Visitors and Other Happy News

Wednesday are usually busy. But between classes, packing for my upcoming 10-day trip to Scotland and Ireland, going to city hall twice to make sure I had my Belgian identity card for the trip, trying to do some last-minute compensation for not practicing enough piano or putting in enough time on composition (huge assignment) this week, and returning to trapeze class, its been an extra-full day.
A broad overview of this past week: things have been great, more or less every day has been a happy day, there's been a lot of variety, and the sun has been shining the whole way through.
I'm going to try to break the news of the last week up into bite-sized bits.

1) Koen is still amazing:
We started talking about overtones in campanology today. I know about overtones. I've given the spiel to too many people to count. But Koen starts talking about them and you feel like he just explained the meaning of life and the hidden structure of the entire universe to you, tying together infinite series, organ construction and maintenance, music history, psychoacoustics, the golden ratio, compass-and-straightedge constructions, acoustic science, historical tuning systems, instrumental performance technique, recording technology, party tricks with pianos, etc. like they were all the most naturally related subjects, and indeed it felt seamless and incredibly enlightening.
We finished looking at historical bell constructions. Its pretty fascinating, there are only two trustworthy documents to tell us how bells were made in the 12th century -- one written by 'Theophilus the Priest' on 'The Several Crafts Conducted at a Monastery', which reads like a how-to guide to making stained glass, casting brass ornaments, building organs, making bells, and other such crafts. The other document is not even a document in the traditional sense. Its a stained glass window in the Cathedral of York, England, which was donated by the Lord Mayor of the town who happened to also be a bellfounder. He put a couple of images of himself at his craft in the window and 800 years later its one of only two records of the ancient crafting techniques that filled his life.
And I'm learning how to look at a bell and read out its history, when was it made, who were the bellfounders contemporaries, what historical techniques did he use, what did he know of the science and what still remained to be discovered, what issues came up during the casting process, etc. Think CSI.

2) Trapeze is going well:

Will this be me by the end of the year?

Last time I went (2 weeks ago) all the inversion and uninversion got me feeling pretty sick, but this time I took some meds to prevent that and in spite of a few topsy turvy feelings I help up well. I still can't really get up the fabrics, but I feel like I'm making at least some progress on the ground. I can hang by my legs from the trapeze and get up and down pretty smoothly now. And we learned a new suspended position on trapeze and I was able to do it! Got it at the same pace as these light strong kids that seem to be able to do everything with so much less effort than me! Here's a pic of someone much prettier than me in the same position:
The thing about this class: I probably shouldn't be doing it. This period in my life should be about learning NOT to do it all, living slowly, and simply, etc. It shouldn't be about learning to climb fabric and hang from the trapeze. But well, I've been dreaming of fabrics for years, and at 1 hour a week, I feel like this is a vice I can tolerate for now.


3) Video-art exhibit:
There was a video-art exhibit (loosely speaking, film, but some didn't really fit the mold of plot or character development, etc.) in town. It was a really great exhibit because they made the setting just as much a part of the art as the videos themselves. They put up TV screens all around town in different locations -- one in an underground parking lot, one in a cafe, one in an ATM booth, a few in an abandoned hospital, one in a nunnery, one in city hall, one in an old indoor meat market, one in the city supreme court, etc. It became a sort of treasurehunt, though you did get a map to help you out. One of my favorites was of pieces of African art from the Metropolitan Museum filmed at night in the dark, with brief flashes of light to illuminate the pieces. The artist's goal was to take away the sterile museum setting from the art and try to make the pieces come alive. In my opinion she succeeded, and it was all made extra-cool by the fact that you had to wander for a bit amidst a dark corridor in an old hospital to find the film, guided only by the sound of an old-school film projector running in a darkened room. Strangest bit was standing next to someone's car in the city's (safe, well-lit, ultramodern and clean) parking garage, watching a movie of a man standing still (close-up profile shot), being hit in the back of the head by an occasional projectile, and trying to guess what the object was by feel alone.
Anyways, the festival was made much more enjoyable by the fact that I had a couple of guests to see it with.


