27.08.10 – Murphy Schmurphy

There was so much excitement after we got back from Townsville a couple of weeks ago. Apart from the weather, it was amazing to have played Schoenberg’s first chamber symphony to an appreciative audience both as part of the Concerto and Vocal Competition and as part of the Chamber Music Festival. It was great to have won (!!) of course, but we were also excited that our guest cellist for the occasion – Blair Harris – took out the Concerto section of the same competition with a really moving performance of Bloch’s ‘Schelomo’ for cello and orchestra.

We were cruising after this – we could do anything. Right? RIGHT? Well, just as toast generally falls butter-side down, we seemed to have angered the gods of logistical programming and smooth functions. But despite the double-booking of rehearsal spaces, the crazy schedules of percussionists, the music that got lost in the mail, the hidden fees from publishers and emails that went missing in cyberspace, we’re still smiling.

Actually – that’s an understatement. We’re GUFFAWING. At least I was, yesterday in the rehearsal for Robert Paterson’s ‘Eating Variations’. In the third movement, where the ensemble needs to ’sing’ like a chorus of hippies high on life, I could barely keep the camcorder straight, I was laughing so hard. And, while this blog is never a shameless (come) attempt to lull you, dear reader (come on September 5th) to all of our concerts, I can’t help (you won’t regret coming on September 5th at 3pm) but sort of plug this (SEE WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT) one because it’s going to be (SEPTEMBER 5th, 3pm, GUILFORD LANE GALLERY) really quite spectacular.

We’re laughing in the face of Murphy and his so-called ‘laws’, and as a result the music is better than ever. The rehearsing for this concert has only just begun, so there’ll be more amazingness to report soon. As well as a video or two. And watch this space over the coming weeks as we eventually allow YOU to rant back at me on this very page.

Yours in gluttony goodness,
Leigh

02.06.10 – Tears, tantrums and transfiguration

I had become a moody, sulky cow thanks to the exertions of Mt Eyjafjallajokull. I was all set to board a plane on a certain Monday evening to participate in the Harare International Festival of Arts (affectionately known as ‘HIFA’) and catch up with the lovely C. into the bargain, whom I’d been missing enormously. Instead, Monday night saw me at the cafe round the corner cursing Mother Nature and her capricious ways. I was taking it personally – I’d been told I wouldn’t be leaving till at least Wednesday, and even that wasn’t looking entirely hopeful.

On Tuesday night I went to a concert, had a few drinks with some friends, and caught a tram home. I was snuggled in bed infront of the lap-top in my PJs (much like I am now – eek!) doing some half-hearted admin work. It was 12.15am. There, in my email inbox was a message from Jo – one of the HIFA organisers. The cover letter was brief: ‘Dear Leigh, does this alternative itinerary work? Let us know so we can confirm. Best, Jo’. I opened the attachment – the first thing I noticed was the convoluted route that expertly avoided all ash-spewing vulcanism: Melbourne – Kuala Lumpur – Dubai – Johannesburg – Harare – clearly I’d be in the air for days. The second thing, slowly dawning on me, was the departure time – 2.40… am??

I suddenly adopted the attitude of a contestant on ‘The Amazing Race’. I rang a taxi, re-packed my hand-luggage haphazardly, scrawled a likely-illegible note to my housemates explaining my sudden disappearance, and bolted. I was actually about 70% sure that I wouldn’t make the flight, but fate was smiling on me and the queue for check-in was non-existent. I have never felt more like a rock-star as when I was in the back of the taxi speeding to the airport, frantically emailing Jo to tell her to confirm the ticket booking as I would be at the airport in 15 minutes.

And two days later, without much incident, I was in Harare and I was face-to-face with C. It was indeed a reason to celebrate. My initial tantrums at almost missing out on HIFA turned to  embarrassed sheepiness when I realised how unnecessarily sullen I’d been, and by the time my HIFA experience was over, it wouldn’t be too much to say that I was actually quite ashamed at my behaviour in light of what I’d been privileged to be a part of over the HIFA fortnight.

The truth is, my HIFA experience still isn’t over. I returned to Melbourne and over a red (of course) breathlessly described everything to Laila and Julia. I had been moved to tears several times in Harare and was struggling to fight back tears again as I related my stories. But I wasn’t crying for the reasons you may think. I was actually moved to tears by the incredibly warm nature of the people there. Above all, everyone wanted to share. Over the course of the fortnight, there was a man who wanted to take us to his favourite coffee shop and who devoted an entire evening to showing us the best markets in town. What did he want in return? Simply to sit and listen in silence to C. and I rehearse, which he did for two hours; another man folded a disc of foil cut from a Sprite can into an intricate (and practically life-sized) mosquito before my eyes and gave it to me as a gift; the mother of a boy who played in an ensemble with C. and I rang our hotel room to invite us to share a dinner at their home; the head chef at our hotel almost became our surrogate mum, enquiring about our well-being every morning at breakfast.

