Suzuki recital

Yesterday was our winter Suzuki recital. All the kids who study locally with my mom or me played. For the first time we were able to "hire from within" for the accompanying. Erin hasn't had a piano lesson in two years, but she continues to enjoy accompanying. She is making pretty good money as the accompanist for the local community choir, and is doing a great job. When accompanying Suzuki students she is a natural: she knows every piece intimately as a violinist and therefore can anticipate and react in a split second to common stumbles. She knows the tempos inside out, and recognizes when to push a student a little for a steady tempo and when to respond to the student's preferences.

A friend of mine video'd Sophie's and Fiona's performances. Sophie just got her violin back from a three-month stay in the violin hospital where it had a bunch of old repair work and some niggling cracks set to rights. She had been playing on a cheap factory-made instrument in the interim, and was so happy to have her Mittenwald 3/4 back in time for the performance. She put out a huge confident sound!

I think slow movements are SO challenging to play on eighth-sized violins and bows, so I take my hat off to Fiona for fitting six slow beats into her bowstrokes in this piece. Her shifting and trills have come along really nicely in the past couple of months.

Holidays

I slept in this morning! We were up late last night, and today had absolutely nothing scheduled.

Last night was the community choir concert. Sophie is doing her first season with the ensemble. Unfortunately she was put in the middle riser so that her sense of pitch could help those in the first row. Which probably benefitted the auditory appeal of the concert, but meant that she alone amongst the choir was totally hidden. I could occasionally catch a glimpse of her shoulder but that was about all.

Erin accompanied. It's a paid gig for her -- a not-insubstantial sum for learning a dozen and a half pieces in time for the first rehearsal and then attending every rehearsal as the choir gradually learns its parts and polishes things up. She did fabulously! She's exquisitely sensitive, manages a kajillion page-turns totally on her own, plays musically and knows exactly when to take the bull by the horns and railroad the choir into melodic and rhythmic cohesion.

It was the choir's 25th Annual Christmas Concert. My dad sang with them for a few years before his death in 2003. Then Erin sang with it for two years, and Noah for one, before they both defected to Corazón. The choir director throughout those 25 years has been the wonderful woman who took Erin to S.E. Asia two years ago. So it's great that Sophie is now taking her turn with them, and that Erin has come back to support it as the accompanist. The choir  is a good one for a community so small and it has a lot of heart, and personality. It even inspired a funny and touching chapter in Caroline Woodward's latest novel. It was a lovely concert, and there was a fabulous community potluck dinner / party in the hall afterwards, with kids running around, people with canes and wheelchairs, old folk, young parents, lots of hugging and singing of carols around the piano.

And now there's almost nothing on the schedule for the next week. Chuck works, Erin has one shift at the café. I teach a few violin lessons and work a morning at the clinic. But no group classes, choir rehearsals, Summit String rehearsals, no trips out of town for lessons or orchestras, no violin lesson for my kids, no driving Erin to and from school.

Today I did some more work rehabilitating the rink from last week's thaw. There's a nasty four inches of crusty snow on top of an inch and a half of frozen slushy stuff that adhered to the rink surface. And the dog walked through it at some critical juncture, making nasty bumps and potholes. It's taken me hours to get it shovelled off, and it will require a few more floods to be back to its smooth state of glory from earlier in the month. Oh well, it will be worth it.

And we started in on the gingerbread house. We used to do some sort of gingerbread construction every year, but we let this habit lapse and I hadn't realized how long it had been: Fiona has no memory of ever decorating a gingerbread house! I know we've done this since she was born, but I guess the last time she was too young to really appreciate it. So it was high time. Sophie and Fiona were, as usual, workhorses in the kitchen, managing huge amounts of the work themselves.

Then to top it off, Noah cooked pasta dinner for us all.

Symphony of the Kootenays

What a difference for the kids, Erin especially. It has been years since she hasn't been if not the most advanced violinist in whatever orchestra she's playing in, at least one of the most advanced handful, patiently waiting for others to figure out where the E-flats and shifts and syncopations are. The last time I remember her being really challenged, in the mid-range or bottom half of an orchestra, was in 2003, when she was 9, at a summer Suzuki institute.

