We're back in the groove again today. No more running around Vancouver for us.
Our faculty presented a wonderful concert of Haydn works last night. It's such a thrill to have such good performers and then get to be taught by them. The other thing is, here it is the middle of the summer, and the auditorium at the music building was FILLED with people from the community at the concert. (There are only 21 of us in the program, so we were not the ones filling up the hall.)
Master class this morning was great. Two new additions. Rose Terada is here -- I met her one year at SFEMS Baroque. She was sick last week and couldn't come. Alvina is now a full-fledged performing member of the class. She made sure she saw the rest of us struggle last week before she set finger to keyboard. But both of them did a nice job today. Alvina is one of several local Vancouver people who are attending. Later this week I think we're taking a field trip to her house to see her new harpsichord.
Last week we had a concert, so today we got new ensemble music and got mixed around into different ensembles. My music is much easier than last week. I'm in two different groups which consist ot two harpsichords, a melody instrument and a gamba or cello. In one group, I'm playing the "solo" harpsichord part, which is the violin part, and Rose is playing the continuo part. In the second group, we're playing another Telemann from the same series and I'm playing the continuo harpsichord part and Dawn is playing the solo part. I think I might be the only harpsichord player who got two relatively easy parts this time through. No weird clefs, no really bad printing, though they could be a bit larger, no facsimiles. Of course, rather than be grateful, I take this as a sign that I'm not up to snuff. But it's okay, because I can be pretty relaxed for the rest of the week, but not so relaxed that I don't get anything done or make any improvement.
But I know that a lot of friends who are reading this blog aren't really particularly into music, so we'll move on to the more interesting stuff: The food.
Granted it's only Monday, but dinner seems a bit better this week. Last night we had a very good shepherd's pie, and tonight we had apples and pork over rice. Plus, as you can see, you can buy wine with your dinner here in the dorms. I find that very civilized. The so-called salad bar now had a dish of cooked beets, in addition to the giant lonely bowl of mixed greens. And dessert is, as usual, wonderful. I think the woman who bakes loves lemon and whenever she bakes anything with lemon in it, it's really tart and yummy. Oh, and last night, she made chocolate volcano cakes.
Sorry to be boring, but after dinner it was back to the practice room to work out my continuo part.

Three if by Land and Three if by Sea, and Three on the Bridge -- Well you get the idea

Short blog today, because I play tomorrow, so perhaps it would be a good idea to get a decent night's sleep.

Dawn, Cindy and I went to Capilano Suspension Bridge today. Getting there was half the fun. We took the bus to the waterfront, then we took the Sea Bus (ferry) across the water, then we took another city bus to the bridge. Since it's Sunday, we did all this for $2.50, each way. Well, they did. I had bought an all day pass, because I thought it would be cheaper (and it would have been on a weekday) . I paid an extra $2, but it was still cheap -- and I didn't have to be sure I had exact change.

Whenever Zoe and I go anywhere, if there is any chance to get on a boat, we do it, so of course I was thinking of her when we took this little excursion. In fact, the whole thing (except the boat trip) reminded me of when she and I took a bus up in the hills around Baden Baden.

By the way, I am the tallest person in the picture below. I'm a whole two inches taller than the other two. But my feet are four inches longer. I know this is the kind of personal information everyone is craving.


This privately owned park was developed in the 1880s by a Scotsman who knew a good thing when he saw it. It had been a popular tourist attraction during all that time. The only bad thing that has ever happened to the bridge is that a giant tree fell on it once (obviously at one of the ends) and did some damage. In the 1980s they replaced the original bridge with something made of more metal, so it's not the wooden bridge it used to be, but it's still a spectacular view and fun to walk across. Apparently they get a decent amount of revenue by featuring this bridge in various movies -- no doubt with the handrails removed. They have also built a number of suspension bridges up in the trees so you can kind of walk around in the tree canopy.

