March 2010 Summary (to date)

1 March 2010:

Saturday morning I had my cello lesson, which was notable for happening half an hour after I woke up. I’d been sleeping badly and HRH decided to let me sleep in, which was lovely, but then he realised at 8:26 that I had a cello lesson at 9:00, and woke me up when I’m usually stepping out the door. I got dressed in record time, he made me tea in my travel mug, and I flew out to the West Island. The lesson was pretty good. It’s nice to be asked, “How long have we been working on this étude?” and to answer, “Well, actually, you assigned it last week and this is the first time I’ve played it for you,” and then hear the teacher say, “Well, you’ve done what you needed to do with that, let’s look at the next one.”

I asked to work on ‘The Entertainer’, which we’re playing in a quartet arrangement for the June recital, and gah. I’m playing Cello 2, and there were some rhythmic things that I just wasn’t getting. My teacher tried all sorts of rearrangements and subdivisions to help me get it, and they just succeeded in confusing me more. I’m a very basic kind of ‘just play the correct rhythm for me and I’ll internalize it’ kind of girl; rhythm tricks just worsen my muddle. I got it in the end, mainly because a few bars later the same rhythm showed up with different notes, only preceded by two eighth notes instead of a quarter note and that seemed to make all the difference. Then we moved to the Boccherini minuet.

Oh, Boccherini. Really.

I have a hate/love relationship with pops and chestnuts. They’re overplayed and so I grit my teeth at them, turn them off when I can, and resist them. If I have to play them, I discover all sorts of lovely things about their internal workings, admit there’s a reason for their popularity, find something to like about them when I hear them, but I still don’t enjoy them. Boccherini’s Minuet is a classic example of an overplayed pop that I hate. And I hate it all the more now that I have to play it, because those opening sixteenth notes are a huge obstacle for me. I can play them in the repeats, but starting from a static bow? Gah. No.

It’s one of those pieces that is all about bow speed and weight and control and I’m sure it’s very character-building, but I’m hating myself because I can’t flipping get that mini-run of sixteenth notes. My teacher pointed out that I can play the piece with my left hand, and that I regularly play much harder pieces in orchestra. (In fact, she expanded that to cover all the Suzuki material I’ve done and will do, which was very gratifying to hear, since sometimes I beat myself up about being on book three after playing for sixteen years.) The point of this is to work the right hand, and my problem does in fact lie entirely with the bow. From a dead stop, I can’t micro-manage the speed to get that lovely sort of swoop and jump for precise phrasing on those two first bars. (There’s an argument in the music world about the validity of the Suzuki method for adults, and what people tend to forget is that review is a huge part of the method. Yes, after sixteen years, you can go back to the earlier books and work on the pieces with all your knowledge and still find technique to polish. The method is a philosophy, not just a set of books.)

We spent the last ten minutes focusing on phrasing those two bars and trying to play them over and over, and I finally said I had to stop because it was getting worse and I was tensing up and losing control of bow and phrasing entirely, and it was doing more harm than good. That’s the kind of thing that stays with me, and despite the lesson overall being great, I had to keep telling myself not to brood about it on the way home.

8 March 2010:

I took the cello downstairs to practice in the basement because I had a lesson scheduled for that night and I wouldn’t be able to play in my office like I usually do since everyone was home. I regret not practising downstairs before, because the sound is phenomenal down there. And the phenomenal sound went with me to the lesson, which was great. We are moving on from Boccherini and working on Webster’s Scherzo now, which is nice for the change, but is also all about the incredibly controlled bow movement.

9 March 2010:

It’s that time of year again! The Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra proudly announces their spring 2010 concert.

Date: Saturday the 27 of March
Time: 19h30
Location: Beaurepaire United Church, 25 Fieldfare Ave, Beaconsfield
Admission: $10, free for children under 18

Programme:
The Wasps Overture - Vaughn Williams
Symphony no. 83 (’The Hen’) - Haydn
Méditation from Thaïs - Massenet
The Banks of Green Willow - Butterworth
Petit Suite - Debussy

This is a gorgeous programme. The concerts usually last approximately two hours, including the refreshment break. There are driving directions and public transport info on the church website, linked above. I usually encourage people who are vehicle-less to find someone who has a car and share the cost of the driver’s admission to the concert among them. It’s more fun to enjoy the evening in the company of others, after all.

