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 17

Very little happened today of note.

I went to church.  I missed the bus to church and so I walked.  It was not far.  I walked in just as the service had started.

I bussed back and made lunch.  I played games most of the afternoon.  It was gray and rainy, and I did not really want to go out.

I considered not going to the concert tonight, but reasoned that since I had been inside almost all day, it would be good for me to get out a bit.

Except that I thought I had to leave at 7.15, when the bus left at 7.06.  I booked it out the door at 7.00 after bolting down food and pulling on a dress and hose ...  and missed the bus anyway.  I decided knew that the next one would get there only slightly late, so I elected to stay.  Something was nagging at me that I shouldn't bother, but I put that up to just wanting to not do anything ... so I stayed aboard.

I got where I needed to go, only to find that the theatre I was aiming for was, in fact, locked.  I don't know why.  It was ten after eight; the concert started at eight.  I decided that the area looked a bit sketchy and the last thing I wanted was to look lost and helpless while wearing a dress in a sketchy area, so I decided to head off and find a bus stop.  When I left, I'd been in a hurry, so I didn't know the nearest bus stop back.  I ended up walking in the wrong direction, getting help from an outside source, and walking back.  All in all it took forty minutes to find a bus stop.  I may as well have been at the concert.

I want caffeine.  I'm stressed.  I'm tired.

But at least there's no bird in my room.  I keep forgetting to tell that story.

VISI, day 15

Yesterday (for it is yesterday now) was fun.  After breakfast in the morning, I went to my performance psychology class, and we rounded off the two weeks of classes with talk of exercise, nutrition, medication, and more quasi-meditative techniques.  It was very relaxing, and I'm glad I went.

We only had one lecture yesterday morning: an overview of 19th-century French poetry.  After my French classes in high school being alternately very dull and very interesting, I was sceptical as to whether I wanted to go, but I got up and made myself go because I knew it would have information I would find useful, whether or not I found it interesting.  Sure enough, it was both dull and interesting in places, and there was indeed useful information.  It was truly an overview, as an hour and a half is not enough time to delve into 19th-century French poetry, but we were able to look at the major movements and their figureheads, which was enlightening.  We also looked closely at a poem of which I am performing a setting, Baudelaire's L'invitation au voyage, and so that was very useful.

I then hopped over to the student union building to get some lunch, and in so doing, get change for the bus.  I finally had a matcha frappe ... oh man those things are good.  :D

I scurried off to the first of the VISI participants' concerts, which was a good concert - varied repertoire, plenty of expression, a sense of being in a community that understood where each interpretation was coming from and where the technique might still need work.  

After the concert was an hour-and-a-half session on French diction with Mme Landry, which did not teach me very much that I did not already know, but the things that I did not know turned out to be rather important - such as the fact that harmonizing the vowels in a certain word can turn it into an entirely different word ... sometimes with grave consequences.  It's a matter of slang, and it's a good thing we find these things out!

I then went to my only coaching, which went well - a well-rounded coaching dealing with marrying consonants and legato, richness of tone with phrasing, etc.  After that, I hurried out to catch a bus, to go meet a very good friend of mine ... an hour and a half away.  

The bus/train/bus ride passed fairly quickly, but she was caught in traffic so I was about half an hour early.  When she got there, we went for dinner at a Japanese restaurant, wandered a bit, went to her boyfriend's (parents') apartment, said hello, went to the taekwondo school at which her boyfriend teaches ... and then, when he was finished, we all chatted and hung out.  I was finally introduced to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which was just as hilarious as it had promised to be, and ... yeah!  We talked and laughed.  The neat thing about it is that we all know each other from way back, and though I didn't know her boyfriend as well, he remembered me (we all met on the same forum), and so we did have that in common.  It was a pretty sweet time actually, and I ended up staying two hours past when I was originally going to leave.

I hopped on a bus at 11.30 and got home at 1.30, safe and sound - if a little bit unnerved.  Some people were kinda sketchy on each of the legs of the trip, but no one was inappropriate or anything.  So it was fine.  

And then I went to bed, and slept in till ten.  Now I have to go to laundry, and then I should go to a workshop on art in conflict resolution, and then I should get ready for the Schubertiade tonight ...  bright red grad dress, here I come.  :D

VISI, day 14

I had breakfast in the dorms this morning.  It was a nice break from the warmth and people of the cafeteria.  I can only take so many people in the morning ... I much prefer breakfast on my own.

