Week 29: April 13

For the past two weeks, the concert hall has been closed to regular rehearsals because the spring opera production required an intense set, which took two days and a whole team of set builders/electricians to put in. The production was "Postcard from Morocco" by David Argento, and I went to see it on Thursday. It was a very interesting show - I encourage you to look it up. It is set in a train station, in which seven strangers meet and find out about each other while waiting for their departure. There is not really a plot - it is more like a patchwork of different-sized vignettes. The last performance was today, and I was on crew for the strike. I got to walk around the set and fool with the props and some of the percussion "toys" (bike horn, acme siren, and some vibrating metal instrument with mallets and a tongue by which you could bend the pitch and I can't find a picture of it and no one knew what it was called. Oh well.)

My journal for this week seems to be mostly taken up with Ian stories, which are not very transcribable as so much of what makes him funny and wonderful and insane and scintillatingly brilliant is in the delivery. I'll just say that on Tuesday I had three lessons and two of them were in the copy room. Most intense lessons I've had all year. Reminded me of the time he gave me a lesson in the MRU stairwell.

I will also say that our most recent studio class was the first time I have seen someone "foaming at the mouth" in real life.

Here is Ian talking and teaching.

Here is Ian talking and playing

These videos are public, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. If I wanted to be really nasty I could post a few of the in-house videos my colleagues have made of our studio classes, but if I posted those on a public website, Ian might get deported to a mental asylum, and then we wouldn't be able to study with him anymore, and that would be the greatest tragedy of my life so far.

Usually I try not to gush on this blog because I know it's not interesting.....but I am going to make a statement now (feel free to skip): Our studio class here at SFCM is the luckiest violin class in the world. Every day, every class, every lesson, I can't believe how lucky I am to a) be studying at this school at all and b) to be studying sweet violin with the single most unique person I have ever met in my life (not to mention one of the kindest, most humble, most creative, most self-sacrificing, most bizarre people I've ever known). 

On Saturday I had a great adventure. Maddy, Nick and I took our instruments and caught the bus up to Marin City, which meant we drove over the GGB for only the second time in my life. I apologize for the bad pictures I took out the bus window - I was trying to capture the rich green rolling hills of Marin County.

I can't find any better stock photos online, so these will have to do. Paul Hersh, our coach, picked us up and we drove out into the boonies where Mark Sokol lives, for a quartet coaching. He lives in a beautiful rustic house on a big property with a bridge over a little stream to the studio. I really wanted to get some pictures but I felt weird about taking pictures of people's private property. I'll just say that we had a fantastic coaching and a glorious drive home through the emerald-velvet hills.

Today I performed in a colleague's recital (on baroque viola!!), watched a violin recital with Stefan Jackiw (wonderful - look him up), struck the opera set, saw a bulldog skateboarding, had a conversation with a Native American homeless dude who had plenty to say on a lot of subjects, tried to get a cache but failed because it was too high up in the tree, and went to the CalTrain station for a virtual.

Time capsule

- Antisocial Violinist