Going green

There is a tiny little dot exactly between wanting all the area's classical enterprises to have an audition in the fall and wanting them all to just hold their horses a bit longer (a year longer, maybe). I am that dot.

Auditions would motivate me, even though there are only a couple of groups here I truly want to join. I still have to play all the auditions in case I feel like playing or in case I feel like buying shoes.

Last weekend I did a wedding gig here. I had sworn off weddings after I started daydreaming about a car wreck or an irreconcilable fight between the bride and groom preempting the nuptials so I wouldn't have to play Canon one more time. (Strychnine in the guacamole.)

Gig quartets are like a mold, spread subtly across the underpinnings of the western world. You're never more than a mile from one. The gig books alone are some kind of hermaphroditic organism. This wedding I played Saturday included the exact same five songs at the exact same moments in the exact same kind of ceremony I have played on the opposite side of the states. They all have these sad feed-lot cow pieces in their books; most even have the same horrible arrangements.

Molds reproduce using spores. I suppose those could be the few self-arranged tunes a group pulls out when the reception has gotten too loud for anybody to hear anyway. Led Zepplin maybe, or the Beatles. Lots of groups keep a second binder of actual real legitimate quartet works: late Mozarts, early Beethovens and the occasional Piazzola. These are usually the things the quartet really wants to play, the things that keep them from "accidentally" driving over nails on their way to the outdoor wedding on a hot day. These give us hope that we'll be able to use some of our artistry in addition to our coping skills and keep us from all spontaneously taking up something lucrative. Like becoming a Hummer salesperson.

It's hard to get connected to musicians when you haven't joined any group full time. Most are running around, drumming up work or working every chance they get or practicing for work or looking for friends from work on facebook. You know the drill. So that made it comforting, somehow, to tuck into my very own Violin III part on Canon, to emote shamelessly through Bach's Air (not on my G-String) and come out the other end with a nice check to put toward diapers.

I was happy to be part of something even if it has the musty smell of sameness.
World Wide Wedding Quartet (n):
multiple, genetically identical nuclei and is considered a single organism, referred to as a colony. Spreading soon to a ceremony near you.