Mark your calendars now! And feel free to share the information with anyone you like; it’s a public concert. See you there!

11 March 2010:

I am giddy to announce the release of A Modern Cellist’s Manual by Emily Wright. I had the very enjoyable task of editing this book.

A very different sort of cello method, A Modern Cellist’s Manual combines technical information and plenty of photographs with advice on approach. Topics addressed range from the basics of a painless bow grip to injury avoidance, working with a metronome, and tenor clef. Emily’s tone and sense of humor lighten the mood of any practice session. A Modern Cellist’s Manual is suitable for those taking private lessons as well as returning cellists looking to bolster rusty technique.

A Modern Cellist’s Manual can be purchased via Lulu.com for now, and should be listed at major online retailers eventually.

Congratulations, Emily. You’ve worked hard for this. And for those who read it and want more… I have it on good authority that she’s working on it.

15 March 2010:

Saturday was a great lesson with some excellent breakthroughs (such as one doesn’t move one’s left elbow forward while crossing strings, one moves one’s forearm, so as to avoiding “breaking” the wrist; I love making discoveries like that), but it was an intense lesson and very draining.

Sunday we had our monthly group cello lesson, where I played my lines rather better than I’d anticipated. It’s so much easier when you hear the other lines and figure out where your line fits in (Yes, I realise this contradicts my complaint of last month, where I said that I couldn’t play my line because I didn’t know how it fit in. Yesterday was magically different. Or I practised the new material. One of the two.) We also sight-read two pieces, a cello quartet arrangement of the theme from Haydn’s quartet op 76 no 3 (we sight-read this one last time, too, but we all had different parts this time; last time I think I had the viola part, and this time I had the first violin) and a piece by Rameau.

22 March 2010:

On Friday night I had my cello lesson where some things fell apart, and others worked. I guess overall it was good, but there were parts that left me really down. This is the part of the-tearing-apart-current-technique process I hate. I know to expect sounding awful while my brain and muscles struggle to implement new info, but it doesn’t do much for feeling good about yourself or your work. A new étude that my teacher assigned had me trying to figure out what it sounded like, and I finally made the connection: it was in the same key and rhythmic pattern as the piece my teacher had suggested doing for the spring recital back in January, the Bach Gavotte from the third Suzuki book, a piece I love. I shared this insight with her and she was slightly taken aback, because we haven’t started it yet and usually she prefers students to present a polished piece they’ve worked on for a good long time. So there was miscommunication: I expected her to assign it when she thought it was time, and she perhaps forgot or had just been thinking aloud. She suggested doing the Lully Gavotte instead, but told me to work on both as the Lully has lots of stuff we can apply to the Bach, and if the Bach is good enough we can do that. We have three months; we’ll see what happens.

February 2010 Summary

17 February 2010:

After a severe setback yesterday wherein I lost most of the day to researching ways to embed fonts on a Mac, and then finding that using Open Office to make a PDF had resulted in borking my document (it was supposed to make things easier!), I finally finished the cello manual layout and proofing today.

It’s been a really fun six weeks, taking a text document and doing a basic layout, then a copyedit, then the endless tweaking that happens when two people trade a document back and forth once a week for a while. Some of that tweaking was to condense the layout; some fixed things that became problematic; some involved adding material; some fixed errors that popped up thanks to the document format. Still, six weeks from plain text to a finished PDF ready for printing is a really good timeline for two busy people. (I come from a publishing world where three to six months for all this is the norm!) I’m crossing my fingers that there aren’t any problems with the printing process. (That’s what all the PDF and font-embedding strife was about. It was a whole thing.)

And today, apart from finishing the book PDF, I managed to wipe myself out having a shower, scrubbing the bathroom, and doing yoga. The fibro is really in my bad books these days. It would help if it gave me some sort of warning sign instead of just handing me a tonne of fatigue and pain all at once when everything seems to be going well.

I have a freelance project due on Friday that I really wanted done earlier this week, but PDFs and fibro are messing that up. I have orchestra tonight, and I fully expect to perform horribly despite practising this week. It occurred to me that I might discuss dropping orchestra with my teacher. Or taking a break. It’s been a really tough winter for me in a lot of ways, and orchestra’s getting trounced in my priority list. I love this new conductor, and I love the music, but I just can’t handle it capably. I know the rest of the section feels the same way, though, so I suspect I’m overreacting in a maudlin self-defeatist fashion borne of fatigue. Still; I really don’t want to drop it, but I feel so stressed about it that I don’t know if the tradeoff is worth it.

