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.