A good chat…
Tuesday September 11 2007
—tonight with Helena Kopchick, a Bassoonist working on her DMA… and who is also a Graduate Teaching Fellowship recipient. We’ll be doing a lot of playing together. And it turns out, she literally lives across the street from me! We can even walk to school together.
It helps that we’ve known each other for so many years, although we lost touch for about years. I’ve blogged about her before, and I’m excited to be working with such an established player. She just finished up her final year on a Contrabassoon fellowship at Aspen this summer, and is looking forward to diving into schoolwork with me. We started looking at music, giggling about what programs we might be able to put together.
I also laid down some ground rules.
- I don’t mind carrying musicians who aren’t as creative in their phrasing, as long as they’re willing to work with us to get better.
- I would be overjoyed to work with certain local players, and refuse to play with others.
- I will absolutely not bite to raise the pitch, so if she or the clarinet player decides to spike the pitch up to 442, she’s going solo because I’m not following!
I think Helena and I are kind of on the same wave. Hopefully, together we can really pull together a tight group. I can’t wait.
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Sep 11, 2007
Yikes, Cooper! Ground rules like that can get you labeled and, I’m sorry (maybe!) to say, put on a “do not hire” list.
While I might have unspoken rules, my primary ones are “make good music” and “get along”. Sometimes we have to change our pitch ideas (some major orchestras do play a 442 ... not the player, but the orchestra).
But I know you and I are extremely different. You of Mr. Confidence and me of “Can’t we all just get along.”
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