The Em & M's

Ok, I've been busy. Work, work, work, but lots of music too. I am playing in orchestra, in the fiddle group, in the women's fiddle group, and now with a new trio, made up of remnants of  the flute choir, after it dwindled down to a precious few.

We call the new group the Em & M's because of our names: Emma, Marilyn, and Marilyn. We all play flute. Marilyn and I play cello, and Emma has expressed interest in learning the cello. She also plays piano and guitar.

We got together just before Christmas to put together a 10-12 minute performance for a benefit concert for a group that collects care package items to send to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The flute choir has always participated (as has the fiddle group), so we gathered what was left of it and created a 2 flute/cello trio. I randomly selected a piece from my stack of mostly unperformed trio music: Trio for 2 Flutes and Cello, by Carlo Wiseman, written about 1750, and a folk song, "The Ash Grove."

The cello parts were not difficult (mostly first position--I would recommend both pieces for an adult beginner), but it did take us a while to get it all together. We performed it this past Saturday, and my husband videotaped it (and missed the first few measures of each piece; the Wiseman has 3 movements).

I am not entirely please with my performance--you can hardly hear me! I really thought I was playing louder than it sounds on the video, and my husband thought the instruments were well-balanced during the performance. On the other hand, I was worried about pitch and sound (the cello sounded scratchy to me), and may have deliberately played softly. I felt good about "The Ash Grove" though, and thought that was louder. But it isn't.

Oh well. I will post them anyway. I am hoping we will perform again in June (again taking the flute choir's regular slot at an outdoor arts fair), and we can see the progress!

The bowl in front of us is not for donations--it is full of M&Ms for the audience to munch on.

(All the videos are cut off in my view of this blog. You can see more on the right side on Youtube.) 

Wiseman, movement 1
 

Wiseman, movement 2


Wiseman, movement 3


The Ash Grove


Oh, I also played with the Falmouth Fiddlers:


And later, Marilyn and I played flute to accompany the Mashpee Singing Seniors, but we were drowned out by the trumpets, the piano, and the chorus, so I won't post that here!

Cape Community Orchestra

Excerpts from the Cape Community Orchestra performance on Sunday, November 14, 2010, in Brewster, MA. This was taken by a friend and fellow cellist; I am playing seventh cello. Well, someone had to do it!

It was great fun, and we are going to do it again all over again in Centerville tonight.

Too busy!

This is not going well, this effort to post every day in September. I am inundated by work and obligations, trying to do a major decluttering of the house, staying up too late, and, generally, forgetting to post. This morning I slept late, missing my 10:30 AM cello lesson. I was also late to orchestra yesterday, missing the first piece. This because I was late getting my work done at the office. It just snowballs. I persist.

Orchestra was fun, nevertheless, and the tricky parts are becoming clearly identified. There is one section in the Bacchus where the fingering is baffling. I really could have used that lesson this morning. The whole cello section had trouble with it, when the conductor singled us out to play it up to speed. There was more or less silence from the six cellos. Then he slowed it down for us, and we managed to get through it. He said he would play it slow for a couple of weeks, but we needed to woodshed it. In a way, it is kind of nice to have that little challenge to focus on.

Ooops.

Well, I missed in a day in my every-day-for-the-month-of-September blogging effort. I have been quite busy with work and stayed up very late last night workg, maybe 5 AM. I went into work today, but was kind of wiped out this evening. It is 2 AM now, and I am taking a break from practicing to write this.

I start lessons again this week after about three weeks of teacher vacation. I thought I would make great progress in certain areas, but, in part because I am going in so many areas at once, I can't really point to great strides anywhere.

For orchestra, I am working on the March of Bacchus because its 3 and 4 flats make it the most challenging. I record the rehearsals so I can listen and play along at home, but I can't say I have happily gotten through this whole piece yet. As our kindly conductor said at the first rehearsal, if we could all play it perfectly we would not have to have rehearsals. We would just show up at the appointed hour of the concert.

I talked to a jazz saxophone/flute player today who said he does not rehearse with his fellow band members before doing a show. He likes to keep the music fresh. He travels all over the world, playing with different musicians. They might talk a little before the concert, if they speak the same language, but the concert is "in the moment," and they all understand the language of music. (This is not just going with the flow, but having an thorough understanding of music theory and how to play together.)

It would be great to be able to play that way, but I don't think it is in the cards for me, without a lot more study. For me, though, fiddling fills that desire to just get together and play, and that is why I keep trying!