3) Houseguests:
My friend Mimi put me in touch with Danny (who I had met for 5 minutes a year ago) and Eric (who I had never met). They're doing the half-year post-graduate Europe trip and passed through Mechelen to come visit for a couple of days. They were great to have, we hit it off well, my air mattress and spare bed got used, I got to sightsee my own town, cook with others, hang around for slow mornings, play cards, etc, and for a few days I got to be just one of several people who sleep with a nalgene by their pillow (Belgians do not do the waterbottle thing). And on their last night we cooked a big feast and had Eddy (teacher), Paolo, and Treasa (my anglophonic carillon-school comrades) over for dinner. Monday morning, I saw them off and went straight to class, tired but happy from a double header of 3-4am nights.



4) Travellin:
Fall break is starting and I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to travel to Scotland and Ireland. I felt a twinge of heavy-heartedness packing my bag, as this was an almost constant act from this past summer (to the point of distress / exhaustion), but it passed quickly, and I have the next 10 days to explore Scotland (w/ Harry, who by now counts as a local), and Ireland (w/ Treasa, born and raised). I'll let you know how it goes.


5). Morning Pages Readthrough:
For the past week or so I've been reading through several notebooks full of my daily writings (3 pages / day, every morning) from the past 4.5 months or so. I consider myself very lucky to have such a detailed record of this incredible, exciting, chock-full-of-life summer that I spent bouncing between DC and large swaths of North America, and its been neat to relive the daily ups and downs in such detail and still get to see it from a broad, condensed perspective.
Its confirmed for me something that I've started to already realize, which is that the biggest thing I need to learn right now to live a happy life is, quite simply, how to rest when I'm tired, and how to build the habits to ensure that I actually do that. I sometimes present as laid-back, but I also have a pretty nasty work-a-holic / always-doing-something-a-holic tendancy. Or, as an acupuncturist guessed from a brief exam, I have a tendency to go full-steam for far too long, until I've depleted all my reserves, and then crash for a long time. I've been trying to cool things down a bit for some time, and probably that side shows more clearly, but its still been an issue. I'd like to think this is the beginning of a period of deeper healing.
The neat thing is that I sort of already knew this coming out here. A big part of my motivation was slowing things down, having more time, living a bit more simply, etc, and while I've discovered that there's still not quite enough time for everything I want to do out here, there's enough time and enough absence of "serious" responsibility to others that I have the freedom to hit the "stop" button when I need to.
Anyways I felt pretty elated to have seen this and articulated it clearly enough to hold on to, and felt that if I could learn good resting habits, life wouldn't be nearly as hard or heavy (or hard-heavy). This is all upon the backdrop of a weeks worth of sun. Today the grey came, kicking off phase 2 of the project -- hanging on to this realization and to gentle living even when the color of the world is less than fully supportive of that. The eventual phase 3 is doing so when the content of life is a bit more packed and less supportive, ie being back in the US and working.
Well, we'll see how it goes. In a nice example of self-referential irony, I've stayed up way too late working on this post.

An Affirming Day

One more photo from the bike trip this past weekend. The road leads ever on and on...

I often wonder what sort of sense I'm giving of life out here. Its likely that I tend to write more on the good days than on the bad ones, and sound extra-happy on the good days because of their triumphant emergence out of the bad. In truth, some days are good, some are a little blah. Its feels like a while since anything's been really bad though, and I count myself quite lucky for that. This past week I was dealing with a lot of fatigue (I really can't say for how long, my sense of time is pretty warped out here and generally timespans seem longer than they are, both for good and bad). I'm not sure why, best case I'm just working out a little bit too hard (I have the endurance to jog the better part of an hour, but maybe its taking too much of a toll), worst case this is related to that Epstein-Barr diagnosis I got a few years ago which may or may not be a real condition depending on whose opinion you ask (some say its like a mild form of chronic fatigue syndrome, others say its just an indicator that you've had mono at some point in your life, it doesn't actually do anything itself). I've found at least that resting and going easier on myself can help, so that seems to be the right direction.

Anyways:
Wednesday is the big climax of my week as its the day of all of my lessons that involve actual work or practice. Wednesday is where I finish last weeks work and find out what this weeks work is. And today was a very affirming Wednesday.

