Excited Exhaustion

Some time after midnight last night I returned from the rehearsal of the big band where I have played baritone saxophone for the past ten years or more, and, as usual, I was too keyed up to go to sleep. I ate some cheese and crackers and read the newspaper till about a quarter to one. And even then I didn't fall asleep right away. When you play with a big band, you absorb energy.
I have to concentrate hard on the music to play it even close to right. I still find it challenging to master the parts and play them tight with the other musicians. My early musical training was in classical clarinet, and the rhythms of classical music, as they are written out, still are easier for me to play than jazz or Latin rhythms, as they are written out. You have to hear them and imitate them. (I believe that's because standard Western musical notation evolved with Western music, the way the Roman alphabet we use was invented by the Romans to write Latin, and it doesn't work all that well even with English, though we're so used to the anomalies we don't notice them.)
Our conductor, Eli Benacot is a fine musician, and playing in his band has been like taking a group music lesson every week. The baritone saxophone part in big bands is challenging, though they're not always technically difficult. Sometimes the baritone plays in rhythmical unison with the other four saxes, sometimes it plays with the trombones, usually the bass trombone, sometimes it plays with the string bass, and sometimes it plays on its own. So I have to know whom to listen to in every part of every piece, so I can play together with them.
Incidentally, when we perform, we often sit in an arrangement different from the one we rehearse in, and the band sounds different. Suddenly I can't hear the bass trombone very well. That's another challenge.
The music is exhilarating because the sound of the band is so intense, and the rhythms have so much drive. Last night we were practicing with our vocalist, Noa Anava, which calls for more sensitivity than we show when we're blasting out an arrangement by Gordon Goodwin. But even when we're playing behind a vocalist, where are moments when we have to roar. When it works, when the band plays tight and swings, there's nothing like it!

I Just (Self-)Published a Novel

The novel is called Site Report, and it's available on Amazon and a few other places. I began writing it 30 years ago.
I realized when I was finished with it that it was unpublishable: too long and on an unpalatable subject (Israel), so I forgot about it. Then, maybe 10 years ago, I rewrote it, cutting out about half of it and sharpening the language, but I didn't have the heart to go through the long process of trying to get it published. I have too much dreary experience with that process with my clients.
Then I heard about Create Space, the self-publishing possibility sponsored by Amazon. You can design and upload your book and have it available print on demand and as an ebook, for free. So I decided to try it out.
Obviously, part of the self-publishing process is rereading your book, which is something I didn't want to do in the worst way, so I waited another couple of years. But finally, I went through with it.
Astonishingly, I liked the book. I didn't remember a lot of it, and I was surprised I had done such a good job with it.
It's the story of an American woman who spend a sabbatical year in Israel in 1980. I imagined her with old-line kibbutznik relatives, orthodox relatives in Bnei Brak, and a Russian immigrant cousin. She encounters all those people, has a love affair with a Moroccan architect, and can't decide whether to marry him and stay in Israel or return to the Boston area.
So look it up on Amazon. There is also going to be a Kindle edition, but they haven't finished processing it.

Simultaneous Relaxation and Effort

When I play flute, my right hand often cramps with superfluous effort. After all, it doesn't take much strength at all to close the holes in the body of the flute with the keys. I've seen Youtubes of a girl of eight doing it fantastically, and I'm sure my hands are stronger than hers. But the application of that strength is entirely unnecessary.
My hand cramps because I'm trying to do a bunch of things all at the same time. I'm holding the flute up, I'm pressing down the D# key with my right pinky both to stabilize the instrument and to improve the sound of the notes from E up. I also have to raise my left index finger for D# and D, but I have to close it when I go up to E, and when I go from D to E, I have to open the D# key again. This is an awkward fingering compared to saxophone or clarinet (which has awkwardnesses of its own), and I'm not used to it. So in my effort to do it right, my hand cramps up, especially when I try to do it fast, which, of course, is when I should be applying the least strength, to obtain agility.
So in my last few days of practicing, I've been concentrating part of the time on relaxing my fingers as I play. The problem is that when you concentrate on a movement, even if your purpose is to relax it, you often make it more effortful. How do you make an effort to relax?
It's the same in pottery (and in typing, for that matter). You have to exert enough strength to control the clay, but not so much that you lose control. At this moment I'm listening to the tenor saxophonist, Houston Person, a perfect example of total relaxation and total control.
Yesterday at my pottery class, one of the other students told me that she could see by the way I was working that I loved the clay, which was true and perceptive of her -- I don't know what she saw. I want to play music in a way that also shows how much I love the sounds I'm making, and to write in a way that shows how much I love the language I'm using. That's not something you can try to do. It's something you have to allow to happen by being relaxed, so that you are free to apply the real effort, not the technical effort but the expressive effort.

Music and Politics

Last night we attended a marvelous chamber music concert in the YMCA auditorium here in Jerusalem, part of the international chamber music festival. A brilliant group of musicians from Israel and abroad have assembled for an ambitious series of concerts, and the auditorium, as in past years, was packed.
Despite boycotts and international disapproval, Israel is still able to attract some of the best musicians in the world. I am always grateful to artists who come from abroad for their moral and spiritual support and for their contribution to our cultural life. They strengthen the positive side of Israeli society, for we have an impressively rich cultural and intellectual life.
Is it self-indulgent for the music lovers among us to enjoy concerts like these when our government is doing things we can't approve? Shouldn't we be out fighting injustice? That is, assuming music lovers want to fight injustice, which need not be the case. The connection between politics and art, or, for that matter, ethics and art, are ambiguous, especially abstract art like music.
I want everything to be connected. I wanted cultured people to be good people and vice versa. But that's not the case, is it?
So I spent two thrilling hours hearing the finest music performed by accomplished players with conviction and understanding, sharing the experience with a large and appreciative audience. I didn't have to think about Gaza and the Palestinians, about the inequality between rich and poor in Israel, about the corruption that keeps surfacing, about the unfair treatment of Israel in the world press, because of anti-Semitism -- or about personal problems among our friends and family. These topics, along with global warming, the outbreak of Ebola in Africa, the civil war in Syria and Iraq, the crisis between Russia and the Ukraine -- an endless list -- are mainly things I can't do anything about in any event. So thank God for great music to keep my mind off them!