you brought it on yourself miss twiddle

I'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.