Experiences galore!

From Sunday, June 13, 2010

Okay, so two really big things happened this week: On Tuesday I played in the MMTA Composition Contest recital, and a teacher wanted to BUY a copy of my original piece (!!!), and last night I played in the Honors Concert at Northrop Auditorium!!!

Which experience was cooler?

It's hard to say.

I was speechless when this teacher said to me, "I have a particular student that I think should play your piece." I luckily had an extra copy I gave her. That's right, I gave it to her and didn't take her money. I had no idea what sheet music costs, especially when it's just a few loose sheets of paper. It didn't really matter to me. She asked me to sign it, too, and that made me feel very warm and fuzzy inside.

Of course, this doesn't mean I'm always going to let my compositions go for free (I hope I can get into a more regular composing habit so that there'll be a lot more of them.)

When I told my own teacher about it, she said, "You should have asked for $50. $30 for you and $20 for your teacher!"

Oh, if only it could work that way.

Then the concert last night! After working my butt off to win the Minnesota Music Teachers Association state piano contest, my reward with 699 other kids was to play in a big duet on the Northrop stage. Two hours of kids from six to 19 years old played in their own age groups, usually about 20 pianos used in a piece, with a conductor. (who liked to sip juice boxes during rehearsal, if you like random facts)

I got to wear a really awesome formal dress, and it was red. Seeing what every body was wearing was...interesting.

With dress rehearsals, pictures, and sticking around for the whole hooha, I was there from 3:25 to 9:07 PM. It was a long day, but I'm glad I got the experience.

The song we played was a nice and easy blues that was only about two or three minutes long, so I knew it like the back of my hand. The part that was really nerve racking though was when we had to wait behind the stage. You have to be real quiet, which gives you too much time to think about what you're just about to do. But once I got up there, I made sure that I didn't look anywhere else but at the conductor, and I was just fine. I saw a bit of the audience in my peripheral vision, but nothing derailed my confidence, and before I knew it we were done. I think for me, my brain can't comprehend the number of people in a space as large as the Northrop, and we're so removed from the people that in a way, it's almost like there's no one at all--just a bunch of kids on a big stage. If I'm in a recital with just a regular roomful of people, then pre-performance nerves are more evident, which is really weird, I think.

So now that all of that is over, I can focus all my energy on preparing for the St. Olaf piano camp next week, which sounds like it'll be really intense. I mean like, soak- your- hands- in -hot- water- and- bandage- your- fingers-at-the-end-of-the-day intense. I say, Bring it on.

Wildflowers

Last summer I decided to plant some wildflowers. We're a big gardening family with flowers all around, like the azaleas...

Some tulips...

Some snapdragons and a marigold in the barrel...

And some vegetables and other plants in the backyard. I help take care of them, but I wanted my own plot. So, when we transplanted the strawberries last year, I took up the empty space, turned over the soil, and in a week planted my wildflowers.

My garden

I weeded. I watered. I weeded again. Then I waited. And then they grew!

This month, all these little orange flowers started popping up, and I'm getting excited for when the other ones decide to arrive.

Wild flowers are really fun because almost each month there's a new kind of flower popping up, and then by the end of last summer I had red, yellow, orange, blue, pink, purple and white flowers the whole length of the garden. It was just beautiful. Here's to summer!

A word from the mom

I haven't been keeping up my end of this blog. Let's get that out there right away. Despite Em's gentle nudges---"you could write about that, Mom!"---"that would make an interesting blog post, Mom!"--I have, as usual, let work take precedence.

What's this blog's title? Play on. Play.

Play is not what comes naturally to me. I was a serious kid. I liked to read. I liked to listen to adult conversations. I didn't care much about meeting unfamiliar kids or playing tag, hide and seek, or alley alley in free.

And I'm a serious adult. I take responsibility, I follow through, I do what I say I'm going to do, I work hard, I accomplish the things I want to accomplish.

But. How fun is a life without play?

I have learned to play through watching my children. There was some child psychologist who talked about the concentration exhibited by children stringing beads. I have watched my children, and my piano students, as they metaphorically were stringing beads. Sometimes what they were actually doing was moving sand, forming dikes and ponds, sometimes what they were doing was taking on a role, and sometimes playing "Heart and Soul."

But the thing all these play-ers had in common was, they were in the moment. Experiencing whatever they were doing without any self consciousness at all. Totally absorbed in what they were doing, without the "how am I doing" or what do they think of me" or any of those other self conscious thoughts that intrude.

Those are the moments I'm seeking to create in my life.

Back from St. Olaf

The verdict: I still love St. Olaf


Even though I pretty much knew everything about it from my mom before I even visited, I liked actually being there, and I could really picture myself there in--golly!--a year or so.

We were there on Flower Friday, when a local florist comes and you can buy flowers for your peeps. The student mail boxes had a bunch of flowers poking out of them.

I found it a cute little quirk, but we're not supposed to go to college for the cute little quirks, so here are some other things that I liked:

They have a top-notch music program, lovely hills to climb on your way to class, a rock wall to climb to qualify as your physical education class, a wind turbine, nice admission staff (even though someone added an extra letter to my last name, I forgive them), and a tight community that I really like. Although, they could have saved a lot of money by making climbing the hill from Skoglund gym/auditorium a way to take phy. ed., instead of walking down the (steep!) hill to get inside the building to climb up a wall with ropes bothering you in uncomfortable places, then walk up the hill again to your dorm on the other side of campus.

