The pain of being a violinist

I spent some time talking with a friend the other day about just how hard it is to play the violin. Not so much because learning to put your finger in the right place and produce the right pitch is a major problem - children gradually learn how to do this, and learn what the correct sound is and what isn't.

Nor is it a matter of the bowing, which is like learning to juggle by adding more and more items to what you're throwing around. Anyone can do it...!

No, what we were talking about is the sheer awfulness of the way violins have to be held, and the way the left hand has to twist back on itself in order to put its fingers on the strings. At speed. Accurately. For long periods of time. (We watched the 45-minute Sibelius Second Symphony being played last night. The violinists were on the go almost all of the time; only the horns played less, I think!)

Viola players have this to contend with too, but go down the scale to cellos and basses and you find they have a much easier road to hoe. Their left hands are in a relatively natural position. And they don't have to keep their right hand - the bow hand - up in the air all the time either. So if you're going to play a stringed instrument go for the cello or the bass. There's a bit of stretching involved for the left hand, compared to violinists and viola players, but that's still easier than dealing with two hands/arms twisted up in front of your face.

Of course musicians who play string instruments in the orchestra aren't the only ones who have to suffer the backwards left hand problem (unless they're left handed, in which case they may suffer the backwards right hand problem, if you're still with me). People who play acoustic guitars, for instance, also have to cope with this, though at least their right hand isn't struggling with a bow at the same time. They only have a pick (something that's likely to cause arthritis in the long run through the concentrated hold on such a small device) or they use the fingers to strum. Once they've got past callouses, they're okay.

Sadly, while it might seem like a good idea for violinists/violists to situate their instrument somewhere else, the practical fact of the matter is that under the chin is the best place, for bowing, for support and for poking your neighbour in the eye if you're sitting too close to each other.

But it has health problems. Here's an old piece about tendonitis and musicians and a more recent piece about musicians' cramp, or dystonia. 

Maybe it might just be better to encourage children to take up a different instrument....

Expression marks

One of my jobs is to transcribe music onto Sibelius so that I can then shift the piece up or down a key or two. (In the old days, when music was still transcribed by hand, with a pen, this was a frustrating job, where you had to not only transcribe but also transpose at the same time.)

I've just done a three-page song which has only four expression marks for the pianist in it, and only one for the singer. There's an fp at the beginning, a couple of mfs and a crescendo mark for the pianist, and a crescendo mark for the singer. I suppose you could count a few odd staccatos and emphases marks as well, but they're fairly minor and hardly to be worried about.

Some songs I've transcribed have almost as many marks as this per bar, which makes the work of transcribing very tedious. It also means that the composer doesn't trust the singer and pianist to work out how to perform the song satisfactorily for themselves. Most experienced musicians and singers have a feel for how things should go, and don't need all this additional instruction. Most of it will be done instinctively, so for the composer to write it all out is just a bit pointless. Better for him or her to stick to the vital things, the changes of expression that aren't obvious from the music itself. 

It's a bit like a scriptwriter telling the actors in every line how they should say the words. Actors will ignore these things, unless, again, it's something that you wouldn't expect from the words themselves. Shakespeare never writes such stage directions, and actors manage perfectly well to interpret his lines. The very few directions he does give are exits and entrances, and the occasional curious one that you'd never gauge from the rest of the script. In fact a lot of his stage directions are written into the dialogue, as it were, and can be worked out from there. 

Compositions are similar to scripts for plays, I feel. While there are purists that claim to know how every note should be played, it's really up to the performer in the end, and the majority of composers will give performers plenty of leeway on this. A very few don't seem to feel that performers have the first idea about how music should be 'done', and clutter up the page with more instructions than any performer will pay attention to in a lifetime of performing the work.

Busy, busy....

Blogging has gone on the backburner because of a number of things. First was the ongoing efforts to finish my third children's book, The Disenchanted Wizard. And now that's gone on the backburner too!

Over the last month and a half I've been tied up playing first for Opera Otago's 60th Birthday Extravaganza Concert; I took over from the pianist who was originally hired because he himself got tied up with something else that caused him to weigh up his priorities. When that finished, just over a week ago, I went straight into rehearsals for two 'House Operas', short, one-act operas to be performed at Olveston, in just over a week's time.