I went to performance psych, which wasn't as scary as I expected it to be - we did a lot of concert visualization, figuring out what makes us feel comfortable on stage and distilling that into phrases we can use as process cues, sentences that bring us back to a place in our mind and body that feels as we want it to.

The ten o'clock lecture was a two-hour forum on translation, which passed in a flash.  It was truly interesting to hear and talk about the art of translation from so many viewpoints: there were people on the panel concerned with poetry, creative writing, French, German, musicology, translation in itself, distribution, and audience/singer/reader understanding.  It was fascinating.  We talked about a Goethe poem (the basis for Schubert's Wanderers Nachtlied) and a Paul Verlaine poem (Clair de lune).  

We talked about the inconsistencies of language, how poetry uses language, the purpose of metaphors, how to be faithful to a poem (rhyme scheme? ideas? metre? words? meaning? intent?), word choice, purpose, audience ...  like I said, truly fascinating.  It could have gone on for hours, and the thing is there really aren't solid answers to many of the questions that translation poses - just stances, and sometimes your stance can change depending on why you need a translation, or why you translate a piece.

My first coaching this afternoon was with Mme Rosemarie Landry, a true top banana (that expression cracks me up) in the world of French song.  I was nervous about working with her, but she was absolutely adorable and so much fun.  She was very kind, if very insistent.  She pointed out errors in my French that were caused by my speaking Canadian French (I have very sibilant fricatives, for instance), and helped me find a way to interpret the Poulenc piece I am working on so that it is not old-fashioned, nor is it unduly sad.  She was very encouraging, and said only time will fix some of the issues - time and practice, of course.  

The second coaching was with Dr Cameron Stowe, a pianist and interpreter.  We worked on a Brahms piece, one that I'd coached several times before in the past week and a half, with varying degrees of success (but always something learned).  There were several long phrases on which I was holding back for fear of a lack of breath, and as such were suffering in tone quality and vowel depth; he said to make it spin, I did, it used more air but ... I didn't run out.  We also fixed some problems of register changes by adding depth to the vowel, which was caused by relaxing the muscles on the bottom of my head (I think it's the geniohyoid muscle, but I'm not sure).  I think those were being kept closed (and still are - I keep catching myself at it) while I had my braces in.  I may have to spend some time with my mouth open at all times to break the habit.

After coachings, I went grocery shopping, and found out how to manage getting to Surrey tomorrow.  Tomorrow is adventure day!  I get to go meet a good friend of mine for the first time.  It'll be sweet, even if it does mean a bus ride of an hour and a half either way.  Oh well.  Worth it.  Also time to relax and read.

Now it is time to have a shower, and then go to bed.

VISI, day 11

Today was not terribly eventful, but good nonetheless.

No performance psych class this morning, so lectures started at ten.  I did a brief warmup at nine and felt like crap, so I decided to leave it.  Tired plus vocal fatigue plus just ate breakfast.  Felt much better in the afternoon, as I expected.

The lecture this morning was about Schubertiades; very interesting, rather enlightening.  Schubert was not well-known enough, nor were Lieder a popular enough art form to be played at big public concerts (plus there was the fact that if a concert was organized to showcase one specific composer, the composer had to pay for it ALL himself, and while Schubert wasn't destitute, he certainly couldn't handle that), so his music was mainly played, during his lifetime anyway, in middle-class salons and, surprise surprise, at Schubertiades.  (that was a long sentence.)  The aristocratic salons were not, for the most part, interested in Schubert's music, though a few songs would have been played through his meager connections with the aristocracy; the middle class was far more interested in his style of music, since they were very serious about the Biedermeier concept of Bildung, or the self-culturing through art.  And, of course, there were the Schubertiades; parties organized (or not) solely for listening to Schubert's music ... and having a heck of a good time.  (Apparently they even engaged in tossing people in blankets.  Y'know, like that movie.  I can't remember it now.  But really.  Also they drank a lot.)

So yeah, interesting lecture ...  The masterclass was not as interesting.  The girl performing didn't emote very well and so much of the masterclass was devoted to that.  

I headed back to the dorms and made both lunch and supper, then went to coachings.  The first coaching was work on staging one of our art songs; I picked a particularly difficult one to understand, and so didn't get to work on it as much this time - but I will later in the week, so that's okay.  The second coaching was led by VISI's director, and so we spent some time staging and some time really digging into the songs.  I worked on a song I've done several times in coachings now, but it was only really today that I managed to connect with it and sing it like I never had before (it has some wickedly long lines for someone of my early stage of training). It was pretty cool.

