Right now I am sitting in my room listening to semi-finals of the Menuhin Competition on YouTube — recorded fewer than two weeks ago in Geneva. It makes me antsy in some ways; one can't help but be impressed otherwise, unless one is stricken by envy. I have to admit that I enjoyed the Mozart, Bach, Kreisler, Suk and Dvorak in the first round — although I felt that the approaches to Mozart and Bach were 'identikit' amongst the older violinists — more than the hyper-sophisticated Brahms, Piazzolla, etc. of the second round.
***
I haven't gotten around to practicing the violin much in the past month. In my mind I am still on a practice schedule and enjoy stealing 10 (or, lately, 5) minutes from my morning preparations to achieve at least a little. But, in reality, I need to leave earlier for work because of the new office location in any case; and my workload is in such a state, and my responsibility as 'team leader' is such, that I can't justify arriving only just on time; and I don't want to play the violin before 8 a.m. for the sake of the neighbours. So that schedule is barely happening.
But I feel that the interruption of my regular practice (which leads to broader-minded reflection); as well as observations that I've gathered from the competition; have led to mental leaps of understanding. For example, I am not supposed to saw my entire arm at a figuratively obtuse angle to the strings, but use my wrist to help draw the bow. I saw the finger-pulling and wrist-waggling technique in a YouTube instructional video before, but hadn't really grasped the genius of this concept. Now I am able to pass the bow straight(!) across the strings, which also helps me to play with a decent tone.
In retrospect, it is entertaining, but kind of awful too, to imagine how I played when I tried out at the amateur orchestra's practice in February. It intimidated me from the outset, because I'm a low-level employee at a pretty democratic tech start-up, a newcomer to the orchestra with no 'in' with anyone else, with rusty German. The musicians were, as far as I could tell, white-collar professionals 0.5 to 4 decades older, and partly extremely German with the critical-minded lack of democratic feeling that this entails. (I emailed the concert master afterward, and received a polite reply saying that 'one had the impression that I was somewhat overtasked.' That's fair enough; it was other things that hurt my feelings.) They were also traumatized by a civil war within their orchestra and altogether I popped in at an anxious time. At times I've rarely felt more like people were exerting mental voodoo powers wishing me away, despite the kindness of others. Either way, I don't want to picture the embarrassing or insulting(?) way my more harebrained efforts in life look like from the perspective of critical onlookers...
(On top of my overwhelmingly exact violin bowing form, I also found out that I seemed to have no rosin left on the bow after the 'intermission' in the rehearsal ended. So when I set my bow to the string, it startled me by sliding off. I could barely produce a tone above a scratch. And that was not a reassuring precondition with which to start a fast movement in a Beethoven symphony that I was sight-reading after not taking violin lessons in 20 years. Thankfully the scratches were inaudible amongst the superior music of everyone else. But I already realized at the time how silly that was.)
When I practice at home, sometimes I go through the Suzuki instructional notebooks as well as playing scales or easy pieces in other notebooks or the first Kreutzer études. I like 'reconnecting' to the Suzuki classes I started when I was five years old. I remember random things in the course of playing. For example, I remember that the teacher kept criticizing the height at which I held my elbow; the height is supposed to vary with the string that one is striking at the time; and so I keep correcting myself in imitation. The pieces which I'm playing through are each a 'blast from the past,' too; some I've barely ever played since before 1996, so it's like lifting the glass dome off a museum piece that has been kept untouched in half a century.
It's brutal having a harsh taskmaster sitting inside one's head, ever on the alert for a failure. But the music school hasn't gotten back to me about my request for lessons, as far as I know. (There's an infinitesimal possibility something landed in the spam folder unnoticed.) And so I haven't had a teacher who can criticize me from a comfortable distance and well. I also don't know if I want lessons at present. Firstly, because of the aforementioned work situation; and secondly, because of the constant fear I have of not being able to like music any more if I'm taught it. (Which is no reflection on past music teachers — just a present paranoia.) So I'm stuck nagging myself and basically needing to imagine how I'm doing things wrong.
Not to sound too masochistic or self-pitying, but I do that nagging and imagining all the time about everything anyway — except in ballet class, when I can count on the teacher to criticize the whole class with frequency, vigour, and knowledge, and I am blissfully free of the responsibility.
