So, here's a birds eye view of the highlights of the past couple of months, and the news of the today:
Amsterdam:
I spent an amazing weekend up in Amsterdam visiting:
a) Sarah Baracks who was on study abroad
b) Gideon Bodden, one of the modern masters of the instrument
The weather was amazing, as was the city and its bells.
Sarah and I did a great shabbes in the park on Friday,
then Saturday I met up with Gideon and several other carillon students to climb the historic Oude Kerk church tower smack dab in the middle of the red light district.I got to meet and hear Toru Takeo, one of my main competitors for the Fabiola contest this fall. He is very good. I also played and we both got good feedback from Gideon. Gideon is very demanding, not in a mean way, but in a very refreshing way -- Musically, platonically, it should sound like this, so make it happen. No excuses. No concern for the limitations of the instrument, the body, or the human mind. Just do it.
After some drinks, we went to the Mint Tower where Kasia got a long (2 hours-ish) lesson on the practice carillon. Eventually I got restless watching the lesson and wandered upwards through the tower, found my way to the roof, and sat up there watching the city go by.
I returned to the practice room in time to see the end of the lesson, and asked Gideon if I could play the carillon. "Of course!"
Mint tower is a small carillon, very light, and missing the top octave (3 octave instead of 4 octave) that I've grown so accustomed to. Not to mention 350 years old, and in a historical tuning system. It may have possibly been one of the most beautiful instruments I've ever played. Like a Stradivarius, you can't beat the old masters. I stayed up there playing much longer than I had intended. Gideon told me to take my time, and that the carry clearly to the ground so I don't need to play loudly. I took about 1/2 hour up there, and according to Gideon, played more delicately than anyone else he's ever heard on that carillon.
We hit the bar again and had a great evening. I was on a huge high from those bells.
A couple weeks ago I got a call to play a concert in Oldenzaal. Eventually I found out it was Gideon who had recommended me for it. Hooray for good impressions!
Sunday was some more park time with Sarah, picnicing, enjoying the city and the weather, and also a visit to the Anne Frank house. Sarah was a great host and I had a lot of fun out there, though I guess to appreciate that you just had to be there.
Though I did many wonderful things there, perhaps the highlight of it all was connecting all of them by bicycling amidst the canals and cars and trams and hundreds of other bicyclists, sometimes carrying several people at once. Its a city that makes you love bicycling.
Croatia and Bosnia:
Last week, three friends from DC converged on the former Yugoslavia and I intended to be the 4th. I booked a flight to Dubrovnik, arriving a day earlier than they were scheduled to get there.
The next day, I got an e-mail. Bosnia is amazing, do you want to come to Sarajevo instead? A day was sufficient for Dubrovnik which, though incredibly beautiful, is a bit too small and tourism-oriented for my comfort. I took a 6 hour bus to Sarajevo, which I grumbled about beforehand, but which ended up being 6 hours of thrilling sights. The terrain out there is stunning. Southern Croatia has a very Mediterranean feel, rocky coastline and islands and clear blue water. Bosnia is much greener and more rugged. I also preferred Bosnia.
Sarajevo was a great. I can't say exactly why or how or what. The weather was stunning, there was a beautiful bustling market area,
absurdly strong coffee, gorgeous Islamic architecture,
(plus Hapsburg architecture, plus Soviet architecture). It felt like a real city where people lived. They didn't mind us being there, but they weren't waiting for us to arrive or structuring their lives around our presence. Plus, a great luxury, old (relatively speaking) friends.
It took a day to get used to being with people again, ie co-planning and communication and all that, but once I did it was quite a treat.After Sarajevo it was back to Croatia and off to an island (10+ hours on the bus) for some SCUBA diving. The dive center picked me up and informed me that since the hostel I was supposed to stay in was not open yet, I'd be staying in the staff-house. This translated to me having my own personal room with king-sized bed and harbor view for about 10 euros per night. They also pointed me to the 2 best restuarants on the island, and the best gelato place. I met an Australian grandmother on the bus who became my dinner partner for the next 2 days and we tried them all. All of them were incredibly good.
And during the days, I dove. Out on the boat in the morning, 2 dives, back in time for lunch. Me, a staff-guide, and an Australian couple. They kept spotting all the cool underwater sea life. On the first dive, the Aussie guy found an Octopus hiding on the sea floor. It took a good minute for me to distinguish him from the rocky sea floor around him and he was perfectly still and impressively camoflauged. Our guide was able to convince him to come out and swim for us. Definitely the coolest creatures down there (besides us). By the last dive, I had gotten used to the idea that I simply don't spot things, but somehow I managed to find 2 hidden octopi in little holes in the rock. Neither came out for us, but one of them looked at me for a while, blinking occasionally (who would've guessed, they've got eyelids).
One week after my arrival, I returned home. My route was a bus to a ferry to an airport shuttle to a plane to a train. Some of them only ran once daily -- missing any of them would've meant being stranded and unable to get home. But I caught everything leading up to the flight, got on the plane, and got to the train station in time to have caught the last train home, if the trains had been running, instead of being on strike that day. An Albanian-Belgian airport employee gave me a lift to Brussels where I crashed on a friend's floor and then woke up early for...
Joint 2-day Jewish - Muslim training on Islamophobia and Antisemitism: This was great. Very cool, thoughtful people, well prepared materials, good and informative. Has helped the way I think about both Islamophobia and Antisemitism.
2 days later: finally make it back to Mechelen and sleep in my own bed. As if a 2-day training after a week on the road wasn't enough, I ended up at a Derrida lecture after the training. It was totally consciousness-altering. I fell asleep.