And finally, I made a new friend today. (You know you would be disappointed if I hadn't included one of these pictures. )

Solved: The Great Canadian Fake Tree Mystery

The tree mystery is solved. They are making a movie. I still don't know why they needed the fake trees, since there are plenty of trees everywhere you look, but nobody asked me. We watched a little bit of the filming tonight. They are using one of the old buildings, and there were a lot of "students" in school uniforms standing around. I assume these were just sort of generic shots because I didn't see any small group that the cameras were up close to.
So many good things at this workshop. Thursday we had a discussion/presentation about fortepianos, how they were used, how they differ from modern pianos as well as how they differ from harpsichords. It was really enlightening. The fortepiano is in the practice room I was using today, so I played it a bit. I found it rather fun. In the discussion he also told us about a combination fortepiano/harpsichord, which was a monster that was more or less built like two nested pianos or harpsichords, with some kind of a cable going across at an angle to keep them together. He played a recording of a piece Mozart wrote for this instrument.

Yesterday was a performance day. They are really organized here. Everyone is in two groups, so there are ten groups. They made it through the concert in less than an hour. Mostly because everyone stayed in the alloted time frame. I noticed that our Locatelli group (the one where we had never managed to get through any movement without falling apart) was placed second on the program -- get it out of the way spot. However, we had some kind of a breakthrough yesterday and played it right three times in a row in rehearsal and nailed it at the concert. I don't know who was more surprised, us or our coach.

Following the performance, we had our after hours tour of the Dutch masters traveling exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery (which is actually a museum). We had a wonderful guide, and since it was an after hours tour, another employee followed us all through the museum to be sure we all left. Of course, no photography is allowed in the gallery, but I did get this amazing picture.This may be the only escalator in Vancouver. We only had to walk up two or three flights of stairs.

Today, Saturday, there are no master classes or ensembles, but we had a little seminar on harpsichord maintenance, by Ton Amir, a builder from Holland who is doing all the maintenance and tuning on harpsichords. It was a small class with about 6 of us and 6 people from the community. We took keyboards out, looked at all the things that could go wrong when a key won't repeat, and got to see a demonstration of making a quill from a feather. (Not anywhere near the type of job I thought it was -- except of course for catching the birds.) Sorry this picture isn't too clear, and that he has already stripped the "feathery" part off the feather. The best part of the explanation of how to do this was: "You just start with your knife as if you were making a quill (pen)." Most of us probably do sit at home and make quill pens right before we sit down at our computers, I'm sure. We also got some tuning "recipes" and tried them out.

I was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time today. First I got kicked out of the practice room where the fortepiano was, because Jacques wanted to practice. Then I got kicked out of the room he gave me, which had a really nice harpsichord in it (in terms of sound, but quite resistant voicing, so some work to play) because Ton wanted to move the harpsichord. Then I ended up having to help move the harpsichord and the fortepiano.

A bunch of us went into the "village" tonight for dinner. It's a small group of shops just off campus with a few small mostly takeout or fast food type restaurants, and a couple of other convenience stores, a dollar store, a bank and a Staples. We ate at the bar and had a really delicious salmon "burger" which was really a nice piece of salmon on a hamburger bun. I only realized then that I hadn't eaten anything but three cookies at 11 this morning at the harpsichord maintenance class. Since I didn't do any exercise today, I guess that's about a wash, though.

Tomorrow Dawn and Cindy and I (I think) are going to make an excursion to the Suspension bridge, which we think we are getting to by city bus, water bus (aka ferry) and city bus. I hope I have the directions right. We bought an all day bus pass which should make it pretty cheap. (the all day pass includes the water bus, but I'm not sure if it includes the bus on the other end of the line. Unfortunately, I can't print out the directions, (no printer) so I'll have to rely on my extremely accurate note-taking ability. The other exciting thing about today is that it was sunny and what probably passes here for warm. Maybe even in the 70s.

Tomorrow night we have a concert of works by Haydn with our resident ensemble. Some pieces will be played on harpsichord, some on fortepiano. (For those of you who aren't into this stuff -- a modern piano is a pianoforte and the older ones (like around the 1700s) are called fortepiano. Both are taken from the Italian words forte=loud and piano=soft.

