Post by Blue on Jul 25, 2012 15:24:15 GMT
In the unlikely event that anyone will be in Taiwan on August 4 and 5, my company will be having a family day event. My company's clubs will be on exhibit to encourage employees to have a more balanced work/life.
Unfortunately, I'm a member of the company's Chinese music club (joined them at the beginning of this year) and will be playing the dizi there. It's not going to be that great of an experience because I haven't been practicing too much recently over depression. The not so good result of today's practice has placed some guilt on my selfish depression, however, and hopefully it will help me to struggle back into playing the flute.
Anyway, if you happen to be in Taiwan, I'll be more than happy to offer tickets to the event.
Playing with so many other instruments has been a learning experience in which everyone tries to have consensus on the overall performance despite the fact that everyone inherently have stylistic differences and preferences. Things do become challenging when the music teacher/conductor alternates each week. One week you have a teacher who says that certain sections have to be played as p (piano) or f (forte); next week the other teacher says that the p should be mp. Then one of the teachers doesn't care too much that certain people are playing at a lower pitch; next week we get admonished for playing too low a pitch. Someone liuqin's pitch was considered by the conductor of week A to be too low and had the player to adjust the pitch untill the string literally broke. The player mumbled that a certain maestro liuqin teacher had the pitch adjusted to be that low.
The other frustration is that the proper stylistic mood is not expressed at all in the jianpu notation. Everyone had to end up grabing pens scribbling notes here and there. For some musical pieces, the notes were optimized for the string instrument rather than for the wind instrument, resulting in the wind instrument player having to play certain notes that felt intrinsically unnatural. Often you might encounter pieces where the jianpu clearly indicates that one would have to play a full beat, but in practice and to emphasize the mood and melody, one effectively plays half a beat with the other half of the beat being a zero.
But we have to remind ourselves that this is only a company music club as our main purpose is to work for the company to produce an output different from that of music. Most of us are not professional musicians and some of us didn't pick up a musical instrument untill when we were way in to adulthood. Of course we can get envious at how those professional bands play, but they play that for a living, whereas we play to help achieve a work-life balance.
Unfortunately, I'm a member of the company's Chinese music club (joined them at the beginning of this year) and will be playing the dizi there. It's not going to be that great of an experience because I haven't been practicing too much recently over depression. The not so good result of today's practice has placed some guilt on my selfish depression, however, and hopefully it will help me to struggle back into playing the flute.
Anyway, if you happen to be in Taiwan, I'll be more than happy to offer tickets to the event.
Playing with so many other instruments has been a learning experience in which everyone tries to have consensus on the overall performance despite the fact that everyone inherently have stylistic differences and preferences. Things do become challenging when the music teacher/conductor alternates each week. One week you have a teacher who says that certain sections have to be played as p (piano) or f (forte); next week the other teacher says that the p should be mp. Then one of the teachers doesn't care too much that certain people are playing at a lower pitch; next week we get admonished for playing too low a pitch. Someone liuqin's pitch was considered by the conductor of week A to be too low and had the player to adjust the pitch untill the string literally broke. The player mumbled that a certain maestro liuqin teacher had the pitch adjusted to be that low.
The other frustration is that the proper stylistic mood is not expressed at all in the jianpu notation. Everyone had to end up grabing pens scribbling notes here and there. For some musical pieces, the notes were optimized for the string instrument rather than for the wind instrument, resulting in the wind instrument player having to play certain notes that felt intrinsically unnatural. Often you might encounter pieces where the jianpu clearly indicates that one would have to play a full beat, but in practice and to emphasize the mood and melody, one effectively plays half a beat with the other half of the beat being a zero.
But we have to remind ourselves that this is only a company music club as our main purpose is to work for the company to produce an output different from that of music. Most of us are not professional musicians and some of us didn't pick up a musical instrument untill when we were way in to adulthood. Of course we can get envious at how those professional bands play, but they play that for a living, whereas we play to help achieve a work-life balance.
