Metamorphosism

Cello progress report

I've been somewhat distracted by life lately, and yet not in a manner one could bitch about in any interesting way. Mornings have been foggy and beautiful. Luckily there were no law enforcement officers around because I was driving and taking pictures on my way to work again this morning. On the bad for your concentration while driving scale, photography falls somewhere between telecommunications activity and what I once saw happening in the Dodge Charger in front of me on a road out in some Wyoming wasteland once a long time ago.

With certain exceptions that may even be more conceptual than real, to the extent that real concepts are less real than, say, fog, or hibernating tortoises (I sometimes wonder whether Schrödinger actually had a tortoise, not a cat, because while one rarely seals cats into boxes, tortoises do like to hibernate out of sight, under leaves in a plastic tub in your cellar, for example, with the result that you have this schrödingeresque period of time every spring: is it dead? is it alive but just sleeping? is it trying to get out but I just don't hear it down in the cellar? is it going through a Cask-of-Amontillado panic right now? did it go through one yesterday, but I missed it and now it's dead and there goes my karma? is it fine and I should quit worrying? and he probably started out lecturing about his tortoise, and everyone was all, WTF? until he got the idea to talk about a cat instead) things have been going okayish or better.

Someone asked me how I was again recently, and it threw me again. I just am, don't ask me how. Ask me how cello is going, I can answer that. They put me on the orchestra list again this year. I wasn't even asked, it was assumed, which is nice. And we got some of the sheet music. And I can already play most of it. Which is to say, I cannot play any of it the way it will eventually have to be played, but at the first rehearsal I managed to keep up with the best cellists there (luckily the two really good cellists didn't come to the first rehearsal).

The fiddly bits all look manageable - nothing evil like some of the stuff I was forced to pantomime last year. We're playing some stuff from Carmen. That's fun. And some other stuff. A Strauss polka, I think it's Strauss. And so on.

I was thinking, if mice don't like dissonance, then the music school has no mice. I've gotten over my fear of robust bowing. The fear was making me squeak too much. I am often unsure of my intonation, and try to play more quietly, which is the opposite of what you should do (at least while practicing, I still think in an orchestral performance you should keep quiet if you're not sure). Last night my teacher got me to play a piece loudly and it sounded good. The cello, I mean. See, he said. That's what your cello is supposed to sound like. It seems to be a nice instrument, as student celli go, and one of my goals for the year is to get sounds like that out of it more often.

Last year, I had the feeling I was making no progress, mostly due to Grieg and other stuff I just couldn't crack. But when I sat down with my sheet music this year and started trying it out, and it started working, I had to admit maybe I've begun to learn something after all.