me, kurt and claude

today, to take a break from writing, i dug out some music. underneath my bookshelf in my bedroom, wedged in a dusty bundle under the bottom shelf is a pile of sheet music from the days when musicianship was just as important to me as being in linguistic shape. throughout high school and my undergrad i worked as a musician in one setting or another. there were my sunday gigs at the church my mom used to work at with vocal solos on christmas and easter (hence the very dusty copy of Mozart's "Alleluja" from his motet "Exsultate, jubilate" with the photocopied programs for undergrad masterclasses where i tried to perfect the frustratingly intricate melodic line on pages 5 and 6) and the year i spent in the community orchestra that played in the pit of our community theatre group (to this day i can sing solos and recite lines from the musical The Secret Garden despite never actually having seen the show because the pit was underneath the stage -- oh yeah, and it wasn't heated!). there are two musical moments, however, that are my particular favourites.

the first was during a lesson with my vocal coach, deborah, at her house in niagara falls. i had arrived at my lesson particularly shaken up that day because on my way, while driving on the 406 between st. catharines and niagara falls, my car door had flown open suddenly. i managed to pull over and shut it, but i was still pretty freaked out by the time i made it into her driveway. noticing how shaken up i was, deborah offered to give me an easy day (yay! no Puccini arias) and so we set to work on some kurt weill songs, ending up focusing most of our attention on "I'm a stranger here myself" from One Touch of Venus. after weeks of focusing on developing the precision and delicacy it takes to sing stuff from Tosca (not to mention working on channelling my inner pissed-off woman) it felt like flying to play the role of a very confused venus who has just ended up on earth, frustrated that none of her wiles seem to work on the one particular man she fancies. there is a time in the writing process when the words just seem to come from some dark place inside and they rise up and pour out effortlessly onto the page. there's a similar moment for singers, and though i'd experienced the writerly equivalent often enough, getting that sense of "swing" (to borrow a slang term from rowing -- not jazz!) as a vocalist was less familiar. this time it was transformative. even deborah, who was infamous among her students for her chilling demeanour, her perfectly coiffed hair and her killer pant suits -- think hard-nosed female ceo in an armani suit who had no qualms about making her vocal students do endless rounds of sit ups to strengthen our abdominal muscles -- was taken aback. i don't know that i have ever sung in quite that way, and i don't know that i ever will again. i felt like i could literally taste the notes.

the second memory is from my senior flute recital that i had to perform in the third year of my undergrad. two friends and i had teamed up with an assorted group of accompanists to pull off an full evening of music in brock's sean o'sullivan theatre. (it has always made me laugh that the abreviation for that theatre was "s.o.s." -- something akin to that sick feeling you get in the green room before you go on). for my portion of the program i spent months preparing Mozart's G+ Flute Concerto, Louis Ganne's "Andante and Scherzo" and Claude Bolling's "Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio". for the latter piece three of my friends, matt, pete and barry (can you tell they were jazz musicians?) played piano, bass and drums. there's a narrative to Bolling's piece: sweet innocent baroque flute meets three nasty jazz musicians and is corrupted by them. it was one of only a handfull of times that i've ever played jazz. there were several times in the piece, where all four instruments were playing that the sound was really lush and full and i literally could feel the wooden boards of the stage floor vibrating under my bare feet. yes, bare feet. i was going through what my flute coach, doug, referred to as my jessye norman phase (the famous soprano always sings shoeless), and i sincerely believed that i played my best in my bare feet. my claim was that shoes, especially heels, threw off my body alignment and hindered my playing, so that evening i walked out on stage wearing a floor-length evening gown, more make-up than i'd ever worn in my life, and glittering toe rings on the index toes of both feet. artistic pretensions aside, i've never felt music move through my body in the way it did that night. it was a little like i imagine it feels to be electrocuted.

tonight, along with the book that is the bane of all flutists, Taffanel and Gaubert's Grande Exercises Journaliers de Mécanisme, my copy of which i found in a used book store in zurich and which has German swear words penciled in beside the particularly difficult passages, i've pulled out Chaminade's "Concertino for Flute and Piano" and her "Sérénade aux Étoiles". i think i need to remember this part of myself right now.