29 September, 2009
One week to go
24 September, 2009
Choosing appropriate ornamentation
21 September, 2009
Introducing Marta
![](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_z39DypgJuVA/SrqpXEsnXeI/AAAAAAAAFLY/pRe-ZG_IrkA/s400/Marta2.jpg)
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!
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
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
![](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_z39DypgJuVA/SqWG9DGX8FI/AAAAAAAAFK4/xPuQyje8arY/s400/LaFontaine.jpg)
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/