COVIDiaries 4 - Stay Positive! ...!!

Napoleon's Grave, my favourite patience. Helps me stay sane.

This is the time for self-discovery. We all have this amazing opportunity to take a step back, evaluate our lives and truly see what's important. What have you always wanted to do but never had the time for? Running a marathon, creating cutting-edge sculpture, writing a collection of short stories, baking artisan bread? Now's the time to make those dreams come true! Fulfill your inner longings.

This society is way too focused on consumerism - now we can all change those toxic thought patterns and start living a more meaningful life. Go outside, go to the forest, breathe in the fresh air. Look at the spring happening around you and feel the mother nature wrap you in it's primeval embrace. Or walk to the sea shore and feel the sand under your feet. Listen to the singing of the waves. Who really needs those shops anyway? You can live without new shoes. Aren't you much happier here, in nature's own museum, than in Louvre? And the movies are streamed in Netflix - much cheaper than in the cinema. Enjoy this opportunity to rebuild your relationship with nature, and start your consumerism detox right here, right now.

Connect with your home. Your home is your haven. Make sure it's zen, so your energies can flow free and undisturbed by the underlying fear of, but never mind that now, take your yoga mat out and start breathing conscious, full deep breaths as you move through a vinyasa or two. Then eat a well-balanced meal you cooked with mindful love, because you have all this time for yourself now.

All of this tries so very desperately to hide the fact that we're all really scared. At least I am, and if you're not you're probably fooling yourself. We're trapped in this time of not-knowing - When will the vaccine be discovered, how many people will die before that, will I lose someone I love, when will we work again as normal, will there be work to return to, what will the economy look like in a year's time, what is going to happen? What about my work, my family, my friends, my hobbies, my life? And when can we go to the libraries again???????????? It's also a problem of choices. How to live through the days so that I don't unnecessarily put anyone in danger, but on the other hand, won't go mad myself? Can I go to the store? Can I meet this person? Is it okay, is it responsible? Should I delay cutting my hair, having a massage? Can I go to other people's houses? Visit my parents? Should I wear a mask? What's the right thing to do?

There are days when I have the energy to make bread, not artisanal, but very normal bread, and I have the energy to tidy something that has needed tidying for quite some time. There are days when I sit on the sofa and stare at nothing and think that it is not possible to live like this. There are days when me and the person I live with spend meaningful time together now that there's plenty of it available, and then there are days when we think this virus will bring our cohabitation to an end. Some days the online teaching gives sudden nuggets of joy and elation, and then there are many days when after teaching it feels like it's drained all my will to live, I feel so exhausted after. Sometimes it feels like I can breathe, and sometimes it feels like I can't. 

These are weird, stressful, unknown times. I'm not saying you shouldn't think positive - on the contrary, I definitely think you should, if you possibly can. But if your vinyasa flow isn't quite working and you still haven't made any bread, if you go cry in the shower so as not to worry people living with you and you play computer games for hours on end to obliterate thoughts for a while, well, that's okay too. Someone somewhere said that this too shall pass, and that sounds very clever. While we're waiting for that to happen, though, remember that fear makes people behave in strange ways. (I knit socks, hate them, unravel them, and start all over again. Also I play patience and scream at people I love.) As odd or stupid as someone's behaviour might seem, have compassion. They might be annoyingly positive, evasive, depressed - but they're just coping as well as they can in a shitty situation, just like you. 

COVIDiaries 3 - Easter Edition

The Baroque Babes (and me) 

Two singer colleagues asked me to join them to make music in the time of corona, and yesterday we recorded Stabat mater by Pergolesi. We're publishing it on YouTube as an Easter offering. I'd never heard this Stabat mater before we started rehearsing (shocking, I know) and I thought it would be fun. It was. Here's what I learned in the process:

• When living through a crisis - this pandemic is arguably the biggest one so far in my lifetime - making music together becomes an act of hope, defiance, prayer even. Working on Stabat mater with Johanna and Elli has yet again reminded me of how much I love what I do. (Listen to 'Thank you for the music' by ABBA now and be grateful. Then continue reading.) 
• Stabat mater is an insanely beautiful piece when played by a baroque ensemble.
• A piano is not a baroque ensemble. It's important to understand all the implications of this - I didn't. I listened to recordings of ensembles, did my best to imitate them, and quickly discovered that things that sound good with a continuo aren't necessarily applicable to piano playing. Steady, heavy pulse? A robot playing slightly too slow. Walking bass all portato? Directionless shit. Trills together with singers? Not great.
• I understood just how little I had studied baroque - I have played the harpsichord, but pitiably little. I have basically learned enough to know how much out of my depth I am - and knowing this mainly helps in making me aware of how much I'm offending the baroque gods. Whatever I do, it's probably somehow wrong, and who plays baroque music on a piano anyway?
• When you have to baroque as a pianist, however, you've got to pay attention to staccatos. I always end up using them too much and too sharp everywhere, making everything sound light, bright and cheerful. Sometimes it works, but just as often the line and drama disappear, taking the oomph out of the music.
• Trills are hard. "Relax," you tell your fingers, "you've known how to do this since you were ten", but your muscles have already frozen, refusing to co-operate.
• Taping scores is even harder than the trills. This time I copied just some of the pages to avoid page turns, and taped the copies to the score. Well. Not only once but twice I actually managed to tape the upper and lower half of the same paper to different pages. Trying to detach the tape I tore some of the pages and essentially made a huge mess. Finally I managed to tape page 29 next to page 41. I have two masters degrees.
• Recording is energy-consuming business, so bring food. Bananas are the best.
• Buy new tights. If you think the old ones won't break when you start manouvering yourself into them, you're very much mistaken. Counting on a small tear not showing in the video? Of course it will. Forgot to check the colour? No worries, surely no-one will notice how weird your orange legs look compared to the deathlike white of your arms.
• It really is possible to cry so tragically over wrong notes and badly formed phrases that the person who you live with thinks someone has died. (In my defence, I was very tired and hungry, and that's when things get tragic.)
• Things might not sound as shit as they feel like when you play them. We're professionals, so in the end all the music we make sounds quite alright, even if it's not the greatest performance ever. All the embarrassing mistakes I bumbled through in this particular recording are just mistakes, after all. While they make me cringe, they will not destroy all the pleasure another listener gets from the performance. A messed up trill here, an ugly forte there - turns out I'm just human. Who would've thought.
• Looking at the video afterwards I realised that I still have the same mannerism I've had for years now - I tend to rotate in a circle, always counter-clockwise, with varying speed throughout a performance. There I was playing, going round and round. A couple of times I managed to pause the movement and sit still for a phrase or two before continuing my rounds, and that felt like a small victory. Baby steps.
• Concerts are fun. Okay, there was no audience and we didn't actually get paid, but who cares when the piece and the people you work with are awesome. Returning to ABBA I'm saying thank you for the music and wishing you all a happy Easter, while we wait for better times to come.