I like the smallness of the school, the not-too-faraway-but-still-far-ness of it, the liberal arts structured education, and the basis in the Lutheran faith, while still being culturally diverse and having many non-Lutheran and non-Christian students.

Oh, and this is the best part--it smells like cookies. I know it's the Malt O Meal plant, but the place smelled like cookies to me.

(This is not one of the major deciding factors in how I choose the school I will attend, but it doesn't harm their chances at all. If it smelled like cows, that would be a different matter)

The only thing that could potentially derail my dream of becoming an Ole is the financial aid that I may or may not get. I find it very unfair that it costs three arms, two legs and your first born child to go to a good private school. But hey, we'll see what happens.

I would say at this point, St. Olaf is my first choice, with Augsburg College in second, then comes Wartburg College (love my Lutheran schools) and UW-Madison with a shrug and a maybe from me.

May the best school win.


And may they all really really really like me and want to shower me with monetary gifts. Amen.

I'm getting excited for my first college visit this Friday to St. Olaf in Northfield. AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! I've been there once to sing in the fall choral festival, so I got a look at the beautiful campus when all the leaves were changing color. Hearing all their wonderful choral groups later that evening also made me want to go there. Singing is my second musical passion next to playing the piano, and I hope to someday direct choirs. Northfield is also a nice little town--not too big, not too small, and just the right distance from home for me.
It's also got a Ragstock. I'm so there. Case closed.

Lots of people I know have gone to St. Olaf (my mommy included), and all of them like to gush about the music program. [Mom edits: I do not gush.] I haven't even applied yet, but I'm probably going to gush too. They're also trying to win me over with their food--but they didn't need to send me a whole postcard about it, though. I'm sure becoming an Ole does not include starvation.

Fun fact: In 2009 St. Olaf won the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest hosted by Purdue University. They were the only liberal arts college in the competition and the only college to enter without an engineering program. Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist who drew insanely complicated machines to do simple and mundane tasks, like turning on a light bulb, as seen in the video.



But anyways. I'm just going for the music. Let's hope on Friday I like what I see even more.

'Oh, When the Saints"

If you need something to make you smile...



Two of my favorite people tearin' it up!

Voyageurs!

My latest musical obsession has been with the songs of the French-Canadian voyageurs. I read this book called "Early Candlelight," by Minnesota author Maude Hart Lovelace, who tells the story about a French-Canadian-American girl growing up at Fort Snelling, and is surrounded by voyageurs and fur traders and all these midwestern pioneery people. Read the book, it is soooo good! Throughout the book these voyageurs sing--almost all the time--and they are beautiful and happy songs. I'd be a very good voyaguer, since I love foreign languages and folksongs. Now they'd only have to show me how to paddle a canoe. I was actually somewhat raised on the voyaguer music as a little kid (see two posts ago). Mom and Dad bought this cd at the History Center gift shop, all the songs being sung by a college choir from Toronto, so the French sounded real. We'd listen to them on long car rides, although the only one my siblings and I could ever figure out how to sing was good ol' "Alouette." It was actually a big part of my life back then. At preschool I drew this wonderful picture of the twelve voyaguers from the cd cover in their canoe, and it became one of the greatest pieces of my shortlived career as a visual artist, along with one entitled "Cast of the Andy Griffith Show." There had to be exactly twelve men in that boat, and I'm told that every time I drew a new figure I had to go back and count them all over again just to make sure. Also inspired by the French-speaking explorers, my older brother taught me how to say, "Ferme le boush." (shut up.) He didn't show me how to spell it though.
So rediscovering the voyaguers and their music has been very cool. The one that Lovelace quotes right at the end the book when...um...something super awesomely cool happens is called "A La Claire Fontaine." I read the words, and it looked very familiar. "Mom," I asked, "do you recognize this?" That's when I found out it's actually her most favorite French song ever. She sang it for me, and it brought me back to being in the the van on the road to somewhere when I was four years old. Isn't it lovely when things like that happen? How music triggers memories. My mom doesn't sing in public very often, doesn't like to, and when she does it's in the choir, but let me say that she sang that song so beautifully, I kept wanting her to sing it over again. The next couple of days I went looking on YouTube (what would I do without you?) for any videos of people singing it, because I didn't want Mom to wear out her voice, but I couldn't remember the tune. That's when I found out it's a children's song. Indeed, the best (and cutest) video I found had three French six year old girls singing it in their backyard. I love the songs that can be sung so simply and still be a thing of beauty. After all that, I looked for the lyrics, even though I don't speak French. I read the English translation and found that it's an interesting storyline for kids to be singing. Here are the third and fourth verses in English:

Sing, nightengale, sing,
Your heart is so happy.
Your heart feels like laughing,
Mine feels like weeping.

I lost my beloved,
Without deserving it,
For a bunch of roses,
That I denied her.

Chorus:
So long I've been loving you,
I'll never forget you.

I never sang stuff that heavy when I was six. The happy tune betrays it's melancholy lyrics, but that's kind of why I like it. Now my mom and I can sing it together.

**I'd upload a video, but YouTube isn't cooperating :(