String Bass Gymnastics

I went to see the Simon Sinfonietta concert last night, featuring string bass player, Richard Fredrickon performing Paul Ramsier's (b. 1937) Divertimento Concertante for Double Bass and Giovanni Bottesini's (1821-1889) Grand Duo for Violin and Double Bass. Charles Sherba played violin.

Fredrickson is not only a highly accomplished bass player, but he also exudes warmth and good feeling, cracking jokes about an out-of-tune string and imitating a fog horn while tuning. Stephen Simon offered a few humorous comments of his own: "no one should play an instrument that large." The two have been friends for many years.

The two pieces offered a rare opportunity to see and hear a solo string bass player, and the Grand Duo seemed to take both instruments through every possible style and technique of playing, each instrument showing off and then coming together, from the lowest possible notes on each instrument to the highest. Simon had arrange the piano part of the Grand Duo for orchestra. It was an amazing piece,and the audience leapt to its collective feet at the end of it.

The Grand Duo is considered to be a very difficult piece. Usually I would say here, but the soloists made it look easy, effortlessly gliding from one note to the next. Sherba did make it look easy. But Fredrickson did not, and I say this with the best possible intentions. He is a tall man, but his double bass seemed enormous, and when he reached his long arms down to play at the very end of the fingerboard, you could feel his effort. I was in the fourth row (it is a small concert hall, actually a private school gym with risers), and you could see the energy it took to produce such music on the bass, and he called attention to it himself, wiping his brow with a handkerchief after every movement. A good honest performance. He made it look hard, but played it magnificently nevertheless.

Fiddling, Again

I hesitate to mention this, again, but, once again, I have made a concerted effort to learn fiddle tunes on the cello. I have been working on learning fiddle tunes for years. I learn a few. I stop. I forget. I decide to try a tune again an octave up or an octave down, trying to make it more playable. I learn a few more tunes. I play with other people. I have memory lapses when I am playing with other people. They play the tunes differently from the way I play them. They play them too fast. They know a lot more tunes than I do.

But, I persist because I like playing fiddle tunes and I like playing them with other people. Eventually, I will stop trying to memorize and focus on learning/playing by ear. I will learn how to accompany. I have lots of fiddling books, lots of information about how to play the tunes and the backup. It is just a matter of finding the time to practice. Well, mostly a matter of finding the time to practice. But no matter what I do, I am still going to have problems with the speed of some of these tunes. I need to simplify these tunes or figure out accompaniments.

This fall, I have orchestra pieces, the cello trio pieces, and my regular lesson work, in addition to the fiddle tunes. So, I am just picking a few tunes ("Irish Washerwoman," "Coleraine," "Red Wing," "Liberty," and "Flowers of Edinburgh"), and a couple of Scottish ones that I "learned" at Scotttish Fiddle Camp from Abby Newton a few years ago. No one plays these in sessions, but I like them, and eventually I will find a group to go with them: "Willie's Auld Trewes" and "The Corbie and the Crow."

I am planning on attending a fiddle weekend in November: one day of workshops and 2 days of playing together. So, that's my goal, to be able to play the handful of tunes I know, these, and, hopefully another batch, by the time mid-November rolls around in two months.

There will be a CD provided, for learning-by-ear purposes, but it won't be available until the end of September. And, of course it is a violin CD. There was only one other cellist when I attended last year. I do have a list of tunes, and it is similar to the list of tunes played by our local fiddle group. Unfortunately, I keep missing those sessions, in part because I just need to learn more tunes to feel like I am contributing. I know, most people go to sessions to learn the tunes. It is a little different when you are the only cellist, but I should just go. The people are supportive.

I do plan to play with the local fiddle group on Halloween, for the Cape Cod Marathon. We play along the route to encourage the runners every year, and it is lots of fun, if sometimes a bit cold. In exchange for playing, we get sweatshirts or jackets, so, except for our fingers, we should be warm.

Stand Up To Cancer

After orchestra rehearsal, I was blathering on to a friend about minor family problems; I finally asked her how she was, and she told me she was traveling to see her daughter the next day because her daughter was having a double mastectomy. That puts things in perspective.

I'm watching "Stand Up to Cancer" now, very moving. Earlier this afternoon, I got a call from another cancer organization, or so they said. I asked how much of my donation would go toward research. They said 20 percent. Amazing they would even admit it. In contrast, 100 percent of donations to Stand Up to Cancer go to research. I'll donate to Stand Up to Cancer, just as soon as I can get through by phone or on the web site!