Stress

Mmmmmmmmh......What time is it? Ummmhhhhh...  That late? Jeez, gotta get going.      Maybe in five minutes....no, gotta get up....Got to....Come on.....Leg out, foot on the floor....That's it, you can do it.....Still so dark out....I can have five more minutes...

Why's the dog barking so much, dammit? It's only....oh crap, it's way past walkies already! Hurry..ouch! Who moved the #@**!! dresser?   

 Such is the usual beginning. The remainder of the day can be productive, or it can be a complete waste of time. Today was the latter.
After a breakfast of blueberries and vanilla yogurt (the new, healthy breakfast) the dog went for her very late walk. Just in time to go through an unfortunately not unusual, maniacal tug-of-war in pursuit of the garbage truck. And a neighbor's cat. There is physics involved for a sixty pound dog to be able to drag a one hundred twenty five pound human, and my dog apparently knows more about it than I do.
Symphony weeks, particularly when there are more than one at a time can be brutal. Just when all of the little muscle groups in your back, shoulders, wrists and fingers have managed to loosen up after the last round of late nights, it begins anew. Break out the aspirin... 
My less favorite orchestra performed a long concert of Copland, Bruch, Gershwin and Kalinnikov with a violinist who seems to struggle with the same problem that I have....She is an artsy woman with a guy's sense of humor. She tried lightening the concert hall mood with a couple of humorous phrases, but they went over like a lead balloon. I felt like taking her aside to say, "sweetie, people just don't expect women to even have a sense of humor, let alone a woman in a glittery gown with a violin in her hands.....They don't know how to react".
We did an extra concert during the week, in a town that is a 3 1/2 hour drive from my home. Got back at 1:30 a.m., then got up at 8 a.m. to start the 2 hour commute to my next job of listening to students all day long (who had obviously not practiced since their last lesson), only to find out that four of them would cancel.
After that, another 45 minute drive to get to the next lengthy concert, and finally the 1 1/2 hour drive home, arriving at midnight. The next day, Sunday is shot, because we do an afternoon performance. Not enough time either before or after to accomplish much of anything at home, because of the commute.
Next day, begin round two with my favorite orchestra. We worked through two contemporary pieces, "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" by Karim Al-Zand and a world-premiere of a theme and variations for violin, "The Transit of Venus" by Tomasz Golka.  Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" on top of all that....See any correlation? Hmmmm?
When you are trying to learn your own part of a symphonic piece, you rely a lot on an understanding of standard compositional structure from the 19th century and earlier. You most often already mentally know the piece, at least from hearing it  many times, even if you have never played it.
Twentieth century works and newer are a different story. Composers began trying to break out of the same-old same-old, and began using sound effects, lots of accidentals (notes not common to the given key) and crazy, compound meters to elude any potential monotony. This means that musicians have to be alert and counting beats like crazy, every second of the piece. Attempts at musicality tend to be halfhearted, due to the intense focus on simply staying together.
 You have no idea how your part fits in relation to any others until you get to your first group rehearsal. The availability of YouTube videos can help a little, but often your own part will be buried in a wash of sound, making it impossible to figure out where you are in the score. And, for a world premiere, of course there is no available recording to listen to. 
This creates stress.
The composer of "Transit" was there to provide guidance, and apparently has a great sense of humor about the process involved. Written on one portion of the conductor's score are instructions for him to: "Continue to improvise....Ignore orchestra......Go ape shit".....
Did I mention that this composer is also a conductor? He definitely gets it.
The "Scheherazade" was on the second half of the program, and while a welcome respite from the previous musical maze, it is still a physically demanding piece with concerto-like interludes for the concertmaster to play. Our concertmaster is in his seventies, and even in his prime never really played very gracefully. It was painful to listen to. OMG kind of painful. Conductor needs to do something about it kind of painful.
More stress.
I was popping pain meds every night over the last half of the week, and after finally having a day off, it sort of feels weird to not have a throbbing pain in my back or my head. I don't want to get too used to this, because our next gig is in less than two weeks. Verdi's "Requiem". The "Dies Irae" is a killer..........

