FOR EVERYONE.)

Frederica sounded lovely in everything she sang; I love that her vibrato (while I still don’t really like opera-vibrato) seemed to come from inside her voice rather than being superimposed on top. She sang a Rossini duet with Kimberly Barber “Duet for Two Cats” or something, which was *wonderful* because Kim Barber let out all the stops and put everything into being dramatic and hilarious rather than perfectly musical, and she inspired Frederica to as well. I very much enjoyed Nat Stookey’s piece, too, for which F wrote the lyrics, but once again, it wasn’t serious the way I was expecting, just light and humorous and delicious. I should very much like to hear something that Nat Stookey  (another side note: he is a singularly floppy man: gangly legs and arms, floppy hair, and a relaxed, shambling sort of walk. He was in the symphony offices the other day and I guess he’d had a long night because he had sprawled haphazardly over the couch.) has written without words – so far I’ve only listened to ‘The Composer Is Dead’ and ‘Into the Bright Lights’, both of which had similar light, idiomatic accompaniments. I suspect he does other things as well.

A bunch of us went to the post-concert party, which was fun! There was a swing band and a free martini and lots of glittering people milling about. I made a Bad Shoe Decision (high heels) and so took them off for much of the evening (a little less than professional, I’m sorry). It was a good night, though! I think everyone was pleased with the proceedings.

Et c’est ça.

SO school begins in not so long! I count it officially begun on the 8th of September with Reed Jail, even though I don’t start classes until the 14th. Is that crazy, you Americans who start class in August? Is it? It is a little crazy for me; I am used to starting at the beginning of September rather than the middle. Still not August, though.

This term, I’m taking Counterpoint and Post-Tonal Theory, a few Englishes (Canadian Poetry, The Novel After 1900, maybe Creative Writing: Poetry), as well as the usual, lessons and Composition. It’s going to be a crazy sort of term, I think, but fun! My goal for my grad project is to have it completely written by December. COMPLETELY. That way, I can get it rehearsed and recorded and produced in the new year. Here’s hoping!
I also need to come up with some new, more interesting titles. The ones I have now are so bland.
“Tohubohu and Brouhaha” is nearly finished, although I’m having some minor existential crises now that I have been immersed in it for weeks without air. “Is it BORING?” “Is it CLICHÉ?” “Am I doomed to be a POPS composer?” I think it is well orchestrated though, so maybe my destiny is to be an orchestrator for Hans Zimmer or John Williams or something. The composer’s version of a sellout?
I think I spend too much time thinking about what will be exciting to play for the musicians. IT IS ALL FOR YOU, MY BRASSY FRIENDS.

Anyway, I’m writing a contrabassoon piece this year, too, for my friend Megan! As usual, I’ve come up with a fantastic title before anything else is begun: “Monster, Fried in a Pan.” Yes.

But to the title! “Desertion” is Peter Hatch and Glenn Buhr who are BOTH taking sabbatical this year. Glenn will be around a bit since he is co-ordinating Glenn Buhr Fest NUMUS this year, but Peter is going to B.C. and Australia and China and god knows where else. Weirdly, Laurier seems to think that Peter is only going to be away for the fall term, and I know for a fact he is going to be away globetrotting all year. I was at this little farewell gathering at his house (which was weird and a little awkward at first, but thank goodness for Jason White and Pam Patel), and got a bunch of T.S. Eliot and Hermann Hesse books, and a giant stack of WIRE magazines, which I’m pretty excited about! I also got an Open Ears t-shirt all my own, which I have now modded from its former boxiness into a sleeveless and excitingly ribboned top.
I’m doing some work for Open Ears–on their website, for example, and scanning pictures for the archives of the past few festivals.  I’m also going to be doing some volunteer-ish work with the KWS–publicity for their Frederica von Stade concert on September 18th mostly. Hear that? FREDERICA VON STADE CONCERT ON SEPTEMBER EIGHTEENTH GUYS IT WILL BE AMAZING YOU SHOULD GO.

My work here is done.

So basically what I’m trying to say here is that I am becoming the Kitchener-Waterloo Arts Bitch (in the sense of “doing a bunch of work for nothing” not “something negative”). If it doesn’t pay off in the future, I shall be sad, but not that sad, probably. And I’m supposed to get some free tickets out of it.

In conclusion, here is an article which you should read! It is one of those things where someone says something that I have been struggling to put into words, but much better than I ever could.

Hey everyone! First of all, you have my sincerest apologies for being so absent the past month or so. But good news! I have scheduled two comics a week for the rest of August, and will get back to the regular three-comic format in September! The Quest story is completely queued, so even if I die y’all’ll** find out what happens to Mr. Tabuteau.

In other news, I went to the Hillside Festival (and wrote about it for NxEW), I spent a bunch of time working on my brass piece (which is going to be pretty neat), I have successfully learnt how to make pizzas (and a few other things), and the first stage of my grad project is nearing completion! Oh, these are exciting times, these are.

My love to you all.

**y’all’ll is acceptable! I SWEAR.