I haven’t posted much about music yet, but in RealLife I am a musician! And a music teacher. I find I’m still feeling 50/50 about myself in terms of the divide between performer and teacher, and I don’t want to lose the performer part! I found out that Philip Glass was going to be the composer-in-residence at the Scotia Festival of Music (ScotiaFest) this year and recorded an audition tape and applied all on the same day because I was so excited. I’d never done ScotiaFest before, despite living in Nova Scotia for my whole life. I think in the past the young artists (what they call people like me who are there to learn) were a younger cohort, but the age and calibre has definitely risen. The festival mainly focusses on chamber music, however there’s also an orchestral component in the second week. There are lots of young artists from near and far who come to learn from the guest artists who are invited to the festival. There are concerts every single night of the whole 15 night festival, and some days there are two concerts!
Most people in the festival were university students who were off school for the summer, and could focus just on summer festivals, but I teach public school so I was trying to balance my job with the festival. I still had to teach Monday to Wednesday evenings, so I couldn’t attend those concerts, BUT there are open dress rehearsals for pretty much every concert so I sat in on those for the concerts I couldn’t attend. I find rehearsals so interesting – the way people work and communicate with each other in a musical setting is great to watch and learn from, and it’s something you don’t get in a concert setting alone. Sometimes I was able to attend dress rehearsals and the concert in question, which was also cool to see how the concert went vs what they’d been focussing on in the morning rehearsal. I knit a lot during those dress rehearsals; I find I can listen much better when I’m doing something with my hands. This is the (much drawn-out) Levenwick cardigan. I think I’ve turned the corner though!
The first week consisted mostly of chamber rehearsals and masterclasses, and the second week was busy with chamber performances and the beginning of the orchestra rehearsals. Below are a couple shots from our first few rehearsals. The principal bassist is Joe Phillips, who came in to give us a masterclass and also play some badass music in a couple of the evening concerts (including Vasks and a sick piece by Golijov for bass and double string quartet). The other fun part is that they brought in Max Kasper to join the section, who was my teacher in grade 12 and also for one year during my year off between my undergrad and masters degrees! It was super fun to play in a section with him.
Between rehearsals, I managed to grab this insanely tall ice cream cone from Dairy Bar. It’s soft serve swirl, vanilla and raspberry rose. I got it on a day when it was over 25C, and I was trying to walk back to the arts centre without it melting all over me. I realized halfway back that somewhere in my brain I had equated eating it quickly with walking quickly, and I had been basically stampeding along the sidewalk while simultaneously licking at top speed like an ice cream fiend (which I am). Upon realizing this, I planned out my trajectory in order to be able to pause in shady spots to maintain my cone.
As well, I spent a lot of time in the freight elevator. Most of which to get between floors because ew, stairs. But also occasionally to play and warm up in because I couldn’t be bothered to find a practice room downstairs. Let me just say that it sounds like a freakin’ cathedral inside it. You could sound like garbage anywhere else, but in there you’re like “ah yis I am world class soloist”. It’s great for the ego. Not so great when someone actually needs the elevator on another floor and you have to fling your case onto your bass at top speed and try to act like you haven’t been casually playing Bach in a freight elevator.
For my chamber group, I got paired up with an amazing and lovely violist from Mexico named Fernando, and the repertoire we were assigned was the Eyeglass Duet by Beethoven! This piece is originally for viola and cello, and apparently it’s even hard on cello, but I had to play it on bass which is a whole other animal. I was actually excited to tackle it – bassists pretty much never get to play non-symphonic Beethoven because it’s not like there’s a ton of chamber music (that’s not contemporary) that’s actually written for the bass and not the cello. I had to change a few things in it, because one particular passage was just impossibly high and sounded like cats dying, and another one involved horrific string crossings at a fast speed that presumably sounds lovely and chordal on cello, but instead sounded like a scratchy mess of indiscernible pitch when I tried to play it as written. So I guess it’s “my arrangement”. I really loved working with Fernando; he’s very musical and easy to get along with, and I found we were able to get a good balance. We got to play a noon hour concert at a public library here that has a beautiful open concert space (directly below). We DID have an insanely stressful page-turning pedal malfunction RIGHT in the middle of the performance (still can’t figure out why – we tested it beforehand, it was fully charged, AND it worked properly immediately after the performance) which made my heart rate speed up a lot, but we got through it with only one minor mishap!