Saturday, April 28, 2018
Saturday, April 14, 2018
Leaves, Flowers, New Office, Transit Books
After a week of weather reaching over 20°, and the flowering and leafing everywhere, I'd have to be very skeptical not to admit that it may be spring now after all. The final emergence of leaf sprays and catkins on the oak trees and knobbles on the tips of the chestnut tree branches, and the greening of weeds and shrubs has happened in the past few days, at least in my corner of Berlin. It's the earliest sign of the mad expansion of May. But there are also paint-red tulips in the grass median; and golden daffodils, purple and yellow and white crocuses, and blue as well as white chionodoxa; and bright yellow-flowering forsythia. These have been blossoming longer.
The company I work in has moved eastwards within the city, and my trip to work is at least twice as long now. But the trip is not so long anyway, and I like seeing corners of Berlin I haven't seen before. When I am not aboveground and staring at the buildings — I have also read about the new neighbourhood we are in, to get a sense of its history and architecture, most of which appears to be postwar Soviet-influenced GDR or post-1989 capitalist where the office itself is at — I am reading.
The office itself is so luxurious, as the managers and the human resources colleagues painstakingly planned the amenities for us all together with architects, that I feel spoiled. The last time I spent weeks at a time at such ease was when I was at UBC in Vancouver. That said, it feels weird to me to be elevated from a cash-strapped, precarious creative, old-fashioned bohemian environment like the neighbourhood we were in before, to the kind of middle-class post-war atmosphere that I remember from Canada.
But there is 'grit' in the new quarter. Homeless people camp on the sidewalks; a seething cauldron (if you'll forgive the silly expression) of house occupiers adorn their houses with protest banners rather than geraniums, and a pair of humourless police vans at the exit of the train station. Tiny businesses that are only a little less tiny than the ones at the old neighbourhood survive behind modest façades and scaffolding on side streets. Last week I pretended not to see a man who was peeing, as decorously as one could on a narrow sidewalk in a by-no-means deserted street, against a tree. (Despite all of the old neighbourhood's other proclivities like copious marijuana, shattered glass windows, and brawls to which the police was eventually called, this was a new experience to me.)
The new neighbourhood grew toward its present shape during the East German period, as I said, because it was largely de facto demolished by the urban battles at the end of World War II as the Soviets moved in from the East, and therefore an easy candidate for post-war development. When I was informing myself about it lazily via a certain online encyclopedia, I saw a photo of a house row that was reduced to three-cornered stumps, only fragments of remaining side wall grasping perpendicularly on the shortened fronts, the empty sky behind them; as the 'Trümmerfrauen' bent in their frocks out in the street to pick up the rubble; from this neighbourhood. And although I can be unsusceptible to these feelings most of the time, it was moving to me to know how much that street had changed.
The GDR-era residential houses are like a Soviet echo of tsarist architecture, that itself was meant to imitate 18th century European architecture: it's all pastel colours and clean lines and classicist influence, and in a strange reminder of the low buildings near the Prussian palaces in Potsdam, not as tall as the 5- to 6-storey 1890s-1920s buildings I'm used to. I think there are surprisingly few archetypal, featurelessly square and large 'Plattenbauten' apartment buildings in this neighbourhood. It might be as close to St. Petersburg as I'll ever get.
In side streets, older non-GDR apartment buildings from the turn of the century with cavernous balconies and arched windows have been kept; but they are pretty unadorned. On the other hand, I feel 'weirded out' by the large stores, banks, hotels and shopping centers that have grown up amongst them since the Reunification. Large scale, Potemkin façades, attempts at mass appeal, etc. — they might have similarities with what existed there before. Perhaps that's a spurious impression, however. I am beginning to see that I have been only in my corner of Berlin too long, and have grown too narrow-minded; I experience a culture shock even when setting foot on a city block I haven't seen before. Also, I work in one of those post-Reunification buildings and can't really complain that it's a hardship ...