We drove for 5 hours and arrived with 40 minutes to spare before the first rehearsal, checked into our motel and made it to the theatre in time for a leisurely tune-up. We rehearsed that afternoon and evening, and again the next afternoon. Almost 8 hours of rehearsing packed into less than 24 hours, and then that was all. After that there were just the performances: one Saturday night and one Sunday afternoon.

Erin sat back of the 1st violins, I was sitting with my old quartet-mate at the front of the seconds, and Noah sat at the back of the violas. None of us had, er, gone overboard with preparing for this gig. I realized I hadn't performed on violin in almost ten years, much preferring viola, but the viola section was well-stocked especially with Noah there and they were in need of violins. Erin hadn't even done more than visually look over her parts, but found her groove and really warmed to the challenge of essentially sight-reading two hours of music. She did fabulously. Noah took a couple of rehearsals to get past his deer-in-the-headlights reaction to having to adjust, remember, mark in and learn scores of bowings on the fly. His note-reading is good these days but bowings? Not so much. But his confidence grew so that he was feeling quite accomplished by the time the performances took place.

We played part of a Mozart piano concerto, a Purcell Sinfonia, a Handel Aria with oboe solo and the better part of Handel's Messiah with a reasonably competent community choir. Pretty lightweight accessible stuff, nothing too challenging, which was a nice first gig with this group. The other orchestral musicians and the vocal soloists were mostly second- and third-string professionals or former professionals. Nice bunch of people, both on the performing and the administration side of things. And a very novel, very exciting and grown-up kind of experience for my kids.

Even though we already drive many more hours a month than we would like, we all felt that this experience was worth the ten extra hours of travel. Not only that, but unlike all the other musical activities we do this one was a black-ink fiscal proposition, rather than a red-ink one. And we found a very nifty café at which to pass the three hours between motel check-out and the last performance. We're hoping to do a couple of other weekends with the orchestra this year.

The big recital

It's been more than a week since Erin played her big local recital. It went very well. She was amazing.

The community hall was full: maybe 150 people? Not bad for a community of under a thousand! The concert was a fund-raiser for the Valhalla Fine Arts Society, the organization which among other things backs the Suzuki Valhalla Institute, so near and dear to Erin's heart. I still haven't heard back about the "take" in donations at the door but it looked very generous.

She played beautifully. Unbeknownst to either of us until the recital was underway, the organizer had done away with the intermission. We had asked that they do the three minutes of announcements about the Society between the Bach and the Saint-Saens, to give Erin a few moments to regroup after all the austere intensity playing unaccompanied for almost half an hour straight. I guess the organizer misinterpreted this as being instead of the intermission which was supposed to occur between the Saint-Saens and the Mendelssohn. The absence of the intermission was announced when Erin was about to walk back out for the Saint-Saens, too late to do anything about. So she ended up playing all this incredibly challenging music for about 78 minutes straight, with only a 3-minute break after the Bach.

The audience was incredibly enthusiastic and appreciative. Erin is very much a darling of the local arts and music scene and has so many amazing fans. In the audience were people who have sung in the local choir with her in the past or who sing in the choir now and enjoy her accompanying, folk who have been part of the Suzuki community over the years, people who have heard her play in the past at many recitals, orchestra concerts and summer chamber music performances, the teachers and the principal of the local school, artists, retirees and electricians who frequent the café where she works part-time, high school students, current and past members of the community orchestra, friends of the family ... lots of people. Many of them remembered her from her first years playing on a sixteenth or tenth-sized violin. Very few of them had heard her in violin solo performance within the past couple of years, so they were blown away by her technical and musical progress.

In many ways it had the feel of a graduation event. In our small town, where high school graduation classes range in size from four to a dozen or so at most, every graduate is celebrated by the community. Even at the big combined ceremony there are speeches and reminiscences and childhood photos shared for each student. Grad here is a way for the community to mark a rite of passage into adulthood, to perhaps say goodbye for now to the students, to remember the role each of them played in the community as they grew up, and the role the community played in shaping each of them as they grew up. Erin's recital had that kind of feel for me.

