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Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Quartet Woes

One of the great mysteries currently occupying the keenest scientific and philosophical minds of this country is why the Solo & Ensemble Contest is called the Solo & Ensemble Contest when it, in fact, is not a contest. A contest is something that has a winner. The winner of a pie-eating contest, for example, is the person who can eat the most pies. The winner of a hot-dog-eating contest is the person who can eat the most hot dogs. The winner of a hamburger-eating contest is the person who can do the most consecutive backward summersaults over giant vats of hydrochloric acid. All right, just checking to see if you’re actually reading or not. My point is, when you hear “Solo & Ensemble Contest,” you think that there’s a winner, a person or a group of people whom the judges proclaim to be the best. But alas, there is no such thing. No winner, no awards ceremony. You do your thing before a judge and go home—what kind of a “contest” is that?

The Solo & Ensemble Contest is more like a game. People prepare pieces of music in advance, either by themselves or with a few of their buddies, and then go to the contest to perform them before a judge. Then the judge, who we must assume is a qualified musical expert, but who might not be, and who might in fact be a professional monster truck racer by trade, and who might know less about music than my pet cat, gives the person or the ensemble a score. If you get a 1—the highest score—you win, and you get to go around bragging to everybody that you got a 1, and you can sleep easy that night. But if you get anything other than a 1—from a 2 down to a 5—you collapse to your knees and furiously pound the floor until your fists are bloody, and then you go home and hang yourself with dental floss. This game is not for the lighthearted.

Despite the glaring falsity in its name, the Solo & Ensemble Contest is quite a big thing around here. For those of you who aren’t too familiar with it, here’s what happens: high school musicians from all over the place, be they in the choir, orchestra, or band, come down to Walnut Ridge High School out on Livingston Avenue one Saturday in February or late January, depending on the year, and take up all the parking spaces, so that when you and Steven get down there at 1:00 PM you’re forced to park 14 miles away on some remote side street in front of a beat-up white car and pray to god that the owner of the driveway you just completely blocked doesn’t have to use it anytime soon. You then have to hike those 14 miles back to the school with your heavy saxophone case and wonder: why the hell doesn’t this street have a sidewalk? But you better not get too distracted with your wondering, because you also have to periodically dodge maniac cars whose drivers seem to be having an immeasurably hard time figuring out where the road is. If you manage to get to the target site without dying, the next step is to find a warm-up room and practice your solo, unless you’re in an ensemble, in which case you want to figure out where Lauren and Adam are so that the four of you can do a final play-through of “Conversation Piece,” the sax quartet you’ve been practicing for the past few weeks. Then it’s off to room 216 to play for real.

And now, a short interlude to tell you who the members of the Bexley High School Saxophone Quartet were this year:
Adam “Hort Dawg” Horton—1st alto sax
Lauren “Anne” Cooper—2nd alto sax
Boris “Boarass” Dvorkin—tenor sax
Steven “BouTwo” Bouyack—bari sax

The four of us and our band director, Jeffrey “Schneids” Schneider, hung around outside the door of room 216 and made idle small talk until the judge poked her head out the door and told us to haul our noisy asses away from the door and go hang around and make idle small talk somewhere else, because there’s a clarinet ensemble trying to perform in here, dammit. Or something along those lines. We moved away and leaned against some lockers, continuing our pointless conversation whilst waiting for the cue to come in. Apparently we were really early or the contest was running behind schedule or something, because we had to wait for quite a long time. Soon the tenor sax hanging around my neck began to feel really heavy. Steven, whose humongous bari sax made my tenor look like sodium molecule, had it even worse, so he shifted the saxophone in his arms. At one point in his shifting—we’ll never know when—he unwittingly dislodged the critical bar that connects to his high F key, popping that pad open just a little. I don’t know how familiar you are with the mechanism of a saxophone, but if your high F key is open when you’re trying to play, that is very, very bad. All of your air rushes out of that one goddam little hole, making it supremely difficult to get any sort of sound out of the instrument. Those sounds that do come out are gross, and low notes are a lost cause altogether. And that is exactly what had occurred on Steven’s sax, though we didn’t know it yet. The seeds of our destruction were sown.

When it finally came time to perform, we were very displeased to discover that room 216 was actually a fully functional blast furnace. This was upsetting not just because it made us horribly uncomfortable, but because extreme and sudden temperature changes can and will completely throw most instruments out of tune. It is a sad fact of life for most musicians that playing all the right notes does not necessarily guarantee you won’t still sound like shit. Tuning is critical, and the tuning that we had done in the nice and comfortable warm-up room was all but shot by the gusts of hot, swampy air that blasted us when we set foot inside that hellhole. I made a mental note to make sure that we re-tuned before beginning to play.