Performance Anxiety Alleviated by Beach Time (Maybe)

I was planning on posting some pictures of the food today, but I was in such a rush to eat it that I forgot.
It turns out that we will be giving a little concert for each other tomorrow. I play in two groups, one which is playing a rather straightforward Marais piece (flute, violin, gamba, harpsichord), and one which is playing a lovely piece by Locatelli (two flutes, two harpsichords) that must have been written to torture the counting impaired. If anybody doesn't come in right, it is, as our coach Jacques Ogg described it, like trying to repair a broken sewer line in the dark. If he had hair, I think he'd be pulling it out about now. We have never made it through this piece without a train wreck. And I am not always the guilty party. The other harpsichordist is also having a tough time. If we play the third and fourth movements, we have a 50-50 chance of not falling on our faces. The above picture was taken in happier times, before the flutists realized what they were stuck with. I finally walked down to the beach this evening. It's a beautiful rocky area, I wouldn't really call it a beach in the "go swimming" sense of the word, because of all the rocks, but it's still a very nice place to go. There are about 300 steps down to the beach plus a hill at the bottom that's about a block or so more. It was almost 8:30 when we went down there, so my pictures are rather dark, but it's a nice place. There's some kind of a bunker/lookout/something or other that looks like it's been there a long time. It's been papered over with posters of naked people (many repetitions of a few posters) possibly because this is a clothing optional beach. Yeah, like anybody's going to take their overcoat off here.
Did I also mention that there are 300 steps and a hill coming back up?

It's Not All It Seems

A few interesting non-music things and mostly pictures today. 

I did a very small campus walk today, haven't covered the entire campus.  There is some interesting architecture here, but it's kind of difficult to see because there is construction going on everywhere.  No doubt they're preparing for the Republicans who said they would leave the US in droves if Obama got elected.  But then, they'd have to have a national health care plan if they were here, so what's a Conservative to do?  A dilemma.

But I digress.  Here are a few pictures of the campus:  The gothic building with glass on either end is unidentified as of now, and the dark one with a lot of glass is the Darth Vader Business School.   (Okay, I made that up.  So sue me.)  Some of the buildings I could see the names of, others I think I was seeing the backs of.               The all glass one is the library.  It must not be as new as it looks, because an all-glass building like that doesn't seem particularly energy efficient in a place as cold as Vancouver.    And on that topic, they are having a drought up here.  Check out the grass in this picture.  Pretty much all brown.  But they don't have water-saving shower heads.  You could get waterboard training in the showers here.  Actually, it's pretty nice.  

On the other hand, paper products -- like table napkins especially, are about the softness of newspaper.  Paper towels are much less soft than those at home.  Toilet paper is about the same quality as in most public buildings in the U.S. 

But now, I must tell you of a conspiracy I have discovered.  FAKE TREES!  As I was walking around the campus today, I noticed this little grove of cedar-type trees.  They were growing very close together.  But when I walked closer, they were not growing at all, but were cut trees nailed into sort of Christmas-tree stands.  Not the kind that keep the tree watered, but just nailed onto pieces of wood.  Not easy to see in a picture, but the first picture is of the little grove of trees, the second is a closeup of one of the stands.  If you care, you can click on it to enlarge.  But wait, that's not all.  These were real trees, and they probably hadn't been in these stands very long, because they were still flexible and not dried out.  However, as I walked around this grove, I found an ominous sign of even more perfidy. 

There were large tree-trunks with holes drilled into them for the insertion of branches.                       Why would they need fake trees in Canada?  Have they secretly depleted their entire stock and don't want the rest of the world to know?  What do they have more of than trees in Canada?  Is it particularly ominous that the fake trees were located outside the business school (which by the way is located on Agriculture Lane)?  Another conspiracy.  You know these Canadians sit up here acting all polite and stopping for pedestrians and not shooting each other and watching hockey games where the players have all their teeth, but I'm here to tell you.  They have fake trees!!  It's clear that there's a conspiracy up here, and I think the U.S. should graciously allow Fox News and Rush Limbaugh up here to investigate and report on it.  We can't have this so near our sacred borders. 