Time for winter to be over, I think. The cold and damp is really bothering the fibro.

18 February 2010:

The thing is, if you stick with something long enough, the bad parts usually get better.

Yes, orchestra rocked. Why would I drop something that challenges and rewards me? When it’s going badly it’s bad, but when it works, when everything comes together, it’s glorious. And I wouldn’t give that up.

Besides, Butterworth’s “The Banks of Green Willow” alone makes up for any frustration. (Including the frustrating passage of stormy strings a third of the way through where everything sounds like it’s falling apart, but is actually building before the absolutely gorgeous climax.) I’ve played some very pretty things, but I find this piece absolutely spectacular and it gets me every time. The transition in the middle is throat-clenchingly exquisite, and then the arrangement of the folk song at the end (the same one that Vaughn Williams used as the second movement of his Folk Song Suite, “The Bonny Boy”; Butterworth and Vaughn Williams were both interested in English folk songs, and Butterworth worked with Cecil Sharp to collect them) is gentle and ethereally beautiful in its simplicity.

I loved this piece even before I found out that Butterworth was killed in the First World War, after destroying the music he though unworthy of survival should he not return. His remaining catalogue is slim, and you can’t help but wonder what he destroyed, and what he might have composed had he lived through the war. Knowing it’s one of the few pieces that survived makes it all the more precious.

23 February 2010:

My monthly group cello lesson later that afternoon was great; we had a new student there, and did some good work on the Corelli. I’m having a stupid time counting, for some reason; I got lost in the middle of everything that I wasn’t playing the first cello line for (I’m fine with first and whatever the bottom line is, but I’m wobbly on the middle voices because I’m not sure how the harmonies are supposed to move or sound like yet). Despite this, our first read-through of Joplin’s “The Entertainer” went pretty well. We sight-read a new piece, “Soldier’s Joy,” that will be paired with “The Ashokan Farewell,” as well as getting the official new music for our quartets and trios. I really enjoy my group lessons, and I wish we could do them more often, although I know they’re a tonne of work for my teacher and the scheduling is enough of a nightmare.

January 2010 Summary

11 January 2010:

Saturday morning I had my first cello lesson of the year, and it went well. This may have had something to do with the hour and a half of work I did on Friday reacquainting myself with book 3, or the beautiful weather (cold, but sunny and still) but whatever the reason, I was in a terrific mood, and pulled off a decent Gavotte. We then filled my slate with working on the musicality of the Gavotte, the 3rd pos Ruined Castle tonalisation, and the Boccherini minuet. (Good grief, what is the Boccherini doing so early in book 3?) And with the pile of work we have to do for orchestra, that’s going to be plenty. When one’s teacher shakes her head over the orchestra material and says, “This is going to be a challenging programme,” you know you’re in for it. I’ve been very afraid to look at the orchestra material. As much as I love it all, it’s hard, and I know that means I will love it less very soon, and least of all right before the concert. It will take a couple of months before I enjoy it again.

I also have to keep reminding myself that the work I’m doing in the Suzuki material is supplementing my orchestral development in particular, and my musicality in general. It’s not like I’ve never used third position, or extended shifts, or seen these keys before. I’ve reviewing things I’ve learned elsewhere, and using simpler pieces to work bits of technique and provide a relatively easy environment to play with musical expression. I need to get past the oddness of telling people that I’m on book three, but I’ve been playing for fifteen years. (Whoa; I just checked, and I started in July 1994. That means we’re rapidly coming up on sixteen years.)

18 January 2010:

Going back into last week a bit, the layout of the cello manual is going very well, and it’s looking more and more like a real book. Today I get to finish photo sizing, adjusting placement, and adding captions, and then I have to look at the ordering of sections to maximize the use of the space available so that people don’t have to turn pages in the middle of an exercise or to compare the before/after kinds of photos.

