May 9, 2009

Phantom of the Opera or someone like him

 

I was hewing and slashing at the rock face of my Just A Little till the last possible minute* this afternoon and then my not-a-piano-lesson lasted two hours.  First we had a little chat about JS Bach’s sonatas and partitas for violin and suites for cello–I have only just discovered Bach’s solo violin stuff:  I was innocently driving home from a hellhound hurtle a fortnight or three weeks ago and this ravishingly beautiful piece–by a solo frelling violin–came on Radio Three and I was suddenly and incontrovertibly blown out of my mind.  I don’t much like the strings!  At very least I can tolerate them when they’re sufficiently covered up by other parts of an orchestra!  Chamber music is made bearable by the presence of a piano!  And here I am without warning having to pull over to the side of the road to concentrate on the noise of a solitary violin.**  Life is funny.*** 

            Oisin, however, prefers the suites for cello.  I confessed I hadn’t got to the cello yet;  I still feel that Stephen Sondheim got the cello bang right in A Little Night Music, and if I never hear that damned Elgar thing again, with or without Jacqueline Frelling du Pre, it will be plenty soon enough.†  Oisin, however, being Oisin, merely pulled a book of Bach for the solo cello off a shelf††, sat down and began playing them on the piano.  They sound really good on the piano.†††  Maybe I’ll have to try the frelling cello again.

            So a fair amount of time had already passed by the time we took Just a Little to the church, whose organ probably is still wondering what hit it.  It’s sending thought waves to Oisin right now:  Tell her to take up knitting!  What was worse is that the church was full of bustling people doing church-organising things–flowers, chairs, hymn numbers and so on–although I noticed they cleared out smartish once Oisin started in.  Arrrgh.  I need more practise just listening to organ music.  I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned here that since the first bars of Just a Little were dragged protesting from the ether and pinned uncompromisingly to manuscript paper, I’ve started snapping round like a hunting dog on point when organ music comes on the radio:  hitherto organ music has made me snap round to dive for the ‘off’ button.  It’s just another damn technical skill, learning to hear organ music in the flattened-out noise you get from recordings and air waves.  But especially if we’re going to continue to fail to find a replacement for Finale’s diabolical organ playback I really need to be able to hear the stuff in my head.‡

            Oisin said that I might want to think about the organ as a one-instrument orchestra‡‡.  Yes, and I might want to run away to sea.‡‡‡  As we parted, he said, grinning fiendishly, I bet you wish you’d never started.  Too late now.  –AND WHOSE FAULT IS THAT???  However it’s not all going his way:  he says my stuff is remarkably difficult to sight-read because you can’t make any assumptions.  I think this translates as ‘having never had any composition lessons’.  Yes, well he’s the one who thinks I’m fun to watch.  And I acknowledge I’m having a splendid time, even if I find composing a little like wrestling eels in . . . in something opaque and gloppy.  Sort of halfway between mud and melted ice cream.

            I got back–clutching laptop, pages of music manuscript and notes for this week’s venture–in time to have a bracing cup of tea and take hellhounds out for their late afternoon hurtle.  And then rallied what forces remained to go ring bells.  There were five of us which meant we all had to ring all evening–but the other four were good ringers so I had an exciting time.  Long touch of Grandsire with lots of dangerous singles!  Stedman with calls!  –I admit I fell down badly on the Reverse Canterbury, but by that time I was running on about one brain cell and it had a few darns in it.§

            And now I’m going to bed.  I have a whole new forest of little green things that need to be potted on out of their cardboard mailing boxes.  Which means getting out of bed some time tomorrow.  Not to mention PEGASUS.  And grappling further with Just a Little while I can still remember what it sounds like. 

* * *

 * Somewhat after the last possible minute.  I wanted to print it out, of course, to flourish at Oisin, and my printer refused to work.  It had a better than usual excuse for noncooperation than my technology customarily does.  I had neglected to plug it in. 

** Given the car radio, I should have been racing home to catch the end of it on my Bang & Olufsen.  

*** Life is bonkers.  It has to be hormones.  Menopause:  You never again have to worry about standing up at the end of listening to a transcendent performance of Verdi’s Requiem at St Paul’s in London and find you’ve bled through your skirt and your coat onto the seat (and you still have to get home);  PMS doesn’t go away any more;  and you discover a hitherto utterly unknown and unsuspected love of solo violin music. 

† I do not defend this position, mind you.  We all have our idiosyncrasies.^  Some people don’t like . . . dogs.  Or roses.^^  Inexplicable but true.  And I wouldn’t want to be without Elgar’s Sea Pictures–which is/are almost as terrific a cliché as any of the Pomps and Circumstances or the cello concerto–especially as sung by Janet Baker. 

^ I may have a few more than the mean. 

^^ Some people move to a town with a several-hundred-year-old working bell tower and immediately start trying to close it down because it wakes them up on Sunday morning.  These people, however, should be shot, or at least sent to very loud heavy metal concerts until they’re deaf and bells don’t bother them any more. 

†† All Oisin’s music room needs is an owl named Archimedes 

††† Oisin said he’d played them quite a lot once years ago while he was recovering from carpal tunnel surgery on his right hand, and liked them so much that later he played one as an encore at a piano concert. 

‡ Like Beethoven.  Or someone who’s been to too many very loud heavy metal concerts.  And I also have to think about what all the knobs do:  those great ranks of buttons on either side of the console.  Oisin helpfully demonstrated that you can have two completely different pieces of music just by throwing in–or out–a few buttons.  Finale of course doesn’t get into this at all. 

‡‡ I was going to be very happy writing a few small strange things for piano and for voice and piano!!!  And maybe chorus and piano!  And maybe a few contraltos and a few harps!  And maybe a flute!  Or two flutes!  But that’s ALL!  

‡‡‡ Nah.  No bells. 

§ Speaking of taking up knitting.  Also the Darkness-extrapolated shoulder from yesterday was beginning to hurt.

May 9, 2009 | Filed Under bell ringing, music 

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Adventure is just bad planning. -- Roald Amundsen