The Second Week

It's hard to believe that a second week has already finished!

My flatmates and I went blackberry picking in the area around our house. We got enough to make a blackberry and apple crumble. Very delicious! On Sunday night's we've started a tradition of having dinner with the other studio members, so we hosted the first dinner and had that for dessert. It's nice having time to really plan out meals and cook. We spend about 30 minutes on lunch and an hour on dinner almost everyday. We even spruce up leftovers :-)

Also during our afternoon of scavenging we ventured to the Elmsted Church across the way. It was so interesting to see! However, the church has been desecrated, as Trevor would say. A few years back they decided, in an effort to make lawn mowing easier, to move all the tombstones up against the outer perimeter of the church yard. It is very upsetting to not know when you're walking on someone's grave, and it makes the yard look not like a church. I can't imagine someone back home wanting to do that... they'd probably be attacked by historical societies.

Trevor is having everyone practice at his home for a few hours a few times throughout the course. On Wednesday it was my turn. It is an incredibly strange feeling to know that someone is listening to everything you do while practicing. He was in other rooms of the house getting paperwork done... but I knew that every wrong note, any cracks and all intonation errors were sending chills down his spine - and he was taking notes. I had visions of him coming in and telling me the average number of flat a's I played per 20 minutes. In the end it was definitely helpful and he noticed things in my playing that he never would have been able to in a class setting. I am to return in two months so he can make sure I fixed everything... wish me luck.

Every class gets more and more difficult. On Thursday Trevor added quite a bit of technical exercises to our daily routine, and after 5 hours of practicing (the maximum he wants us to be doing) we still feel we have another 5 hours of work to get done. Hopefully as we improve on those exercises this will improve, but for now it's very frustrating!

Dot, Trevor's wife, has been on holiday with her sister all week, so he made us dinner Wednesday night. I had a "special" meal, because he did beef for everyone else. He picked me up a pizza, and had a type of Japanese dish where there are pots of heated beef stock (fondu style) in the center, and you take very thinly sliced beef and cook it in the pot. Then after you finish, you throw in some vegetables, water, and noodles and have soup! I think he said this part was Chinese... I made him take the noodles and make me a vegetarian version of the soup. For dessert we had a combination of fresh mango and pummelo with cream (similar looking to a grapefruit, but almost dry and crunchy, slightly bitter). It was a perfect combination of fruit, and a perfect dessert after such a heavy meal.

Tonight, Saturday, we watched the first part of an incredibly long French film. I can't remember the name... but it has something to do with flowers and Jean. It's quite depressing, but I think once we watch the remaining two hours it will be much more rewarding. The theme is from Verdi's "Il Fortuno di Destino", which we use as a warm-up in class... it played many times and I kept having flashbacks to Trevor telling us to raise the pitch or "play music, not the flute!".

The past few days have been pretty glum in terms of weather. Raining almost everyday. It hasn't gotten too cold, highs are in the 50s now, but the rain and wind makes it feel much colder, especially for our evening walks! Having rain makes laundry an annoyance, more of one that it is anyway. We don't have a dryer, so everything must be lined dried - which is great for the sake of energy costs, but our clothes end up smelling like farm and we have to plan laundry around the weather. There have been at least two instances where we're running outside to save our clothing form the incoming rain.

In two weeks we're attending a weekend workshop with Robert Dick, hosted by the British Flute Society (BFS). The BFS is giving us each £30 towards lodging and paying for the weekend workshop fees (we are so incredibly thankful for this!). We have to find our own lodging and transportation, and I ended up being the one to do it. I didn't think it was possible for a train system to be any more confusing. After finding a hotel, for under £30 each, for 5 persons, I needed to figure out how we would get there since we don't have a car. Apparently the train system here went independent a few years ago, so in order to find the best price for a train ticket, you have to check 10 different websites/companies. Sure in the States we have to do this for planes, but we can easily just go to expedia.com or some other overly advertised third party and find decent prices. That is not the case here. After a few hours of searching, on dial-up, I did manage to find something through Virgin Trains. But to be sure I was booking the right thing, I wanted to order by telephone. I think the woman I spoke to was Indian, and had no idea what she was doing. It's complicated enough to explain to someone why my billing address is in the US but shipping in the UK, but then to have two extreme accents trying to communicate... I should have just ordered it online, because I had everything sorted out properly to begin with. Now I'm scared the tickets will end up in China.

Well... I suppose that's it...

love,
lindsay

More learnings:

• In Japan people don't have middle names.
• It was common, during the prime recording time of Marcel Moyse, to cut portions of pieces in order to fit them on vinyl.
• Not all Japanese can use chopsticks.
• Sheep cheese is yummy.
• The US is not the only country with a very complicated transportation system.
• ABC.com won't let me watch shows because I'm not in "the continental United States". How am I supposed to survive without Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives?!?!
  

And so it begins!

I decided to do this blog in an effort avoid inconveniencing everyone with mass produced emails that seem to come at the worst possible times. Read this if you like without the extra email in the inbox. I’m online a few times throughout the day, so feel free to email me – I’d love to hear what everyone is up to!

I have no idea how to even begin explaining how wonderful it is here. I’ll give it a shot, in no particular order.

To start I suppose the obvious is the scenery, you can see pictures here http://jmu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2137894&l=77cc5&id=7808985 because I don’t think words can describe it!!

Next would be the food. I’m still figuring it out, but there must be a national vegetarian society, because all vegetarian food is marked with a green “V” symbol on the package. This cuts grocery-shopping time in half, I no longer have to read labels! Also, real ingredients are used, like sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup in everything - even the “cheap” store brand. We go to Tesco, the local store, weekly. All fresh vegetables, fruit and animal products come from within a ten-mile radius. And once again, this goes for the Tesco brand as well. The treatment of the plants and animals is always humane with no hormones/pesticides added, so everything tastes better and lasts longer!

