12:58 p.m. - 2005-11-12
Tosca talk
This opera is really sucking the life out of me this week. Normally operas are just kind of long and boring, with stretches of non-activity during which we in the percussion and brass sections have ample time to catch up on our reading, practice our archery, etc. But this one has me kind of on edge throughout.
I play a cymbal crash in the second measure of act one, and then I have twenty minutes or so of doing nothing. The thing is, though, my next entrance is on the cannon, in a spot where there's no other sound but the cannon (and I imagine people on stage in period costume responding to the cannon, Star Trek style, lurching to and fro, obviously leaning to give the illusion of slantiness. Hilarious.). This is oddly stressful for me, since it's a sampled cannon sound on a cd. I have only to press a button and hope it comes out of the giant speakers. Whether the cannon sound indeed comes out of the speakers is pretty much out of my control, but I'm the one in the pit with the ill-fitting formal wear and the conductor glowering at me and so if the cannon doesn't happen for whatever reason it's my fault. So I spend the first half of act one obsessing, Will it work? I'll bet it won't work, what if it doesn't work? It'll work. BUT WHAT IF IT DOESN'T, and on and on. I can recognize, rationally, how dumb it is to worry about it and yet I still worry. It's kind of a lot like life, where you know how little control you have over everything and yet agonize over everything nonetheless.
Then, in act two, I go backstage to play snare drum and have only two entrances, halfway through and at the end, and again I can't use all the downtime productively because I'm worrying about making the entrances and staying with the orchestra. It's very tricky playing from backstage, since the distance will tend to cause you to play behind the orchestra. The end of the act has a roll that starts loud and gets soft over about twenty seconds. This is more difficult than non-drummers realize, and constitutes another source of anxiety, with the nervousness and jittery hands and all.
Then, act three isn't so bad. (MAN, is this a boring blog entry! Sorry if you're reading this; I just needed to vent a little.) There's more backstage stuff, but it's chimes and my AMAZING KICK-ASS SHEEP BELLS and there's no arduous technique involved, just following the guy with the stick on a little television. Then I run back to the pit, play a couple cymbal crashes, and we go home.
I think maybe a lot of my anxiety in this opera stems from the fact that I'm playing principal and the other two percussionists are in their twenties and getting doctorates and really on top of everything. In this sort of case, I put a lot of pressure on myself to play well so I don't fall into the role of the Complacent Old Hack. This is what being in the company of the entusiastic young go-getters does to me. It's an awkward place to be: not yet ready to give up but also somehow immune to the youthful exuberance of others. Ah, well; that's opera, doc.
SOLO CD UPDATE: I finished up my solo collection last week and gave it to TWO gentlemen with good ears and widely divergent musical tastes so that they can give me notes, criticism, approval or pans. Now I await their reaction. How I wait.
