29 September, 2009

One week to go


We are leaving in exactly one week! I can hardly believe it!

This past week, I had a scare with tendinitis. I started having pain in the second finger of my left hand, right along the top of the joint where it connects to my hand. Anxious to avoid aggravating the problem, I immediately did everything I could think of to get it under control. I went to the pharmacy, where they gave me anti-inflammatory gel to rub into it and a band to immobilize it. (The band turned out to be a terrible idea, because after one night it made my whole hand stiff and sore, so I gave that up.) More importantly, I made a conscious effort to put less stress on that finger and to share the work more evenly with the rest of my fingers. For example, I realized that in the course of each day, I ended up tuning sometimes up to 4 or 5 harps, all with that finger, so I started tuning with other fingers. This all seemed to help, until...

...my thumb then started hurting. Same thing, same hand, in the corresponding joint. It didn't make sense that it was my left hand, because I feel like I work a lot harder with my right hand. Maybe it's a subtle technique problem that I'm unaware of. Maybe it's just that when you overwork a joint it will inevitably wear down, no matter what you do. I realized that I haven't actually taken a day off in about two months now. I became upset and started envisioning a bleak future of permanently reduced functioning in that hand – a crippled harpist – all because I overworked it for a competition. It's not worth it! I concluded this was a sign from the harp gods that I needed to do some mental practicing. Thus, I spent the weekend working on my memory and only air-harping.

This did a lot of good for my hand. I feel significantly stronger again. Today I did a full-volume, public run-through of the pieces on my second stage, at Camac Harps. (I had done first stage there last week, with a happy amount of success.) I have a lovely friend who works there, Claude, who lectures me about how to take care of tendinitis and who schedules practice performances for me. I have been inviting a few friends to come and listen and give comments. I chose Monday afternoon because I figured that the store is usually not too busy then and so dominating the space with my playing wouldn't be to much of an imposition.

But... today! Today, Kimberly Rowe, the editor of the American publication Harp Column, was in the store to choose a new harp. Her assistant Alison Reese was there with her. Jakez François, the president of Camac, had come up for the day to help manage the sale, AND my teacher, Isabelle Perrin, also showed up! Rather than being annoyed that I was interrupting their harp selection, they all exuberantly professed delight at the idea of hearing me play. So I played!

It was an unexpected level of stress, and maybe because I was already feeling anxious about the time I had taken off over the weekend, it was mentally a very difficult performance for me. My thoughts were all against me the whole time, and I just couldn't muster the energy to stay focused and on top of everything. By the end of the run-through, I was completely spent. I'm exhausted. A month ago, I could still laugh at all the stress people submit themselves to in the name of competitions and optimistically proclaim that I will keep a healthy perspective. But the pressure is rising, and it's harder and harder to ignore. The next week will be a balancing act of getting enough rest while also staying on top of the repertoire enough to feel confidently prepared. The final countdown is on.

24 September, 2009

Choosing appropriate ornamentation

The Prelude of the Bach suite on second stage ends with two chords (V/V and V for those of you who are interested) prolonged by fermatas, followed by a short coda. Historical tradition has it that in such cases the performer was expected to ornament the chords in order to 1) prolong the harmony and 2) show off a bit. Elizabeth has been playing around with ideas for embellishments for these two chords for quite a while now...long enough to be slightly frustrated with her indecision. During her most wonderful fortnight of masterclasses at the Moulin d'Andé with Helga Storck, it was suggested that she just come up with several cadenzas for this passage, sit down, play them all, and then decide, instead of just waffling aimlessly about the V/V chord. So... over the past few weeks, I have helped her make a small collection of cadenzas from which to chose. To the ideas that she already had, I added four of my own, and even asked my ex-counterpoint teacher, Stéphane Delplace, to help. He contributed two to the cause - on a side note, he's quite the expert in Bach's music and is able to sit down and practically improvise fugues. He has an amazingly satirical sense of humor - can you image a fugue on the pink panther theme? Look no further.

This evening before our show, Elizabeth played two that she had chosen and we discussed the pros and cons of each one, transformed them, mixed and matched them up, played them forwards and backwards (really), and finally came up with a wonderful solution. I will not give it away :) but will say that it is really perfect - very subtle and refined, but appropriately stylistic of the Baroque.

