VISI, day 23

The final day of the fun ... 

I went for a short shopping excursion this morning, to find two more gifts as well as a baggage scale.  My time is very short tomorrow morning, and I do not want to spend unnecessary time repacking bags ...  My shopping was successful, and I returned home to pack.  The morning was very, very rainy, and so my hopes of going to the beach one last time were dashed ... 

... except that when I got home, the sun came out.  I rethought my schedule, and decided I had time to go to the beach.  Off I went - so quickly that I forgot my sunscreen.  Oops.  Upon arriving at the beach (the third one I chose, and the nicest), I went and walked in the water a bit.  I didn't really want to go swimming, and then try to get the seaweed out of my hair, so I just walked.  It was rather cold, and the sky had clouded over again.  I went back, leaned against a log, and read for half an hour; at that point, the sun came out, and I just lay in the sun for another half hour.  I then bussed back, did a little bit of packing, and hurried off to the music building to run through staging ... 

... only to find that they were an hour behind!  I decided to go have a shower, which I had meant to do earlier, but when I returned an hour later, I only just got there in time to rehearse my song.  Luckily it went quite well and no one seemed particularly annoyed that I hadn't shown up in time.  Oops again ... 

I stayed in my gown to make dinner, and then eat it, and then do my hair and makeup.  It's a bit of a hassle to get into, so I didn't want to have to do so again ...   The gala was wonderful.  Rather long - three and a half hours - but every minute was packed with interesting interpretation and excellent acting.  The first act was the first half of our art songs; the second act was a short staged production by several of the students in a parallel program to my own; and the third act was the second half of the art songs.  Almost all of the songs were staged (only three or four were performed in recital fashion), and they were all brilliantly conceived.  Some were hilarious, some were heartbreaking, some were somewhat disturbing ... and all were so very artistic.  :)  We had drunk men, cocktail lounge singers, marionette masters, blind women, amorous pining from both sexes, and then little moments like reminiscing about one's grandmother ... yes, that was me.

Now, after the gala, everyone else has gone off to party, and I, alas, am not old enough ... besides, I still need to finish packing.  So here I am.  Packing.  ... blogging.

VISI, day 20

The second half of today was uneventful.  I went to the beach - a closer beach than the one I went to the first time - but it had no sand, really, just a bunch of rocks.  I moved some rocks around so that I had a relatively smooth place to sit and lean back, and I read for an hour and a half or so.  Very, very quiet - next to no one around.  Steep incline from the main city, quiet waves.  A Wednesday afternoon - the only people at the beach are the ones trying to relax.  :)

I then went home, made some dinner, and hung out on the Internet for a bit before bussing to a concert about 20 minutes away - a lovely miscellany of art song, rounded out with a second act consisting of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel, a cycle I had never heard all the way through.  I quite like it.  

And then we all bussed back to UBC, and hilarity ensued as several of my VISI-mates began reading the program of the night's concert in a sort of tone-imbued English, substituting alternate phonetic pronunciations of consonants, creating diphthongs or taking them out (or, goodness, triphthongs), speaking in a very singsong fashion (hence the choice of the term "tone-imbued"), and just generally mangling the language so that it sounded nothing like English at all.  It was incredibly funny, and some of them were really very good at doing it on the spot.  

Now I am home, and snacking on cereal while getting ready for bed.  G'night world ... tomorrow I shop.

VISI, day 19

Yesterday was a day full of movement.  Performance psychology first thing, then the final lecture (about Paul Verlaine's poetry - interesting, but got a bit dull and repetitive - I left a little bit early), then lunch, then a coaching ... 

and then the adventures started!  We all bussed downtown to attend a concert in an office building - June 21st is the Fête de la Musique in France, and Vancouver is trying to start its own tradition.  There was music everywhere, of all kinds.  It was very neat!  The concert was all French music, very traditional, very pretty.

A smaller group of us went to dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory, which was very yummy, and then we walked over to the Orpheum Annex theatre, where the VISI faculty was going to give another concert of French music.

It started with very traditional French mélodie and chanson, but then got very funny.  Real French humour!  It was roll-in-the-aisles hilarious, with spoken-word song, immense amounts of wordplay (I'm so glad I speak French), little pokes at composer styles by setting words from a Raisin Bran box to music ... and then an absolutely hilarious performance of Erik Satie's Je te veux - performed, eventually, by everyone who had sung!  The program was written as if one soprano was going to sing it, which is the traditional way of performing the song, but the two very French baritones took over and started singing to her (which is very funny because the song is from the perspective of a mistress talking to her lover) ... and then she replied ... and then it just got insane because everyone started singing.  

It was truly the best concert I'd been to in a long time.  Finally, a concert proclaiming that the French repertoire is not boring, is not old, is not passé - but that the French themselves are hilarious, love poking fun at themselves and their history, and aren't offended by it!  It was glorious - like a return to high school, in a very good way.  

Bussed home, talked to my boyfriend for a bit (which was nice), and then went to bed ... 

So far today, I have discovered which muscles I am overusing to create a posture that isn't even right, and I have been enlightened as to the interpretation of Duparc's L'invitation au voyage.  Now I am eating lunch, and then I will go to a concert, and then the beach, and then shopping, and then another concert!

VISI, day 10

As promised: 

I went to church.  

I bought laundry detergent, and sunscreen.  (and cheese and meat.  I`m going to have to buy more vegetables soon, too.)

I went home, made lunch, and put sunscreen on.  (I think this is the first time in my life I've actually applied sunscreen 30 minutes before sun exposure.)