The rehearsal period for these has been immensely short: around three weeks. I've had the music for several weeks, but had to practice and learn it at the same time as I was dealing with sixteen major items for the Extravaganza concert. Not only that, one of the operas was handwritten, and for my aging eyes, very difficult to read, so using the music programme, Sibelius, I put it on computer and printed out a readable copy. Which took several days, working a few hours at a time.

And then we've had some family ups and downs, as usual, and that takes energy, and we had to clear around the house because the scaffolders were coming to put up scaffolding so that the painters could paint the roof, and...

All in all it's been quite a couple of months, and though I've put some time into the book, it's been very inconsistent, and that's not ideal. There's been no blogging time at all, really, because I just haven't had the energy to keep at it!

Living with computers

Just thinking how commonplace computers and such have become in my lifetime; actually it's not even that long. My first experience of computers, as far as I can recall, was when I worked at the Dunedin City Council, back in the eighties. We couldn't actually change anything on the computers (which in those days were still fed by cards with holes punched in them), but we could type something onto one of the terminals, and print it out. That was Big Time! (The actual computer filled an entire room and had enormous rolls of tape spinning around working very hard.)

I think the very first computer we actually owned was one that was about the size of a calculator: it was about twice as long horizontally as vertically, and you could only fit one program onto it at a time. With an upper limit of something like 64 bits...! It was very low level programming, but it worked...even though it was frustrating having to delete one programme in order to do another. From memory this was called the Casio PB-100, and it was very popular, in spite of its considerable
limitations.

I remember sitting up to the wee hours of the morning inputting information on its little keyboard, and getting very frustrated when one single error would make the whole programme refuse to run.

At some point after that I used a friend's computer. He was always somewhat ahead of us, and had a computer where you spent a great deal of time typing stuff in via the keyboard (that was progress). You had to add in information for bolds and italics and all that sort of thing, because of course it did none of these by the mere press of a couple of keys. There was no mouse, so if you made a mistake you had to go back by pressing the cursor (at least I think that's what we must have done - it's a long time ago) in order to change things.

And then all this information was recorded on a tape. You'd play the tape back and only then would you discover whether you'd done everything correctly or not. If you hadn't, you have to go back and find the error and fix it, and then record it again and then play it again...I don't know how we had the patience, quite honestly.

Was it really this big? Seems enormous. 

Finally, around 1989 we bought an Amiga 500; this was truly the Big Time! What a wonderful machine that was. Okay, you had to save things to disks, and it was wise to do this fairly regularly. And you couldn't use more than one programme at a time, so none of this modern idea of having several programmes open that you're working on simultaneously. You had to find your own typos and do your own proofreading. Woe betide if you didn't save on this machine...the work was gone for good.

I first learned to use a mouse with the Amiga. I can remember trying it out at a friend's house and seeing the cursor flying out of control all over the screen, and wondering how anyone ever got any finesse with it.

The Amiga played some great games, ones we thought we far superior to what Microsoft was producing at the time. And we eventually began to discover email, and the Internet. It would cost us a dollar an hour to be online, and we could spend an hour just getting online. Email was terrific; the Internet didn't seem to be that big a deal initially.

Regretfully, Amigas went out of circulation, and we finally had to concede to buying a PC. (Which was named Alphonse, as have all of his descendants since). Though we mourned the loss of the Amiga, it didn't take long to get used to the new style, and by now browsers had appeared, and we realised just how extraordinary the Internet was. And this was before Wikipedia, IMDB and dozens of other sites that we use all the time - even before Google. Remembering a time when these didn't exist, or when they were baby sites trying to find their way, seems odd now. They've become so much a part of the Internet worlds.

And then we added a laptop to the family (this must have been in the mid-noughties, because we had we carted it around parts of Europe in 2007). Later, though probably not that much later, an iPad invaded the place, and an iPhone (this was my wife: she's always been up with the play), and then Smartphones and such.

Now my wife even has a Mac after the laptop became sluggish and slow. I don't personally like it much: Apple seems to have contrarily put things that are normally on the right in the PC on the left, just to be annoying. And there are other things about it that don't grab me. Still, it has its points, and occasionally I do concede and use it for something.