Firstly, I finally managed to compose something more than a handful of broken fragments and half-hatched ideas. I actually made something that held together, and I knew it was good before I walked into composition lesson, but I guess I didn't fully realize until I looked up from the piano after about 3-4 minutes of playing and saw the smile on Geert's face. "Bravo" he said, and within a minute we were sitting in front of the carillon talking about how to realize it on the instrument. Its gonna be tricky to play, but we (well, Geert) found a possible avenue as a four-hands arrangement. If it comes out as good as we imagine, it'll sound awesome and pretty unique too compared to what else is out there.

Secondly, I had my lesson with Eddy today, and finally asked him some of the long-term development questions I had, like when he says a piece sounds pretty good, what does that mean, where does it need to go next, and how far does it need to / can it go, where do I take it over the next year, etc? I think I was frustrated because of the two answers I could conceive of, a) This is as good as it gets, what, you want more? and b) This is far from as good as it gets and you can and will spend the rest of the year taking these 5 pieces all the way to the end of that road, neither of them made me very happy. But the answer was satisfying and somewhere in between these two options; the pieces I've been working on are mostly there. With focus I can execute most of the expressive details of the performance but what remains is to assimilate those details so that they come naturally, so that the performance is organic and not cerebral. This seems like the right advice to me. And it means that 3/5 of my performance requirements are in some sense fulfilled, as far as lessons are concerned. I just need to keep running them mindfully and get them into my body. And that means that we'll be able to cover a lot in lessons over the next year, far beyond the 'learn 5 hard pieces really well' requirement for graduation. Indeed, Eddy mentioned that he has realized that I'm going to need some more 'stimuli' as he put it and that we'll be able to move past the exam requirements and look at new and interesting repertoire that might fall outside of the suitable-for-an-exam-piece box.

Thirdly, Piano: here it was exciting just to be playing and feeling like I was on my feet again. For a long time I considered myself a pianistic invalid. I had had a lot of lessons, but never learned good technique (wouldn't have had the patience for it), just partially learned pieces, therefore I could fake it and make some music but from a classical piano perspective I was ruined and a lost cause and could never properly learn or perform serious pieces to any reasonable standard of quality. Now its clear that that's false. I'm less advanced than on carillon, so there's more tangible to fix and practice, but I can still make music and now my technique is moving in the right direction. Its a good feeling a mix of 'I'm on the way' and 'I've got lots of interesting ground to cross'.

Fourthly: I gave a concert today on the 'Our Lady of the Dijle Church' carillon, which I had visited once before. It was really hard to play, stiff springs, lots of resistance, and uneven resistance from note to note. Last time we met, I was unprepared, but this time I managed to make some really great music on the thing!

Finally -- a few weeks ago I ended up at a party with 15-20 Belgian students, and it turns out they were all journalism students, and one of their assignments now is to interview a native English speaker. I did one interview a week ago that will be published in a local paper -- pretty cool :) And I did another one today that was just for their class assignment, but we did it in the carillon school and it was a bit more in depth. As always with interviews, I was nervous about being able to say something intelligent on the spot, but when we finished, they told me I was a really good speaker and fun to interview. They also asked me to play for them so I put out a rendition of the Barnes Sicilienne. This was cool for 2 reasons.
1) playing the piece, I actually felt like I played it better than I used to, in spite of not having any coaching on it. Its like I was able to think more clearly about where I wanted it to go. It still had the sensitivity that the American carillon community likes, but it had more backbone. This is good news for me because it means I'm progressing as a musician, not just learning how to play specific pieces.
2) they really responded well to it. There was that sort of silence after I finished when you could hear their smiles. The guy said something like, "I listened and I became all quiet inside". Sweet.

Well, it was a tired day because I jogged yesterday, so I skipped out on trapeze class and by the end of the day felt refreshed enough to go out for a beer w/ my two fellow English speaking carillon students. 1 beer and 2 hours later I'm back home and ready for bed.

A logistical note -- I set up this blog-update-email thing so that folks who weren't familiar with blog-tech could get the updates in their e-mail. Let me know how it is and if you really like the system or really dislike the system -- if its unpopular I can just switch it off and nobody will get it. Of course, if some like it and some don't I'll just have those that don't unsubscribe themselves.

