My new squeeze
Jan. 23rd, 2007 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kate_schaeferI grew up with music. We had a family orchestra: my dad on French horn or string bass, my sister Gini on clarinet or piano, my brother Duncan on cornet, me on violin or French horn, our friends roped in on whatever instruments they played, or all of us on recorder. My little brother and sister learned piano and clarinet as well, but they were enough younger than the rest of us that the family orchestra was history by then. Gini and Geoff picked up guitar, and I eventually acquired two mountain dulcimers without ever gaining any facility with them.
We were not the Trapp family. We didn't lack talent, but we lacked application. I suppose that if we had needed to use our remarkable musical performance to escape from the oncoming Nazis and if we had had a forceful governess to make us practice all the time, we might have turned the family orchestra into something people would pay money to hear, or we might have practiced bribing border guards (why did the completely Aryan Trapps have to escape rather than just buying tickets and leaving Austria? I must have missed something crucial when I saw The Sound of Music). Instead, it became something we did together that lurched from fun to painful, moment to moment.
Besides the family orchestra, there was band at school (our school district had band instrument instruction because you have to have a marching band to go along with the football team, but no budget to cover string instruments; that's why I learned French horn as well as violin. That, and the fact that we already had a French horn. We acquired a second mouthpiece so that my dad and I could share the horn. Nowadays that school district has an orchestra and a jazz ensemble as well). There were community orchestras; my dad joined several over the years, and took whichever children would go with him to play in them as well. We played with the local recorder society for a few years. We sang in choirs at church and school; we sang Christmas carols at home, and popular songs of the thirties and forties on car trips.
The record player -- monaural all the time I was growing up, but stereo by the time I went to college -- always had something on it, classical, swing, or jazz. We could listen to rock and roll, but only at other people's houses, or eventually on tinny transistor radios or my grandparents' old record player on my desk, which I kept playing at about the right speed by continually adjusting the rubber band with which I had replaced the turntable belt.
Music is important to me, to my sense of self and to my sense of family. It's something I have always had around me; it's something I've always made for myself and for other people, by myself and with other people. I stopped playing the violin after mine was stolen while I was at college. I stopped playing the French horn long before that. In college, I was in singing groups and a social group that sang regularly.
Once I left school, I was surprised at how little amateur music was available to me. Some of my friends would sing with me, sometimes, but we never sang together enough to develop a repertoire. As an atheist, I had no church choir (I hadn't yet found the Unitarians). I took voice lessons for a while, which was a lot of fun, and I sang at some weddings and a funeral.
I met Glenn. On our first camping trip, we took recorders for everyone, and I thought I was back in a musical family. As it turned out, only Mary could play her recorder with any facility. I had forgotten most of what I had known, Glenn could only noodle around a little bit, and Ruth used her recorder as a whistle with one note, once only. It hurt her ears. We weren't going to play beautiful baroque quartets together; we weren't even going to play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" together.
For my 35th birthday, I replaced my old violin. I played the new violin very badly indeed. I took a few classes in folk fiddling and practiced relatively diligently, getting good enough to play fiddle tunes with my patient friend John Hedtke on the banjo. We played in public once, at a party, and somebody observed that what we played sounded just like fiddle tunes, only much slower. John's parrot bit my finger during a practice session, and what with the tetanus shot and the damn finger healing and John's travel schedule, we never got back to playing again. My aging back didn't appreciate the fiddle, either.
My friend Grace missed singing, too, so she joined a series of community choruses: the old Seattle Women's Chorus, which was painfully sincere and musically much less than the sum of its parts, the Labor Chorus, and maybe something else. She and I went to Messiah sing-alongs with the Lutherans, who were kinda bad, and with the Methodists, who were very good, with professionals to sing the solos, and with the Unitarians, who were good and who let everybody sing everything. Grace joined the Unitarians' choir right after that, and after I'd heard them sing a few times, so did I. They have a really, really good choir; that is, they have a fine director, paid section leaders, and admission by audition only. Because they are the Unitarians and inclusiveness would be their middle name if Universalist weren't, they also have a not-as-good choir in which anybody can sing and a bell choir for those who have always wanted to stand around in a circle playing one of two notes when it's their turn and staring intently at the others in the circle all the rest of the time. I dropped out of the choir when I went to school a few years ago, and haven't returned because rehearsals conflict with the symphony concerts we started going to in the meantime.
