youth music programs

2011-06-12 23:58
My goddaughter Maddalena had her first choir performance yesterday, and I attended the concert. It was actually a pretty big deal too, as the Seattle Girls Choir features students from first grade through high school in various choirs, so the whole event was about two hours long. I've never been particularly big on choral performances, so I was a bit surprised by how much I enjoyed this. All of the choirs were really good, they each did a fun song as well as more serious pieces, and I enjoyed all of the music. I also had a strong sense of nostalgia for my years in student orchestras, remembering how much fun that was and how big a part of my life it was. I'm glad that Maddalena has such a strong interest in music and singing already, and hope that she will continue on at least through the rest of her school years, as I believe the choir will be a great benefit to her as she grows up. And although I'm still trying to straighten out my own use of time, and will continue to be heavily involved in supporting KEXP, I feel I should consider looking into some youth music program that could use some volunteer help as well. It's something to keep in mind at least.
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40 T/D/Y #26: Nashua Chamber Orchestra

2009-12-17 21:23
When I graduated from high school, I stopped taking violin lessons, even though they weren’t actually connected to being in school in any way. Essentially, I had learned all I could from my teacher, who certainly could have continued coaching me on improvements, but as I had no plans to pursue being a violinist professionally, it didn’t seem necessary. However, over the years my teacher had evolved her student string ensemble into a small amateur orchestra for adults, the Nashua Chamber Orchestra, and she invited me to join. So I did, and that kept me active as a violinist for a dozen years.

The orchestra had three conductors in those dozen years: first its founder, my former teacher, and then two others we hired after my teacher decided to leave. Each of the new conductors we hired pushed the orchestra to expand its repertoire, playing both more recent and more challenging pieces. Each of them also championed new music, the first getting the orchestra to premiere a couple new pieces and the second even having us premiere a couple of his own compositions. After years of playing baroque and classical music more often than anything else, I really enjoyed the opportunities to play post-romantic and twentieth-century symphonic music; it was much more interesting than the endless running sixteenth notes of Bach and Mozart.

I had never really liked practicing my parts at home by myself. For several years I still made some effort to do some practicing at home, as there were always sections that I certainly needed to work on in between rehearsals. However, I found that usually I could get by well enough just with the work we did in our weekly rehearsals and by the time the concerts came around I’d play my parts fairly well. Once I started working in Boston, I had even less time, energy, or will to practice on my own, and I stopped doing so.

By that point, though, our newest conductor was leading the orchestra to take on even more advanced and challenging pieces. I began to feel that I wasn’t keeping up, wasn’t able to perform in concert as well as I should, not without spending more time on my own practicing, which I was still reluctant to do. I also started feeling physically uncomfortable; I may not have been keeping a decent posture while playing, and after years of doing so, my body was starting to protest. Finally, about a year after I started working in Boston, I moved close to the city, which meant I now had to make an effort each week to leave work early enough to rush through traffic in time to get to rehearsals, and I wouldn’t even have a short trip back home after that, I’d still have to drive back down to my place near Boston. This combination of factors made me decide at the end of the 2000-2001 season that I needed to take a break, and would not return as a performing member the next season. That effectively put my regular violin-playing on a long-term hiatus that has not yet ended.

However, that did not quite end my involvement with the orchestra. Back at the start of the 1994-1995 season, I happened to learn that the person who had been producing our program books would no longer be available. I really don’t remember why I even thought this, but I looked over the program from the previous year and claimed that I could do it instead. At the time, I was still using my ten-year-old Apple IIc, which certainly was not capable of the job, and I had no prior experience doing any kind of desktop page layout work. At most my exposure would have been watching my friend Jay working on a version of his zine. Still, for some reason the orchestra took me up on my offer, and fortunately my friend Doug’s dad had a relatively recent PC with Aldus (not yet Adobe) Pagemaker, so I had access to the right tools. So I sat down and figured out how Pagemaker worked, and started designing that season’s program by spending an hour and a half meticulously comparing the fonts available to choose a nice pair. Although I was a complete novice, it turned out well, looking better even than the previous year’s program, and that’s how I became the program book editor for the orchestra. (I also started writing the program notes at that time.)