Best,
Jon

Also...

Video shots of the school's courtyard and carillon museum for anyone who's interested:

Trip to Boom

On Sunday I took a trip out to the hanggliding training hill in Boom. Boom (closer to rhyming with gnome than with room) is about 10-15 km from Mechelen and was a beautiful bike ride. Belgium has an incredible bike-transit system -- there are canals running everywhere with bike paths alongside, and bicycle waypoint numbers on all bike friendly routes that help you line up where you are with the map.
You really only need to write down all the waypoints you'll pass and then follow the signs. There are bike bridges to cross the canals, local maps alongside the route, and even biker cafes right along the bike path. Here's biker cafe and a bridge in the background (blue, on the right)

All this to say I rode between two reasonably separated towns without ever seeing a car. Just water and rolling countryside.

I don't have too much exciting to report from the training hill - I got to hold and run with the glider (its heavy before you start moving, like 50 pounds at least), no take off or anything, but maybe next time. I also got to watch some more experienced people take off from the top of the hill. Someday soon, that shall be me.

It was a little frustrating being language-separated from everybody -- anyone can speak English to you if you have a question, but in a big group hanging out and watching people fly down a hill, the natural language is Dutch and its hard to keep up and stay in the loop if you can't understand it. The eventual destination with this hanggliding thing is a 10 day mountain flight camping trip in France this April. I just hope by then my Dutch is good enough (or my charming personality has made people want to only speak English) to feel like a part of the group for those 10 days.

One final shot, because after all, the low countries are famous for their windmills:

How to Beat the System

There is a law which states that city officials may not speak any language to you other than Dutch. I learned this when trying to register and get my Belgian identity-card at city hall.
Me: Kant u Engels Spreken? (do you speak English?)
Then: Nee (no)
Now that I have enough Dutch to fumble around and try to explain myself, I've discovered how to beat the system: speak Dutch with reckless abandon, whether you know the right words to use or not. After about a minute of this, the attendant will simply lose patience and kindly request that you switch into English.

The Bronze Heart

This afternoon I saw Eddy and he told me that he could give me a VIP ticket to the performance of Gaston Feremans' Het Bronzen Hart in Antwerp. The name means the bronze heart and it is written for full orchestra, adult choir, children's choir, vocal soloists, and carillon. Over the course of 8 movements, it paints a series of tableaus of Flemish urban life through the seasons, all tied together with the carillon that sits in the center of the city ringing out music throughout the year. Eddy was performing one of Feremans' works for solo carillon as part of the first half of the concert.
So off we went to Antwerp, and I got to hear a lot of really big music that was both good and largely about the carillon. It was kind of strange to have an entire concerthall full of people sitting and listening to 200+ musicians sing about the carillon. I'm not used to my instrument getting so much attention.
Afterwards there was a reception, where I met the 'fames' Gunter Cauwenberghs, who occasionally sent strange / amusing e-mails to the Yale carillon listserv trying to track down his long lost love, and two conservatory students who offered to show me around Antwerp next time I'm in town. There was beer and hors d'oevres and talk of Flemish and world politics. It was a good night and now its almost 2am. Good nights seem to threaten good sleep, especially because I've got a big bell outside my window that rings at 8am whether I went to bed early or not.

OK, aside from this evening's reception, the last couple of days have been a bit cabin-feverish. Before that for a while things were really great and it was exciting to have so much time and opportunity to focus on practicing and composing and get to do it in a small medieval city. Then it got to be too much time and opportunity and only composing and practicing on my to do list, and not too much else here to distract myself. Well, there are other things I'd hope to do but they seem to use the same mental muscles as composing and practicing and so don't quite help. Well, now at least I have an excuse to go to Antwerp soon. Also a couple of American friends of friends are stopping by for a visit on their European trip, and I've got school holidays coming up in a couple of weeks, with opportunity for some good European travel. So I think it shall be alright.