All this time, I hankered after an instrument I could play competently again. I could take up one of the instruments I'd played -- played at -- before, or I could try something new. I thought about the accordion, because I like the sound of free-reed instruments, because I wouldn't ever have to tune it (I have a pretty good relative ear; with the violin, that meant I was tuning and retuning all the time, because it's only a pretty good ear. Good enough to hear when I'm off; not good enough to tune spot-on every time, not good enough to get all the notes right every time even when the open strings themselves were correctly tuned, good enough for continual frustration), because it was an instrument scorned by nearly everyone in my youth except my heroic fifth and sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Moore, who played it cheerfully and badly while she taught us to sing.
I went to the accordion store. Seattle has a good accordion store, run by the Petosa family, makers of fine American accordions for generations. They are lovely people at Petosa, passionate about the piano accordion, dedicated to high-quality instrument making and maintenance, maddened by the inferior Chinese accordions flooding the market, saddened by people who buy accordions at garage sales and don't want to spend the money on repairing them, dismissive of anyone who wants something that sounds like an accordion but doesn't weigh a ton and a half. There's no demand for an instrument like that, they say. Oh, really? I wanted to buy such an instrument. What they mean is, besides me, there's no demand. Well, there are those smaller, accordion-shaped objects with fewer keys, but they aren't going to get much lighter than the student accordion, and they're toys, not real musical instruments. What about folk accordions? I ask. An eyebrow is raised. I leave, but not without looking for a moment at the large collection of truly cool antique rhinestone-studded toy accordions and folk accordions and smaller, accordion-shaped objects in Petosa's front room, few of which remotely approach the bulk and heft of a standard piano accordion, all of which look like they earned their keep in the hands of a professional musician at some point.
I went to The Trading Musician and bought an inexpensive little piano accordion that only weighed about ten pounds and had a great sound. Yes, it had a very limited range, but I'm not about to audition for the Lawrence Welk Show. I played it for an hour or two, and the next day I took it back, with regret. The inferior Chinese accordion glue with which it was constructed set off my allergies something fierce every time I squeezed the bellows.
Okay, so no piano accordions for me. Inexpensive button accordions? Mostly made in China as well, so they'll have the same glues. Okay, what else is there? Cajun accordions from Germany, maybe, and the peculiar organetto from Italy, and concertinas. I decide to go for concertina, because it's light and essentially symmetrical, an Anglo rather than an English because there seem to be more books available on Anglos than English. Why the two kinds of concertina should be distinguished the one from the other by words that mean the same thing in normal language is left as an exercise for the student; the difference is that Anglo concertinas play a different note on the pull than on the push, while English concertinas play the same note in both directions. English are marginally better for accompanying singers because of this, but Anglos are what more people play. The Anglo concertina is used in Irish folk music. The seaman's concertina is a 20-button Anglo.
Yesterday, I went to Lark in the Morning down in the Pike Place Market and bought myself a lovely wooden seamen's concertina, a coupla books on playing it, and the Mel Bay recorder book for good measure. Today, I'm pleased to report that I'm not allergic to the damn thing, and I think I can learn to play it without much pain. Everything I know about playing the recorder seems to be accessible, too, and I'll probably achieve something I'm not too embarrassed about on that a lot sooner than I will on the concertina.
It's good to be making music again.
We were not the Trapp family. We didn't lack talent, but we lacked application. I suppose that if we had needed to use our remarkable musical performance to escape from the oncoming Nazis and if we had had a forceful governess to make us practice all the time, we might have turned the family orchestra into something people would pay money to hear, or we might have practiced bribing border guards (why did the completely Aryan Trapps have to escape rather than just buying tickets and leaving Austria? I must have missed something crucial when I saw The Sound of Music). Instead, it became something we did together that lurched from fun to painful, moment to moment.
Besides the family orchestra, there was band at school (our school district had band instrument instruction because you have to have a marching band to go along with the football team, but no budget to cover string instruments; that's why I learned French horn as well as violin. That, and the fact that we already had a French horn. We acquired a second mouthpiece so that my dad and I could share the horn. Nowadays that school district has an orchestra and a jazz ensemble as well). There were community orchestras; my dad joined several over the years, and took whichever children would go with him to play in them as well. We played with the local recorder society for a few years. We sang in choirs at church and school; we sang Christmas carols at home, and popular songs of the thirties and forties on car trips.
The record player -- monaural all the time I was growing up, but stereo by the time I went to college -- always had something on it, classical, swing, or jazz. We could listen to rock and roll, but only at other people's houses, or eventually on tinny transistor radios or my grandparents' old record player on my desk, which I kept playing at about the right speed by continually adjusting the rubber band with which I had replaced the turntable belt.
Music is important to me, to my sense of self and to my sense of family. It's something I have always had around me; it's something I've always made for myself and for other people, by myself and with other people. I stopped playing the violin after mine was stolen while I was at college. I stopped playing the French horn long before that. In college, I was in singing groups and a social group that sang regularly.