I relate all this because it’s ALL to do with music, and music-making. I’d been privileged to play music to people that related it directly to their lives (and often their lives were rich with hardship) and who considered it an act of sharing, of story-telling, of somehow divulging a secret part of ourselves, if only for a moment. We’d given something to them and they wanted to offer us something in return. Money never changed hands, and yet both parties ended up infinitely richer from every exchange.

Rehearsals for our ‘Metaphysical Morsels’ concert began as soon as I stepped off the plane, and I couldn’t help but view performing all of these existential pieces – most of them dealing with the big issues of death and transfiguration – as the most intimate of emotional exchanges. I felt silly for being on the verge of tears most of the first rehearsal. The frightened weight of the  entire fragile world seemed to be contained in the first movement of the Hindemith Bass Clarinet Sonata that Julia and I started working on. Jolivet’s ‘Chant de Linos’ is a piece that Laila and I have performed many times before, but this time around it seemed almost unbearably tortured. When Peter Tregear asked us on live radio to explain the background of the piece I found myself poised to start blubbering again, thinking about the intense nature of grief and the necessary catharsis of funeral rites.

But there was an instance when there was no ‘poised’ about it. Brenton Broadstock has transcribed for us an incredibly moving work called ‘I touched your glistening tears’. Such a poetic title beggars further explanation, and Julia had the foresight to ring Brenton and ask him about the piece’s background. He related a moving story about his role of carer for his handicapped son and the helplessness felt in those instances when all he can do is wipe away his ‘glistening tears’. As Julia related the story to me, she was fighting back tears. As I absorbed it, I found that fighting back tears was impossible.

As classically trained musicians, we can often be cynical and one-eyed in our quest for technical perfection. But the bottom line is that we have to be aware that music arouses emotion – be it happiness, awe, anger, ecstasy, or even revulsion. Every piece, like every person, has a story – a story that should be shared, discussed and celebrated. If we perform a piece, but haven’t told a story, perhaps we haven’t done our job properly, even if we’ve executed the notes perfectly. The story might be different for every person in the room who hears it, but it must say something. When we performed ‘I touched your glistening tears’ on the radio last week, I realised that by the end of the work I had my own eyes shut so tightly that I’d squeezed out some tears myself. But it was no longer about me. In fact, it never was. What had I been complaining about again?

Leigh

15.04.10 – Short, sharp jabs

“Now, I hope you’re not going to kick me in the shins and scream at me the way that last little child did”, joked the nurse as she prepared to give me my typhoid shot for my upcoming trip to Zimbabwe. I sympathised – I really did. The cute little girl in pig-tails who had just exited the room in tears after her flu shot didn’t seem capable of having lungs big enough to emit the blood-curdling screams I’d heard while reading about whether ‘Jen really pined for Brad’ in the adjacent corridor while I waited my turn.

Poor nurses must get that a lot, I thought. It must get a little depressing after a while –  inflicting pain on confused little patients day after day, knowing that they won’t appreciate any of it until about 15 years later when they’ve reached adulthood and are strapping and healthy. But, that aside, I *did* want to kick her – just a bit. And it wasn’t her fault – I mean, I didn’t even *know* her. It was just that this innoculation was item #6  for the day in a list of about 139 things that I had to do before I left for overseas. Some of these things were to do with the impending trip, most of them weren’t. Most distressingly, none of them involved playing the piano. I wanted to be as rowdy as that little girl. I wanted to yell out ‘BUT I JUST WANT TO PLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!’

I *know* how to play the piano. I find it difficult some days, and slow going at others, but I know that with enough tenacity I’ll learn the notes I have to learn at any given time for any given concert. Likewise, Laila seems pretty handy with her flutes, and, well, Jules plays a mean clarinet (and just wait till she breaks out the bass clarinet for our next concert!). It’s because we’ve been trained in it, and we love it – we couldn’t imagine doing anything else, in fact. We *need* to do it.