Anyway, I've rambled and probably asserted utter nonsense. So, on to my reading: I think it has been heavier since I finished We Were Eight Years in Power within the past week or so. Reading books is a more engaging experience if they were written within the last ten or five years, I think; and a few lines in that book described the events of the Trump presidency so closely to the present that Ta-Nehisi Coates might as well have written them today. I made no progress in the foreword to Aristotle; instead I've gone between the Structure and Evolution of the Stars; Res Gestae Divi Augusti (I was delighted when I abruptly reached the end of the Res Gestae themselves, only to find long endnotes); and new books. One book is a collection of Joseph Roth's newspaper reports and letters from Ukraine and Eastern Europe generally during the inter-war period, which are written in a steely skeptical style. Like Thomas Mann's it has the griping, doubting and analyzing urban mindset that is still rife in Berlin. (But, thank goodness, is far easier to read than Mann's.) I hadn't expected it after reading the Tolstoyan-sounding descriptions of his Radetzky March — I thought his prose would be earnest, worthy, and longwinded.
The second book is a German-language biography of Federico García Lorca. I liked the descriptions of his childhood in Andalusia; even translated into German, the description of the mists and the trees and especially the poplars was magical. While still a child, of course, he moved from his birthplace to 'Asqueroso,' which I think means 'disgusting' in Spanish but doesn't come off badly in his biography, and Granada. Later he studied in Madrid and travelled around to New York, etc., bankrolled by his wealthy father. It's almost comical how his student life is a who's who of famous Spanish names: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Manuel da Falla, etc., etc. What I find a little irritating with the book is that it demands a lot of mental exertion. It makes sense because Lorca was full of ideas, abstractions, and tangents; but it's not restful reading. But a far worse problem is I think not with the book, but with Lorca's biography itself: Lorca seems to have not respected consent very much when he was chasing erotically after men. The very worst episode is the one where he was in Cuba and, if I interpreted it correctly*, went around picking up 'mulattos,' to quote the word that the biography uses. It sounded like a bad situation to me — exploitation of people in precarious socioeconomic positions who could not defend themselves, where any pretense of being given a choice is essentially ludicrous. At a time where being gay was fiendishly difficult in Catholic Spain, it's definitely worth considering that Lorca could not develop healthy attitudes; but on the other hand that's not much of an excuse for making life difficult for other men, especially if they are gay themselves and don't need someone else to worsen their existence.
* [Edited to add] Here's the actual text from the biography: "Auch in Bezug auf sein Liebesleben schien die Insel eine aufregende Erfahrung zu sein, und noch Jahrzehnte nach seinem Besuch zirkulierten in Kuba angeblich Anekdoten, die sich auf Lorcas amouröse Abenteuer und seine Vorliebe für Mulatten bezogen." If they were indeed only rumours, I am being grossly unfair.
The company I work in has moved eastwards within the city, and my trip to work is at least twice as long now. But the trip is not so long anyway, and I like seeing corners of Berlin I haven't seen before. When I am not aboveground and staring at the buildings — I have also read about the new neighbourhood we are in, to get a sense of its history and architecture, most of which appears to be postwar Soviet-influenced GDR or post-1989 capitalist where the office itself is at — I am reading.
The office itself is so luxurious, as the managers and the human resources colleagues painstakingly planned the amenities for us all together with architects, that I feel spoiled. The last time I spent weeks at a time at such ease was when I was at UBC in Vancouver. That said, it feels weird to me to be elevated from a cash-strapped, precarious creative, old-fashioned bohemian environment like the neighbourhood we were in before, to the kind of middle-class post-war atmosphere that I remember from Canada.
But there is 'grit' in the new quarter. Homeless people camp on the sidewalks; a seething cauldron (if you'll forgive the silly expression) of house occupiers adorn their houses with protest banners rather than geraniums, and a pair of humourless police vans at the exit of the train station. Tiny businesses that are only a little less tiny than the ones at the old neighbourhood survive behind modest façades and scaffolding on side streets. Last week I pretended not to see a man who was peeing, as decorously as one could on a narrow sidewalk in a by-no-means deserted street, against a tree. (Despite all of the old neighbourhood's other proclivities like copious marijuana, shattered glass windows, and brawls to which the police was eventually called, this was a new experience to me.)
The new neighbourhood grew toward its present shape during the East German period, as I said, because it was largely de facto demolished by the urban battles at the end of World War II as the Soviets moved in from the East, and therefore an easy candidate for post-war development. When I was informing myself about it lazily via a certain online encyclopedia, I saw a photo of a house row that was reduced to three-cornered stumps, only fragments of remaining side wall grasping perpendicularly on the shortened fronts, the empty sky behind them; as the 'Trümmerfrauen' bent in their frocks out in the street to pick up the rubble; from this neighbourhood. And although I can be unsusceptible to these feelings most of the time, it was moving to me to know how much that street had changed.