When one is essentially making notes up to be played in an "empty" spot in Bach's music (what sacrilege! Even the rests in Bach's music are not empty!), it can't be just anything that pops into the brain. Music is so full of spoken and unspoken rules based on history (or what we know of it), tradition, and simple gut feeling, that no matter what choice you make you are bound to upset someone. It is not out of the question that Elizabeth may get comments like: "Why do you add notes? In an international competition you should follow the score to the letter!" or "Do you not realize that this suite was written for lute? Your cadenza should sound like a characteristic lute flourish!" or even "This cadenza of yours is simply too minimal, and not at all historically correct". Which brings me to my point: when preparing a competition like this one, obviously you have to cater to what you think the jury wants to hear if you want to please them. But that means second guessing them - would they rather hear what you think they want to hear, or would they rather be convinced by your performance because you have thought it out to the last detail and are convinced by it yourself? Obviously, the second choice is more risky, but it is the only way that true artistry can shine through, unhindered.

21 September, 2009

Introducing Marta

I am very excited to introduce a special guest writer to this blog... Marta!


In the interest of bringing you the most up-to-date news that we can from Israel, Marta will be here, armed with camera and computer, to give the latest scoop, while I'm busy glued to a harp or have my nose stuck in my scores. Marta is highly qualified for this job, being my team partner in this whole operation, privy to all the details behind the Israel competition, but there's no need for me to tell you all this. I've set her up with her own author's account, and here she is to speak for herself:


Hi, My Name Is...Vicarious Parasite

Since Elizabeth has invited me to contribute, I thought I would write my first entry as a sort of short introduction. Officially, I am a harpist working and living in Paris, teaching many students big and small, and performing whenever at all possible (usually to the right of Elizabeth as her duet partner). Unofficially, I am a parasite ready to vicariously conquer Israel through Elizabeth's hard work and determination! Actually, I try not to be that invasive. I hope to be a nice, warm, fuzzy parasite, whose best interest lies in the success of her host body! It is true, that the Israel competition has always been presented to me as the ultimate goal of any self-respecting harpist. Having "missed the boat" for many reasons that my amour-propre would like to think are out of my control (having to begin teaching in order to support myself while still in school, deciding that it is not worth doing competitions after a certain age, realizing that I didn't really like preparing, participating in, and then crashing after competitions, etc. etc. etc.), I am thrilled that Elizabeth was able to step up to the challenge, and that she is allowing me to be an intimate part of the whole process. It is really the best way to participate in such a harrowing experience - empathetically!

My job assignment in Israel is to be Elizabeth's surrogate mommy (iron dresses, fetch water, provide snacks when signs of fatigue appear...) travel companion (Jerusalem, here we come!) and of course, personal and musical yogi (specializing in the uplifting of spirits and with ears ready to hear a missed muffle a mile away). For you, dear readers, I will be your eyes on Elizabeth as she goes through the competition, providing photos, descriptions, and insights on her day to do day doings.

This completes my first blog entry... I'm now off to rescue small students from droopy thumbs and wrong notes, and then to the theater to reunite with my lovely and exhausted duet partner, Elizabeth, for another wonderful LaFontaine show!

20 September, 2009

Shana tova!

This weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year! I looked it up, and we are now on year # 5,770, counting since the beginning of the world. It's disconcerting, isn't it, to imagine living under a different calendar from the one we're used to? Since time-stamping e-mails would be a computer programmer's hell otherwise, the Gregorian calendar has been universally accepted. It's true that the Gregorian calendar is highly practical, like an equal-tempered piano, but lunar-solar calendars like the Jewish calendar resonate so beautifully with the motion of the astronomical bodies involved. Each month corresponds to a phase of the Moon, and because there aren't quite 12 of these in the time it takes the Earth to travel around the Sun, they add an extra month every two or three years.

Weeks are also seven days long, having no basis in astronomy but rather the biblical seven days of creation. The Jews have figured that the seventh day of rest falls on Saturday instead of Sunday, and it is called the Sabbath. Moreover, days officially begin at sundown. Until you have really lived through a day that begins at sundown, this will always just seem like an arbitrary fact, but studying the schedule of performances at the competition in Israel I am noticing that the rounds always end early in the afternoon on Fridays, and nothing is scheduled on Saturdays, to allow us to observe the Sabbath.

It will definitely be interesting to get a feel for how this different conception of the structure of time affects daily life in Israel.

