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| Re: Rain and drama [message #41796 is a reply to message #41792 ] |
Sun, 01 May 2011 21:12   |
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 Aniaj
Messages: 3
Registered: January 2010
Location: Reno, Nevada, United Stat... |
Junior Member |
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"...opera isn’t highbrow, okay? You do not need a PhD in musicology to have an opinion. You don’t even need to be a professional musician. You can just like it for the noise. And you can say so on the forum."
As a semi-professional musician, I don't exactly dread opera performances, but they're not something I look forward to. Mostly because I have yet to experience a pit that isn't dark, too small, overcrowded, and with a ceiling 18 inches too low. There's never enough room for a full bow, the percussion/piccolo/trumpet/whatnot is always seated directly behind you, and most of the time every spare bit of attention I have is put toward trying to both read my part and follow the conductor's stick in really crappy low light. Add to this the vagaries of Murphy's law in which a bit of the set and occasionally the cast will plummet randomly on top of us. And quite a lot of the opera rep hasn't ever been converted from handwritten score/parts to type-setting, so more often than not you're facing a copy of a copy of a copy of the (usually) hastily written out part and wondering if that's a dotted half note or a mark on the copier. And most opera companies can't afford to have the orchestra for more than one or two rehearsals, so there's not a lot of time to adjust to the individual styles/tempos of each singer.
I like to listen to opera. Most anything goes, though I have to really be in the right mood to sit through Puccini or later. I should stipulate that my mother, who is the least musical person on the planet, ADORES opera, and I spent a good deal of my childhood doing housework with Verdi going in the background.
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| Re: Rain and drama [message #41797 is a reply to message #41792 ] |
Sun, 01 May 2011 21:30 |
Catlady
Messages: 231
Registered: December 2008
Location: Aurora, Colorado |
Senior Member |
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I loved The Phoenix and the Carpet.
And I'm trying to become interested in both the opera and the Lord of the Rings. (The former is a long ambition of mine, despite having been quelled when I was 14 by an extremely bad operatic experience that had nothing to do with the opera in question, and the latter because Polly from Fire and Hemlock really likes them and she likes a bunch of other books that I like.)
I've recently started riding my bike to work, and at a rate of two hours a day, I'm going to be getting through books on mp3 remarkably quickly. Maybe, if I listen for two solid hours, I will, finally and at last, get PAST THE PARTY SCENE that has never allowed me to read Tolkien. It can't take longer than two hours to read out loud, can it? That one scene?
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| Re: Rain and drama [message #41804 is a reply to message #41792 ] |
Sun, 01 May 2011 23:39 |
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I need to go to bed, but
I’m rereading E Nesbit’s THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET. What a total charmer.
Yay! Now I'm tempted to rescue my Nesbit from the packing box. . .
The only thing better than singing is more singing. - Ella Fitzgerald
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| Re: Rain and drama [message #41810 is a reply to message #41792 ] |
Mon, 02 May 2011 00:55 |
EMoon
Messages: 669
Registered: March 2009 |
Senior Member |
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I found the articles on amortality incredibly narrow-minded, smug, and privileged...clearly written by urban folk in first-world countries who travel to and fro in the city with their earbuds in and blinkers on.
In other words, they annoyed me. A lot. Yes, some of us luckier people are able to "perform" a decade or so later than most people could fifty years ago. With a lot of support from our culture starting at birth, a lot of money spent on that staying healthy thing. But life expectancy drops like a rock in the poorer parts of the world (and like a rock in water in the poorer parts of this country.)
As for the menopausal thing...it diminishes but never seems to quite disappear, at least as far as sleep disturbance is concerned. Waking up hot enough to use for a toaster oven still happens sometimes. Just not as often. The wrinkles, sags, stiffness, and cataracts, however, just keep getting more and more obvious.
E
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| Re: Rain and drama [message #41822 is a reply to message #41810 ] |
Mon, 02 May 2011 22:24 |
claning
Messages: 266
Registered: February 2010
Location: California |
Senior Member |
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Yes, one of the things they DON'T tell you about menopause is that hot flashes WAKE YOU UP in the middle of the night. Repeatedly.
The hot spells by themselves wouldn't be nearly so bad, and in fact I barely have them in the daytime any more (the first one usually hits about 8:00 PM). But I really wish I could sleep through the night without taking pills that make me feel groggy in the morning. I need my sleep.
(Well, groggi*ER*. I am not and never have been a morning person. And I'm moving my time schedule back an hour and a half this week due to New Job. Gnnnnnnggggghh.)
O Chris Laning <claning@igc.org> - Davis, California
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| Re: Rain and drama [message #41858 is a reply to message #41810 ] |
Wed, 04 May 2011 01:43 |
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danceswithpahis
Messages: 382
Registered: October 2008 |
Senior Member |
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| EMoon wrote on Mon, 02 May 2011 00:55 |
I found the articles on amortality incredibly narrow-minded, smug, and privileged...clearly written by urban folk in first-world countries who travel to and fro in the city with their earbuds in and blinkers on.
In other words, they annoyed me. A lot. Yes, some of us luckier people are able to "perform" a decade or so later than most people could fifty years ago. With a lot of support from our culture starting at birth, a lot of money spent on that staying healthy thing. But life expectancy drops like a rock in the poorer parts of the world (and like a rock in water in the poorer parts)
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Yes, I'd noticed this too. Perhaps because I work in a job relating to disability benefits, so I talk to a lot of people who become disabled at younger ages. Sometimes your body just doesn't keep going no matter what life choices you make. You can eat all of the healthy food and get all of the exercise you like, but sometimes things go to pieces anyway. Or maybe you die in a car accident at age 39 because the road was icy. Who knows? A lot of it is luck of the draw (including, as EMoon pointed out, luck of the draw in being born somewhere that provides good health care, plentiful nutritious food, etc, so you have a better shot at staying healthy).
"Oh good! My dog found the chainsaw!"
-- Lilo ("Lilo and Stitch")
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