After our last concert, Laila, Julia and I celebrated with our audience and debriefed over some great food and wine. There is always a wonderful sense of relaxation after a concert – as critical and masochistic musicians, not a single one of us will actually be 100% happy with our performance (“Did you *hear* my awful second chord in the Beaser??” I asked Laila loudly after a couple of glasses of wine), but we can at least acknowledge the satisfying culmination of weeks of hard practise and rehearsal and look forward to the next goal.

But the celebrations are short-lived, and then it’s back to work. And not just learning notes. There are new subscribers to add to the mailing list; business negotiations with guest artists; media releases to write; music publishers to write to; publicists to engage; emails to send out; rehearsal schedules to juggle; flights to book; statistics to analyse; interviews to participate in; and, Leigh, when was the last time you actually updated the blog? Suddenly, I feel on much less stable ground. Musicians are very rarely trained in the art of actually managing a business or, indeed, of marketing themselves *as* a business. All three of us are eager students and are willing to learn the ropes, but  some days it’s a lot to take in.

On the said ‘innoculation’ day, I had suffered a computer failure, had a circular conversation with an Optus customer service provider about our land-line, been told a score that I needed was out of print, rang almost every pianist in Adelaide and Melbourne to find a replacement for myself for a gig that I’d appeared to have been double booked for, and – lastly – been told at the 11th hour via email that I really needed to get a typhoid jab asap. Apart from the jabs in my arm, there were signs of stabbing pains in my head by the afternoon when I realised the task I’d *originally* set myself for the day – to learn the music for an upcoming Melbourne Symphony Orchestra concert – was starting to look more and more like a distant fantasy. Today, when I saw Julia massaging her temples after the three of us had just divided up another mammoth list of admin tasks, I knew she was feeling the same. I wanted to yell it out again in petulance on behalf of all three of us: “I JUST WANT TO PLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!”

The truth is though, we all know that the more we attend to these little tasks, the better our performance experience will be. And there’s three of us to egg each other on, to take up the slack if another has to drop their bundle suddenly, and to convene over spicy ribs at the end of the week to check up on each other. And, most importantly, we’re learning a hell of a lot about ways to make the concert-going experience for you, dear reader, as memorable as it can possibly be. The artistic returns outweigh the blood, sweat and tears by so much that it’s no contest really.

And there’s that moment to look forward to – that great moment when we *do* meet for the first rehearsal of a piece of music and transform our administrative frustrations into artistic gold. There is a wonderful section in the Broadstock piece we’re doing for our next concert called “All that is solid melts into air…” where the bass clarinet has angry spit-like sounds in unison with percussive stabs from the piano. I’ll never be able to play them again without thinking about my jab from the nurse, or my evil desire to kick a complete stranger in the shins.

Signing off on duty #73,

Leigh.

17.03.10 – George?… Is that you?…

In retrospect, stepping straight off a long-haul flight from London to Melbourne and straight into a national tour was a bad idea. I thought if I hit the ground running I’d stave off jet-lag, but I realised at about the third day of rehearsals that things just weren’t right. I’d contracted some sort of weird virus that gave me a crushing headache, a killer fever, and – most annoyingly – just made me want to sleep all the time. I could gather just enough energy and focus to play for each concert I had to do with the percussionist I was touring with, and then it was back to the hotel room to rest. For me, this behaviour was decidedly atypical. My friends jokingly asked me if I might be pregnant.

Of course, I tried to stay in denial all-too-long about the fact that my body simply needed to rest. After all, Syzygy has a concert coming up – I needed to practise! In the lovely, intimate Wesley Performing Arts Centre in Horsham, I took the score to George Crumb’s ‘Apparition’ and thought I’d sneak in a quick practice session in between the soundcheck and the concert I had with the percussionist.

The stage was kind of dark, and a little warm. I began the first page – all swirling mists of sound created by strumming the strings inside the piano hypnotically – up and down, up and down, up and down, up and- woah! It was time to stop by that point as I was making myself decidedly seasick. “No problem”, I thought. “I’ll play it a bit slower to calm myself down”. It was fine until I got to the point, about three-quarters of the way into the first page, where the pianist is required to play a melody on the keyboard with their right hand while continuing the strumming with their left. I looked down at the keyboard from my ‘crouching tiger’ stance over the piano strings. The forest of black and white keys swam before my eyes. No good. I looked back into the yawning chasm of the piano’s interior – I really needed to stop that up and down strumming before I got any more woozy.