Pros and Cons of competitions

Thank you to Helen at Camac Harps for the plug for my blog on the Camac Harpblog! I feel so honored to be featured in such a serious and wonderful publication, and additionally encouraged that she completed the post with the poignant citation of a convocation address given to incoming students at Juilliard in 1964. The speech addresses the big question which musicians are constantly posing to themselves: why do we devote our lives to music when it is a life of such adversity; is it worth it? I quote here the part I found most inspiring, from the closing paragraph:

“If you want to understand art, you have to understand the world; in order to understand the world, you have to understand human beings; then you will understand yourselves, and that is the key to everything. That will make playing, composing, dancing less an exhibition of unimportant skills in a society game, meeting with more or less approval, blindly climbing up the deceitful ladder of success, but an opening of your heart to the world and the world to your heart. And that is what you came here for, this is what makes music one of the most sublime emanations of the human spirit, that is what makes it worthwhile to devote one's life to it.”

It is precisely this “exhibition of unimportant skills” and “deceitful ladder of success” that competitions tend to get everybody focused on – competitions, diplomas, and all forms of prestige, for that matter. In the mess of second-guessing yourself, trying to figure out what the judges are looking for, worrying whether you're good enough, beating your head into the wall practicing the same pieces again and again, it's too easy to lose track of why we do music. We come to believe that winning first place, or having certain diplomas from certain institutions, really matters in the long-term. This view doesn't make any sense to me; the only thing that could possibly matter in music is whether people enjoy listening to you or not.

The two are closely related, but the causal relation between them is confused. It's what you learn at the conservatory that is valuable, not the diploma. Maybe diplomas are useful in other careers, but music diplomas won't do much in the way of getting you a recording contract, concerts, an agent, or any of the other staples of a music career. It's not prizes in competitions that will lead you to success in the end, but the ability to play really well and to capture the hearts of your audience. If you are very good at that, you may also win some prizes in competitions, but not the other way around.

Results were recently announced for the ARD competition that took place in Munich this month. This is another important, international, four-stage competition for harp (they also hold equivalent competitions for other instruments). I learned this year that they not only assign first, second, and third prizes, but they also award an “audience prize.” I assume this is where the audience gets to vote on who they liked the best. The crazy thing is that the audience prize doesn't necessarily go to the first-prize winner! In the harp competition, Anneleen, who was awarded third prize by the jury, won the audience prize, and in the violin competition, the second-prize winner received the audience prize. This clearly betrays the subjectivity involved and the conflict of interests between the audience and the jury. Let's be clear, once you're out trying to sell CDs and convincing people to come to your concerts, it's that audience prize that you're going for.

Competitions are useful because playing music well (especially the harp) is damn hard – very technically demanding – and the technical side of music can be judged quite objectively, by experienced musicians who know what details to look for. By rewarding those who achieve great technical mastery (both in execution and in interpretation), the standard is constantly being raised, and we become witness to levels of attention-to-detail never seen before in history. The competitive atmosphere provides great motivation to pay attention to those details – motivation that I, personally, never would be able to muster otherwise. Working on individual details is tedious and not especially musical, but once they are all finessed and intelligently put together, it turns out to be precisely those little details that work the magic in a musical performance.

What's been upsetting me recently, however, are the ways in which the game-world of the competition is a distortion of the real world. In isolating the technical aspects, the game has eliminated many of the more creative aspects of being an artist. A prime example of this is that the repertoire is all imposed. I suddenly woke up this year and realized that the pieces I play have always been dictated by the competitions that I do. It will be such a revolution to finally choose my own repertoire once this is all over! Another is that there is such a ridiculous amount of repertoire to prepare all at once for this competition that in the months before, it is practically impossible to be a well-rounded human being because you can't afford to spend your concentration on anything else. I have always thought that the single-minded pursuit of one great goal is a wonderfully romantic notion, but in practice it is beginning to wear on me. There is so much more to being a musician than this, and so much more to life. In Life-After-Israel I'll have the chance to discover who I want to be as an artist, in all the other ways that competitions don't address, and I'm greatly looking forward to it!

11 September, 2009

Challenges

I have reached the point in my preparation where I have, for the most part, finished learning and studying my pieces, and now what remains to be done is getting the hang of playing them through cleanly from beginning to end (or from end to beginning, while standing on my head and drinking a glass of Perrier). I have to build up my concentration and endurance so that nothing may throw me off. But of course the game wouldn't be fun without some surprise challenges thrown in at the last minute, so fate has sent me a team of construction workers to set up camp in my courtyard, just outside my window, a mere meter away from my head while I'm practicing. Today they brought in all the pieces that will become their scaffolding and started the business of banging them together, loud metal on metal, while they shout back and forth to each other and smoke. No hurry; they'll be here for two to three months!