The computers over the year have done very little 'computing' - for me they're biggest benefit has been being able to write at speed, and correct easily (I bought my first typewriter in the year I first started work and taught myself to touch-type; that was around 1960...), and cut and paste and so on. But the other big boon has been the music programme, Sibelius. If only I'd had this when I was younger I would have had a ball with it. The hours it would have saved writing out fair copies of music for others to be able to read. Not to worry, it came along in good time, and along with the millions of words I've written on the various computers, there have been hundreds of thousands of notes.

What a time to be alive!

Just a little overview

While commenting on Facebook this morning, I thought that it would be interesting to list the number of different skills that have been employed since I began to work on the musical, Grimhilda!   It hasn't been quite a matter of everything and the kitchen sink, (as in Sienna Sinks stainless steel sinks) but it's felt close to that at times.


Of course, the first skill was writing the thing, in collaboration with my friend, Cherianne Parks (she contributed many of the crazier ideas, and is very strong on structure and plotting).

Then the was the writing of the music, first in a piano/vocal score, and then gradually this was orchestrated.   None of these skills, so far, were new to me.

Next, and these aren't in any particular order, I had to discover how to apply for funding and how to fill in applications forms to funders.  I was greatly helped in this by Sally-Anne Howes, who's done it before and made editorial comments and did the budgetting side of it.  As a result we got some $6000 of funding!

Then there was my involvement in the auditions.  I didn't make the final decisions on casting, but was involved in the process with the director and music director.   When we didn't have a complete cast as a result, in collaboration with the D and MD, I began the search through every means I could think of to find the additional actors we needed.  So you might say I acquired some casting skills...

Then there was advertising.  Initially I was doing this in a kind of ad hoc way, and then somehow it became my job altogether.   It's been interesting, and I've met some great and friendly and helpful people.   And been overwhelmed, as always, by the willingness of people to get involved.

I also recorded two selections of music and put these on SoundCloud, along with some of the instrumental music - courtesy of the Sibelius program.   And last weekend, I went through and checked (and corrected) the instrumental parts, and printed them out, and, with my wife's assistance, taped all the individual pages together into a concertina format, so the musicians don't have pages flying everywhere during the performances.  That was a much bigger job than I anticipated.   And then we'd no sooner done that than we had to add in a number of bars because the Director wanted a bit of dancing in one place.  Such is his prerogative, but it's surprising how much extra work that was.  It's much easier to cut stuff than add stuff!

And then there's what you might call my 'producing' role: finding things, and people to do stuff, and making decisions that something is far too expensive to go with and trying to find a better and more economic option.   Surprisingly the economic options are often because other groups in town, or people, are willing to be generous to a degree that continues to amaze me.  This week has shown me just how generous people can be - we were even offered a keyboard for the celesta part in the score after I advertised on Twitter.  Someone retweeted the original tweet, and within five minutes, I was on the phone to a resident saying he not only had a keyboard he was willing to lend (to a complete stranger!) but was willing to drop it off to the theatre.   Wow!

I've just been having coffee and liaising with the MD and the man who's going to look after the mics for us.  He's even willing to go chasing up additional items we need to get this part of the show to work properly.  Again, Wow!   (And he's been willing to come to rehearsals and see how things run and what needs to be done.)

My list of helpful people is growing - and I'll keep it for future reference!

Meanwhile, Cherianne has also played multiple roles: props person (collecting them and organising for them to be built where necessary); overseeing the making of the costumes and liaising with the scenic designer; ongoing script consultant and much more which she could tell you about better than I can.  And of course, she'll be Stage Manager during the show's run.

I'm sure there are other jobs I've been involved with (such as putting together the promo at the Library yesterday) but they're all beginning to merge...maybe I'll update this as the other jobs come to mind!

Elderly Sibelius

Most of my music writing is done on Sibelius, as I've no doubt mentioned before. While I still compose initially at the piano (normally -there are occasions when I write straight onto the computer), increasingly what's written down there on the manuscript is sketchy and gets transferred to the computer fairly quickly (before I forget what the scribblings mean). In fact, the extra manuscript books I bought to use for writing the musical (Grimhilda!) haven't been used. (Saving them for the next musical!)