Becoming the program book editor for the orchestra led to two other developments in 1995. One, I bought my first Macintosh, one of the new PowerPC models with a CD-ROM drive, despite my friend Jay’s argument that one of the older and now cheaper non-PowerPC models would be good enough and that CD-ROM drives weren’t important and I wouldn’t need one. As I used that Mac for the next six years and both PowerPC chips and CD drives became required standard hardware for Mac software, I think I made the right decision. Two, the orchestra asked me to join the board of directors. So even after I retired from performing in mid-2001, I continued as both program book editor and the board’s secretary until I moved to Seattle early in 2002. Because I already had the books set up and just needed the new information to fill in, I even produced the final program book for that season, in June 2002, after I had moved.

In the past several years, I’ve been writing about music regularly, reviewing the concerts I was attending, which is somewhat different than writing the orchestra’s concert program notes about composers and classical music pieces, but still related. I’ve been doing volunteer work with the non-profit radio station KEXP, and organizing and running the non-profit Go Play Northwest annual game convention. I joined the association board of directors after I moved into my condo. And just in the past few months, I’ve finally got back into doing page layout work, this time as a paid professional. All of these are things I first gained experience in through my involvement with the Nashua Chamber Orchestra. Along with leaving my supermarket deli job and starting my martial arts training, my increased level of involvement with the orchestra made 1995 a very significant year of changes for me.
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40 T/D/Y #16: Student Orchestras

2009-12-07 23:19
One activity that I missed out on in ninth grade was participating in Odyssey of the Mind (then still called “Olympics of the Mind”, before the International Olympic Committee brought their legal trademark hammer down). I remember going to the information meeting about it, and I don’t quite remember why I passed it up. I have a vague idea that I was concerned I wouldn’t have time for it with school, although that seems an unlikely concern. More likely there were some Saturday meetings involved, and I was already busy on Saturdays with the New Hampshire Youth Orchestra.

I joined the NHYO when I was in eighth grade; my violin teacher let a few of her students know about it, and at least two of us auditioned for it, myself and my friend Scott. Scott was a year behind me in school, but I already knew him from string ensemble. Being in the NHYO together let us develop a close friendship that’s lasted to this day. There were a few other kids from Nashua in the orchestra, and the following year my younger sister Andrea joined, playing flute; being together in the orchestra also helped us bond. At least one other member needs to be mentioned, a cellist by the name of Eldy who moved to Nashua a couple years later; he befriended Scott, joined the NHYO too, and became another close friend.

The NHYO held rehearsals on Saturday mornings in the little town of Hopkinton, which was about as central as you could get for NH. We’d do a half-dozen or so concerts during the school year. Two of those concerts were basically for family-and-friends, as they each concluded one of the Music Weekend events, which were loads of fun. The orchestra would stay at some kind of hotel or inn for the weekend and do a lot of focused rehearsing to get that season’s repertoire in shape, but also spend time having fun hanging out. For my first few years, the fall music weekend was held at the Loon Mountain Ski Resort, as it was the off-season and the owner of the resort was a supporter of the orchestra, and I remember it fondly. Also for my first few years, the final concert of our season was held at the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College, which was a very cool place and was directly responsible for my decision to apply to Dartmouth in senior year. (It also, randomly, was the first place I discovered raw chocolate-chip cookie dough on sale as a dessert item.)

I enjoyed the NHYO so much that, as the October after I graduated high school rolled around, I found myself seriously longing to attend the fall music weekend one more time. The orchestra had let some kids stay on an extra year or two before, even when I was a younger member, so I got in touch and they were happy to let me return for one more year.