Their excuse is that they are going to clean and repaint the outer wall of our building, but honestly, this wall we're talking about is right up against the wall of the next building over. Nobody uses the courtyard or ever sees this wall, and unless there's some structural work they need to do, this sounds like a flagrant waste of noise to me.

Courtyard: pre-construction.

From the moment I found out that they were coming, I've been worried that they will be a major distraction. Israel is something I've been working toward for almost two years, and now when I have barely a month to go my practice environment is converted into a construction zone! Strangely, external factors don't always affect my mood in predictable ways. My mood seems to respond more readily to what I perceive as the underlying meaning beneath the externalities. This is turning out to provide some interesting insights.

I've had plenty of problems with noise in the apartment before this. At first I was the problem. When I moved in two years ago and practiced my harp every day, this crazy lady who lives across from and a floor above me would occasionally reach her threshold and blow down the stairs like a tornado to have a shrieking tantrum all over me and threaten to call the police if I kept playing. It was kind of scary, because I didn't feel so comfortable with French yet, and... oh lord, she is terrifyingly hideous. Fortunately, she is actually crazy enough to have had a 180-degree turn-around, and now she loves me and wishes I would never leave. It's because I'm so charming! No really, at the time I demonstrated my good faith by offering to confine my practice hours to before 1:00 pm. Coincidentally, this was all going on right before a different competition, in Hungary. As you can imagine, it took a good deal of inventiveness and lots of character-building to work around that challenge.

This year it's been more the other way around. Crazy is up there having occasional tantrums about other things, vocalising stream-of-consciousness to her little dog, or clunking around the stairwell at 2:00 am. The neighbors just across the hall from me, with whom I share the courtyard, have two small children that whine and cry an inordinate amount, often either right by their open window or in the courtyard itself. And there is some Asian or possibly Polynesian family a few floors above me, with a whole flock of little children who don't go to bed until well after midnight and a mother whose words always are whipped out in impassioned, rapid-fire spurts. She always sounds indignant and bitter, but I have to assume it's just the lilt of whatever language she's speaking, because you can't always be that grumpy can you? When it's nice outside and everybody has their windows open, the wall across from us echoes and amplifies all this noise right back into every body's windows. Thus I am witness to the daily sounds of human vulgarity at close range. (Just as I typed the last sentence, the guy across the courtyard noisily snorted out a wad of spit... aaand here comes another.) It is ugly and depressing.

When the workmen showed up, I shut my shutters, and I'm sure everyone else at least shut their windows, and as they took over with their clanking, I was amazed to discover that the first thought in my head was, “Yes! They are drowning out all the other noise!” It's only been one day, but I think I actually prefer their noise (deafening as it is) to the usual, because it is the noise of productivity. Those are the sounds of people with a goal, building something. It turns the building into a workplace. Spurred on by their aura of activity, I feel more justified working here than I ever have before, and I crank out my pieces as loud as I please! After I gave them a good talking-to about not smoking outside my window and clarified that I was playing a harp and not a piano, they mind their business and I mind my own. I think this is actually going to work.

08 September, 2009

La Fontaine


WARNING: Do not try this at home, kids!

When you're preparing a big, international solo competition, you're generally supposed to say no to other commitments that creep up, especially in the days immediately preceding the competition. However, real life is always more complicated, so I have gotten myself dangerously over committed.

I am going to be spending most of my evenings this month playing for a show in two different theaters in Paris. The show is a collection of fables written in old French verse by Jean de la Fontaine. Like Aesop's fables, many of these fables use animals to represent various character types. This show centers around fables about the animals who have been type-cast with the short end of the stick. From left to right, we have Alain de Bock as the wolf, Katherine Gabelle as the snake, and Damien Luce as the rat. As a harp duo, Marta and I provide the accompanying music and illustrative sound effects, and in the latest staging we even get to die and collapse dramatically onto our harps and then strut around the stage plucking hairs off the guys' heads. Fortunately they have not entrusted any of the French verse to our weird accents, so we do all our work in music and mime. I'm especially excited about all the cool lighting effects we've been able to add to the show now that we're playing in a real theater.