Of course she's not graduating. She's not moving on. She's not leaving. Not yet. Which begs the question: what next? Montreal beckons but even if that happens a year early it's still a long way off. The time since the recital has felt pretty aimless and empty. I guess we knew it would feel like this. Some other stuff is on the horizon, but it does all feel like a bit of a let-down. Not surprisingly. The recital was a big high after months of hard work.

You can reconstruct the recital for yourself via YouTube. I didn't record the Bach again, so for that you're stuck with the lovely exerpts from the Kelowna recital. But the rest is here:

Saint-Saens' Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso
Mendelssohn Violin Concerto 1st movement, 2nd movement, 3rd movement
The encore!

First recital

Erin went to Kelowna last weekend and performed her recital for a small appreciative audience in the wonderful century-old Anglican cathedral there. The acoustics were so live and lovely for the unaccompanied Bach I just had to record it.

I am in awe of this girl's playing. She has come so far in the past few months. And just look at her -- how much she loves what she is doing, how much she plays right into the music, clearly caring deeply about both the music and what she is giving to the audience.

The local recital takes place later this week. I think there might be a lot of people there.

Posterized

She has to come home after all, I guess, since the posters are being printed, large and glossy.

Montreal chat

Erin is in Montreal, checking out the McGill music faculty and falling in love with the city all over again. She was there for a week in 2008 on an exchange trip and loved it then. This time her perspective is different. She's not there for a visit; she's looking to live there, and soon.

Last night we managed to chat for a while on-line. She's had two lessons. Liked both teachers a lot, but loved one of them, and thought she was "adorable." The French accent probably didn't hurt. It sounds like they connected really really well. Both teachers basically told her she'd have no trouble getting into the performance program and that she should focus on trying to win scholarships. She got some input on her recital performance pieces and on general posture and technique and tone stuff. She has one more lesson with another teacher today, as well as the McGill open house to attend. It was lucky good timing for this trip that the open house happens this weekend. Hopefully she'll get some helpful information and impressions from that. Though the real money for her is in the personal and artistic connection she thinks she might be able to forge with a teacher there. So far things are looking very good on that count.

She's dreaming of an apartment. A small funky somewhat scuzzy one in a run-down building within a few miles of the university, near a metro station, that she can paint "blue and purple and chalkboard," and fill with IKEA furniture, tea, an espresso machine and strings of LED lights. She's using whiney "pleeeeeeases" with far to many e's to ask if she can possibly live in Montréal next year, during her last pre-university year, as soon as she finishes her high school coursework. Did I mention she's fallen in love with the city? I was already entertaining thoughts of an arrangement of some sort in Calgary, but Montreal is so darned far away. Soooooooo darned far. (This issue just cries out for strings of repeated vowels.)

Four years ago I wrote about how, in raising our kids, we've tended to compress or entirely skip many of the intermediate stages. We've let the kids stay little and dependent for as long as they'd like, and then let them be independent and autonomous as soon as they're ready. But (gulp!) does this translate into letting my country bumpkin move more than 4000 kilometres away at age 17 to a city of a million and half, completely on her own and without the support of a university environment? I don't know ....

Recital promo photos

The first one is just crying out to be an 11x17 full-colour poster, I think, with no more graphic design necessary than text in a artistic font tastefully positioned. But I like the second one best as a portrait. I love my big girl.

Recital, and other plans

Erin is planning a violin recital in November. A full program. She'll be performing as part of the Valhalla Fine Arts Community Concert Series. Usually these concerts feature guest artists, but this time it's a home-grown one. She's also going to play the same program in Kelowna the week before. Her accompanist lives there and she will take that opportunity to do a "warm-up recital."

On the program will be Bach Partita No. 1, Wieniawski's Polonaise Brilliante, Saint-Seäns Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso and the entire Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in e minor. Well over an hour of repertoire, none of it easy stuff in the slightest, all at the ARCT level.

