October 2009 summary

13 October 2009:

Friday night I had a good cello lesson. We cleared up some fingerings in the Beethoven symphony, then I said I wanted to work on recital stuff instead of my lesson stuff. I’d been playing on Thursday night with the practice mute (a good hour and a quarter of practice, hurrah, although it meant I didn’t sleep well) and was struggling with making an Air by Bach sound properly smooth, and I’d worked on the Mozart duet and Ashokan Farewell too. I also finally said I needed to walk away from the Berceuse, because I was fighting it so much that it was causing more problems that it was solving. My teacher said that leaving it wasn’t a problem; we’d revisit it later. Although, she added, I’d been making progress on it, even though I couldn’t tell. The Mozart duet had good parts in it, and I have notes to help me focus on string crossings and smoother shifts. We worked out better fingerings for the Bach that made it so much easier, so I’m feeling better about that too. I don’t feel as overwhelmed by it all any more.

15 October 2009:

Orchestra was good last night. At least, it sucked less that it had for the past three weeks, so things must be better. I still need to work on some of the Beethoven trouble spots. Some I have down, others I don’t (which is an incredibly helpful statement, I know). We got to play the Schubert, which was nice because I could play it with no trouble even without practice, and we sight-read the first movement of the second Weber clarinet concerto (well, it shouldn’t have been sight-reading, because I’ve had it for two weeks) and that wasn’t as much of a disaster as it could have been once I remembered that we were in E flat major. It always sounds so wrong until you hear everyone else playing.

19 October 2009:

Saturday AM: Awful cello lesson. It’s been a while since I almost broke into tears. I’m at the I-can’t-do-anything-and-I-don’t-understand-why point.

26 October 2009:

An excellent cello lesson always begins the weekend nicely. Things have improved over the past couple of weeks, which is great, but I’m still a month behind where I ought to be. The six-week breakdown of technique while my subconscious implemented the new lesson stuff really crippled my progress in orchestra.

30 October 2009:

On Wednesday M. came over for our first rehearsal together of the Mozart duet we’re playing for the recital in December. Nothing like a practice session with your duet partner to emphasize that you’re really not as bad as you think you are. I sounded much better and steadier than I thought I did, with pretty good string crossings. This piece is all about waves and flow and steadiness, so I’m further along than I thought. There are still places that go ‘crunch’ so there is lots of room for improvement, but I felt a lot better about it than I did going in to the rehearsal. Orchestra that night wasn’t a compete disaster either: I got some of the harder bits but flaked out on the easier patches at the end of the Beethoven. I hate doing that. Just under one month till the fall concert, too.

Dull

I seem to be at a pretty bad fibro low. The cold/flu thing that tag-teamed me through September really kicked me hard, and getting back on my feet is a very long drawn-out process that's not much fun at all. It's also that time of year where I'm restless, but don't want to leave my office. I want to be out being distracted by things, but I don't have the energy to either do it physically or mentally, since dealing with People At Large requires a heck of a lot of energy. And as I no longer have the car, going out via public requires more time and physical energy as well.

So I'm spending a lot of time flipping dully through stuff on the internet hoping for inspiration, researching spinning and testing stuff out because it relaxes me and doesn't draw a whole bunch of energy from me, and getting frustrated because I can't work. Work is... draining. It's at the point where I'm not being fulfilled by it, and it's just a paycheque. Which is not a bad thing, because I never set out on this particular freelance gig seeking fulfillment; it was always intended to be just a paycheque, because money is good. It's just really hard to open these documents and run a review on them, because most of the time they're poorly written and poorly laid out, and that's really depressing. I have to muster up a huge amount of energy to deal with them, and that's draining on a whole other level. What would probably fulfill me more is actually writing, except that whole finite amount of energy and currently low levels means I need to direct the energy towards paying/deadlined work first. I feel exhausted just thinking about writing my own stuff, and not terribly inspired. What I need to do is rethink how I handle these assignments. Maybe read through them entirely before starting to pull out the broken elements for the report, then handle the report at the end rather than starting with it at the beginning of the read-through, because it slows things down.

Cello is feeling kind of sloggy at the moment too, because I'm trying to internalize a whole lot of stuff that's coming up in lessons, mostly about technique, and as a result a bunch of other stuff is breaking down. This is not unusual; very often we have to unlearn things, or take things apart in order to reassemble them properly. I know this intellectually, but my emotional awareness just sees things I was playing decently now being played horribly and piles on the self-confidence crisis. Orchestra is a slog too, because I've been dealing with the take-apartness issues (I've played everything on this program before, so why can't I do it now?), the past month I've been ill and unable to focus properly, and I'm experiencing issues with bringing things up to tempo. I can play them sub-tempo at home, and I'm not up to speed yet at rehearsal, which, let me tell you, is frustrating and embarrassing when you sit second chair right in front of the conductor. (I am very specifically not looking at the Beethoven, here. I know, I asked for a Beethoven symphony; I've changed my mind. How about some Haydn? Or some Boyce?) So rather than being excited about cello the way I was in the spring and early summer I'm dragging my feet.

* The complete original post at Owls' Court
* Owls' Court: the main journal