I didn’t get around to mentioning in topic 8, Violin Lessons, that after a few years the school system discontinued support for stringed-instrument lessons. As a result, there was no orchestra program in the schools and no place for strings. I continued taking lessons privately with my same teacher. However, there was one school-related event involving strings, the All-State Music Festival. Students from around the state would audition in the fall to be part of the orchestra, band, or chorus, and those selected would then spend the next few months practicing their parts (ostensibly in school). The festival would be hosted in the spring by one of the high schools, where the students would gather for two days of intense rehearsals followed by a concert. I did well enough to pass audition all four years in high school, although the orchestra demanded a lot of violins so the competition wasn’t as fierce as for other instruments. It was a funny thing to attend these festivals as a member of my school, with the band and chorus kids I didn’t know so well because I wasn’t in music classes; some of them I only really knew from attending All-State.

Although I passed audition all four years, I actually missed the festival in ninth grade for a funny reason: my baby brother brought home the chicken pox from daycare, and my sisters and I all came down with strong cases that kept us in bed, agonizingly itchy, for a week. We all thought we’d had the chicken pox when we were little, but apparently if so it hadn’t ever been a strong enough case to give us immunity. I believe I still have some faint scars from the pox. I also think I might still have the sheet music for that year’s All-State, since I wasn’t there to return it…

The other years I did go and they were fun events. It was interesting to contrast the schools: Nashua Senior High had the second-largest student population in New England, at around 3,000 students. In my sophomore year, All-State was held at the Fall Mountain Regional High School in the small town of Langdon in western NH; it probably had a tenth as many students at most. In junior year, All-State was at Salem, which was closer to Nashua High in size and had a television studio, which Nashua did not. I’ve forgotten where it was held my senior year, though I seem to recall it was also out toward eastern NH. I might still have the concert programs tucked away in my box o’ memories or my sheet-music folders, I’ll have to check.

I’m pretty much out of time and space, but I do want to mention that my violin playing didn’t entirely let up for the summer: I also participated in the Greater Manchester Youth Symphony Orchestra’s summer program for at least two, and I think three, summers. That was a two-week summer day camp for orchestra, again mainly focused around prepping a few pieces for a concert but with some fun time outside orchestra too. Now that I think of it, there were at least a couple other random one-time concert events I ended up playing in. It really wasn’t that unreasonable that I passed on participating in Odyssey of the Mind, because between school, orchestra, and Scouts—and a paper route as well—I was pretty busy already. I do have a little regret for missing out on OotM, because I think it would’ve helped me feel fully part of my social group in my grade, whereas instead I always felt a bit outside the group (through no fault of theirs) right through high school. But I’m glad that I stayed involved in orchestra and developed friendships I otherwise might never have had.
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40 T/D/Y #8: Violin Lessons

2009-11-29 22:50
One day in third grade a woman came to our class to tell us that she would be offering violin lessons to anyone interested, and she brought along one of her students to play a little demonstration. She had a sign-up form, but I wasn’t particularly interested so I didn’t sign up. However, when I went home I did tell my parents about the visitor, and they immediately asked “why didn’t you sign up?” “I want to play guitar!” was my response: eight years old was old enough to know that guitar was cool, and, partly inspired by the bass guitarist from the church’s folk group, partly inspired by listening to popular music in general, I liked to pretend that I could play guitar. My parents said no, that I should go back and tell my teacher I wanted to sign up for the violin lessons, and they said that if I learned violin now I could learn guitar later. Being eight, I thought of that as cause and effect—if I take violin lessons now, I will learn guitar later—and the idea of learning an instrument was still neat, so I agreed.

To this day, I don’t know what made my parents insist that I should sign up for violin lessons. As I said, I had enjoyed pretending to play guitar and was interested in music in general, but I don’t recall asking about taking guitar lessons before that point, or any other discussion with my parents about learning an instrument. I know that my older sister decided to learn piano around that time, although I don’t recall for sure who started learning an instrument first, her or me. Despite my initial indifference to signing up for lessons, I did think violin was cool for something of an odd reason: I was a fan of Thomas Jefferson, after seeing the musical 1776 and reading a children’s biography of him, and he played the violin. In any case, I still see this as a surprising development in my life, an unexpected path that appeared and I was sent down.