A week ago she spent her elective week at the high school planning her recital and practicing her fingers off. We managed to get to Kelowna for a first rehearsal with her accompanist. Today she went off for a publicity photo shoot. Glossy full-colour posters will be forthcoming. Tomorrow she's heading off to Calgary again for more lessons. She's trying to practice 5 hours a day. It's tough. She's at school for up to 6 hours a day, and then there are all the extras like group class, and Summit Strings, and shifts at work, and assignments for school, and photo shoots and choir rehearsals. But she's doing remarkably well.

Next month she'll be flying to Montréal to check out the campus at McGill and to get some lessons with some of the members of the Strings Department at the Faculty of Music. That's where she wants to go to university for violin performance. That's what GH recommended to her, and it certainly doesn't hurt that she loved Montréal when she travelled there in 2008 on the quartet exchange program.

After that she'll be working on auditions for summer programs. Though it pains her greatly to have to look beyond SVI for next summer, the time has definitely come. National Youth Orchestra is in her sights, and she might also do auditions for the Britt Institute, Domain Forget and possibly some others. NYO would be her first choice, I think. All that heavy-duty symphonic experience, plus choral singing! What could be better?

She's working hard to pack away credits at school this year so that she can spend her Grade 12 year more focused than ever on violin. She's got a lot of work ahead of her due to a very light course-load last year. She has a few Grade 10 credits to mop up, those pesky required ones like "Planning" and social studies and PE, the ones that are mostly just hoop-jumping for the diploma she's decided she'll graduate with after all. And then she'll have some Grade 12 math and science and possibly a couple more Grade 11 credits to fill in. She's being driven to distraction by the busywork involved in the on-line version of Social Studies 10, but she's barreling through, having completed three assignments in the past 24 hours. (Only twenty or more to go?!)

So she's very driven and very motivated to achieve these days. Most impressive of all: she's talking about cleaning up her bedroom soon!

Photo day

It was family photo day. A strange day. Strange beginnings, strange light, strange weather, strange happenings.

It started for me at around 6 a.m., in the back of the van. Erin and I had driven her to Calgary for an extra lesson. All her maniacal practicing has left her sorely in need of some instruction, so we squeezed a trip to Calgary in during her three days off work. We decided that since it was summer, and there were just the two of us, we should save motel money and just sleep in the spacious back of the van. It worked really well. Neither of us being six feet tall, we were able to stretch out quite comfortably after stowing the third-row seats and flipping the middle-row seats out of the way. With Thermarests, pillows and sleeping bags, we were quite comfortable. We know the highways to Calgary well and were pretty sure we'd be able to find good (free) places to "camp" in the van.

As it turned out we had great luck finding places. I followed a hunch, turned off the highway, and almost immediately stumbled upon something just right. The first night we ended up right alongside the Kicking Horse River. Beautiful, and with a washroom with plumbing nearby and trains rocking and squeaking by in the night. We were utterly alone and it was a fabulous spot. Last night we were at Halfway Creek, close to home but a welcome spot for two people just about nodding off in transit. Someone else had snagged the spot right on the creek but we had a private mossy treed area and the sounds of the creek. So that's where we awoke this morning.

We climbed into the front seats and drove the rest of the way home this morning. Unpacked the van. Filed away the half-dozen novels I'd bought at Chapters in Calgary. Put the leftover food in the fridge.

I went for a tempo run. I'm in Week 8 of a 10-week running schedule prior to the Rocky Mountain Half Marathon. I wore my Vibram Five Fingers KSOs, which I haven't in a while since I've been taking every suitable opportunity to run barefoot, using my Nikes for the really wild and wooly stuff. But this was supposed to be a hard fast run and I needed to do it on a trail since the sun was beating down on the roads. I knew I couldn't run anywhere near fast enough barefoot, but the trail wasn't too knarly so I donned the KSOs. Ended up with the beginnings of a blister on my big toe, but that won't be a problem since I likely won't need to run in the KSOs for a while. The trail had a gradual rise and fall to it, and it was hot, and I've been off caffeine for a week, so I wasn't quite as fast as I'd hoped ... but I managed over 6.5 km in 35 minutes which isn't bad for me under those conditions. I'm being very careful not to push myself too hard: it was August last year, in the hope of running a fall Half Marathon, that I injured my hip. I don't want any repeats of that!

