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: 2007-03-21 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.
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Date: 2007-03-21 03:14 pm (UTC)