sounds of music
May. 3rd, 2022 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWhen I got laid off from my previous job seven (!) years ago I took up viola, on the grounds that it was portable, had the same strings as a cello just an octave up, and (most importantly) wasn't a violin. I may still have a chip on my shoulder from years of bad cello parts in junior high orchestra. I never got "good" at viola but I'm good enough to get by. For awhile in Vancouver I was playing fiddle tunes with a weekly group, and that was fun.
In November Erin pointed me at a Facebook post from Vanderhoof, the next town over, where the high school was putting on Sound Of Music and wanted a pit orchestra, and would anyone from around be interested in playing in that? This seemed weird but on reflection it's more that I was spoiled: my high school did a musical most years, with full orchestra, but this is also a high school in a wealthy suburb that gets tons of money shoveled at it. Anyway. I wrote to Russell the music director and said "if you need people i can play viola or cello" and he said "OH GOD YES A VIOLIST". At which point I remembered Tegan my viola teacher pointing out that there's always demand for violists.
So I shrugged and spent the winter driving down to Vanderhoof and back roughly one night every couple of weeks. There was supposed to be rehearsal every week but there was a month break at Xmas, and frequent "yeah we're calling it off due to bad road conditions."
Rehearsals were ... alright. The music tended to be like the dullest cello parts I'd ever played, a lot of rest-bum-bum rest-bum-bum. Occasionally Richard Rogers will take a song that's been quite pleasantly bopping along in a reasonable key like G or D and drop it half a step into Gflat or Dflat. I assume for the vocalists this is just, oh, whatever, modulate a half step, sounds nice. For strings it's "we will now modify five or six of the seven notes that you're playing, have fun with that." So, music that's both dull and difficult, which is not a good combination. And I didn't really break it out to practice at home much, because, well, dull, and even more dull without any melody to play off of.
There's one bit that I regret not having practised: the entr'acte combines Sound Of Music, Sixteen Going On Seventeen, and Goatherd. And the viola part for Goatherd isn't the normal oom-pah-oom-pah, it's ... it's the equivalent of the yodeling, fast eighthnotes dancing between strings. That would have been fun to practise and would have sounded good. Unfortunately we never rehearsed the entr'acte until the tech rehearsal a week before opening, so I didn't realise that it was actually interesting. Oh well.
There was one other violist, an older woman named Thea who I think is actually a violinist but plays viola because someone has to. So that was alright, good to have someone else to keep me on track and vice versa. She and the two cellists and the bassist (and, come performance time, the guitarist who got moved over next to us) were friendly and chatty, a bit more than I was really up for but not too bad.
The thing is... the thing is. Only once did one of the cast show up to rehearse with us: Maria came in one evening, so we played through all her songs. And that made just such a huge difference, it was no longer playing harmony to other harmonies with no real melody, it was actually harmonizing against something. Still somewhat dull but not pointless. And then we did tech rehearsal all day Saturday before opening, and while it was A Mess it did give that feeling of making music instead of just noise.
And the show itself ... "by thursday it'll be art," as my theatre ex Steph said. And it was. It came together, it worked. It was fun, an energy I've not really felt in ages. Show energy, performance energy. I got bits of it when I did Orpheus several years ago but that's a different thing altogether.
... and this has sat half-finished for so long I should just wrap it and backdate it. So.
In November Erin pointed me at a Facebook post from Vanderhoof, the next town over, where the high school was putting on Sound Of Music and wanted a pit orchestra, and would anyone from around be interested in playing in that? This seemed weird but on reflection it's more that I was spoiled: my high school did a musical most years, with full orchestra, but this is also a high school in a wealthy suburb that gets tons of money shoveled at it. Anyway. I wrote to Russell the music director and said "if you need people i can play viola or cello" and he said "OH GOD YES A VIOLIST". At which point I remembered Tegan my viola teacher pointing out that there's always demand for violists.
So I shrugged and spent the winter driving down to Vanderhoof and back roughly one night every couple of weeks. There was supposed to be rehearsal every week but there was a month break at Xmas, and frequent "yeah we're calling it off due to bad road conditions."
Rehearsals were ... alright. The music tended to be like the dullest cello parts I'd ever played, a lot of rest-bum-bum rest-bum-bum. Occasionally Richard Rogers will take a song that's been quite pleasantly bopping along in a reasonable key like G or D and drop it half a step into Gflat or Dflat. I assume for the vocalists this is just, oh, whatever, modulate a half step, sounds nice. For strings it's "we will now modify five or six of the seven notes that you're playing, have fun with that." So, music that's both dull and difficult, which is not a good combination. And I didn't really break it out to practice at home much, because, well, dull, and even more dull without any melody to play off of.
There's one bit that I regret not having practised: the entr'acte combines Sound Of Music, Sixteen Going On Seventeen, and Goatherd. And the viola part for Goatherd isn't the normal oom-pah-oom-pah, it's ... it's the equivalent of the yodeling, fast eighthnotes dancing between strings. That would have been fun to practise and would have sounded good. Unfortunately we never rehearsed the entr'acte until the tech rehearsal a week before opening, so I didn't realise that it was actually interesting. Oh well.
There was one other violist, an older woman named Thea who I think is actually a violinist but plays viola because someone has to. So that was alright, good to have someone else to keep me on track and vice versa. She and the two cellists and the bassist (and, come performance time, the guitarist who got moved over next to us) were friendly and chatty, a bit more than I was really up for but not too bad.
The thing is... the thing is. Only once did one of the cast show up to rehearse with us: Maria came in one evening, so we played through all her songs. And that made just such a huge difference, it was no longer playing harmony to other harmonies with no real melody, it was actually harmonizing against something. Still somewhat dull but not pointless. And then we did tech rehearsal all day Saturday before opening, and while it was A Mess it did give that feeling of making music instead of just noise.
And the show itself ... "by thursday it'll be art," as my theatre ex Steph said. And it was. It came together, it worked. It was fun, an energy I've not really felt in ages. Show energy, performance energy. I got bits of it when I did Orpheus several years ago but that's a different thing altogether.
... and this has sat half-finished for so long I should just wrap it and backdate it. So.