After my run I came home, showered, and then we put a picnic dinner in the van and all drove up to Summit Lake where we were meeting a photographer/friend for a family photo shoot. We hadn't got anyone to take pix of us as a family since well before Fiona was born. We arrived. The weather looked threatening, so we decided to get some photos before digging into the food. The photographer pointed us to a bench/dock thing at the side of the lake, and suggested we sit down in a row on it. As we were just moving over about to do so, there was a crack and she yelled "Oh God!" and a pretty large rotten birch tree fell down right on the dock where we'd been about to sit.

We laughed pretty hard about that after we got over the shock. Wondered cynically what it would have been like if we'd been a minute earlier and had managed to immortalize our family of 6 in a photo seconds before we'd become a family of 5, or 4.

So we managed a bunch of photos without any fatalities. And then it poured rain, and thundered plenty, and we drank wine and ate dinner under a gazebo. We wandered around and picked up a few of the hundreds of tiny toads roaming the shores of the lake and watched them climb and jump. Each one is about a centimetre long. And then we came home as the skies cleared. Saw a lovely rainbow.

While Fiona and I were practicing with our new hourglasses (10 minutes, 5 minutes and 3 minutes respectively, assigned to different violin tasks here and there as appropriate), we looked out the window and noticed the sky. It had got seriously dark again. The last sunlight was streaking across onto the northeastern slopes of the mountains, but the clouds were dark and ominous. Such brightness in front of all that mounting nasty weather. The photo above doesn't do it justice.

A few minutes later it began to hail. Sophie and Fiona headed outside with a sieve to catch some, and the dog skulked inside.

Now it's dark. The nasty weather has abated. Surprisingly the power hasn't gone out. We've watched our BSG episodes and it's time to start one of our new novels as a bedtime story.

Ten hours

Yesterday Erin practiced longer than usual. She did 10 hours. That's up from her "usual" (of late) 4-8 hours a day. She normally has a bit of a burst of motivation after the summer music school weeks. But this much? It's almost unprecedented. Three years ago, delighted by the prospect of a new violin teacher and lessons in Calgary, she practiced 3-4 hours a day for a while. Since then her typical pattern has been 1-2 hours a day with occasional runs of missed days. Sometimes 3 hours. But rarely more.

So what happened? Well, she had a great week at SVI. Especially being part of the Advanced Chamber Music program, and performing the Mendelssohn Octet. And afterwards the social connections, friendships new and old and renewed and deepened, continued to give her the sense of belonging to a wonderful musical community. Several of the other ACM participants either live in the area or were able to spend additional time here afterwards.

During the VSSM week that follows SVI, Erin was to do only an hour a day of chamber music, on piano. But at the last minute I managed to slot her in for a couple of private violin lessons, one with Gwen Hoebig. Gwen must have been impressed with her, because she not only gave her the gears about not having specific plans for a post-secondary performance music program at a good university, but gave her advice about where to go and who to study with, and offered her letters of recommendation. This is big. The letter of recommendation offer especially.

Erin has received a lot of encouragement from various teachers over the years, but almost all of them have been friends of her mother's and/or grandmother's long before she studied with them. To get this kind of validation and encouragement from someone who not only is a leading light in the development of young violin talent in the country but who is an objective outsider, meant a lot, and it came at the perfect time for Erin. With two years left in her high-school-aged education, she has just enough time to make good on Gwen's advice.

