May 19, 2010

It’s just before 11 pm – the wonderful quiet end of the day.

I spent most of it in the studio editing the video from my concert with Andrei Ivanovitch in May last year. Our performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is about 38 minutes long. It took from 9 in the morning to 4 pm to edit the video for 6 minutes of music, and that was a very productive and flawless day. By now, we have edited the first 16 minutes and have about 22 minutes to go. We also did today color correction, which is a process designed to make the shoots from the different camera consistent. I’m trying to finish this project before I go to Europe in July.

When I arrived to the studio in the morning I realized that I forgot at home the hard drive which has out project on it. I had to go back home to bring it and decided to jog it out of respect for the good people that were waiting for me back at studio in particular and for the Goddess of Music in general . I don’t think I ran since the early 18th century. I have something in principle against anything that is more than walking. But I was able to make it back by 9:20 and we started working. I didn’t have anything to eat, and had a brief struggle with a vending machine for lunch (a bag of pretzels). It insisted on only accepting exact change. I would have been very happy to pay a whole dollar, but it was 85 cents or no pretzels at all. In the end I found my 85 cents in loose change and obtained my desired bag of giant pretzels. I don’t remember enjoying a pretzel for quite some time like that. The moment when my hand was feeling its way though the plastic bag then realizing that the last pretzel has just been relinquished was a sad one indeed. When they were finished (it was a rather small bag) I stayed traumatically hungry for the rest of the day.

I got home quite exhausted after the editing session and slept from around 5 to 7. I only had one student at the conservatory, because all the rest were either outside of the country, had a headache, or were on their off week. The one lesson I did teach was very nice, proving to me again that it is the teacher who is often learning at least as much as the student during a lesson. I personally don’t like using these words: teacher, student and lesson. They reflect a certain hierarchy which doesn’t feel natural to me. The process of studying is a shared one where all participants contribute their knowledge and insight. My students (again, this word) are often surprised by (and seem to be pleased by) how glad I am to say that I don’t know something or that I can’t give their question a definite answer.

After the lesson (I’ll stop using this word soon. I would put it in quotes, but it masses up the text in the blog text box with HTML codes. That’s why I’m avoiding for now italicizing, bolding, quoting and such) I grabbed more wonderful junk food and went back to the conservatory to practice. My recent problem with practicing is that I like to start with reading Bach’s Preludes and Fugues. It’s a wonderful thing, only that what usually happens is that I don’t get to practice the pieces I need to practice for concerts and recordings. I call it Positive Procrastination – the process of delaying doing something important by doing something also important. At least it’s much better than normal procrastination, which usually involves video games, DVDs, popcorn and long phone calls to forgotten friends. My procrastination, I can say proudly, is playing Bach. By the way, procrastination is one of the words that don’t exist in Hebrew. In return, the Hebrew word Davka doesn’t exist in English. And if it is words we are talking about now: I think Love Seat is a brilliant English invention. What a wonderful way to describe a sofa for two! On the other hand I have a serious problem with the word Broth. Broth should not be a word for food, it sound really not appetizing. Instead, Broth should be the word for bad breath! Also, everyone should know that a pill in English is a medicine capsule that you swallow, but in Hebrew Pill means an elephant. And last but not least, I have a great affection to the word Barvazim in Hebrew which means Ducks. It just has a cute sound. A duck is always cute, no matter how you look at it!