The violin teacher must have thought great, some kid being pushed into lessons he’s not interested in, but still she agreed to take me on. I think I started out renting a violin from a local music store, although maybe we bought it; in any case it was a cheap small violin. I remember that initially I was sharing lessons with another kid or two, although I forget exactly who that was. A couple of the students and I played a few basic songs for a school-wide talent show, which I think happened when I was in fourth grade; I remember happily asking for the microphone to announce the song titles, and then having a friend ask me afterward what I said because he couldn’t understand me. (In fairness, the titles were just the Italian names of the dances—”gavotte”, for instance—so the confusion may have had more to do with the unfamiliarity than my speech impediments.) I know I played around a lot when practicing at home, and occasionally I’d fuss about having to practice, but whenever my mom would suggest that maybe I should stop taking lessons in that case, I would grumble but keep practicing.

The key moment in my musical development came near the end of fifth grade, if I recall correctly. My teacher had judged that I’d made enough progress to start playing with the string ensemble. This was a group that included her students, some cello students and their teacher, and some other adult string players. We met after school in the gym/cafeteria/auditorium, I sat with the second violins, and we started working on some music. The most astonishing thing happened: suddenly I was inside the music. I could hear all four parts at once and understood how they fit together. I could listen for the cellos to play a bit and know that meant that my part was coming up. I could follow along in my sheet music and see where the first violins would play a particular line, or know when the violas were playing the same part that we seconds were. I remember going home and telling my mom excitedly all about this wonderful experience of hearing everything going on all at once and being part of making that happen.

That, I think, is when I truly fell in love with music. It’s certainly the experience that kept me playing the violin for years afterward, continuing with lessons right through high school and then joining the amateur orchestra she led—an evolution of that same string ensemble—after that. I don’t believe that my parents really knew or expected I would have such an experience or stay devoted to playing the violin so many years, but I’m glad that they did push me to learn.
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random violin moment

2008-12-09 22:25
KEXP just played a song I've never heard, "Kick the Tragedy", by a band I've never heard of, the Drop Nineteens, although the DJ described it as an "older" tune. (Checking Wikipedia, I see that they were a Boston band active in the early '90s.) From the very first notes it was clearly a cool shoegazer track and I immediately decided I loved the song having heard all of one line of music.

A few weeks ago I finally made myself pull my violin out of my bedroom closet and put it under the futon in the living room where it'd be more easily accessible, in an attempt to get myself to actually play a bit. For some reason, hearing this song made me actually take the violin out of the case and try just matching notes as the song played, to see what would sound good with it. It was a pretty simple song, just alternating two chords, but as a violinist I'm not used to thinking about chords so this was an easy opportunity for me to think about what worked. I didn't do much else, not even try to come up with rhythmic patterns, but just getting out the violin to play along is something.

I might even have played some more, but I haven't had dinner yet and I must make pancakes. Still, I'll have to do that more.
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money dooms us - DOOOOOMMM!

2006-07-22 22:21
Well, I started the topic yesterday, I might as well follow through with it.

The optometrist determined that my current prescription is still fine for close viewing - using the computer and just general-purpose stuff - but my distance sight has weakened. I could have, and perhaps should have, just stayed with my current glasses. But vision's important, I don't want to mess around with that, and if I put off getting new glasses now, when I do have insurance, it's possible that I'd find myself without that insurance later and not be able to afford new glasses. So I did order new ones. The total for the exam, new lenses, and new frames was $715, of which I'm paying $248.

Meanwhile, the surgery bill that I said I was still awaiting arrived today; it includes the bill for my emergency room visit to check on my acid reflux/irritated stomach problem. That bill's $1,146. Paying that up front is technically possible, since I've got plenty of room on either credit card, limit-wise. Practically speaking, though, it'd drive my finance charges up even more, and as I noted I'm already not getting anywhere with trying to reduce the debt, so it's not a good idea. Now, one thing I can and will do is call the hospital on Monday and see what kind of payment plan they can give me. Another thing is that I do maintain a savings account - again somewhat in vain, as I'm constantly having to pull money back out to cover shortfalls. Still, I do currently have a little over $500 in savings, so I can pull all that out and use it to offset the surgery bill. I hate to do so because that leaves me with nothing to cover emergencies, but then I am in financial straits and I seem to have little choice.