And the result is shown above. Erin hasn't had a regular lesson since mid-June. Since then she's expanded her task list of assigned repertoire, studies and technique to include ongoing polishing of previous repertoire with a view to an early-winter full-length recital, repertoire she knew her teacher had in store for her for the fall and winter, and an ambitious array of extra-challenge repertoire that's she's set for herself, stuff like the Kreisler Tambourin Chinois and the Bach Chaconne. If you wondered how a 16-year-old can fill 45 to 50 hours of practice time a week without any lessons, this is how.

The result of Gwen's encouragement also shows in Erin's school plans. Although she's been attending school part-time for a couple of years, she was until recently still hedging her bets on whether she was going to pursue requirements for a graduation diploma. Her reasons for taking courses at school used to be about providing some challenge and structure to her learning and some time away from home in an academic environment. But recently a new reason has percolated to the surface and taken on primary significance. She's going to school so that she can graduate with the diploma that will simplify her admission to her music performance program of choice. She told me recently that she would like to work hard at school, in the self-paced independent study program she's been part of all along, in order to complete almost all her required credits this academic year. For her this means immersing herself in a full-year course for two or three weeks and completing it in one fell swoop, then moving immediately on to the next one. This will allow her much more time in her Grade 12 year to focus on violin, working up her audition to as high a level as possible.

I don't doubt that she can do whatever she sets her mind to. And she is certainly setting her mind to this!

Brandenburg

This was one of the first chamber works I learned as a teen in the program I grew up in, so it holds a special place in my heart. I played Viola 1, my first-ever viola gig, in a chamber group with my two brothers and six or eight other kids I grew up with. It's always been my most quintessentially joyful music, and ever since I got my first Sony Walkman I've kept this piece on hand as an emergency cheerer-upper. I also own an Academy of Ancient Music recording of it at a tempo of exactly quarter-note to 90, which means eighth-notes run at 180 per minute, making it a perfect addition to my running mix, barefoot running being a short-stride rapid-turnover sort of affair. 

So I was probably as excited as the kids that they got to play it this summer. Their quartet and octet preparation took a lot of energy, so the Brandenburg got short shrift, but when they first ran through it with the group last Friday night they dug right in. Less than two days later they performed it at the opening event of the main SVI week. As above. 

Sophie's Beethoven Quartet

It was a big piece for an 11-year-old, one with little chamber music experience and none from the 1st violin chair of a string quartet. But she sure rose to the challenge! I was so proud of her assertive playing and her cues and leadership.

Mendelssohn Octet

Seven years ago my dad was dying of lymphoma. He organized a family reunion that summer, bringing my sister, my brother and his family from Ontario, and my other brother and his family from England. The anchoring event for the reunion was a "performance" of Mendelssohn's Octet. My dad loved the rare occasions when his whole family had played chamber music together, and with us widely dispersed geographically, the Mendelssohn seemed a fitting large-scale work to celebrate us being drawn together again, one last time. My sister, my mom and my brother played violin, joined by a friend from Nelson. My sister-in-law and I played viola, and my brother and a local friend played cello. We held one hilarious and chaotic rehearsal and then the next day we played through the whole thing under the tea-house pagoda at the local Japanese garden. Erin and Noah were 9 and 6 at the time. They remember it well.

This summer they performed the Mendelssohn Octet themselves. Erin, Noah, two other local kids, three friends from the Okanagan and another cellist who spends summers half an hour away were placed together in an octet during the SVI. They spent the week in master classes, group classes, choir, orchestra rehearsals, and rehearsing the octet's magnificent first movement. And they performed at the final Ensembles Concert. My dad would have been so proud to see the next generation taking on this great work a mere seven years later!

SVI 2010 Vignettes

ACM Program

The Advanced Chamber Music (ACM) program which prefaces this year's Suzuki Valhalla Institute has begun. It's a weekend of intensive quartet, octet and chamber orchestra rehearsals for twelve advanced  students, including Erin, Noah and Sophie. These are kids who easily participate in non-Suzuki events and ensembles as well. Often their Suzuki-ness is incognito in these situations, as they read and play Beethoven and Mendelssohn just as any traditionally trained student would. We thought it would be nice for them (and for all our future advanced students and their parents) to have t-shirts that would not simply indicate that they attended the SVI summer camp, but spoke to their musical roots in the Suzuki method. There are certain bastions of traditional music education in Western Canada where it is thought that "Suzuki is okay for little kids, but you should move on to something else pretty soon." And yet, unbeknownst to them, these same teachers are coaching (and raving about!) advanced Suzuki students in ensembles and master classes without knowing that they are Suzuki students.

