Freelance Accompanist

The benefit concert for the local nonprofit has been postponed until next year, but as an indirect result of that, I was put in touch with a music teacher who needed an accompanist. I stopped at her studio Tuesday afternoon and picked up the music. Yesterday was my first rehearsal with the ensemble. The teacher is a delightful young woman named Clara. She has about two dozen students learning to play various string instruments. Roughly half are homeschooled and half are in public school, so she put together two string ensembles and chose four pieces of Christmas music for them to perform.

We met for rehearsal at a local church in Kalispell. Clara directed one piece, but she asked another friend of hers—a retired public school music teacher—to direct the others. (The music teacher is playing the flute on the piece that Clara is directing.) This is the first time Clara has organized any kind of ensemble like this and she admitted it was a bit more involved than she thought it would be. Despite that, it was obvious to me that she is an excellent string teacher. A group of middle school violins, violas, and cellos has the potential to sound like a group of cats stuck in traps, but her kids have their techniques down. I thought both ensembles sounded quite good.

I am not a music teacher, but I have a fair bit of experience with kids learning to play music, having subbed for the music teacher at my kids’ elementary school for many years. I am also not a piano soloist; my strengths lie in accompaniment and playing in ensembles. Those are two completely different skill sets, by the way. It is not that common to find piano soloists who are also willing to be church pianists. When we were in Ohio, DD#1—who plays the piano and has a darling little baby grand of her own—mentioned that she had been asked to play piano at her church. The first words out of my mouth were, “Don’t do it,” but I realize that she needs to find out for herself if that is something she might find enjoyment in.

[I find enjoyment in it most of the time, so I shouldn’t project my cynicism onto her. It’s just that I know it also can be a thankless job on occasion.]

I had a good time yesterday. There were a few hiccups along the way, but the three adults tried to keep things lighthearted and fun for the kids. Clara had chosen “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies” as one of the pieces, which is a bit beyond the capabilities of this group of musicians, including the pianist. My music for that piece looks like this:

This is the result of trying to transcribe an orchestral piece for the piano. I might be able to work this up in a month or two, but the concert is December 1 and I don’t have five hours a day to practice. For yesterday’s rehearsal, we settled on me playing the right hand of the piano part. Anna, the public school music teacher, said that if all we did was play the first page of the piece, the parents would still be impressed. With kids, you punt.

I was able to read through the other pieces of music without difficulty. They will require only a bit of practice time to polish them up.

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My travel reading on my trip was the Heying/Weinstein book, The Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century. I enjoyed it very much, although I was a bit surprised by the feeling of relief I felt when I started reading it. I said to the husband that it was akin to wandering around in a society where all you hear around you is gibberish, then suddenly stumbling upon a couple of people speaking a language you understand.

My degree is in biology, and while I haven’t practiced in that field beyond horticulture and animal husbandry (also known as farming), I did spend time in some pretty rarified air. I did an internship at NIH—specifically, at NIAID, which is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease—when I was in college. The head of our lab, who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine and thus no stranger to the rigors of scientific inquiry, had nothing flattering to say about Anthony Fauci. This was in 1986, near the start of the AIDS epidemic, even before Fauci had thirty-five years to become an entrenched government bureaucrat. It sets my teeth on edge to hear people talk about The Science™ as if it is some monolith of unassailable truth. I even threatened to start handing out copies of Thomas Kuhn’s excellent book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to people who said to me, “The Science™ is settled.” Science is never settled, and statements like that fly in the very face of what scientific inquiry is supposed to be. We’ve got a whole country full of people who think The Science™ is what they are told it is by the media.

So to hear people speaking about and discussing science as scientists—not as politicians, journalists, or pundits—was a welcome relief. I got the same feeling listening to a recent Peak Prosperity interview with Chris Martenson and Dave Collum on the way back from Spokane. Chris Martenson has a PhD in neurotoxicology from Duke, and Dave Collum is the Betty R Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. These two guys are not lightweights. While listening to them converse for almost two hours, I was struck by how many times each of them said, “I don’t know,” or “I thought this, but after seeing this data, now I need to revise my theory about what is going on.” That kind of humility isn’t a weakness; it’s a core component of being a scientist.

Here endeth today’s sermon. At some point, I hope to do some actual sewing—I have an apron order to complete and send out this week—but for the moment, I’m immersed in other tasks.