I really need to make an appointment with a financial planner at my bank, and see what they can do to help me straighten things out. I've been getting credit card offers that include deals on transferred balances, either 0% rate for a year or a permanent 4% to 5% rate on the transferred balance. That seems like a very good idea, but I'm reluctant to take an offer without checking with a professional. But besides the question of whether it works to simply consolidate the credit card debt onto another card (and what does that do to my credit rating?), I just need general help and advice on managing my situation.

I've also been toying with the idea of selling my violin (this'll get Andrea to post a comment, no doubt). I've hardly played it since moving to Seattle, and realistically I'm not likely to start playing it more. It's handmade and in good condition, so it ought to be worth something, and I have the idea that my parents paid a few thousand for it when I got it about 25 years ago. But I have no idea what the resale value on violins is, and I don't know that I could get a good value for it without going through someone else. I'd have to find someone to appraise it first, I suppose. If I could sell it for enough to clear the credit card debt, then I should do that. If it's just going to get a few hundred at best, well, that's still money that I could use, but I'd be more inclined to keep holding on to it.

I'm even toying with selling my car. It's in fairly good condition all things considered, so I should be able to get a thousand or two for it. The difference between paying car insurance and buying bus passes should save me a couple hundred, and with current gas prices I must be paying a thousand or so a year for fuel. It'd be pretty inconvenient in a number of ways and I don't want to be carless, but if it comes down to keeping the car or keeping my condo - my home - I'm going to have to go carless. It's worth noting that before I bought my condo, I'd managed to pay 3/4 of the orthodontics treatment; the bulk of my credit debt comes from over $3,000 in necessary car repairs that came up during that time. I suppose if I'd really been smart I would've just gotten rid of the car at the time, and thereby cut my losses.

Things will work out somehow, the questions are how much will I end up sacrificing, and whether I'll ultimately keep the condo or have to give it up.
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miscellany (Freezepop at the Catwalk)

2004-11-06 12:42
I feel like I need a new post, but I don't have a particular topic.

One of my favorite Boston bands, Freezepop, came to town lastThursday* night and I got to go to the show. Seattle was their second-to-last stop on a two-week West Coast tour, and yet they showed a phenomenal amount of energy and good spirits on stage; they were clearly enjoying the show a lot, and even seemed to be a bit overwhelmed by the very enthusiastic crowd response. I got to speak to [livejournal.com profile] lizenthusiasm and she said we were the best audience they'd had on the tour, which was very good to hear. As a New Englander who loves my new home of Seattle as much as I love Boston, I'm happy that my fellow Seattleites gave one of my favorite bands such a warm welcome.

(* I tried making this post last night but something happened to my internet connection just as I tried to update - my computer still claimed I was connected to the internet, but I couldn't connect to any sites whatsoever. Very annoying.)

You might want to look at the unofficial LJ fan group [livejournal.com profile] freezepop4ever for more about their show and the band.

Other topics...

I'm still adjusting to braces. They still occasionally catch my cheek painfully, mainly when trying to eat, and they still cause me to occasionally bite down on my lips as well while trying to eat. Hmm, one month down already, eleven or so to go.

With $4,500 worth of metal (and related orthodontic services) in my mouth, I still haven't decided whether to go home for Christmas, as that will undoubtedly add another $500 to $700 to my credit card bills. However, I did just find out my friend Eldy will be back in Nashua for Christmas, and also my friend Jase ([livejournal.com profile] parkbenchzine) just had a baby girl, so there's a couple good reasons to make a visit (though I don't know whether I'd actually get a chance to visit Jase and see the new baby).

Sorry kids, nothing new to say about pants. The colored mid-rise briefs are working out nicely, thank you very much.

I've started training in aikido with my friend John. It's good to finally be getting back into some kind of martial arts training, though I still miss forms and weapons.

I've also started playing my violin again, messing around with my friend Tony S. (see his band Library Science) on guitar, playing melody or accompaniement to songs he's made up. I'm a bit surprised actually at how much fun it is to get my violin out again, but to be just making up stuff instead of sawing away at classical music.

Guess that's about it for now...
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