Saturday morning I had my weekly cello lesson, where we worked on musicality, using the Lully Gavotte as the focus. I learned a tonne of stuff about using the weight of my bow arm and staying in the string, which was really nice considering I hadn’t worked on my lesson stuff at all during the week. (There was lots of work, and orchestra, and I looked at the orchestra stuff and not the lesson stuff, okay?) We looked at the Boccherini minuet, which I’m starting next, and talked about my solo for the spring recital; I think I’m going to do the Bach Gavotte in C minor. On Sunday I packed up my cello and music and drove to my monthly group lesson. It was the first one of the new year, and I love getting new music. We’re doing a lovely quartet arrangement of The Entertainer, a trio arrangement of Ashokan Farewell, and a quintet arrangement of a Corelli theme, and the sight-reading went pretty well in general. We finished by sight-reading some quartet and trio arrangements of some of the Suzuki material, trying them out to help our teacher decide what to programme.

21 January 2010:

[Part of the 2009 year-in-review post]

Things I Did In 2009 That I Have Never Done Before:

Bought a brand-new cello.

Sold my primary musical instrument (to someone very deserving!).

Things I Did in 2009 Of Which I Am Proud:

I bought a new cello. If you follow my journal regularly you were privy to the angst I felt about the whole buying a new 7/8 cello when the 4/4 I had was so very excellent an instrument. This was a huge issue for me, because I had to deal with my preconceptions regarding thrift and what I deserve versus going overboard, and what constitutes any of those things. I am very, very happy with my choice to sell my first cello and buy this brand-new 7/8. The sound is evolving nicely and we play well together. We’re a good fit. This was HUGE for me. I am so very proud of myself for taking this enormously weighty step.

I am very proud of not quitting my cello lessons. As of mid-October it was one full year of lessons down, and I can tell that my technique has improved by leaps and bounds. I wasn’t ever really in danger of quitting them entirely, but I came close to asking to move to a biweekly schedule for the sake of finances, a move that would have had negative repercussions on my development.

I am proud of sticking it out in second chair at orchestra and not asking to be moved. I really, really struggled with the music this past fall, and I came very close to asking to be switched. Actually, I did ask, indirectly; I told the section leader that if she wanted to rotate me to the back to give someone else a chance, I’d be fine with that. She immediately vetoed that idea, which felt nice on one hand, but made my heart sink a little on the other. I’m sure this is very character-building for me.

December 2009 Summary

3 December 2009:

We got new music at orchestra last night, so now I can share the programme for the spring concert (27 March 2010! Don’t say I didn’t give you enough advance warning this time!):

Vaughn Williams: ‘Wasps’ overture
Debussy: ‘Petite Suite’ (originally written for the piano, four hands, in 1889, and arranged for orchestra by Henri Bussex in 1909)
Butterworth: ‘The Banks of Green Willow’
Haydn: Symphony no. 83 ‘The Hen’

Sight-reading new music is always an… interesting experience. I can give you the correct rhythm, or the correct notes, not both, especially on something I’m not familiar with, like the Debussy. (Or something like Vaughn Williams, whose music I am familiar with and adore, but who is, erm, somewhat eclectic in his use of rhythm and key signatures, I am discovering now that I have the chance to see the scores.) On the other hand, I aced the Haydn. It’s nice that it was the last thing we did before we left.

7 December 2009:
Saturday morning I had my cello lesson, where we worked the pieces for which I was playing new lines. Last group class I volunteered to move from the first line of ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ to the second line in order to keep it on the programme. We’ve been working on this piece for an entire year. It wasn’t ready for last Christmas so it was bumped to the spring, and it wasn’t ready then either so it was rescheduled for this Christmas. And then we lost one of our musicians, which left our youngest cellist on this piece alone on the second line, and he needs someone steady to keep him on beat. I love this piece, especially in this arrangement, and we’ve all worked so hard that I didn’t want to see it cut. I’ve worked hard on the top line, too; it’s the melody, and it’s got some soaring bits and challenging shifts that I’ve really polished. But cutting it would disappoint everyone, so I stepped up and said I’d move to the second line if it meant keeping it. The other song I’ve moved lines on is V’la l’bon vent (do click through to the YouTube video of the McDades singing it, holy wow), a French Canadian winter song that I only heard for the first time this fall when I’d been assigned the piece. Our arrangement was done by my teacher’s father, and it has a lovely little swirling wind theme in the second part. It’s a call and response song that overlaps, so the timing is everything, and after learning the timing of the top line having to recast the timing for the second line, even though the line is simple, is breaking my brain a bit. When I played my part of the duet recital piece M and I are doing I had the very encouraging comment that my teacher really had nothing else to tell me. We could, of course, tweak and finesse till the cows come home, but with a week till recital it’s as solid as it needs to be. I am so happy about this. One more duet rehearsal on Tuesday, then the dress rehearsal on Saturday morning, and the recital is next Sunday.