So above is the 2010 SVI t-shirt. I love it! My friend did the artwork. My kids helped choose the colours. So far reaction has been very positive.

Last night the ACM program began with a tutti rehearsal of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. Fantastic rehearsal, fantastic group of kids. None of them seem to be in over their heads, the overall match in abilities being good, and they seem to be enjoying themselves. Which is lucky, because they'll be working pretty hard, and spending a lot of time together, especially over the next 36 hours. They perform the Brandenburg tomorrow. Quartet and octet rehearsals will continue throughout next week, as these dozen students are joined by more than seventy more for the main SVI.

Suzuki Family

Left to right: S., Noah, M., B., Erin, Fiona, Sophie and (down front), D.

Just a somewhat random sub-set of the Suzuki kids here in town, after the recent Performance Party (a.k.a. casual recital). These kids come in all shapes, sizes, musical levels, ages and personalities. And yet they support each other unconditionally, feel connected, enjoy being together, know and accept each other's quirks and enjoy watching each other grow and increase their abilities. "Creating Learning Community" is the Suzuki Association of the Americas' slogan. I think these kids are doing so.

Twinklebell Canon

At the orchestra concert last weekend, I invited my Suzuki Group Class to come and play just before the interlude. I had a hidden agenda: I wanted them to hear the orchestra concert. But I also think this is such a fun piece, and they hadn't performed it locally yet. It takes the opening phrase from "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" with the dominant substituted for the final tonic, and repeats it over and over, melding it with an abdriged and simplified Pachelbel Canon. It allows the little beginners to play a piece that provides some additional musical interest for the older kids. My three elder kids have all done Pachelbel in the original, so this was a piece of cake for them, but I think it's really valuable to have them support and play with less advanced students. Fiona learned one of the Pachelbel parts too and proved herself strong and secure playing contrary rhythms and melodies on occasions when she didn't have the support of other players.

The front row of this ensemble is comprised of the extra Suzuki group class kids who are not part of the orchestra -- yet! We were missing a half dozen but I was pleased we got the numbers we did on short notice on a Sunday afternoon. Noah is the second player to enter. He plays the main viola theme alone once. Erin is the farthest forward of the two 1st violinists who enter next. Sophie is in the dead middle of the group (in the black strappy shirt) and she enters as a 2nd violin with the main mass of players. Fiona is in the white shirt, behind Sophie's scroll and she comes in as one of two 3rd violins last of all.

Girl duet

Sophie's friend brought her flute by this morning to play for us, wanting to go through a dry run in preparation for her recital this weekend. "One of the pieces is a duet I play with my teacher," she said "so it'll sound kind of weird without the other part."

Sophie got her violin and read through the teacher's part. They sounded really good!

These girls are close friends and have been for years. A. has only been playing flute for two or three years, piano being her first instrument. Discovering that they can play duets together now was pretty cool!

Spring climax

It's that time of year, when so many activities and responsibilities seem to reach their climax. It's the end of our year of reporting with the SelfDesign program, and that involves a mad rush to submit and rectify purchases we've made, and spend the balance, as well as the final "annual report" document to be collaboratively created with our Learning Consultant for each child. There were the final rehearsals and performances for Sophie's women's choir, where Erin and I provided instrumental accompaniment. There are the lengthy and complicated planning sessions and board meetings for the Valhalla Fine Arts summer programs. The regional Suzuki Celebration Concert took place, with ensemble contributions from our local crew. The AGM of the regional Suzuki society happened the same day, meaning mad catching up for me on my Treasurer duties so that I could table a financial report. There was a trip to Calgary for lessons, our first in two months. Erin and Noah went off on their Corazon choir tour, with immensely successful participation in the Rocky Mountain choral Festival. They have a series of three final concerts and two recording sessions for Corazon which will round out their year, all within a two-week window at the beginning of June. We're into the last week of rehearsals for the community orchestra, with a concert next weekend. The bookkeeping and income tax deadline looms large in mid-June as always. Yesterday was Fiona's piano recital. And we have the end of year Suzuki recital coming up at the end of this month.