Movie Review: COMA

   I remember having read the book when I was 15 or so, but couldn't remember most of the details. Not because it wasn't a good book, but because outside of all the embarrassing stuff you did, you don't remember too much from your teens if it didn't involve whoever you had a crush on.
   I also keep forgetting that Michael Crichton was a physician as well as a writer and director, which makes this story quite believable. You like to think that the relationship with your doctors is one of reliability and trust, but "Coma" will make you wonder....
   The tension and mistrust is set up from the very beginning, using the difficulties of being a woman in a male-dominated field to kick off a sense of paranoia. The opening scene has me a little confused though....     
   The lead characters, lovers played by Genevieve Bujold and Michael Douglas are both surgeons, and come home together after a long rotation only to argue about who should cook dinner and who gets to shower first, with Douglas wanting to be served a beer, whining about how difficult his day was and Bujold arguing exactly the same thing. Seems like a point is being made about women working just as hard as men, and shouldn't we all be served a beer?
    But this conversation is immediately followed with lingering, gratuitous Bujold-in-the-shower nudity, sort of cancelling out the support for feminism token with obviously intentional boobsploitation. Given that this film was made in the 70's, I suppose it implies that back then men thought, if she's going to burn her bra, then what's underneath it must be fair game! Still so much to learn...........
   The question as to whether the lead character is delusional and paranoid or justifiably afraid is well played, and carried far enough into the story to keep you guessing. We were kept on the edge of our seats until the very end.
   Besides the above-mentioned issue, the only other complaints that I have are with props and editing. Bujold ditches her shoes and panty hose in one scene, climbing up a utility ladder. Next scene, she is wearing the same shoes, but her panty hose are found on the ladder by someone else much later in the movie. What... was she waiting for them to drip-dry? And Michael Douglas (surgeon, remember) drives around in what looks like a Datsun 4-door sedan. I can accept the very small apartment he supposedly lives in, for a single guy in Boston, but a Datsun?
   My rating: !#*
! (quite suspenseful), # (you see enough of our star and a few comatose female body parts), * I would recommend this film unless you are already afraid of hospitals.
   Keep the remote handy!

  

Movie Review: Westworld

   In keeping with my gripes about Hollywood in a previous post, I have decided to periodically write movie reviews. Not reviews about brand new, still-in-the-theaters-movies (because we never, ever go to the theater anymore), but old movies. The stuff you browse for on Netflix or down the aisle of your favorite book/music/video store where the dvd cases are jammed so tightly together that it takes knocking half of them off the shelf to get one out, and you have to walk with your head turned at a rather painful, sideways angle and squint really hard to read the spines. Where "Pan's Labyrinth" is labeled a family film, movies from the 80's with Burt Reynolds in them are filed under "classics" and store clerks don't know that the word "The" in a title doesn't usually count when you are alphabetizing.
   I will use my own ratings symbols in lieu of stars, partly because everyone else already uses stars, and partly because there are no stars on this keyboard (no, sweetie, *'s an asterisk, and while we can argue for eternity over the word's prefix meaning star, IT ISN'T A STAR).

! = Isn't that symbol obvious?
@ = At what point in this film are we going to see any sort of plot?
# = The pound of flesh given by a superb cast member
$ = Lots of product placement and/or special effects substituting for content
-$ = Dim lighting throughout substituting for special effects and content
% = Ridiculously high percentage of film obviously shot in a location other than where it is pretending to be
  (doesn't apply to studio lot films ...the background cheesiness is to be expected in pre-1990's movies)
^ = Make a point of seeing this film, if you have any taste at all
& = Sequel available
* = Recommended, but with following qualifiers or reservations
? = What the hell?

   First up is Michael Crichton's cinematic debut, "Westworld". Yul Brynner stars as a realistic android gunslinger in a town populated by android humans and animals, created for vacationers seeking to experience life in a past period of history.
   True to nearly every sci-fi story involving computer technology, things start to go wrong....Very wrong. Heroes played by Richard Benjamin and James Brolin discover the trouble and try to stop the ensuing madness.
   While the film seems somewhat campy when compared to sci-fi movies of today, one can see where ideas for later movies and television shows came from. It's essentially "Fantasy Island" meets "The Terminator".
A number of cast members have familiar, 70's and 80's-era  faces (remember Dick Van Patten, from "Eight is Enough"?), and certain scenes definitely date the picture (people smoking while working at their boxy, pre-Atari-style computers).
   "Westworld" definitely has some of the "Captain Kirk fighting the Alien dude" suspenseful action, and I've always thought Yul Brynner was sexy. Something about bald guys with an attitude....The fact of Richard Benjamin's disappearance from the cinema has been confirmed as a "Well, no wonder" kinda thing.
   All in all, I'm glad to have seen it. I've noticed the box on video shelves for years, and always wondered about it. If you are someone who can appreciate the campiness, allowing for the time frame of the movie, I think you might enjoy it. My scores:  **&       *(don't expect much for special effects) *(Yul Brynner does more stalking than talking) & (Futureworld is out there somewhere).

   Next in line, coincidentally will be Michael Crichton's second film, "Coma". Didn't plan for a Crichton bingefest, but what the heck...Perhaps we will eventually revisit "Jurassic Park" as the most recent sequel to "Westworld"............................Keep the remote handy!