13 December 2009:

The Christmas recital was fine. I preferred the dress rehearsal version, but the different venue may have influenced that. I had a weird disconnect happen about fifteen bars into the duet where my left hand went to the completely wrong place on the fingerboard (wrong position, wrong notes, wrong everything) in a place where I have never had a problem ever, but overall it was all right. The unison bits were lovely, and I stuck the landing. Our last piece was pretty good, too, so hopefully we left them all with a good impression.

When we got there I went right into the seniors’ residence where we do our concerts, and the boys went around back to the snowy yard, because we’d promised the boy he could play in the snow until it was time for the concert. Apparently they found rabbit tracks, which kept the boy busy for quite some time. While they were out there it started to snow again, too, which wasn’t a surprise; light flurries had been predicted (although what we got was pretty much a heavy snowstorm). In fact, they had so much fun they actually missed the beginning of the concert, but they got in and settled down to enjoy most of it.

As I mentioned earlier, I preferred the dress rehearsal version, but the different venue may have influenced that. I had a weird disconnect happen about fifteen bars into the duet where my left hand went to the completely wrong place on the fingerboard (wrong position, wrong notes, wrong everything) in a place where I have never had a problem ever, but overall it was all right. The unison bits were lovely, and I stuck the landing. I felt off in every group piece except the opening one, though (and in the Ave Verum Corpus, in which I was playing a line I’d been switched to a week ago and played it very well, but the piece didn’t feel tight overall). Our last piece was pretty good, too, and it was a challenging all-cello version of the William Tell theme, complete with a guest flute playing the opening theme. Hopefully we left them all with a good impression. I was so proud of the littlest girls; they’ve improved audibly and visibly in the year since I’ve met them. And it’s so interesting to hear other students play pieces I’ve played before; everyone does them differently.

17 December 2009:

Work news: Now that we’ve confirmed it, I am all backflippy to announce that I am doing the book design for Emily Wright’s upcoming A Cellist’s Manual. I am thrilled to be working with Emily on this project, and to be working on a book about one of my main interests and areas of… er… I can’t call it expertise, but fifteen-years-of-familiarity doesn’t roll off the tongue too smoothly. Anywhats, yay for Emily, and yay for book design, and yay for working on a super awesome cool project!

22 December 2009:

A lovely, lovely carol singalong tonight with the Preston-LeBlancs, marred only by the boy’s meltdown when it got to be an hour past his bed time (first because he wanted to go home, then because he wanted to stay). We did get there later than I wanted to, because the boys got home later than I expected, but we had a wonderful time when we settled down at last. We had a lovely buffet of hot hors d’oeuvres and cheese and nummy little things, and drinks, and opened presents before turning to the music. Both sets of children were enchanted with their respective gifts, and other than the same CD we exchange every year (no, it’s not like regifting fruitcake; every year we buy one another a specific CD so we both have a copy), they gave me a print of one of my favourite Waterhouse paintings, St. Cecelia, which positively glowed in its heavy gilt frame when we saw it in person last month at the MMFA exhibition. The reproduction is surprisingly good, much better than most of those done of Waterhouse’s other works.

We were a guitar, a recorder, and a cello, each sightreading; always interesting! The adults gamely improvised Jingle Bells and Frosty the Snowman for the kids, and we had lovely versions of Away in a Manger and Silent Night, and courageous attempts at other carols. The boy squeezed in between my oldest goddaughter and myself and we sang Silent Night together (this version was all open strings on the cello, so I didn’t need to actually read the music), the boy looking up at me with a smile and copying the shapes of my mouth to sing the sounds. With his quickness at absorbing music and words, it ought to be easy to familiarise him with the traditional carols like the Gloucestershire Carol, Coventry Carol, and the Holly and the Ivy. I foresee a proper Solstice mix CD next winter.

