Church and Geisha movie

Church was really good this morning. I am really glad I went. The sermon was given by a guest speaker, The Rev. Robert Timberlake, a Presbyterian minister who had just done work in Cape Town, South Africa, to set up a study abroad program for students at Marquette.

He told a lot of stories about the extreme poverty, famine, and horrific living conditions there; and how these conditions inevitably bred much corruption, crime and robbery, of which he and his colleagues were often victims. Yet he also pointed out that South Africa has three living Nobel Peace Prize winners, has a much more liberal constitution than the US, and has an aggressive affirmative action program.

I found this very interesting, although I think I must have missed how it tied into his main point, which was that the main litmus test for a good religious belief should be the compassion and kindness it manifests; the rest is just commentary. A bad religion exudes judgment, intolerance, and a lack of compassion, a belief that poverty is somehow deserved, earned or justified.

Anyway, it was really good to get back to church and to see friends again. Some friends there had been to the Symphony to see the Bolero concert, and a fellow tea lover talked to me about tea that she bought online that was imported from Britain - I think it was called Yorkshire Red - and other teas she orders from Ireland. I also spent a good deal of time perusing the books at the book table (I love that my church not only has an extensive library but a book table with brand new books for sale during the coffee hour every single Sunday!). I bought one for David for Valentine's Day; it was a collection of essays on interpreting the Bible that I thought he'd really like.

Mainly it was really good to be back in such good intellectual, progressive, spiritual energy. I really feel at home at that church, more than I have ever felt anywhere else.

David treated me to a showing of Memoirs of a Geisha today. I thought it was really well done and true to the book. The few omissions/additions were purely for dramatic effect and didn't affect the general feel of the movie. If you are interested in the story but aren't sure you want to read the book, the movie will give you a really good sense of the story. I highly recommend it. It was also really neat to more fully expand the visual images I had made in my own mind by the gorgeous shots they captured of the kimonos, Japanese gardens, and makeup. And strangely, the woman they got to play Hatsumomo, the evil geisha antagonist, looked exactly in the movie how I had her pictured in my mind as I read the book. That was really cool. :)

Okay, time to go to bed now. Hope your week gets off to a good start tomorrow.

XO Darcy

Transformative concerts, happy horn playing

Well, after all of my complaining this week, I reached a transformative state during the Vaughn Williams last night. Because of limited rehearsal time with the chorus, we hadn't really ever run the piece until Friday night (we couldn't; we had to rehearse all the choral parts with the chorus with all the time we had and the afternoon rehearsals were devoted to the orchestra and soloists). So last night was enjoyable but everyone was still getting a sense of the piece.

Last night, however, was absolutely - what's the word I'm looking for? - well, transformative. It's a word worth repeating. First I must say that it was also easier to get into such a happy mental place because we hadn't rehearsed the hell out of our faces in the afternoon like we had on Friday, so I wasn't in pain. It's amazing how the absence of pain can make things so much better! {*smirk*}

I just absolutely basked in the glorious sound of the chorus. This is one of the most amazing orchestra choruses in the world.

Side note: The Milwaukee Symphony was the first American orchestra ever to get its recordings on iTunes! How cool is that? We got a lot of publicity for it. Go to iTunes and do a search for "Milwaukee Symphony". You can walk around listening to us on your iPods! (If you don't have an iPod or mp3 player yet, don't worry. Even I, techno-gadget girl, do not yet have one.)

Bill Barnewitz did an amazing job on the Hindemith again last night (Friday was incredible too). He has Parkinsons, and yet you would never know it to listen to him or to meet him. There was a very well-written article in the paper about Barnewitz and how he's dealt with his disease and I thought it was really interesting. Read the article; it's worth checking out.

Ooh, another thing that was great last night was that I think I finally figured out the intonation on my horn since Wes Hatch, the famous maker of amazing hand-made horns who we're lucky enough to have right here in Milwaukee, did some work on the lead pipe (the main pipe that the mouthpiece goes into). Not only is the pitch much better, but because of it, I feel much more confident on the triple horn in general now. But it gets better - because the overtones are locking in so well now, the resistance somehow seems less. I think because I wasn't getting a good ring before when I hadn't figured out the pitch, I was forcing to try to get more sound, or a better sound somehow, out of the horn. Now it comes naturally, without my forcing, and it's much better!! I think this will also help my face to not take such a beating when we're playing loud things.

Today David and I are celebrating Valentine's Day, since we have a run-out concert to Hartford on the actual day. We're also celebrating the 2 year anniversary of David's move up to Milwaukee from NE Ohio - a very happy milestone for me (I know his family in Wooster misses him very much!). I can't believe he's been here for two years already; it's been so blissful having him up here it hardly seems like any time at all. We're going to go see the movie Memoirs of a Geisha (even though I told David we could also go see the Narnia movie if he wanted to), which seems to work better with our dinner reservations at Ristorante Bartolotta, a 4 star Italian place in Wauwatosa.