Sibelius is a fantastic programme for composers and other musicians - I'm just finishing up transcribing a bundle of some 15 songs for a composer in Alexandra. And I think there are more to come. Her music has all been written by hand in pen or pencil up till now.

All this is a lead up to the photograph below, which I assume shows the very first version of Sibelius (we're now on version 7). I got this off someone who's signs him/herself as jwkay.


The manual that came with my version (that was number 4, and I use number 6 now) is thick and probably the best computer programme manual I've ever used. Excellent!

Now that the exam is over

Over on one of my other blogs, Webitz.net, I've been celebrating the fact that geocities.com, the huge conglomerate of websites put together by enthusiastic amateurs like me, and then dumped from the Internet without much warning by Yahoo, has not only been rescued by reocites.com, but also ASCII and OoCities. Great job, guys!

Now that my exam is over, and the course finished, I can relax a bit and start reading books that aren't related to NZ history again. I've been reading one called Bottled and Sold - the story behind our obsession with bottled water, by Peter Gleick. It's interesting but a bit repetitious, so I may...not...finish...it...yet. On the other hand I finally started reading Half the Sky today, which I bought a month or more ago and couldn't allow myself to get into because of the study. It's an in-your-face look at the way women are treated around the world, not just in terms of forced prostitution, but slavery in general, and abuse of every kinds (and I mean abuse: beatings, eyes gouged out, having acid thrown at them and much more).

I did read some other non-study books over the last few months (impossible for me not to do so). One was a biography of Georgette Heyer, the historical romance novelist. My mother had practically every book she wrote, I think, and I've read some of them in the past myself. She was an excellent writer, a great humorist, and a somewhat indomitable human being. I also started reading the biography of jazz pianist Mike Nock called Serious Fun. It started off very interestingly but has become a bit of a list of who played with whom and who was taking drugs at the time and which album they recorded while they were together for a few months and so on. I'm supposed to review it, so I'll have to give it some more house room yet.

I haven't consciously heard a lot of Nock's music, as it happens. I know his name well, and I've no doubt heard tracks on which he's been playing in passing (usually on one of those jazz programmes on the Concert FM, or whatever it's currently called), but I've never really sat down and listened. Hmm. I got a CD out of the library the other day and was surprised at how dull it was. Nock's left hand went on and on playing the same thing, while his right hand wandered around with no apparent idea where it was going. That was the first two tracks. After that my mind had switched off and I didn't hear what came next. I gave the CD another go a day or so later, and the same thing happened.

I'll have to try a different album. It's unlikely that his reputation stands or falls on that particular CD.

And the other thing I'm doing, of course, is getting on with writing the music for the musical. The stuff I'd already written has been buzzing around in my brain every time I stopped thinking about anything else, so I need to get on and write some more (or go mad). I've been orchestrating some of the music I wrote a while back and it's been good to hear it - particularly now that I'm actually hearing what it's like rather than what my two dud speakers on the computer claimed it sounded like. A bit of adjustment on the Sibelius program itself, and the use of earphones, made a huge difference.

I've just noticed that there's some way to record music via a microphone using Sibelius. Once it's recorded and Sibelius has transcribed it, you can edit it - make it look like it should! I hope it's better than the scanning program Sibelius uses: I've given up on that because it's more work trying to edit than just transcribing the stuff straight into the computer in the first place. It doesn't seem to work any better with this latest version of Sibelius than it did with the old one. Of course, it possibly doesn't help that most music people want me to transcribe is elderly, often torn, scribbled over and various other things. But even clean copies don't seem to go too well.

It doesn't look as though I installed the microphone (audio score lite) program. Maybe I'll get onto that some time - although the way I write music doesn't really lend itself to that much. Still it may prove more of a bonus than I think!

By the way, the exam went far more smoothly than I expected, I felt pretty good about it, and hopefully the examiner will too. But three hours of typing took a fair amount of concentration (I can't even begin to imagine writing for three hours) and my bum also got tired of sitting in the same spot for so long. There were only two of us disabled people in the room - I don't know what was wrong with the young woman who was also doing an exam (probably a different one to me) - and there were two supervisors! All very friendly. Because there were so few of us we started a quarter of an hour early. Better than sitting around nervously.