Once I left school, I was surprised at how little amateur music was available to me. Some of my friends would sing with me, sometimes, but we never sang together enough to develop a repertoire. As an atheist, I had no church choir (I hadn't yet found the Unitarians). I took voice lessons for a while, which was a lot of fun, and I sang at some weddings and a funeral.
I met Glenn. On our first camping trip, we took recorders for everyone, and I thought I was back in a musical family. As it turned out, only Mary could play her recorder with any facility. I had forgotten most of what I had known, Glenn could only noodle around a little bit, and Ruth used her recorder as a whistle with one note, once only. It hurt her ears. We weren't going to play beautiful baroque quartets together; we weren't even going to play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" together.
For my 35th birthday, I replaced my old violin. I played the new violin very badly indeed. I took a few classes in folk fiddling and practiced relatively diligently, getting good enough to play fiddle tunes with my patient friend John Hedtke on the banjo. We played in public once, at a party, and somebody observed that what we played sounded just like fiddle tunes, only much slower. John's parrot bit my finger during a practice session, and what with the tetanus shot and the damn finger healing and John's travel schedule, we never got back to playing again. My aging back didn't appreciate the fiddle, either.
My friend Grace missed singing, too, so she joined a series of community choruses: the old Seattle Women's Chorus, which was painfully sincere and musically much less than the sum of its parts, the Labor Chorus, and maybe something else. She and I went to Messiah sing-alongs with the Lutherans, who were kinda bad, and with the Methodists, who were very good, with professionals to sing the solos, and with the Unitarians, who were good and who let everybody sing everything. Grace joined the Unitarians' choir right after that, and after I'd heard them sing a few times, so did I. They have a really, really good choir; that is, they have a fine director, paid section leaders, and admission by audition only. Because they are the Unitarians and inclusiveness would be their middle name if Universalist weren't, they also have a not-as-good choir in which anybody can sing and a bell choir for those who have always wanted to stand around in a circle playing one of two notes when it's their turn and staring intently at the others in the circle all the rest of the time. I dropped out of the choir when I went to school a few years ago, and haven't returned because rehearsals conflict with the symphony concerts we started going to in the meantime.
All this time, I hankered after an instrument I could play competently again. I could take up one of the instruments I'd played -- played at -- before, or I could try something new. I thought about the accordion, because I like the sound of free-reed instruments, because I wouldn't ever have to tune it (I have a pretty good relative ear; with the violin, that meant I was tuning and retuning all the time, because it's only a pretty good ear. Good enough to hear when I'm off; not good enough to tune spot-on every time, not good enough to get all the notes right every time even when the open strings themselves were correctly tuned, good enough for continual frustration), because it was an instrument scorned by nearly everyone in my youth except my heroic fifth and sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Moore, who played it cheerfully and badly while she taught us to sing.
I went to the accordion store. Seattle has a good accordion store, run by the Petosa family, makers of fine American accordions for generations. They are lovely people at Petosa, passionate about the piano accordion, dedicated to high-quality instrument making and maintenance, maddened by the inferior Chinese accordions flooding the market, saddened by people who buy accordions at garage sales and don't want to spend the money on repairing them, dismissive of anyone who wants something that sounds like an accordion but doesn't weigh a ton and a half. There's no demand for an instrument like that, they say. Oh, really? I wanted to buy such an instrument. What they mean is, besides me, there's no demand. Well, there are those smaller, accordion-shaped objects with fewer keys, but they aren't going to get much lighter than the student accordion, and they're toys, not real musical instruments. What about folk accordions? I ask. An eyebrow is raised. I leave, but not without looking for a moment at the large collection of truly cool antique rhinestone-studded toy accordions and folk accordions and smaller, accordion-shaped objects in Petosa's front room, few of which remotely approach the bulk and heft of a standard piano accordion, all of which look like they earned their keep in the hands of a professional musician at some point.
I went to The Trading Musician and bought an inexpensive little piano accordion that only weighed about ten pounds and had a great sound. Yes, it had a very limited range, but I'm not about to audition for the Lawrence Welk Show. I played it for an hour or two, and the next day I took it back, with regret. The inferior Chinese accordion glue with which it was constructed set off my allergies something fierce every time I squeezed the bellows.
