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ricardienneI'm playing in Obscure Repertoire Orchestra again. Thankfully, the music is obscure '30's Germanic rather than, say, unbelievably bad music written by living and local composers, including the conductor's frighteningly precocious 8-year-old. (And his was not, by far, the worst piece on that program.)
Anyway, I'm sitting third, so I am not turning pages in the giant, page-turn-full pieces we are playing. And that experience is making me recall odd things.
Page-turning, recently, has been in my life in the form of awesomely executed turns in a very short time in chamber music, solo pieces that have to be memorized because they have no places to turn, and a few brilliant page-turn tricks that I taught my section this semester.
But in middle school and high school, page turning was a big deal. It was where the hierarchy of the obsessive competition for chairs played out -- much more than in divisi parts. There was something demeaning about having to stop playing and turn the page for your partner: if you were on the inside, you performed the service with passive-aggressive punctiliousness, if on the outside, you enforced your superiority by not ever turning the page, even if the other person forgot. I admit that I probably obsessed over the implications of this more than other people, it being the only major intrusion of practical status-difference in my life. But I was not by far the only person who behaved this way (and shall I go into the Mean Girls-esque fights and broken friendships that happened when a violinist sat in "the wrong chair" in middle school? Or the problem of the appropriate attitude toward a section leader and his/her bowings?)
I think that I have become a little more mature: at school, I usually beat my stand-partner to the turn, because slow page turns annoy me. But tonight, I was getting a pleased-embarrassed feeling every time my stand-partner stopped playing to turn the page for me.
Anyway, I'm sitting third, so I am not turning pages in the giant, page-turn-full pieces we are playing. And that experience is making me recall odd things.
Page-turning, recently, has been in my life in the form of awesomely executed turns in a very short time in chamber music, solo pieces that have to be memorized because they have no places to turn, and a few brilliant page-turn tricks that I taught my section this semester.
But in middle school and high school, page turning was a big deal. It was where the hierarchy of the obsessive competition for chairs played out -- much more than in divisi parts. There was something demeaning about having to stop playing and turn the page for your partner: if you were on the inside, you performed the service with passive-aggressive punctiliousness, if on the outside, you enforced your superiority by not ever turning the page, even if the other person forgot. I admit that I probably obsessed over the implications of this more than other people, it being the only major intrusion of practical status-difference in my life. But I was not by far the only person who behaved this way (and shall I go into the Mean Girls-esque fights and broken friendships that happened when a violinist sat in "the wrong chair" in middle school? Or the problem of the appropriate attitude toward a section leader and his/her bowings?)
I think that I have become a little more mature: at school, I usually beat my stand-partner to the turn, because slow page turns annoy me. But tonight, I was getting a pleased-embarrassed feeling every time my stand-partner stopped playing to turn the page for me.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 06:08 am (UTC)>_____>no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 06:11 am (UTC)