Well, I really want to go to church this morning since I've missed the last few Sundays, so I had better get going. Have a lovely wrap-up to your weekends!

XO Darcy

I met the Beethoven Dancer!!!

Remember a few weeks ago when I told you the story about the Beethoven Dancer? Well, I saw him waiting outside by the stage door entrance off of State Street last Saturday night, and having written so much about him and how I wanted to meet him, I introduced myself! He was so nice, just as I thought he'd be, and said he couldn't have missed the concerts (the ones with Bolero and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg) for the world. His name is Peter, and he was very nice! I told him that we loved having him here, that his presence was hugely appreciated and that he added a wonderful energy to our audiences, and that the orchestra can sense the audience's demeanor when we're playing and that that energizes us tremendously. Now that I know him by name, I'm going to talk to him every time I see him so I can thank him for coming. He is such a great supporter of the orchestra and his enthusiasm is just so refreshing.

Speaking of admirers, a woman in the orchestra who of course shall remain nameless has an admirer who has taken to sending long stemmed red roses to the Marcus Center backstage for her. He was sending so many that she gave some to me to take home since she was running out of vases. What a sweetheart she is to have been sho generous as to share her bounty with those of us who (thankfully) remain admirer-less. :)

Aren't they gorgeous? I love the one yellow rose in the middle of the 11 other red ones. At the time this picture was taken, the roses had just started to open; at the height of their glory, the yellow one got to be almost twice the size that it is here:

Today I stayed on after rehearsal to listen to Bill Barnewitz play the Hindemith Horn Concerto. Bill is an incredible player and though I don't know the Hindemith well, it was a pleasure to hear him play it as my lips recovered from the beating they took after rehearsing the Flying Dutchman for the first hour of rehearsal. I saw Ted Soluri, our Pr. Bassoonist backstage after the rehearsal and said, "I think I broke my face."

Seriously, this week has been brutal for us brass players. My lips are swollen and my jaw is very stiff and sore from all of the pressure. The triple horn is great for playing in the high range but the resistance on that instrument is just so high that I end up pushing so hard just to get the notes out. For those of you who don't know, most horn players play double horns, which have two layers of tubing. The triple has an extra layer of tubing built in to give high horn players more ease in the high range. It's a lot heavier than a regular double horn because of all the extra plumbing.

Here's a picture of what my triple horn looks like, only mine has even more tubing since I have an extra stopping valve (so when I have to play stopped horn I don't have to transpose). When I bought this horn from a Yamaha dealer in Chicago, he told me I probably have the fanciest horn in all of Wisconsin. Bill Barnewitz plays on a Yamaha Triple as well, although his does not have the extra stopping valve.

I worry that I might injure myself on this horn; the resistance keeps whacking me back in the face when I play the least bit loud, almost like feedback from a microphone. I might try to see if, now that I have learned how to play with a brighter sound, I can go back to the 11D for a while to see if that makes things better on my face. I really don't want to damage my face irreparably. Of course this week's program would be difficult no matter what I was playing on...

That's all for now. Hope you all are having a great start to your weekend!

XO Darcy

Symphony in Sea (har har)

Well, I stand corrected - this is why I should reserve judgment on a piece until we've been through the whole thing! Today we rehearsed the the 2nd movement of the Vaughn Williams Sea Symphony called "On the Beach at Night, Alone" which was just orchestra and soloists and it was just beautiful. It was very intimate and I was thrilled, after all the blasting last night, that it was soft and gentle with intricately spun chords and beautifully balanced harmonies.

We also ran through Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture, which is - well, loud. But it's fun and it ends.

I love these quotes on Wagner:

Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches -- he has made music sick. I postulate this viewpoint: Wagner's art is diseased.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Der Fall Wagner (1866)

Of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningness,
endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, scrannel-pipiest, tongs and boniest doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliest of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest -- as far as the sound went.

-- William Ruskin, letter, 1882, referring to a performance of Die Meistersinger

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.

-- Gioacchino Rossini, 1867

I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

-- Mark Twain, Autobiography (1924)

I finished Memoirs of A Geisha, and it was just fabulous. It was so depressing though. The protagonist achieves the absolute height of her power as a geisha, which is more than most women similarly fated could ever hope of attaining. And yet she still was only the mistress to the man she loved; he was married. She was completely dependent on him. The book really exposed how difficult the power struggle for impoverished women was during the 30's and 40's; the only ways that poor women could survive were to be factory workers, wives if they weren't sold into slavery first, prostitutes, or geishas if they were pretty enough. They were only valued for their bodies, their worth measured only by how they could serve or please men.