Okay, so no piano accordions for me. Inexpensive button accordions? Mostly made in China as well, so they'll have the same glues. Okay, what else is there? Cajun accordions from Germany, maybe, and the peculiar organetto from Italy, and concertinas. I decide to go for concertina, because it's light and essentially symmetrical, an Anglo rather than an English because there seem to be more books available on Anglos than English. Why the two kinds of concertina should be distinguished the one from the other by words that mean the same thing in normal language is left as an exercise for the student; the difference is that Anglo concertinas play a different note on the pull than on the push, while English concertinas play the same note in both directions. English are marginally better for accompanying singers because of this, but Anglos are what more people play. The Anglo concertina is used in Irish folk music. The seaman's concertina is a 20-button Anglo.
Yesterday, I went to Lark in the Morning down in the Pike Place Market and bought myself a lovely wooden seamen's concertina, a coupla books on playing it, and the Mel Bay recorder book for good measure. Today, I'm pleased to report that I'm not allergic to the damn thing, and I think I can learn to play it without much pain. Everything I know about playing the recorder seems to be accessible, too, and I'll probably achieve something I'm not too embarrassed about on that a lot sooner than I will on the concertina.
It's good to be making music again.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 11:24 pm (UTC)Good news! Congratulations!
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 11:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 02:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 12:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 02:45 am (UTC)Dunno how long it will take before I feel confident enough to play in front of other people. I mean, I've had the object since yesterday.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 01:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 02:52 am (UTC)I've never stopped singing, to myself when I wash the dishes or drive places, to the grandchildren as they fell asleep when they were small, with Glenn on car trips. I noodled on my granddaughter's keyboard some while she lived here, but she kept it in her bedroom most of the time, and I was reasonably scrupulous about not invading her space. I want there to be a piano around me, but it would have to be one that somebody else played. I'll never play piano enough to justify the expense and space.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 01:58 am (UTC)Everybody in my family (except Mom) plays an instrument, but we've only played together in recent years. Dad found or organized baroque ensembles in Colorado and Texas, and I think he's already found one in Michigan. He plays harpsichord in it, or else picks up a recorder. He also has been in recorder groups.
I had a dream that I was looking at used accordions some time last year or the year before. I have a couple of tiny keyboards -- the kind with 31 teeny keys and two-note polyphony. I've sometimes thought of attaching two of them to a cigar box and using them as a fake accordion. The cigar box could hold a small amp; enough to make them audible in the same room as a string instrument.
I'm starting to think I should go find a choir to sing in. Just for something to do. I've been able to stay active musically because I play a piano, and you can do that by yourself, but it gets lonely. I am always looking for somebody to play with, or accompany, or whatever. I've become adept at recording one part of a duet and playing along with it (something that works better with an electronic keyboard and a computer, it tuns out). For a while, in Virginia, I actually got people to come to my house and we'd work on show tunes together. (sigh)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 03:32 am (UTC)Yeah, after I wondered about that, I looked it up. No escape drama necessary, none of that one-by-one stuff, just an ordinary international singing tour such as any ordinary family that happened to be international musical stars might go on.
It's great that your dad finds baroque ensembles wherever he goes. My dad, in retirement, leads a swing band. It's a pretty good band, with several music teachers, a few retired musicians, a few young musicians, and a few complete amateurs of varying abilities and application. It's not the band of his dreams when he was young, but it is a band that plays a lot of the charts he wanted to play when he was young.
There should be a choir near you. Boston's a pretty musical city.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 04:25 am (UTC)I played with a swing band once. I had a call from the bandleader that they were looking for a pianist, and I bought a blazer and then the gig got cancelled. Quite a while later, he called me about another one at the dedication of the Air & Space Museum in Hampton (VA), and I insisted that he provide me with the music so I could give it a look ahead of time. He was rather casual about it, but he did manage to get me all but one page of it, which I copied into a spiral book for the occasion.
I did okay with the missing page, to my relief. I didn't realize it wasn't there until I was playing.
Then I didn't hear from him again for another long time. When he did call, I said thanks but no thanks. He didn't seem like he was paying a lot of attention to things, and I didn't like the long waits between the occasions of being noticed by him. It was fun playing, though.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:04 am (UTC)With my dad's band, nobody gets to take the music home between gigs. My dad keeps the charts (and the stands, and the amps and speakers and a big pile of other band-related stuff) in his office, the room which would otherwise be his spare bedroom. The band does get to see the charts at rehearsal once a week. I said it would drive me crazy not to be able to practice at home between rehearsals, or at least read the music over by myself every once in a while. My dad said that nobody in his band practices between rehearsals. I guess not, I said, not if they don't have the music. I see the point about keeping the charts all in one place for that sort of band; there's a core group of people who always show up, and others who usually show up, and a few floaters and substitutes. Sounds like the Virginia band was organized on a different principle, one without rehearsals.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 03:40 am (UTC)You'r another person about whose singing I know only from reading about it. I've known you a zillion years, and I know that music is very important to you, and that you sing well, yet I've never heard you sing a note.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:24 am (UTC)Not being able to accompany her is the one thing tht makes me regret I never continued on piano lessons enough to be able to play an accompaniment - or anything, really. I know the piano really only as a visualed embodiment of harmonic theory, which I did study. But I don't have the kind of coordination necessary to perform, and I always preferred to listen to and study music.