Schizophrenia and Sibelius

Occasionally someone sends me a request to include something in my blog, and usually I'll reply in the affirmative, since people help me and I like to help them.

Of course, I check first that it isn't spam. However, most spam goes down the spam tube at gmail.com, so if it is there's a distinct possibility I'll never see it in the first place.

Today I received an email from Suzane (yup, that's the spelling) Smith. She told me that she was wanting to promote an article called 10 Myths about Schizophrenia, which appears on her blog. The site is on is actually called X-Ray Technician Schools which a blog itself, but has a section called Articles, which is where you'll find Suzane's piece, but a number of other similarly well-written posts on a variety of health-related topics. This part of the sight is called X-Ray Vision-aries, and they explain it thus:

WHAT IS X-RAY VISION-ARIES? X-Ray Vision-aries is a blog designed with non-health nuts in mind and written by a group of guys and gals who are excited about self-improvement through diet, exercise, and overall health improvement. In our blog we deliver what we hope are enthralling and at times even educational articles about health, welfare and better living. We try to bring you a forward looking vision of health and health care in a light-hearted manner that makes learning about and improving one’s health and life accessible to everyone. Enjoy!

The post/articles vary in subject matter quite extensively, which makes them worth checking out. Regrettably I'm just off to play Settlers of Catan with my wife and daughter, so I'll have to check them out tomorrow! (Today I've been busy re-scoring the Brass Band suite I wrote back in 2008, which I played through - on Sibelius - with a friend of mine from the brass band days. He's a lecturer in composition at the Varsity, so is well up with what works and what doesn't, and in his opinion the pieces work. They needed a bit of re-scoring because I'd missed including a couple of instrumental lines in my original versions. Bit fiddly, but satisfying!)

Intuition and Structure in Composing and more...

I bought a copy of a book called Performer as Priest and Prophet a few months ago, but hadn't got round to reading it. I first came across it at work, where my boss had a borrowed copy from the Hewitson Library. Something about it rang bells, and I bought a secondhand copy (it's out of print). However, with all the shifting around in the house due to the renovation of the kitchen, it kind of got shelved in more ways than one.

The book is by Judith Rock, a professional dancer (and former auxiliary NYPD police officer!), and Norman Mealy, a liturgist and musician (and occasional hymn-writer) - Mealy died before it was completed, but still had a great deal of input.

I only began reading the book this morning (in the bath - a great place to read: the mind seems more relaxed, and absorbs more, and is less distracted), so I can't really comment on it overall. But one thing struck me, and that was Rock's comments on intuition in the arts. (She wrote the Introduction.)

It made me consider how I write music. To an extent, I've tended to put down my way of composing. For the most part, I start at the beginning and finish at the end. Sometimes I do some chopping and changing on the way (particularly now that I work half between the piano and half between the Sibelius program), and at all times I'm looking for the right note or chord in relation to what goes before and after. But I seldom start out with a 'plan,' and sometimes the music just doesn't go - even though it seemed promising at the time - and gets abandoned before it reaches the end. Sometimes something that seemed promising is promising, but it takes a patch of time away from it to realise it. My piano piece, the one that wound up with the title, A Cowboy Learns the Tarantella, is a case in point. I woke up with the 'theme' running around in my head, went to the piano, jotted it down and then thought: that's pretty basic. But a few days later it came together, and 'basic' or not, it works. And Schoenberg Plays with his grandchildren - another piece that didn't in any way start out with that title (the titles tend to come later) - also started out with what seemed a great idea, but it just didn't want to work. It was only after I came back to it some time later than I saw the potential: same kind of material, but different approach.

I kind of find the music as I go along, rather than having it all worked out beforehand. Even with songs, it's as if a particular idea connects itself to the opening words, and we go along from there. It's very possible that a totally different idea could work - in fact, more than possible. What gets written on Tuesday may not have turned up on Thursday.