The GDR-era residential houses are like a Soviet echo of tsarist architecture, that itself was meant to imitate 18th century European architecture: it's all pastel colours and clean lines and classicist influence, and in a strange reminder of the low buildings near the Prussian palaces in Potsdam, not as tall as the 5- to 6-storey 1890s-1920s buildings I'm used to. I think there are surprisingly few archetypal, featurelessly square and large 'Plattenbauten' apartment buildings in this neighbourhood. It might be as close to St. Petersburg as I'll ever get.
In side streets, older non-GDR apartment buildings from the turn of the century with cavernous balconies and arched windows have been kept; but they are pretty unadorned. On the other hand, I feel 'weirded out' by the large stores, banks, hotels and shopping centers that have grown up amongst them since the Reunification. Large scale, Potemkin façades, attempts at mass appeal, etc. — they might have similarities with what existed there before. Perhaps that's a spurious impression, however. I am beginning to see that I have been only in my corner of Berlin too long, and have grown too narrow-minded; I experience a culture shock even when setting foot on a city block I haven't seen before. Also, I work in one of those post-Reunification buildings and can't really complain that it's a hardship ...
Anyway, I've rambled and probably asserted utter nonsense. So, on to my reading: I think it has been heavier since I finished We Were Eight Years in Power within the past week or so. Reading books is a more engaging experience if they were written within the last ten or five years, I think; and a few lines in that book described the events of the Trump presidency so closely to the present that Ta-Nehisi Coates might as well have written them today. I made no progress in the foreword to Aristotle; instead I've gone between the Structure and Evolution of the Stars; Res Gestae Divi Augusti (I was delighted when I abruptly reached the end of the Res Gestae themselves, only to find long endnotes); and new books. One book is a collection of Joseph Roth's newspaper reports and letters from Ukraine and Eastern Europe generally during the inter-war period, which are written in a steely skeptical style. Like Thomas Mann's it has the griping, doubting and analyzing urban mindset that is still rife in Berlin. (But, thank goodness, is far easier to read than Mann's.) I hadn't expected it after reading the Tolstoyan-sounding descriptions of his Radetzky March — I thought his prose would be earnest, worthy, and longwinded.
The second book is a German-language biography of Federico García Lorca. I liked the descriptions of his childhood in Andalusia; even translated into German, the description of the mists and the trees and especially the poplars was magical. While still a child, of course, he moved from his birthplace to 'Asqueroso,' which I think means 'disgusting' in Spanish but doesn't come off badly in his biography, and Granada. Later he studied in Madrid and travelled around to New York, etc., bankrolled by his wealthy father. It's almost comical how his student life is a who's who of famous Spanish names: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Manuel da Falla, etc., etc. What I find a little irritating with the book is that it demands a lot of mental exertion. It makes sense because Lorca was full of ideas, abstractions, and tangents; but it's not restful reading. But a far worse problem is I think not with the book, but with Lorca's biography itself: Lorca seems to have not respected consent very much when he was chasing erotically after men. The very worst episode is the one where he was in Cuba and, if I interpreted it correctly*, went around picking up 'mulattos,' to quote the word that the biography uses. It sounded like a bad situation to me — exploitation of people in precarious socioeconomic positions who could not defend themselves, where any pretense of being given a choice is essentially ludicrous. At a time where being gay was fiendishly difficult in Catholic Spain, it's definitely worth considering that Lorca could not develop healthy attitudes; but on the other hand that's not much of an excuse for making life difficult for other men, especially if they are gay themselves and don't need someone else to worsen their existence.
* [Edited to add] Here's the actual text from the biography: "Auch in Bezug auf sein Liebesleben schien die Insel eine aufregende Erfahrung zu sein, und noch Jahrzehnte nach seinem Besuch zirkulierten in Kuba angeblich Anekdoten, die sich auf Lorcas amouröse Abenteuer und seine Vorliebe für Mulatten bezogen." If they were indeed only rumours, I am being grossly unfair.
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