Thesis:
This is going well right now. Lots to do, little time, but in full gear and most obstacles seem to have been cleared. The hardest part of this is working with my building guy. He does a lot of the building work, but working with him takes a lot of interpersonal / managerial skill, not to mention language abilities. The problem with giving someone directions in a language that they speak fluently and that you barely speak is that you come off as the dumb one and its very easy to wind up in a situation where the native speaker starts to wonder why they're doing the things that this idiot is asking them to do. Poor Dutch has not been my only mistake in the process and I'm learning that I really need to do my homework before our meetings to make this process flow smoothly.
The last 4 times we've met its bounced back and forth between productive and frustrating. I think he has less patience for - and interest in - refining the product and more interest in being finished, fair enough. Every once in a while, he'll grab the wheel and say, "this is what needs to happen and this is how its going to look." Or he'll just go ahead and built it between our meetings. Gotta love the initiative. That said, he doesn't understand the product the way I do, and some of these changes / new systems are simply not correct / not good enough.
4 meetings ago, I described the needs for a specific system and he designed a solution. I looked at it and knew it was overly complicated. He wanted to go ahead to the next step. I didn't know yet how to simplify it. Or how to explain tactfully in Dutch why even though it did the job, and even though I didn't have an alternate solution, we weren't moving forward. That was a frustrating meeting.
3 meetings ago, I figured out how to simplify it and explained it to him. He agreed that the new way was much more effective and would save loads of work. That was a good meeting. I had hoped it would be a turning point, one in which he realized that, in spite of my broken Dutch, I had a good head on my shoulders.
2 meetings ago I walked in hoping it would be different and found that it was not. I had just come back from vacation, my vision of next steps was different from his, and I was too rusty on the project to properly discuss the order of things. He also had skipped some of the things I asked him to do. After reflection, I realized that his vision of progress is building the large components and frameworks first, then adding in the little systems. For a woodworker this makes sense -- build the cabinet first, then the drawers. Thus he's likely to skip little component X but take some initiative and modify big component Y without my approval. My vision of progress is figuring out the little systems that actually produce the sound and making sure they do the job they need to do -- then building the larger framework up around those. But in that moment, all I really knew was that when I told him what needed to come next he got frustrated.
So after that meeting I sat down and did my homework. I mapped out all the components of the design, I wrote up specifications, not just for the next piece we were working on, but for all parts. I learned the dutch I needed to explain all of the systems and why the needed to be the way they were. I prepared to explain why they needed to be built in the order I proscribed, such that any piece whose design is informed by another piece is built after that other piece. I wrote up a dual task list for us which coordinated the work he would do with the work I would do, in order, such that each result feeds into the other person's next task. This plan spanned from today, until the point of finishing. I hoped that the birds eye view of the project would keep him from feeling like we were off track or not moving with direction and intentionality.
Today I explained it all to him. At the end his proposals for next steps matched mine. This was a productive meeting. We'll see what comes of it. I've learned a lot through the process. From now on I'm going to prepare like this for every meeting, not just when things go wrong. I also need to take control readily, be more comfortable saying how things will be, and stop worrying about hurting his feelings by not affirming his ideas. He doesn't seem to mind me making things be the way I want them, as long as I can clearly articulate them. But whenever I'm unclear or hesitant, he takes it as a sign that I'm not in control and that he has to step up and take the wheel.
Performance:
Performance has its ups and downs. Today was an up.
I rocked St Rombouts. Delicate. Sensitive. Compelling. Powerful. Everything seemed to go my way. If I could imagine it, I could play it. I had a trace of Gideon. Platonically, musically, this is how this section should be played, I would decide. And it would come out just that way, practically effortlessly. I found I was able to not only play multiple lines with multiple appendages, but to care for each of those lines as its own little organism, voicing it expressively as its own creature separate from the other lines going on simultaneously. Ultimate multitasking. Somehow I could be aware of every note, even the fast ones buried amidst a sea of sound, somehow there was enough time to think about each of them and exactly how they should sound within the context of the whole and somehow thinking was all it took to get my body to play it that way.
I credit several things -- being exposed to Gideon, listening to a recent concert by a very accomplished carillonneur and realizing that what I had thought of as the instruments limits were really just excuses for sloppiness. Returning to tai chi practice. Starting to study music less at the practice klavier, where your technical limits color your sense of what the music sounds like, and starting to do more study from the score, or at a piano, where you're more free to conceive of the music in its full potential. Realizing that time is running short and if I'm imagining myself playing everything better at the time of the competition, I'd better make better happen now.
Who knows where it came from or whether it will last. For today, soaked in the sweat of an hour and a half of playing in the warm Mechels humidity, I felt as though I had reached an artistic pinnacle. If I played that way at the contest, I wouldn't really care about anyone else or how I measured up. That would be enough for me. I'm mostly fearful of playing below my abilities on that particular day. Like I said, there have been ups and downs.
Concert Carillon:
Tonight I went to a concert for travelling carillon and brass band. Pretty cool stuff. Check out the clip.
Also, for some reason, they had an accordionist do a number. I wasn't expecting much here, but when someone plays the famous aria from the Marriage of Figaro on solo accordion, I take notice. He's even got a little dance.
Looking forward:
Life is going to be an exciting cocktail consisting largely of running around gathering materials, building and supervising the practice carillon project; practicing on St Rombouts and on the schools practice instruments, polishing my huge competition repertoire and learning the last couple of pieces; visiting carillons on the weekends; studying campanology and history for oral exams (first one in 2 days); writing up my thesis work; and all the unpredictable and hopefully good things that happen in between.