Structure suffers a bit in the process - I've discussed this several times in this blog - and there have been pieces, particularly pieces for larger forces than just a piano, or piano and voice, that have required some considerable sorting out. That's perfectly normal, of course, for any work, and I probably do it more with the piano pieces and such than I remember afterwards. It's just because they're smaller scale and more manageable in terms of tidying up structure.

What I'm saying is that I suspect far more composers work intuitively than we're led to believe by musicologists. The latter find all manner of connections in works afterwards; the composer doesn't think 'rationally' about these connections at the time; he or she tends to be so focused on getting the thing down on paper (preferably before it all blows away and he or she loses concentration) that he/she doesn't pick up a number of the connections.

But when you go back over your own work - particularly some time later, after you've forgotten the sweaty stage - you can often be surprised by what's turned up.

And talking of that, in one of the posts I just picked up regarding structure, I find that I was writing about a screenwriter called Blake Snyder. I'd forgotten his name altogether, but now realise I've just read a book by him called Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: the screenwriter's guide to every story ever told. It's a sequel to Save the Cat! the last book on screenwriting you'll ever need. When I got Save the Cat! on interloan, I thought it was the first of the two books I was getting; it was the second. This second title goes through about fifty well-known movies and shows how each and every one of them follows a structure that's virtually identical.

Now whether that's really true is another matter. Whether the scriptwriters sat down and said: here's the structure, what story can we tell, is another matter altogether. I rather think Snyder has come along, like a musicologist, and made these films fit his theory. In the end the book isn't very inspiring. I'd still like to have a look at the first of the two books, though I suspect it's title is a little overblown. Yes, certain facets of storytelling turn up again and again, particularly in the movies - and there's a certain satisfaction in that. But quirkiness in movies, oddball approaches, the thing that is different, is also satisfying, and it would be horrible to think that we would have to endure endless movies all plotted along similar lines forever and ever Amen.

(Incidentally, I've just seen that Snyder died just last month of a pulmonary embolism- he was only 52.)

Well, I've strayed a fair way from my opening, but that's what happens when you don't have to go to work for a couple of days, and can relax while blogging!

A change or two

I had my computer away from home for a couple of days while it had a good clean out, and had a new and much larger hard drive installed. I wasn't entirely bereft, as the laptop we'd used while we were overseas was happy to come back into service for a while, but it's more comfortable sitting at my desk and working on the 'normal' computer, I must say.
Of course, it's had all its innards sorted, and consequently things that would normally be sitting here aren't, and I'm having to reload things that I never gave a second thought to up until a few days ago.
Sibelius isn't quite working, which is a pain. I can't get the Kontakt Gold disk to reload as yet, although no doubt I'll suss it out in due course.
Meantime I've started writing some songs, hopefully in preparation for the concert I'd like to have at the end of the year. The poems are by Peter Olds, a local poet, whom I used to see in the bookshop fairly regularly: he was more a customer of my offsider who ran the secondhand side of things, but we still had some contact.
The poems are about Dunedin, too, which is good. They're fairly short - think the first song barely makes a minute in length (as opposed to the whopping nine minute job I wrote for Brent Read for the last concert).
I'll also going to mention that I spent twenty minutes on our one and only piece of fitness equipment the other night: walked and ran on the treadmill, and felt good. I'm getting a bit concerned about feeling as though I don't have any muscles when I go running for the traffic lights. Sometimes it's like my legs are just too tired to be bo

Tune in the head

I don’t know how it is with other composers, but I find when I’m working on something (as I have been on the third of the brass band pieces I’m currently writing) a tune from that piece will get itself in my head and hammer away at every opportunity. I know composers aren’t supposed to write tunes anymore (sez who?) but I write tunes still; that’s the way I am. At least two of the three ‘movements’ of this brass band collection have big tunes, ones where the tune is built up gradually from a small number of players to the whole band. Listening to it on Sibelius is quite exciting as you hear more and more instruments joining in.
But having the tune go round and round in your head for days on end is as annoying as seeing one of those funny t-shirts where you catch the words on the front but don’t have time to see what’s on the back. Or vice versa.
Or it’s as annoying as reading a review by James Berardinelli and finding that he likes a movie you hated. Or vice versa.


Photo courtesy of Steve 9091, on Flickr.com