Then there are the other loose ends. The gardening, the chicken massacre courtesy of a bear, the thousands of dollars worth of work that urgently needs to be done on the van, time-consuming work and inconveniently distant from home, the music library catalogueing I'm trying desperately to get done for the summer school, my clinic work, updates on web content for the various non-profits I volunteer with, meetings with the school about a new homeschooling prospect for next year, and violin teaching to fit in around the edges. And somewhere else the grocery shopping, meal prep and housekeeping. And music practicing with the kids. And ... er, ... homeschooling. And ... er, .... running. Neither of the latter two is happening much.

In the midst of it all, we went off to Vancouver Island for the Provincial Music Festival for a week. Erin and Noah had "won" the Intermediate and Junior Strings divisions respectively at the local level. Erin had been recommended to the Provincials in the past, on piano, but we had opted not to go then due to her lack of interest in the competitive milieu. This year she was happy for the opportunity and while Noah was lukewarm at best, he responded well to a nudge and I supposed figured if he was going anyway with the family it was no big deal to participate. I was very ambivalent about the whole endeavour, as it is a competitive situation. But we knew a few of the other participants, friends from SVI and VSSM, and I was hopeful that the exposure to other hard-working passionate music kids would be good for my two. I just hoped the competitive nature of the festival wouldn't poison the atmosphere.

It didn't at all. The adjudicator was encouraging and insightful. The other students were great. It did not feel like a pressure-cooker. We saw old friends and made some new ones. We saw a couple of well-loved piano teachers whom we've known as guest clinicians in our area. We enjoyed a number of stunning performances by amazing kids. Unfortunately for whatever reason there were no master classes or workshops for the strings kids. Guitar, dance, winds, speech arts, piano and voice all had their workshops, but the string players got nothing. No one seemed to know why. A bit disappointing, but whatever.

Erin and Noah played well. Neither were "outclassed" by their peers, as there was a range of abilities represented. Our province has basically two large urban areas and these have one to three local festivals each, turning out some incredibly highly-trained students. Then there's the rest of the vast province with small local festivals like ours with just a handful of string participants and a few teachers. So there were other "big fish from small ponds" like my two. The quality of performances was very high, the ability level ranging from, oh, Suzuki Book 7-ish for one of the participants in Noah's class to Bach Chaccones and Paganini Caprices in his and Erin's class.

We watched an afternoon of chamber music too, as well as all the solo performances. I was blown away by the musical-ensemble sophistication of these kids, and left feeling very frustrated that I'm not able to give my own children that kind of experience in any way, shape or form. They get good individual teaching, albeit very infrequently (one lesson in March, one in May....). But they do not have a proper youth orchestra or challenging community orchestra to be part of, and neither is part of a string quartet or trio or anything of the sort. Their absolute keenest love is for chamber music, both of them, and there is simply no way they can get the kind of opportunity they crave -- for a well-matched group of local students to meet every week and work hard at challenging standard repertoire like Brahms, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Schubert. And I see no way to change that.

The kids I think felt similar combinations of inspiration with frustration. The students from cities just take for granted that they'll have regular lessons, orchestras and ensembles that can challenge them at whatever level they need. If they get inspired and work hard, they have a next level of challenge to look forward to. They are so lucky!


Is there anything we can do differently to give Erin and Noah something a little closer to what they need to continue to develop musically? I'm racking my brain, but I can't see how. Given the fact that they don't really want to move, my medical license is no longer portable between provinces, they aren't yet equipped to live away from home alone, nor would a boarding-type arrangement work well for my unschoolers. And a float plane isn't really practical, is it? How about a stargate or star-trek style transporter?