It starts tomorrow night!
http://www.lafontaine-spectacle.fr/

07 September, 2009

Thanks for the support


When I was little and would see Oscar winners work themselves into a babbling mess frantically trying to thank everybody they could before being dragged away from the microphone, I thought it was all a boring political formality and wished we could just move along to the next prize. But now that I am developing my own long list of people to thank, I understand.
Originally, I didn't want to be a burden to anybody else, but I've been forced to admit that Israel is just not something any one person can do on their own – not if you're going do it right. Fortunately, people seem to enjoy being able to help. They seem inspired to see something exciting taking form and want to share in the excitement by contributing to the effort.
I have thus abandoned the notion that asking for help is a burden to others (they are free to say no if they like anyway), and I am coming up with productive ways to tap in to my support network. Today I had a huge, three-hour rehearsal for the Beethoven Serenade, which is one of the pieces programmed for the semi-finals. I have been practicing it for months by myself, but it's a trio for harp, flute, and viola, and I had reached the limits of my imagination for how to prepare this piece without actually trying it out with the other instruments. So I tracked down an excellent flutist and violist, and essentially hired them to rehearse with me! It was a thoroughly productive and exhausting rehearsal. I learned so much, and they were able to give me good advice about how to work within the chamber group and how to play in a convincing beethovinian style. The violist was especially entertaining about acting out metaphors he would come up with to describe how he envisioned the character of the piece. (They are hard to keep up with, though, because the harp is at such a technical disadvantage. It's always discouraging when they come in having only had their parts for a week, and even though I've been practicing meticulously for months I'm panting to keep up!) I've done the same thing with the other chamber-music pieces on the program; I snagged myself a brilliant pianist – Damien Luce – and have had several rehearsals with him, also receiving good bits of advice.
Any chance to give practice performances is also a big help, since – by definition – that's also something I can't do on my own. I am thankful to my parents for hosting a really great practice performance for me while I was home this summer. We rented the neighborhood club house, and my parents did so much work organizing, setting up the place, coordinating invitations, baking deserts! Today, my wonderful friend Claude at the Camac harp store scheduled another practice performance for me (Monday, September 21st at 3 pm, if anyone is interested!). And I am especially grateful for Helga Storck, my surrogate harp teacher from Germany, whom I went to study with for a ten-day masterclass last month at the Moulin d'Andé – a countryside retreat an hour-and-a-half by train down the Seine. Not only did she create performance opportunities for me while I was there, but she has been very morally supportive with the encouragement she has offered and all forms of advice extending well beyond music and into other concerns such as what kind of harp to play, the ordering of my pieces, and even on to life lessons and general pieces of wisdom.
I am thankful to my teacher, Isabelle, for the entire last three years of my musical development and for suggesting that I do this competition in the first place. I would not be here now if it weren't for her. Inconveniently for me, she is such a wonderful harpist that I have to share her with the rest of the world, and she's traveling between so many different countries right now that I've lost track of what they all are. She'll only be in Paris for a brief window of time before I go to Israel.
This is all leading up to say that the one I am depending on by far the most, way past the point of mere “being thankful to” and on to something more like “being bound eternally to,” is my dear Marta – my other American harpist in Paris, duo partner in crime. She is the one who was there at the kitchen table with me in January deciding once and for all whether to do this crazy competition or not. In the end, I said, “If I do it, you're coming with me, right?” And she responded yes without missing a beat. That was that. We both have our tickets to Tel Aviv, and she'll be there as my second pair of eyes and ears. (She is especially excited about the part where she gets to iron my dresses and fuss over jewelry; which I hate doing by myself.) Part of this effort is for her, because Israel was always her dream, but she gave it up in favor of marrying her wonderful husband, teaching thousands of students, and living a nice, sane life. I get to be the insane one, at least for the next two months. She came and sat by my for my Beethoven rehearsal, following the score and helping keep us together, and she's even been cooking meals for me to have in tupperwares in the fridge! That is friendship if you ever saw it.
When people help out along the way to a big goal like this, they share a part in the excitement. They are investing in you, implicitly saying that they are putting their faith in your ability to take the help and encouragement they give you, achieve something even greater than you would have on your own, and produce something that they can be proud of. In fact, the burden isn't on them but on me; this is probably the real underlying reason why I was hesitant to ask for help. Whatever slacking off I do is no longer exclusively my own business, because for each person that has supported me along the way I carry an added piece of responsibility to them. It commits me and focuses me, and in the end it does give me strength that I never would have been able to muster on my own.