Good Practicing

When you go to the school to practice, you never know if there'll be an instrument free -- there are only 5 practice rooms and often they're all taken. Today I went to the school and every room seemed to be filled, until I remembered that there was an additional practice room in the carillon museum attached to the school.
This was a real pleasure, as I was never able to use the space before, its usually used for campanology lessons. The practice carillon is very new and expressive with a good feel. And instead of an old upright piano, there is a shiny new grand piano that sounds amazing. The space is a big vaulted hall with an old world feel to it.
I had a really great and effective practice session, felt like I got really deep into some of these pieces and broke past some old barriers to get them to come to life in new ways. That was exciting. It'll be hard to get the same effects on the big beast of St. Rombouts, but one step at a time.
It was also really cool to be practicing amidst all sorts of bell artifacts covering thousands of years of bell history, not to mention historical photographs of famous old school carillonneurs working at their craft. Somehow it made it easier to focus and get down to business. I spent about two hours between the practice keyboard and the piano. So I hope I get to use this space more... if I can keep this up, I'll develop a lot while I'm here.

In other news, I went on an errand trying to buy an item for my thesis research. As part of my final project I'm hoping to build a portable practice instrument which should be very useful for me in the states. Well, I wanted a particular part and wound up on a fun wild goose chase from store to store that left me empty handed in the end. Still, it gave me lots of opportunity to bike around the parts of town further from the center (suburbs? but they're only 5-10 minutes away), and practice my dutch at each store. Plus, I found a gourmet grocery store that I expect will help fuel some good home cooking out here.

OK, off to Dutch class.

Monday Monday

Pardon my venting:

I was hoping today would be a new start to a wonderfully directed life that I had just finally figured out for myself, but things didn't quite go as hoped...
First off, I ended up climbing St. Rombouts twice. Once to practice, and then visit the balcony up top (530ish stairs) , and once to take up a journalism student who promises me I'll be in the local papers (420ish stairs). That's almost 1000 stairs. I imagine thats on par with climbing up a 50 story building. This in and of itself is not a bad event, but it robbed me of a lot of energy that I could've used to deal with other stuff today.
There was this weird thing when I went to practice, I climbed all those stairs only to find that there was someone in the tower. Somehow some guy got up there and was actually playing on the carillon (during my practice time, mind you) and even once he knew I was there he kept playing, and I wasn't about to stop him seeing as seemed pretty insistent on it. Then when he finally gave up the bench, he stuck around and kept interrupting my playing, giving me unwanted corrections on my playing and not letting me proceed until I had played the passage 20-30 times in his particular way (which I now need to unlearn) and he was satisfied. This would be a disturbing but overall insignificant event if it weren't for the fact that this person in the tower happens to be the director of the school, and will likely be back there most weeks before (aka during) my practice time. I'm afraid that if I try to wait and avoid an encounter, he'll just barrel through all of my time, and if I make my presence known, he'll still barrel through half of my time so I can 'benefit from seeing him play' and then sit there and 'listen to a bit of my playing' for the remaining half. This does not bode well.
Getting home tired, I checked out the engineering parts website that I a former prof e-mailed me. I had been waiting to get this link so that I could price some parts that I was hoping to use for my final project (designing a cheap and portable practice instrument). Sadly, the parts I wanted were far too expensive to be used ($15 each, with at least 120 being needed to make a full instrument, if they even worked the way I hoped). So there was my big design idea out the window. What if it was all a pipe dream? The project that had made me so happy and excited a day ago, simply infeasible. Who was I kidding?
I went to get my rental bike. They raised the price that they unofficially quoted me, and needed to take a photocopy of my passport, which I didn't have with me. I had to go back home and get it.
I was in a pretty rotten mood at this point. Did I mention the day was overcast and gray? I got home feeling behind on everything but without the energy to do anything.
Well, it passed. I cooked some dinner and drank a beer. Got in touch with a friend who had some helpful words. I played a random puzzle game on the computer to get my mind off of things. Eventually even made it out to the Pastoraal Centrum where I got to have a laugh with my 2 fellow English-speaking carillon students. The director's name did come up from time to time :). And coming home, amidst studying Dutch, I had a new creative jump in my design that has breathed life back into the project.
The day certainly didn't go as planned, but I think its alright. I get to go to bed happy. Maybe tomorrow will be more in line with my hopes, or maybe it'll be an emotional adventure like today. Either way.