I then headed off to catch a bus, and proceeded to go to downtown Vancouver.  I ate supper looking out over the harbour, and then watched the last 15 minutes of game six (Stanley Cup finals, in case you're A) living under a rock or B) don't follow hockey) at Canada Place.  That was pretty cool.  The series is now tied 3-3, so I'll head back on Wednesday to see the last period or so of game seven, which is at home in Vancouver, and so should be entirely mad.  that'll be fun.  :D

And then I found a way home, and here I am.  Kinda sleepy.  Tomorrow is a new day - or something like that.

VISI, day 2

I met my flatmates late last night - a girl from Virginia and a girl from Toronto.  Both singers, both just finished the second year of their Bachelor's.  Very nice.  We chatted.

This morning I went over to the student union building to get a decent breakfast.  Not bad.  Scrambled eggs, pancakes/French toast, bacon (I have never seen so much bacon in my life.), ham, oatmeal, coffee, orange juice, cereal, hash browns ...  I had oatmeal, bacon, hash browns and orange juice.  

After breakfast I bought a notebook, and then headed back to my dorm to make my schedule.  Schedule duly made, I finished the workout I had started before breakfast, then went to find the music building.  It was a bit of a walk, but the campus is lovely, so it was fine.  Having found it, I went looking for a practice room.  While searching, I heard someone singing - it was a bit intimidating.  Whoever it was was particularly good.  When I found a practice room, I felt much better about it - my voice is in good shape.  

Once I had finished practicing, I went down to the lobby and registered officially.  Got my nametag and everything.  :)  I then decided to go on a walk to find the chapel where many of the lectures will be held.  It was a nice fifteen- to twenty-minute walk, as I took my time; I walked along a drive that must not be more than a kilometre from the coast.  It was gorgeous.  

Having found the chapel, I then headed back to my dorm, where I hung out for a few hours before orientation.  Orientation itself was semi-interesting, and answered a few questions for me, so that was good.  I got the chance to meet a few people and re-realize that I am likely one of the youngest here ... which is still kind of odd and makes me feel a bit nervous.  Anyway, there are a lot of people here from the States (New York, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia ... ) as well as quite a few from across Canada.  I believe a couple of the girls were from France but study in Montreal.  That was neat.  

After orientation I caught a bus to go grocery shopping.  I returned an hour and a half later with $90 of groceries ... including a POT to COOK WITH!  There is no microwave in this apartment - instead, there are two fridges!  I made myself some rice and had a lovely long chat with a couple of women, both doing their PhDs - one in sociology of education and one in city planning.  The sociologist-researcher is a Palestinian Arab originally from Israel, who is working on the peace efforts in her own roundabout, education-oriented way, and the city planner is an academic based in California.  Very interesting conversation was had.

Now I am eating oatmeal cookies (I love these things) while typing up my blog.  I am very tired again and must sleep soon ... the bed is quite comfortable, and I am warm.  That is nice.  

Other interesting things I noted today:

On the street, parking spots are often painted in.  This is especially true when there are meters around.  I thought this was very interesting, but perhaps not the most efficient way of doing things.  What if you have a monster of a station wagon, or a teeny little SmartCar?

The UBC cafeteria not only has garbage and recycling bins, but compost bins.  Clever!  And environmentally sound.  Also, they have signs clearly stating what goes where.  Even better.

This campus is absolutely gorgeous.  All the flora makes me think I am back in Rwanda (side note: the artistic director of VISI has also been to Rwanda; I would like to have a conversation about it with her at some point), which is vaguely surreal.  I am not used to seeing so many flowers and such green trees anywhere but Rwanda, and I am even further from Rwanda than I normally am.  I miss it so much.  I want to go back ... 

Also: mountains.  holy crap.  that is all.  (I'm such a prairie girl.)

It is interesting to me how integrated the university is with the city.  The university itself is much like its own mini-city, though mini is, of course, quite relative.  It is strange for me to go from a university campus that is all of two city blocks (more or less) to one that you could not walk from one end to the other without it taking forever!  

The transit system is very efficient and very prompt (even with the Canucks game).  Also: electric buses!  I think.

Tomorrow I hope to wake up in time to find a church to which I can bus.  (I bought a monthly pass.  Considerably more expensive than one in Winnipeg, but then, it's a far better system.)  If not, I will spend my morning in contemplation.  Lectures start at one tomorrow afternoon, and I am looking forward to exploring what exactly the philosophy behind the "theatre of art song" really is.