I also got to attend a lobster party hosted by a lovely couple who provided SO MANY lobsters and other vegetarian options, and beer for everyone, and local soda pops, and many chip snacks, and watermelon, and cookies, and and and. It was very good. Here is a cute friend of my friend Sarah, myself, and my close friend Josh (the other bassist at the festival!). Note the raincoat hood is up: it was very windy and honestly kind of cold and we huddled in packs to preserve warmth while we scarfed down lobster.
I brought my banjo over to the arts centre for a couple days because I was experiencing a bit of bass overload and just needed to walk away from the instrument for a little break (while still doing music-y things) to something that has no pressure attached to it because I am a pretty amateur-ish banjo player. Everyone was very entertained by the presence of this exotic stringed instrument and the official ScotiaFest photographer snapped my photo.
Philip Glass did two performance nights, and two nights of moderated interviews. We were each allowed to attend one of each type, because they were essentially sold out (one of the benefits of being a young artist at this festival is that you can get into everything for free). He also held a private Q&A one morning for just the young artists, and I honestly loved that the most. It was kind of strange, but at the first concert I attended with him performing I found I got really upset and actually cried. I think it was just this combination of feeling so ridiculously lucky to be sitting in a room listening to Philip Glass perform his own music, and then the surreal nature of having heard this music so many times and then hearing it in person AND having him talk about hanging out with Allen Ginsburg and getting choked up about missing him, and then playing a piece with a recording of Ginsburg reading his own poetry for the piece. The thing he said that stuck with me the most was during the private Q&A. He said that even when he writes a new piece, it’s “not new music”. He said, “I’m 81 years old!” Someone asked where he thought process music would go in the future, and he said, “I have no idea! No one is the future of music. The best you can hope for is to be the music for right now.”
My duo also performed two more times during the second week. Once was at a local private school for some grades 1-3 students as part of an outreach concert (no photos of that because of privacy regarding the kids), and I got to talk to them about the funny name of the piece and how it was likely named that because Beethoven was poking fun at his cellist friend that he wrote the piece for (for them to play together!). Finally, we were selected to play in the evening young artists concert on the Friday night, and that performance went really well! Definitely the best out of the three. I felt really relaxed and pleased, and basically just pretended the audience didn’t exist so that I didn’t get self-conscious about many many people peering down at me expecting me to make nice sounds. The photo below is from our dress rehearsal earlier that day.
Then, we finished out the festival with an orchestral concert! The repertoire was a keyboard concerto by Bach, Bartok’s Divertimento for strings, and Philip Glass’s second violin concerto. The violin concerto was super amazing to work on because we were performing it with violinist Tim Fain, who is a member of the Glass Ensemble and has collaborated extensively with Philip Glass. He’s an amazing performer, but also just the most genuine and enthusiastic and kind human. He even made a point after the young artists concert to call to me in the hallway (which my first reaction was, TIM FAIN KNOWS MY NAME?! in my head) and tell me that he loved my playing! *swoon* For the orchestra concert, all the principal seats of the sections were taken by guest artists, which was a fun dynamic to be able to learn from them while rehearsing.
The concert went really well! I honestly felt a bit comatose by that point – the dress rehearsal was 9:30am to 12:30pm, then the concert was a 2pm, and we’d all been attending the guest artist concert the previous night that ended at 9pm and then I had to drive back to my house. But the concert was really exciting and everything just came together perfectly! Below is Tim’s final bow after the concerto.
And here’s the bass section! Note my extreme shortness. (Side note, I hate when people say that someone is “too small to play the bass”. That’s not a thing. If you want to play bass, play bass. Get a smaller instrument if you are a smaller person. It can also often be code used to unconsciously discourage girls from playing double bass.)
And to top it all off, Tim Fain, magical human, hosted a sight-reading party after our post-concert pizza party and it was so fun! I ended up playing cello while sight-reading the Mendelssohn octet (which was a bit of a hot mess pitch-wise, but rhythm-wise I nailed it) because Josh had packed his bass in his flight trunk and was using mine and there was a spare cello. Here’s the gang who participated in the nerdiest most fun thing (this is one of the nerdy fun things I love most about classical music people – the sight-reading party).
FINALLY on the way to a bar to get drinks with a group of stragglers one last time, Josh and I managed to stop by Cows before it closed for the night. (Mine is mango and strawberry sorbet.)
I had such a fun ScotiaFest, and if I can make it work in my schedule again next year, I’d definitely consider applying/going again next year! It’s fun to do a lot of chamber music – in the past I’d mostly done summer programs that focussed either on masterclasses (ie. solos) or orchestral repertoire, so this was a happy medium for me! Masterclasses, chamber music, AND orchestra music! Plus lots of ice cream and good friends. 🙂