I love this tradition our godfamilies share. Most of us could have kept on playing for a good long time, but small persons have their limits. Next year, we’ll definitely do this on a weekend afternoon in order to have more time to actually play and sing, although there’s something special about doing it at night, with the midwinter darkness outside the snow-framed windows that reflect the twinkling lights on the tree.

Ongoing

I read pretty much the entirety of Perri Knize's Grand Obsession in one day. It was fabulous. I was worried at one or two points that it was going to veer a bit too far into the mystical (and coming from me that's saying something) but it righted itself in time. After all, how do you define how music affects us? It's a twofold story about a woman deciding to study piano in middle age and buying one, then trying to understand what the personal connection to a specific instrument is (not violin or cello or piano, but one specific example of the chosen instrument), and an exploration of how pianos are built and maintained. Really engaging and quite enjoyable.

We had our second rehearsal with our third guest conductor, and I enjoyed it even more than the first. He's good. There is a problem with his voice carrying to the back, but he's terrific in his bilingualism, and his musicality and his interaction are fabulous. He knows exactly what to work to smooth out problems, and how to phrase what he's looking for. We've added Grieg's Norwegian Dances to the programme, and (hurrah!) Vaughn Williams' English Folk Song suite. Of course, the Vaughn Williams starts in A-flat major (F minor? no, pretty sure it's Ab) which is four flats, augh! I have enough trouble remembering to flatten my As, and he wants me to flatten my Ds as well? But it is Vaughn Williams and I am over the moon.

Also in cello news, while I was working on some ensemble stuff earlier this week and trying to isolate why my intonation was unstable, my left elbow kind of said, "Oh, I've got it," and moved a millimetre or two forward on the horizontal axis, all on its own. And it solved the problem. I was amazed and very grateful to it. Perhaps the next time I have a problem of some kind I shall consult it.

I've had a series of excellent cello lessons with small but significant breakthroughs like that over the past couple of weeks. Of course, there was also that monthly group cello lesson where we worked on ensemble pieces for the upcoming recital. For some reason I couldn't get comfortable with the length of my endpin or the angle of my cello. I blew stupidly easy shifts while playing solo (naturally). Moral of the story: Revisit your ensemble pieces regularly, even if the last time you played them they were easy and note-perfect. I am appropriately humbled.

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

Yay! Daniel Levitin has a new book out, this one called The World In Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. I loved This Is Your Brain On Music, so I'm going to pick this one up ASAP. Because, you know, I don't have enough books on the To Read pile. (Two-thirds of the way through Anathem, still loving it, regretting that there are only 300 pages left; sigh. Also, I have a review book I'm supposed to read and, well, review, except I am so not in the mood for something set in the Regency period right now.)

Last night's first rehearsal of the season was great. It felt really good to be back playing in concert with everyone. Our first guest conductor is in fact someone who we tested fiveish years ago when our original conductor passed away. I didn't remember his name or his technique at all until about halfway through this rehearsal. He worked on having us express the music cleanly and with emotion, already set bowings for us prior to the rehearsal, and used examples and terminology to shape our interpretation. One night isn't enough to fully evaluate someone's technique, of course; we'll be working with him properly for a couple of months to see how we suit. My borrowed cello was solid and serviceable but I'm glad I don't play it on a regular basis. It was somewhat stiff, and the action was very high; thumb position would have killed me. I can see why C. upgraded to her current instrument, and again I'm reminded of how easy my cello is to play (oversize notwithstanding).

When I left for rehearsal I thought, Hmm, what do I need to bring? Oh, I should take my bow. A bow is a very personal thing, you see. So I grabbed that and off I went... leaving behind my (empty) music folder, my tuner, my pencils, my cleaning cloth, and my rosin. All these things are usually in my cello case, which is currently at the luthier with my cello, and since I don't carry them separately it didn't occur to me that I might need to collect them as well. At least I brought a bag with me so I could carry the music home, there was a pencil in my purse, and our section leader lent me her rosin (Liebenzeller Gold, wow; wish I'd had my own cello so I could have evaluated it better) and tuner.

Of course, although she'd heard about the new mystery cello and asked after it (hurrah for the tiny musical community who shares links to exciting blog posts about a fellow musician's good fortune!) I forgot to ask her about lessons. Argh. I will write myself a note and stick it on the front of my music folder for next week.

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