But before we could do that, another problem sprang up—we were missing a stand. Oh, sure, we noticed right away that there were only three stands as opposed to four of us, but somehow the importance of this fact didn’t sink in until everything was set up and Lauren was left standless. The three of us guys had all taken a stand. Were we all so lacking in gentlemanly tact that none of us would give up his stand and offer to go in search of another for the only lady in the group? Were we all such rotten bastards that when Lauren said, “I think I’m gonna go look for another stand,” we actually let her leave the room to find a stand for herself? Were we all such despicable, heartless monsters that we allowed Lauren to wander around in platform shoes which made her duck under the doorway and which forced her to expend the same amount of energy and effort to take five steps that most men would lose climbing Mount Everest? Yes, I’m ashamed to say we were. We watched Lauren hobble out of the room and waited in awkward silence for her to return. When, several minutes later, Lauren finally stumbled back into the room, stand in hand, she looked ruffled and flustered. Collapsing heavily into her chair, she began to spew forth the angry tale of how hard a time she had had in procuring the stand. I don’t remember the exact details, but Lauren was really pissed, and to hear her tell the story it sounded like the act of acquiring that stand had required her wrestling to the death with a 350-ton mutant giraffe.

The long wait, the heat, the music stand escapade—these factors all combined to make us antsy and anxious get the whole thing over with. In our rush to start the song, no tuning note was played, and thus two important facts were left undiscovered: 1) the four of us were about as close together in tune as Iowa is close to France, and 2) Steven’s bari saxophone was, for lack of a better word, farked. Completely farked. Because we never learned these important facts, we didn’t get a chance to fix Steven’s sax or our horrible out-of-tune-ness. As a result, though we made very few technical errors, the quartet pretty much sucked. All our chords sounded like barf and the bari sax part was all but missing. I think it unnecessary for me to point out that what we played before the judge at the Solo & Ensemble Contest on Saturday, February 8, 2003, was definitely not one of our better performances. After the song was over, I looked over at Adam and saw a sour look on his face that I, personally, would probably never sport unless I looked out the window one morning to see my mother getting eaten alive by a pack of deranged poodles. Steven was no less upset, and after he discovered, upon returning to the warm-up room, that his entire problem could have been fixed in two seconds by simply pushing the metal rod back into place, he became so anguished and agitated that he went so far as to steal a spritz of Adam’s Warheads Sour Spray. Lauren didn’t feel terribly great, either, and Schneider was unsuccessful in his attempts to cajole her.

For lack of anything better to do while we waited for the results to come in, Steven and I trudged back to my car to put our saxophones away. When we got back to the school, I offered to buy Steven some candy from a vending machine to try to cheer him up. He asked for Fruity Chewy Runts or some such thing, and I got Sour Starbursts for myself. Did you guys all know that there are Sour Starbursts out now? I had no idea. My favorite Starbursts up to that point had been the ones that come with Apple instead of Lemon, but for some ungodly reason the majority of the people voted for Lemon instead of Apple and so now they don’t make those anymore. The sour ones were really good, though. Anyway, we eventually made it over to the cafeteria, where the results were posted and Lauren and Adam were sulking. We had gotten a 2. Nobody was in very high spirits. I hid how thoroughly depressed I was, but the first thing I did when I got home was pull out my dental floss, only to discover that I had absolutely no idea how to tie a noose.

In the face of this horrible outcome—we didn’t get a 1 on our last ever Solo & Ensemble Contest—there was a tiny shred of consolation. For one thing, a 2 really wasn’t all that bad considering we had sounded like a bunch of dying toads (one of whom was actually dead). For another, we still had several performances ahead of us and thus several chances to redeem ourselves. If we did an awesome job, if we could get people to think, “Wow, those guys were awesome! There is no way they got a 2! The judge must have been drinking too much cold medicine or something,” then maybe a little smidgen of the hurt would fizzle away.

Our first such opportunity occurred on the Wednesday after contest. The band and orchestra of Maryland Elementary were putting on a concert for the rest of the elementary school, and since the high school band and orchestra directors also run the elementary school band and orchestra, they asked several of the high school kids to skip 6th and 7th period that day and play at the concert. In addition to a few orchestra kids, the brass quartet, and a flute trio, the humbled sax quartet came along. Yeah, our audience would be a bunch of third graders more interested in the contents of their nostrils than in our saxophones, but so what? We still came with a heavy sense of purpose and focus, determined not to repeat the fiasco of the previous Saturday that was still fresh in our memories. After warming up, we sat outside the gym door and listened to the concert going on inside. Lauren was so nervous she went to the bathroom no less than 84 times before we performed. The elementary band kids slogged through some unrecognizable songs and also the oddest, weirdest arrangement of “Old Macdonald Had a Farm” that I have ever heard in my life. I’m sure the little fellas played it fine, but whoever composed that thing needs to have his ears sawed off.