The Routine

As at all workshops like this, by the second day we are settled into a routine. The week's routine goes something like this:
Day 1 - I am hopelessly underqualified to be here. I think I'll change my status to audit.
Day 2 - They gave me a bunch of music to play that I'll never be able to play. I think I'll go home.
Day 3 - I think I'm going to be able to handle this.
Day 4 - I play better than that bozo.
Day 5 - Where did all these good players come from, and why do I think I"m one of them?

As it turns out, this is day two, and I've already arrived at Day 3. Apparently it was efficient to do a lot of pre-workshop worrying at home. Master class is fun, we are all more or less at the same level, though I suspect some people would be insulted by that. The music I got for one ensemble is incredibly difficult (for me) but for reasons of not being able to read it easily and having a partner who doesn't pull me along. It's not that it's anything I couldn't play on a good day. I just haven't quite had a good day yet. Neither has the other harpsichordist. We had a pretty good rehearsal today. These two flute players, Anne and Lydia, are really good. I suspect they are a bit annoyed with Amy and me. But they don't say anything and are being good sports, even though all the attention is being given to us. (Something I have always griped about at SFEMS, that the melody instruments got all the attention.) But Jacques Ogg, the harpsichordist, is our coach, so of course he spends more time with us. And frankly, we need more help than the flutists do.

Today was also the first day of the Baroque dance class. It seemed a little more difficult than some of us expected.

The particular place where I'm staying is designed to be residence for visiting scholars and the like. The public rooms are quite nice -- there's even a pool table and a baby grand piano in the lounge area, which is the whole ground floor of one of the other buildings. The outdoor spaces are quite lovely as well. However, the individual rooms are like monks' cells.
The only soft surface in my room is me. It's very noisy. Not because the neighbors are noisy, but because I am noisy. If I blow my nose or make other bodily noises that are perfectly acceptable if one is alone, it reverberates around the room. When I open or close a door, I routinely forget which way the lock turns and therefore I turn it the wrong way and then yank on the door. This makes a lot of noise, as does the following unlocking of the door and going in or out. The room has a wooden desk and chair, a bed, a wardrobe, and an open set of shelves. The floor is cement. The windows have miniblinds. It would be nice to sing Gregorian chants in here with the rest of the monks. Even my usual trashing of the room ceremony hasn't made it any quieter.

There are six players this week in harpsichord class. This means that in the two-hour class, four people get a 40-minute time slot every day. I played Monday, I didn't play today, but I will play tomorrow and Thursday. Then I won't play on Friday. There are plenty of harpsichords, and they are available four times a day in 1-1/2 hour slots. They are assigned, and each of us goes through all the available hours and harpsichords at the rate of four a day if you used all your practice hours. Last night Don Simons and I played a bunch of two-harpsichord stuff that he brought with him. There was some Schikhart that was a lot of fun, but like the other Schikhart I've played, had some real duds. But it was fun to play even when the music wasn't that good.

Later this week we have a private after-hours visit to the museum in town. They have a traveling exhibit of paintings from the Ryjksmuseum (I made up that spelling) in Amsterdam. We had a lecture tonight with slide show that was kind of a preview of what we're going to see. Last night we had a movie of a really well-staged Baroque opera, though we didn't get to see all of it. A lot of the late afternoon things get short changed because they don't get started on time, and the dining hall closes at 7. The food here is okay, but basically I think they believe they are catering to runners rather than musicians. Most of the food is carbs. On the other hand, they'll sell you a glass of wine with dinner, which goes a long way towards making up for pretty lame food.