I walked to the beach.  The route I took was not as direct as I expected it to be, and so it took me 45 minutes instead of 30, and my feet hurt.  I am not used to doing quite this much walking.  Anyway.  I plunked down on a grassy bit for an hour, reading a book (Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson; Dad, I hope you haven't been wondering where it is).  I then picked my way along the rocks to the actual beach, where I spent the next hour.  

I then walked back, and elected to take a scenic route through Vancouver's forest preserve - a gorgeous ten/fifteen-minute walk through nothing but trees.  I couldn't hear the city for most of the time.  It was beautiful.  (It was accented by the fact that I was playing Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess music on my Zune, and I totally felt like I was on a heroic quest all the way across some fantasy land.  super cool.  yes I am a nerd.  but most of the time it was gentle town/forest music and so it felt really peaceful and not so heroic.)  When I came out of the preserve, I wasn't quite sure where I was - neither of my first contacts could help me out, so I just went in the direction of the university, and was delighted to realize that I was far closer to it than I thought I was.  As such, it was only another twenty minutes to home - and that was walking slowly.

(I now have blisters on my feet, and again, they hurt.  Sheesh.  I feel like such a spoiled ... I dunno.  city kid.  The next few days will be interesting.)

On returning home, I made supper.  One of the downsides of A) not having much money, B) not having a lot of room to bring things home, and C) only being here for three weeks means that I have bought no spices, and so my meals are somewhat bland.  But!  At least I have food, and it is not cafeteria food.  That is nice.

I then went on an extended Wiki wander through the unsolved ancient and modern mysteries of the world, started by an article on the Hum (which I swear I've heard at home ... but only a few times in a very short period ... and Mom has too.  it was really weird.  We chalked it up to the transformer, but, you never know), which then proceeded to the Julia unidentified sound, and ended up (after a large ballooning) at The Starving of the Saqqara.  Normally when I do Wiki wanders of this type I feel rather small and frightened of the world, feeling like something's watching my back, but this time I'm a bit better.

Oh!  I also did laundry.  They have multiple washers and dryers here - I got all my laundry done in an hour.  Granted it was only two loads, but even two loads at BU takes me three hours.

Now I am going to relax, eat some cheese (I like cheese, it's yummy) and play a video game.  and then sleep!  ... and back to the lectures tomorrow, sigh.  They're so interesting ... but it feels like this day just started.  I'd like some more days like this one, where I don't worry about anything at all.  I may not have necessarily done much during May, but the frustration of not having a job kinda took over.  (I realized several times today that I don't have a job to come home to.  I need to start applying ... but that's a little bit hard to do from Vancouver.  Notably because I hate calling people.  But that's another story.)

Anyway.  Cheese.

VISI, day 9

No, I didn't blog yesterday.  By the time I got home from the concert/play I was just too tired ... 

Yesterday started more calmly, with no performance psychology class to delve deep into my soul first thing in the morning.  I went to one of the two lectures on collaborative relationships between singers and pianists, and picked up a few things I hadn't known before (but not that many).  

I then packed up a small lunch and a book and went for a walk to a nearby park, where I ate and then relaxed on the grass and read.  It was quiet, and though the park itself wasn't much to look at, the houses on the way there and back were.  I'm pretty sure this is a fairly rich part of Vancouver, so everything is impeccably groomed and the houses themselves are wonderful.  A lovely place to go walking.

The masterclass yesterday afternoon was what I was really looking forward to, and it certainly didn't disappoint: two hours with the Very British coach that I'd worked with the other day, focused on English art song.  Actually, the focus was on Ralph Vaughan Williams' The House of Life, or selections thereof.  He prefaced it by talking about a bit of the history of the cycle and of Vaughan Williams, but didn't go into the poetry much, because we'd already had a lecture on it earlier in the week.  However, once we got into the songs, the insight he gave was fascinating.  I believe I have three or four pages of notes.

After the masterclass, I practiced with my accompanist a bit, identified places that I needed to work on personally, and then went to make dinner.  I actually made dinner last night - ground beef with a Cajun rice mix that was really good, if a little spicier than I usually eat.  Oh well.  Very yummy.  

The last event of the week was a Shakespeare-infused concert/play that I had been looking forward to all week: the first act was an original story (very simple: boy meets girl, girl goes head over heels, boy backs out, girl's heart breaks) set to various songs with either texts by Shakespeare or from the same period; the second act was Try Me, Good King, a telling of Henry VIII's last night, where he is visited by the Fool (as in jester) to introduce him over again to the spirits of his dead wives (five, in case you forgot).  The spirits of his wives sing, but I didn't think much of the songs ... they didn't sound much like songs, really.  Maybe glorified recitative.  However, the text was quite good, and the actors were top-notch.  It was both hilarious and painful to watch as poor Henry struggled through this last night.

After the concert/play, I went for a walk in the gardens near the theatre, and contemplated life and such.  Beautiful, beautiful gardens.  I would love to have gardens like those at my own house.  Terraced, stone arches with vines, hemmed in by trees, you know ... oh and these gardens had a gorgeous view of the mountains and the sunset.  :D

Anyway, got home, basically went to bed.  The bed is getting better by the day as I tweak it to be ever-so-slightly thicker each evening.  Today my plan is breakfast (check), Callanetics (35% check), church, and then the beach!  It's kind of cool today, but I'm hoping it either warms up a bit or that it's not windy.  After the beach, I'll head home, shower off the sand, and then head to a choral concert.  Relaxing day.  No practicing.  Not even thinking about art song.  la la la.

(in tagging this post, I realized that I have already tagged Shakespeare in another post ... now I have to go find that post.)