Have done some Messiah singalongs though, always as an everybody sings everything bit. Always amusing when all the hesitant amateur basses and baritones stand up to demolish "For He is like a refiner's fire." And I'm one of them.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 09:31 am (UTC)I went through much the same process about 18 months ago. Bascially, I worked out that I was too old and too inconsistent to learn to play fiddle properly, so what else was there? I spent a summer (2 summers ago) listening to free reeds at folk festivals; I'd initially started looking at anglos, but quickly established that the people who were playing concertina were all playing antique instruments. And besides, I realised that the sound I really liked was the sound of the English button accordion. (We call them melodeons, which name is used for a small organ in the US, rather confusingly). The standard instrument used in English folk is a two row button accordion in D and G; you see other keys as well.
Anyway, I've been playing for a little over a year. I too am still like 'folk tunes only slower' -- but of course the benefit there is that English folk, as opposed to Irish, is not predominantly about massive speed. But melodeon players mostly play concertina as well, and of course when they play concertina they play anglo because it's 'the same sort of thing'. As is harmonica, which I can now just about get a tune out of with the benefit of my melodeon practice.
You will be interested in concertina.net if you haven't already found it.
We are lucky to have a splendid folk club in Walthamstow, at a pub just about ten minutes walk from here. It gives me a chance to do floor spots singing, from which I'm smarting slightly becuase I really stuffed Sunday's up. No sessions though, but people play in the corner before the evening starts. I haven't yet had the nerve to join them. I did go to several sessions at Towersey last year, and I've been down to the George Inn's session.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:07 pm (UTC)And yet had there been eight books with which I could teach myself how to play the theremin rather than just one, would I have gone for that instead? (Ponders the stefnal qualities of the theremin, along with its reputation for being easy to produce cool sounds, difficult to produce music.) No.
Ive cruised concertina.net, paying particular attention to the ergonomics section. It looks very useful. I'll be enhancing my strap and handle arrangement shortly.
"...from which I'm smarting slightly because I really stuffed Sunday's up...." Could you translate this? Do you mean you've overscheduled yourself on Sundays, or that you are suffering from nasal congestion, or that you made mistakes six ways from Sunday, or some other thing that I cannot guess?
Oh, I love our language.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:44 pm (UTC)My granddaughter's guitar teacher explained that he preferred to start kids playing by ear and introduce reading music later, because it made them listen more carefully. It sounded plausible and he was the only teacher I'd found willing to take on a 7-year-old, so I went with it. Much later, I learned that in fact he couldn't read music himself at all, and despite being a brilliant guitar player and pretty good keyboard player, he sucked as a teacher. My granddaughter did learn some stuff from him, including how to listen carefully to a lot of music, and it was helpful for her at that point in her life to have an adult with a valuable skill spend a half hour with her every single week, paying attention just to her and encouraging her to try again.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:56 pm (UTC)For ten years, I've been carrying a keyboard in my pack to play with when I feel like it. I wish I took it out more often; I'd probably be a lot farther along if I had. Yeah, listening is part of the problem, I think.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 04:19 pm (UTC)Cheers on the concertina! It's such a great name for an instrument.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 10:18 pm (UTC)i will be in seattle for a shapenote singing the weekend of feb 17 and 18. the singing is two days, but i will only go on the 17th (my voice can't take two days of singing all day). i would LOVE to have people who are interested in giving it a try come over sometime--preferably the day i can see you but if i knew you were coming the other day, i could put the word out for someeone to watch for you. the great thing about shapenote is that you are not rehearsing--you can go when you can go and skip it as much as you need to. here's a webpage with other local singings, btw, if you can't make it to that one:
http://pnwshs.org/
anyway, i will be posting about it and if you can come, please do!
congratulations on your concertina--may you have much enjoyment with it!
no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 04:55 pm (UTC)Thanks for the notice. I'll pass it on to anybody else I know who might have an interest.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-16 01:52 am (UTC)I had a houseguest recently who observed that my allergy precautions are a way of life, and a complicated way of life at that. I said I didn't think it was more trouble than keeping kosher, for instance; she rolled her eyes.
See you at Wiscon.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-21 08:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-03-21 03:08 pm (UTC)And thank you for having an LJ name that allowed me to realize that I know you.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-21 03:14 pm (UTC)