I have two flat mates, Judith and Mime. We are in a three-bedroom, one and a half bath, one story house. Judith is from Georgia; she just graduated from UGA in flute performance. We met in Albuquerque at Trevor’s class in August of 2006. Mime is from Japan and knew no English when she came here. She just graduated from a Christian College in Kyoto. Trevor goes to Kyoto annually and she has played in his class a few times over the past three years.

We have a great living situation so far. Obviously practicing is never an issue because we are all understanding of the need to play high annoying notes and repetitive fast passages. Judith and I are relearning English while teaching Mime – Trevor says (and I agree) that we have a huge responsibility to make sure she learns everything properly. We are both more articulate and speak slowly in an effort to include her in all conversations, and we are also improving our own vocabulary. It’s never irritating with Mime because she is learning so quickly and isn’t scared to ask questions when confused! I can’t imagine moving somewhere that I’ve never even visited, and then to not know the language! Traveling is difficult enough!

As far as flute goes… well I’m improving by leaps and bounds daily. It’s not easy, but I’m so focused progress comes quickly – at least for now! We have two classes per week, Mondays and Thursdays. Each class begins at 9am with a warm-up consisting of a melody we learn by ear and then imitate one another. After this we do scale and arpeggio exercises. We memorize all the exercises as fast as we can throughout the week – for now we can use the music in class but I don’t think he’ll be so kind in the future… Following this warm-up, about one hour, we do either studies or repertoire (Mondays are studies, Thursdays are rep). The studies consist of Andersen etudes, Moyse 24/25 melodies and Moyse’s variations on Bach’s Allemande. For the repertoire we have been given a general layout for the first 10 weeks. It’s generally one work and two orchestral excerpts. This past week was Hue Fantaisie, Beethoven Leonore #3 and Debussy Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Monday was our first class so things went pretty smoothly, he was understanding and forgiving on a lot of things and helped us better understand what we should be working on while practicing. Thursday he began to reveal a little more of his true self – which is why we’re here anyway! We had random scales/arpeggios called and we basically all failed miserably. The performances of the rep went ok, but we know a little better on how to prepare for future classes.

In addition to the class we have weekly and semester assignments. They aren’t anything to stress too much over, and they are very useful for our flute careers. He has given us a list of rep/performers/etc. to listen to, and a topic that goes along with it. We are to write a brief amount on what we hear (this is for the weekly project). For the semester we have a research project where we are to read through some of what he has and write the history of the flute – it’s broken by year for the Fall and Spring.

Aside from missing everyone, I love it out here. I could really get used to this lifestyle. When we don’t have class we wake up between 8 and 9, make breakfast and then shower. Once we’re ready for the day we practice for a few hours, cook lunch together, practice a bit longer with a snack break, cook dinner and clean the kitchen, have our evening walk with Trevor, come home for another hour or so of flute, then sleep. Of course the whole day isn’t playing, we take breaks and chat a bit in the living room, play on the computer (now that we FINALLY have internet) and listen to what we’re preparing for Thursday’s class. Evening walks are at 8pm daily. Trevor picks us up at precisely 7:42 where we then grab the other two studio members, Ritsuko (Japan, second year here) and Marta (Croatia). We go to Trevor’s where the walk begins. Each night we do about and hour’s worth of walking, with breaks to visit with the village pets. I’m still learning names, but it’s about 2 dogs and 4 cats we always see. Tonight we took a different route that included stopping to visit with some horses. Two nights ago it was cows we detoured with…

On Wednesday we went into London to take a tour of Buckingham Palace. It was amazing. My favorite aspect of the palace is that everything in it is used often. It was setup like a museum for the tour, but when the Queen is actually living there (she spends her summers touring) everything is used! I hate visiting places where things just sit in cases and are only looked at. I understand the importance of keeping precious things in good condition, but if you simply take care of them when in use there’s no problem! After the palace we went to the National Gallery, which was also amazing. We walked through a good bit of London but not seeing everything I want to (see come pictures here http://jmu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2137912&l=74095&id=7808985). Hopefully we’ll be able to go back often! Trevor picked up sushi from the city while we were in the National Gallery and we went back to his cottage (about 1 hour and 20 minutes train ride) to eat with his wife, Dot. It was so good to eat sushi!!!

The weather hasn’t gotten too cold here yet. It’s probably in the high 60s during the day, and low 50s at night. The wind is very strong and often wakes us up in the night. Pretty soon it will drop drastically in temperature, but the possibility of snow is not yet known. It’s very similar to VA here in terms of winter, except I’ve been told they don’t get much ice. When there is snow everything shuts down since they’re not equipped for it. The roads are all so narrow it would be impossible to plow anything.

FYI - My mailing address is:

Lindsay Carr
The Dairy – Elmsted Court Farm
Elmsted
Ashford, Kent
TN25 5JN
UK

With love,
lindsay

Things I’ve learned so far:

• I will probably improve more this year than I did all through college, simply because I’m not focused on anything but flute.
• A fortnight is two weeks.
• Having one faucet that you can adjust the temperature with is much better than two, where one is for hot and one is for cold.
• No matter what country you are from you will always feel ignorant when you travel abroad.
• In Japan when making rice it is most common to add 20mL of water for every 100 you have – meaning 100mL rice, 120mL water.
• Dial-up will always and forever suck.
• I will always have too much to do in one day.