Always something new

Next week my sister Barbara, who teaches piano at the University of Oklahoma, and I are performing at the IDRS (International Double Reed Society) conference in Ithaca NY, and we have been exploring ways of rehearsing long distance. We tried rehearsing using skype, but that wasn't satisfactory because the transmissions are not simultaneous both ways. So while she played the piano part, I recorded it (via skype) onto minidisc. Then I edited it and could use the recording to play along with. Skype distorts rhythms here and there, and makes it a bit of an adventure to play along with the recording. While it is better than nothing, the technique was just serviceable. Then she tried recording the piano part via another third party software, and posting the sound file to me via the .mac service. That recording had lots of distortion in it whenever she hit a big chord after a rest. It was less satisfactory than the skype recording. Then yesterday I sent her some sound files of the different movements of the Bruns piece. I learned how to record straight into the Garage Band program on the mac, edit it, and then via a series of conversions, compressions, exports, and imports, posted it in a folder on the .mac in reasonable file sizes. Then Barbara could save my recordings into iTunes and play them through her stereo in Oklahoma, playing along with her piano part. The learning curve was a little long, but since we have very little actual rehearsal time together, we will be glad we did it.

While I was working on all of this, my practice room became invaded by bees! I kept chasing them out, but knew something was up, as they kept coming out from behind the steam radiator vent covers. This morning I looked online about swarms of bees in house walls and read the sobering news about getting rid of bee colonies in walls. Then I went outside and saw where the bees are going in and out through a gap between the bricks at the outside corner of the dining room. I went back inside and put my ear to the interior wall opposite that spot, and heard a beehive's worth of activity. Stuffing a rag into the gap in the bricks outside confirmed that we have either an established colony or they are setting up house. I called a beekeeper and he is coming to look at our valuable but uninvited guests this afternoon. If it is an established hive, it will probably involve opening up walls and maybe the dining room ceiling to get the hive out. They say you have to do that, otherwise the honey attracts other bee colonies as well as insects and rodents. When a comb is chewed into by insects or other animals, it leaks honey and creates a big mess, so it needs to be taken out. We may soon have a few more holes in our walls!

This project was not included in my sabbatical proposal to the Philharmonic.