JAVS Fall 2011

Example 5. Casey Cangelosi, Theatric No. 8 , mm. 81–83.

with me, had the brilliant suggestion of writing out numbers above the staff (so, for five repeats, writing 1–2–3–4–5) in different colors in rainbow order. That way, if I forgot which repeat I was on, hopefully I could at least remember the color. It worked perfectly and had the added benefit that now my part to Casey’s piece is extremely colorful! The other problem was in Danny’s arrangement of Andrew McIntosh’s piece. he decided, once we start ed rehearsing, that he would rather play the straight quarter notes in the kick drum (to my relief ), but he was also playing ever-changing, very complicated polyrhythms in the woodblocks. In addition, the kick drum quarter notes were supposed to speed up over the course of the piece, threatening to make me spin out of control as I tried to hang on to my polyrhythms for dear life. It was quite an exercise in strenuous ignoring, because I found that if I permit ted the sound and rhythm of the woodblocks to enter my consciousness, I was doomed. When I left California, we felt that we had accom plished an incredible amount, but most of the music still felt shaky. I would be back in two weeks for our first performances, so we both had a lot of individual practice to do before then. On my part, I made sure I was rhythmically rock solid on everything and knew Danny’s part almost as well as my own for each piece. I brought the music to my lessons, and my teacher, James Dunham, was invaluable in helping me devise creative solutions for some of the tricky passages I had yet to master. First Performances Feeling like I had barely been home at all, two weeks later I boarded a plane back to California. We had two days to rehearse until out first concert, and we

used to playing together and having to communicate, Danny would sometimes step on the wrong pedal, and a loud kick drum explosion would come out in the middle of a soft lyrical passage where he was sup posed to be using the sustain pedal. Other times, he would be moving so quickly from hitting a drum on one side of his body to a cymbal on the other side that he would misjudge the distance and play another instrument entirely, usually to comical effect. Several times, he almost fell off his seat because he had to swing around moving from instrument to instrument and lost his balance. Often, these mistakes would catch me completely off guard and startle me, espe cially if a loud bang happened where there wasn’t sup posed to be one. A few weeks before our rehearsals, Danny had received an invitation to perform our program in Los Angeles in late January at a new music chamber series at the Pasadena Central Library. We then received another invitation to perform at CalState university, Long Beach, the night before the Pasadena concert. We couldn’t perform our entire program at either of these venues, so we had to choose which music we would present. After rehearsing for a few days, we decided that the two longest pieces, Chris’s piece and Aaron’s piece, would need more time, so we would play a program of the five shorter pieces. Two interesting problems arose for me when playing with Danny that were not an issue when playing alone. The first I had anticipated: doing the correct number of repeats of the cells in Casey’s piece when we were playing in different meters (ex. 5). It was also a psychological problem: if Danny and I couldn’t trust each other to always do the right number of repeats, that would cause both of us to second guess each other and ourselves when we gave the cue to move on to the next cell. My boyfriend, who had made the trip

J OuRNAL OF ThE AMERICAN VIOLA SOCIETy 46