Very depressing, in a good way. It was excellent perspective, reminding me of how fortunate I feel to be gainfully employed and receiving equal pay to that of my male colleagues for doing the same job (a rarity even today for a woman); and having enough power and stature that I could choose my own relationship and marriage based on my love and feelings and not have to depend on anyone else but myself for my financial stability (though of course two incomes are better than just one :D). Geishas were never allowed to marry, and even if they were to have feelings for their dannas or "husbands" (not in the literal sense, for dannas were almost always married already and were only taking the geishas on as subsidized mistresses) they were, in essence, owned by their dannas.

I watched a special on PBS on human trafficking and how still, women and young girls are still sold into prostitution and slavery every day, across the world, even in this country though moreso in less developed countries. It is a huge underground business, illegal of course; but in so many countries the laws against it go unenforced and there is tremendous apathy about the plight of the girls and women in captivity. Even if they escape, the chances that their traffickers will be penalized at all are very slim to none. I wept. It was so sad.

I'm going to go upstairs and clean up the kitchen now. Hope you all have a lovely Thursday evening!

XO Darcy

Symphony at Sea

Last night I scrubbed, poked, and popped three medium sweet potatos into the oven. If you've never had a sweet potato as an entree before, you should really try it. I drizzled a bit of natural peanut butter, chopped apples and walnuts on mine, and it was sweet and dessert-like but also full of fiber and made me feel energized for the whole evening.

Which was good, because I needed every bit of it for last night's rehearsal. We're doing Vaughn Williams A Sea Symphony, which is an obviously programmatic piece about being, well, at sea. I'm feeling about it as I feel about much of the Wagner I have played before.

1. It's probably much more fun to listen to than it is to play. For example, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is one of the most difficult operas I have ever played and it was sheer mental (and physical) agony to have to perform it in Febr. 2004 when the MSO did it with the Florentine Opera; but seeing it performed at the Met (the very night my sweet David proposed to me before the 3rd Act!) in October of 2003 was a life-altering experience.
2. It's all build-up [i.e., LOUD] and never really seems to go or arrive anywhere. In the case of the Sea Symphony, it's like being on a boat that's supposedly going somewhere but there's never any land in sight. Loud, loud, loud.
3. It's painful. It's all loud, and we're playing pretty much all the time, but very little of what we're playing is all that important.

But, the chorus sounds fabulous, and thankfully, they're singing pretty much the entire time. I think the piece should be called "A Sea Mass" or "Songs of the Sea"; the title "Symphony" is misleading because very little of it is unsung/purely symphonic.

What else is new? Well, it's still cold, but I'd feel as pointless as a bra on a supermodel if I complained about it. It's February. I'm in Milwaukee. It's gonna be cold.

But I do have good news...the scale has finally jumped back in the right direction, and I've lost 24.5 pounds now since Sept. 05. I am continually humbled by this journey toward wellness and a less encumbered self. At times, I am amazed at how simple it really is: don't eat more calories than you need to function. I think the word simple is often misinterpreted as easy. Losing weight may be simple, and at our most motivated, it may even seem easy. But it is ultimately really, really difficult for zillions of reasons: emotional associations with certain foods, the social aspect of eating, the ever-increasing pace of life and devalue of taking time for sit-down "slow food" meals, avoiding processed and additive-laden foods, the difficulty of staying active in an increasingly sedentary media/computer/TV dependent society, eating to self-medicate and comfort with sugary/carby foods, etc. etc. etc. The list is infinite and unending.

I am in this for the long haul. It's very different from those other times when I looked to a program, an unsustainable exercsie routine, or expertise of other people to achieve my wellness goals. This is much more internal, personal, and I think ultimately much more of a lifetime awareness. I thought about it and realized how easy, how imperceptible it would be to gain just .5 or 1 pound a week. Well, if you do that over the course of a year, you've gained over 50 pounds. Consequently, if you lose only that much per week, you could lose over 50 pounds in a year. Taking it easy, making small, non-drastic manageable changes, seems to be the way to go for me.

The hardest thing is going to be to remain humble about it. I'm not saying I shouldn't feel good about this, but I have to remember that just as seemingly easily as this weight has come off, it could just as easily come back on. I have also noticed the tendency within myself to loathe the fat person I was and had become and to want to just shut that person out of my mind forever, to abandon her and gloat that she's no longer a part of my life now. Our culture has become so obsessed with burning fat and demonizing weight that anyone who's been the least bit heavy can't help but internalize some of that. Of course it's good to be healthy, but I can guarantee you that there are some heavier people out there that are fit who eat healthfully that will greatly outlive some skinny, inactive person who drives around in his car smoking and eating Taco Bell all day.

Anyway, I have rehearsal in a bit so I'd better get showered and dressed. More on this subject later!!

XO Darcy