Miscellaneous information about Canada -- health plan: One of the people auditing here told me he doesn't play anymore because he has Parkinson's and can't play because of the tremors. I was asking him how long he's had it, because he actually doesn't have noticeable tremors. He said about six years. Told me he needed an MRI and was on the three-year waiting list to get it, but was able to drive over to Buffalo (near where he lived at the time) and get it for $800. There was also an article in today's paper about a proposal that would do some significant rationing of health care. So interesting question of the day: When we go in for an MRI and our insurance company sends us a bill showing how much it cost, isn't it usually around $2K? But they will do the same MRI for a Canadian with cash in hand for $800. I'm having a hard time figuring out whose health system is the most screwed up. And who's being lied to the most.

Steps to Greatness, Vancouver Early Music Programme

This is a beautiful campus. Very green, views of the ocean, lovely landscaping, interesting architecture, especially Cecil Green college, where I'm staying.

I woke up about 3 a.m. this morning to the sound of rain pouring down. It rained here most of the day, finally stopped around 6 or so. Of course, I've been chained to a harpsichord for much of that time, so anything could have been going on outside.

We were treated to a wonderful concert by our faculty last night, and assured that by the end of the workshop we will all play as well. I know I believe it. Notice that they are wearing SUITS!! At the reception following the concert I kept looking at this gentleman who really looked like Colin Tilney (a well-known harpsichordist from Toronto, and who taught the first harpsichord workshop I ever went to.) Even with my limited knowledge of Canada, i know that Toronto is nowhere near Vancouver. So obviously it wasn't him. But it was. Turns out he has moved to Vancouver (or perhaps Victoria).

As a small digression, at the first workshop I went to, I was entirely clueless about playing the harpsichord. It's just another keyboard, right? Well, no. I was swiftly disabused of the notion that I knew anything. The group at this particular class was almost as clueless as I -- though there were two people who were really good in the class, and then all the rest of us. The way I remember it, he groused through most of the week saying he had thought the level of students would be higher, and we had groused most of the week saying we expected someone who could teach at our level.

So fast forward to last night. A woman who was in that class with me is here, and we finally got up the nerve to go talk to him. He mercifully didn't remember me and I think remembered her only because she has a very unusual name. But as we reminisced about the class, he said "I have only happy memories of that time." Apparently being in a place where you could buy good wine for next to nothing and the weather is warm does something really nice for Canadians.

As I said, it's a beautiful campus. It's on several levels, of course. This is my course to get to class: Walk about half a block, go up a flight of stairs:
Walk a half block or so, cross the "busy" street, and go up some more stairs. Take a brief respite by walking about 20 or 30 feet through the rose garden and guess what? More stairs!

Once we get to the music building, our classes are on the 3rd floor, or in the basement. So we get more stairs, and we get to use these stairs multiple times each day, so we won't be too lazy. There is an elevator in this building, but it's clear that using the elevator is for wimps and older folks. And guess who doesn't want to be categorized that way? Have you ever noticed how hard it is when you're out of breath to try to talk normally so the people you're with won't notice that you're h-u-f-f-i-n-g to make...it...through...every...word? Did I mention that my room is up several small 5-step flights of stairs, or that the dining hall is on the second floor?

Today was our first day of classes. There are only 6 participants in the harpsichord master class, which runs for 2 hours, so four of us play every day, which means it's a good thing I brought a lot of music with me. I played today and had a good time. And of course, I lowered the bar for everyone else which is an easy way to make people like you. I got a number of good pointers today, and didn't feel put down about anything yet. Jacques Ogg has a very engaging manner when teaching.

Everyone is in two ensemble groups. One of mine is two flutes and two harpsichords. We're playing a Locatelli piece which is essentially two trio sonatas being played at the same time a beat apart. The other harpsichordist and I did not do too well on this, I think we had to start over about 20 times. It's a facsimile, somewhat hard to read, looks like it's lined up, but isn't, and has no realization, and only the other harpsichord part is showing. In fact, nobody asked any of us whether we could realize a bass or not- they just don't give out any realized parts. So it's play or die! Simple. No excuses. Don't admit you don't know what you're doing.

My other group is playing a Marin Marais suite with flute & violin. I know a few people here from SFEMS workshop, Anne Simons, her brother Don, Dawn Kuymejian, and Rob (don't know his last name, but he's a flutist.)