With that in mind, soon it was our turn to go. We opted to stand instead of sit—we had sat at contest—and we were extremely pleased to note that there was a music stand for each of us, and that the temperature inside the gym was not comparable to that of a sauna. Taking a cue from mistakes past, we made DAMN sure to play a tuning note, and we all checked our rods to make sure that they were where they needed to be. After satisfying ourselves that we were in tune and that our saxes more or less worked, the four of us began to play. Oh, how we began to play. When I plunged into the first chord, I was moved. We had never played the song so beautifully, had never sounded so frickin’ awesome. It was, I think, the best start to the song that we had ever had. We were amazing. So amazing, in fact, that it felt like nothing could go wrong.

Did you catch my subtle foreshadowing of bad things to come? Yeah. Steven didn’t have his music open all the way. The song is two pages long and is written on two sheets of paper connected together in the middle, like this:

M | M (“M” denotes music, and “|” denotes the fold in the middle of the page.)

Well, Steven had forgotten to open his music all the way, so on his stand it looked like this:

M |

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the song afforded him a chance to flip to the second page after finishing the first. But, as it happens, everybody has notes right up until the end of the first page, and the bari sax has a solo at the very beginning of the second page. I guess it was this realization that prompted Steven, about halfway down the first page, to stop playing completely and open his music all the way. There we were, running along smoothly, when suddenly our bari sax player STOPS and begins to futz with his pages. This looked quite bad, I bet. Furthermore, Steven picked a pretty awful spot to do this, completely missing a solo and creating a weird pause where music should have been. Eventually Steven got the paper straight, figured out where we were, and joined back in, but by this point I had given up all hope. I don’t know about Adam and Lauren, but Steven’s little goof-up completely disheartened me to the point where I could no longer concentrate on the song. Rhythms were muddled, notes were mucked. I suppose I should have tried harder to at least finish the song well, but I felt like there was no point. We had blown it again.

The same concert was put on the following night, only this time it was for the parents. Third time’s the charm—that night we were sure we wouldn’t screw up. Everything bad that could have happened to a sax quartet, had. The evening, however, began on a bad note (hah! Get the pun? “Note?” Oh, I kill myself). Again I found myself giving Steven a ride, and as it always seems to happen when I’m driving Steven somewhere, I had difficulties parking. After my attempt to find anything remotely resembling a legal parking spot in the street ended in pitiful failure, I was forced to enlist the aid of an alley to turn around and go back. Next I decided to try the playground, where other people had parked. I was pulling into the asphalt path that led to the playground when something bizarre caught my eye. It seemed that the driveway type thingie was cut off just ahead by a row of bushes. Oh, well, I thought. If worse comes to worse, I can just drive across the…

That’s when I felt my car climb onto the sidewalk. Yes, I had actually driven onto the sidewalk, thinking that a patch of grass was the driveway, when in fact the actual road into the playground was several feet farther down. People with keen ears could probably have heard Steven’s laughter as far away as Pennsylvania. I made it into the playground on my second attempt and parked near a basketball hoop, burning with shame. Steven and I then tried to get into the school, but the door was locked. Fortunately, Marina’s dad was there to open it for us, and we momentarily found the warm-up room and met Adam there, who told us that Lauren would be a bit late. She finally arrived, at which point the four of us had a mini jam session of jazz band favorites and probably scared the crap out of all the little kids. Schneider quickly told us to can it and began to warm up the fifth and sixth graders. I have to say that I was especially impressed with the clarinetists—they played with a power and confidence that I wish more of our clarinet players had.

Soon the concert started, and we took up once more our perches outside the gymnasium door. It seemed like an eternity before Schneider poked his head out and told us that the time had come for us to try again. Again we chose to stand, not sit. This time, though, it was a lot more crowded than the day before, and we had a hard time setting up. Ultimately we had to arrange ourselves in an L shape instead of the usual square. But that was all right. Learning from previous mistakes, we not only made damn sure to play a tuning note and check our rods, but we also gave Steven evil glares and made certain his music was open all the way. For the last time, we began.

It wasn’t a brilliant, masterful performance. Steven has this one rhythm that he always plays wrong, and Lauren and I almost always derail just a little during a particular bastard of a sixteenth note run. Our dynamics could have been better, as always, and I think we might have been a hair slow. But you know what? We sounded okay, and we didn’t make any major mistakes. We played pretty dang well—we played how we should have played at contest. And, we were being taped. That performance of “Conversation Piece” is the one that we will be remembered by, and I couldn’t be happier.

.: posted by Boris 12:00 AM

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