The second page calls on the pianist to actually find harmonics at certain places along the length of the piano strings and stop them while actually playing the piano keys. A certain amount of bodily contortion is required to do this effectively. I stood up, placed my fingers upon the strings needed for the three notes of the first chord and promptly fell onto the floor on my bum as stars danced before my eyes. Clearly today’s Crumb practice was not going to be all that effective. I sat back down on the piano stool, swallowed some Panadol, and waited ten minutes for my fever to break. Suddenly I had an apparition of my own. “Leigh? Leigh?” I had fallen asleep sitting bolt upright on the piano stool. In my mind, I was having a visitation from George Crumb. He seemed angry that I wasn’t taking his beautiful setting of Walt Whitman seriously.

But it wasn’t Crumb after all. it was Nick – my percussionist and touring partner. From where he’d appeared on stage behind me, it was impossible for him to tell that I was asleep. I opened my eyes and the world swam back into consciousness. “Leigh? LEIGH? Are you going to get some dinner? We’re on in an hour.” I mumbled something in the nick of time, and then we wandered down to the local pub for a schnitzel. The food and the Panadol kicked in. Was I really having my own fever-induced delirious communion with George Crumb just an hour ago? No time to think about that now. I had a job to do and the show had to go on. Nick and I walked onto stage smiling warmly and took our first bow. Somehow, the music flowed out, but then again, that’s the power of music – it’ll do that, regardless of how its conduits might be feeling. I knew I was going to sleep well that night.

Yours in good health (now),

Leigh.

24.02.10 – The cherry-popping blog: Greetings from England!

Rousing greetings, dear listener, and welcome to the inaugural Syzygy blog!

It seems rather odd to be typing away here, in a cozy flat in Acton, London, where it’s 5 degrees outside. I’m over here on a sabbatical to see loved ones and do some writing – both of which are tasks that were long overdue. Just so I don’t become completely self-indulgent though, I’m grateful for Laila and Julia for gently (and sometimes not so gently) nudging me in the back and reminding me that, actually, we have our first concert in a month!

Not that I need reminding really, but the semantics involved in preparing for something like this when ensemble members find themselves on the other side of the world to each other really are something to behold. There’s a lot of  ”So 8pm my time is actually… 7am the morning before… no, after, no… so I can Skype for, say, 3 hours, before I go to bed, unless you’re in the middle of breakfast in which case…” as well as “Well, if I play this passage like this *insert scrunchy, crackly sound of piano travelling through lap-top speakers* then you should just be able to come in on…. hello? HELLO?” at which point the connection drops out and a terse email is sent. Sheesh.

On top of this, Greta Bradman, our utterly oustanding guest soprano for this concert has just given birth to baby Caspar (congratulations, Gret!) and is combining learning the Crumb with late-night bottle-feeds and nappy-changes, as well as attempting to move cities into the bargain. It’s amazing how her enthusiasm (“Leigh, these melismas in the Crumb are f@#$%g AWESOME!”) never seems to wane.

And then there’s the music itself. George Crumb’s ‘Apparition’ looks like a work of art on the page. The score’s lines bend and twist so that the musical journey the listener is taken on is actually notated graphically to inspire the performers. When I first opened the score it actually made me feel  a little queasy (“Oh Lordy, how am I going to learn this?”) but now that I’ve started, I feel as though I’m conjuring up whole worlds and spectres as I scrape the strings inside the piano and produce sounds on the instrument that I barely knew existed. Its a beautiful work that has to be heard to be believed.

On Skype the other day, Julia remarked that Eliot Carter’s ‘Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux’ was putting her through her paces. We all feel the same. Robert Beaser’s ‘Variations’ for flute and piano is an epic work that pretty much covers the entire stylistic gamut. Thankfully, Laila and I have played it before, but it still feels like limbering up for a marathon every time we polish it up for another concert. Of course, it’s utterly worth it because it’s one of the most powerful works in existence for flute and piano. I remember the first time I heard it I couldn’t stop shaking. I kept asking myself how one tiny, tiny theme of just six notes could grow (one might even say mutate) into whole worlds and galaxies right before my ears. It’s like Beethoven but for the post-Vietnam generation. It really is that powerful.

Luckily of course, music bridges the gap – good music makes the technical difficulties seem conquerable and the long-distance seem non-existent. Of course the biggest problem is that, when we’re so far away from each other, we can’t crack open a bottle of red after rehearsals and head off to Chinatown for some spicy ribs. That’s something that’ll have to be remedied in a fortnight. Until then, it’s ” *crackle* so in bar 53 should we crescendo or… hello?… HELLO?!” and then a matter of inserting some cliche about suffering for one’s art.

London sends her love,

Leigh