Tai Chi Cha Cha and the Left-Hand Pizz Stress Challenge

(Or just give me a Xanax with a scotch on the rocks.)

So first the universe said to me, “and you will greatly expand your left-hand pizzicato skills this week.”

Last week and into this scores have been arriving via email for this coming Sunday’s 7:30 PM International Street Cannibals Tai Chi Cha Cha (how could you miss that?) concert at St. Mark’s in the Bowery in Manhattan.  (The New York one.  We probably have an Indiana one somewhere, along with our own Brazil and Poland.) It’s Fall Break, a whole week, at DePauw, and, having played on two of the Cannibals concerts while on sabbatical in New York last winter/spring, I invited myself to play in this one.  So I’m flying up there in the morning.

Two of the pieces have lots of left hand pizzicato.  If you’re not a string player, pizzicato is the fancy-pants Italian word for plucking.  (Classical musicians still use Italian terminology with each other because in the the 1600s opera started in Italy and became really popular.) 95% or more of the time we pluck with the right hand, the one that holds the bow.  But sometimes we are playing a note, or notes, with the bow and pluck other strings with the left hand, which is also holding down a string or strings.  This is just about as difficult as it sounds.  Maybe a bit more, especially if you haven’t done a lot of it for a while.

One of these pieces almost put me over the edge yesterday.  I can’t play this a voice said somewhere in me.  Keep calm answered another.  First learn the slightly awkward double stops and then figure out how to add in the pizzicatos. 

Took a break.  Laid down on the couch and Figaro, one of my cats, plopped down on my belly.  “Help!” I posted on Facebook.  “I took a practice break and now there’s a cat on my belly and I can’t get up.”  A friend added a comment to the effect that cat therapy is good for the playing.  Eventually the cat moved on, I got up, and returned to the cello.

Just did everything in  s  l  o  w    m  o t  i  o  n.

Very, very calmly.

My thoughts went quickly to Dale Stuckenbruck, the wonderful violinist (and musical saw player) who was my RA when I was a 16-year-old high school junior at the North Carolina Schoolof the Arts.  Dale would help me practice, bless him, and he taught me more about practicing (calmly, intelligently, methodically, and focused) than anyone else.  Thank you, Dale! (Isn’t that great . . . we can still be learning from our earlier mentors 35 years later?)

It’s going to be alright, it turns out. Just have to work out the choreography–which finger will pluck which string when.  And then it will speed up on its own. (And it just occurred to me that I’m practicing in tai chi-like slow motion for the Tai Chi Cha Cha concert.  Neat, huh?)

So that was handled.

Then the universe said, and you will be humbled.

I made a quick trip to the DePauw recording studio this afternoon, to record the Prelude and Gigue of the Bach G Major Suite for a doctor friend who is making some educational videos and needs some music for them.  Oh, I’ve played these movements a zillion times, it will be a piece of cake.  Ha!  As I listened to the playback of the takes, I kept thinking, man, I’d like to give this guy a lesson!  We’ve got something useable, and I may like it better a year from now, but I really need to do a lot more recording of myself. Holy fuck, this music is amazing and needs something more than me winging it.

OK, now back to practicing that left-hand pizzicato.

 

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Norman Johnson: “Amatuers forget, professionals . . .”

Norman Johnson

During my last two years of high school and my first year of college, I was privileged to attend what was then known as the North Carolina School of the Arts (now it’s the University of North Carolina School of the Arts). Conducting the annual ballet (I think) and opera (for sure) performances was the late Norman Johnson, the founding Artistic Director of the Piedmont Opera, and, I just learned by reading the short bio on the Piedmont About Us page (scroll down), the Director of Opera at NCSA (so no wonder he conducted the operas!) from 1968 to 1996.

He was kind, perhaps a little too kind for someone working with a student orchestra;  so many of us looked at playing an opera as a pain in the ass.  Norman was great at conducting an opera;  the type of teaching notes that one has to do from time to time with any student orchestra wasn’t something he was, well, into.  At times, I thought even then, a Toscanini-like temper tantrum might have had a good effect on us, but Norman was to kind a soul for that.

He did get exasperated.  In so many operas, there are ritards and accelerandos and unwritten fermatas and pauses and what not.  He would patiently teach them to us, and we would not always remember them.  I remember feeling put upon and resentful, in a myopically teenaged way;  instrumentalists are so trained to do what’s in the score that it seemed an outrage(!) that we had to do so much that wasn’t in the parts!  Someone, at least in the rehearsal process, was always forgetting a fermata or playing in newly inserted silence.  And so my irritation was with myself, and my fellow students, as well, with the whole damned situation and it was fueled in part by defensiveness.

In one of these rehearsals, when yet another one of us had quite audibly forgotten to do or to refrain from doing something or other (sins of commission, sins of omission), Norman stopped us, sighed and after a glare asked us,

“Do you know what the difference is between an amateur and a professional? An amateur forgets.  A professional . . .”

Dramatic pause.  I was sure he would say, “remembers.”

” . . . writes it down!”

That really hit the adolescent me.  Human beings, amateur or professional, forget.  The problem wasn’t that we’d forget, the problem was that we were trying to remember things and were too lazy to write them in.  It was a relief and a revelation all at once.  It was so typical of Norman’s kindness.  No shaming, but a genuine lesson.And he was so right!

I’ve used that line on students countless times ove the 30+ years since I heard it from Norman.

I was reminded of this earlier today.  My colleagues in the DePauw Chamber players and I performed for the Warren Central High School orchestra in Indianapolis.  We were approaching the last page of the Chausson piano trio, and in my music, a couple of likes before the last page, were penciled the words, “turn here!”   So I turned.

Oops.

I had written those words in when I was using a photocopy of the penultimate page next to the last page. I’d turn that next-to-last page, then look at the photocopy of it, which would be to the right of the last page, then go back  . . . it was as complicated as it seems.  Then I realized that all I needed to do was photocopy the last page.  But that page had come untaped, so I had it next to the music (which is somewhat narrow) on the stand.

In the heat of the moment, I turned.  But then I was missing the last two lines.  I realized my mistake, turned back, and then was lost for a while.  Eventually I caught on and joined back in. It was a mess;  how many of the kids know what was going on I don’t know, but I was momentarily panicked.  All’s well that ends well, and as it happened we ended just as the bell rang to end the period.

Norman came immediately to mind, of course.  A permutation of his adage has now entered my vocabulary:  “Amateurs forget, but professionals . . . ”

“. . . erase.”