matthew wengerd|bassist

Corner Violin Shop is a great example of blogging to give your customer base the ability to peek into your world. Lately, they’ve been lamenting their lack of posts and inability to keep up with their good intentions (seems a little familiar, huh?). Well, this post took the cake. What upstanding string player wouldn’t want a tree decorated with tailpieces or a wreath of chinrests?

OK, I have no use for a chinrest and my tailiece would cause the tree to fall over, but this picture brought a nice close to this very busy, sometimes quite unmusical week.

Nothing philosophical here. Last night, I upgraded WordPress and wound up blog-less overnight. There was some problem with wp-cache that was fixed by removing the plugin entirely.

Seems Jason Heath is having a different kind of problem

This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota

Please contact this site’s webmaster.

Wait a few minutes and use your browser’s “Back” button or click here to try again.

If you are the webmaster, your account may have gotten this error for one or more of the following reasons:

* Your account has used more than its share of the cpu in the past 60 second sliding window.
* Your account has too many concurrent processes running simultanously.
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* Your site was recently very busy trying to run inefficient scripts.

The solution would be to optimize your applications to use less CPU.
Adding appropriate indeces to your SQL tables can often help reduce CPU.
Using static .html documents instead of painful .php scripts will practically eliminate CPU usage.

I’ve been in seclusion for a while now, trying to keep my proverbial head above the proverbial water. Well, this was worth braking the silence for:

One of my students told me he saw me on the USF Music webpage so I had to check it out for myself:

Isn’t that funny! I’m also in the flash video on the site. Go here to see more of my ugly mug.

Several years ago, I was dropping my parents off for a cruise from Port Canaveral while a hurricane (I can never remember which one was which) was coming in on the West coast of Florida. They had perfectly calms seas while I went to sleep unsure that the roof would still be there in the morning.

Seeing this, I wouldn’t wish rough seas on anyone on a cruise. That looks plain-old scary.

Jeff Berlin has a tendency to cause quite a stir. He has very strong, sometimes controversial opinions about music instruction and the learning process. He has written for Bass Player magazine and founded the Players School of Music.

This video is a hilarious testament to his musicianship. There are plenty of bass players who can’t sing the National Anthem and play it simultaneously. Ever fewer can shift the lyrics one syllable:

For those of you who do not know, I work for a radio station in the Tampa/St. Petersburg/Sarasota Market. I have been a desk jockey for the station since the start of the summer. In recent weeks, I have been “voice checking” (recording copy for evaluation by my supervisors), working on my inflection and pacing. Wednesday afternoon, I was doing a VC in the production room adjacent to the Master Control Room. I was reading promos for some of our national broadcasts and out-of-date copy regarding our last fund drive.

We have a complex digital system, where the control boards can all be controlled remotely; I had been told that it is not uncommon for someone to mess with a coworker by re-arranging their board remotely during work like voice checks. So, when the lights on the board flashed, I assumed someone was playing tricks on me. Several minutes later, I notice several people hovering over the Master Control Board. At once, they all looked up and me and, in slow motion, raised their hands to their throats to make the left-to-right slice of the “kill it” signal. I looked at them, puzzled, and muted all the channels on my board.

A software malfunction had caused stereo channels in the two rooms to cross, and my voice was going out over the air, live. I was talking over classical music, reading completely unrelated copy several times. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so humiliated. People were quite upset with me until they realized I had done nothing wrong. I continued to do VCs with the caveat that a single blinking light would send me straight home.

At least the big leap is over with.

In high school, they all used to laugh at me because I dug this instrument. The theremin is one of my all time favorite sounds, coming in right behind that of my own instrument. www.clickforlessons.com had a link to this video on their blog. I now feel slightly vindicated:

The Aebersold wrap-up will be here shortly, but I have to relate a more pressing issue:

I arrived home from the workshops and immediately set upon the most urgent task: sorting through two weeks of mail. I separated the letters, cards, and invitations from the magazines and bills (no letters from collections agencies) and left to pick my wife up from the airport.

The day got away from us and I didn’t get a chance to sort through the rest. What a shock my wife got when she saw this:

Yep, that’s me on the cover of Wired Magazine! I had forgotten that they asked subscribers to submit their pictures for customized covers several months ago. The email I received in response led me to believe I did not make the cut-off and would not be getting a customized cover, so the thought completely slipped my mind. I don’t even want to handle this one; I may go buy one off the newsstand to keep mine in good shape.

1…If you know Jamey Aebersold, you know he likes to take pictures. He tells me he uses the SnP method of photography - Shoot and Pray. He gets some good shots that are featured throughout the buildings this week. Unfortunately, he snagged one of a visible stunned me and had it placed prominently on the bulletin board in the lobby of the school of music.

It’s been a running deal to place captions below it. I believe the one here is “INCONTHEIVABLE!” Let me know if you have any good captions.

2…At least one camper has come to me and said “you’re the guy with the blog, right?” If you are reading this and attending the Aebersold workshops, come up to me and let me know. It’s very gratifying to meet readers (long time or new) in real life. I’m the guy in the picture above, say hello.

This is the staff of the Jamey Aebersold Summer Workshops. God Have Mercy On Our Souls.

Where else can you see Transformers with Antonio Hart?

I played a benefit for the the volunteers of WUSF this week at the USF alumni Center. You can see pictures of the event here. Not only does my right hand look awful, but I have a nasty case of bassface. ugh.

(I am posting this link as soon as I read it in order to beat Jason Heath to the punch. Jason is a wonderful, prolific blogger who posts things with such speed and regularity (at least way more than I can muster) that I find many things tagged toblog in my delicious on his blog long before I even get the chance to read the whole thing. I hope to say I beat him to it just once!)

Michael Hovnanian’s blog climbed to a new height in my book today with a candid look into the day-to-day workplace issues of life in one of the world’s great orchestras. the CSO has been without Music Director for an entire season and the musicians have worked (sometimes dealt) with a series of guest conductors this year.

Michael relates an amusing story (with a protected identity) culled from this week’s rehearsal. I will only give you a teaser:

The grizzled old principal dragged his eyes from the crossword bedeviling him the past three rehearsals. “Maestro,” he drawled.

Eyes rolled in the orchestra and a kind of ‘here we go again’ sigh started up, just what a weary old-time saloonkeeper might do when he knows his place is about to be busted up and there isn’t darn thing he can do about it.

You owe it yourself to read the rest of this.

I have been in ensembles where things have come just to the brink of falling apart, but I have never found myself in a situation of on-stage restarting. It is comforting to know, however, that I would be in good company if and when that situation arises. My number one, the Cleveland Orchestra, had a restart on-stage recently, as noted by Vivien Schweitzer in Playbillarts: “There must have been something in the Midwestern air last Thursday, as performances in Detroit and Cleveland both came to a grinding halt.” She goes on to quote some of the Donald Rosenberg story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Anyone who has ever played an instrument or sung knows the uncomfortable feeling that creeps in when things don’t quite go as the composer planned.

Listeners aren’t always aware of these discrepancies, but the Cleveland Orchestra’s audience Thursday at Severance Hall was abuzz at intermission about the two interruptions during the last movement of Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto for Piano, Violin and 13 Wind Instruments.

The piece was moving along when everything suddenly collapsed and music director Franz Welser-Möst uttered, “Sorry.” He took the ensemble back a bunch of bars and tried again, to no better effect.

“You see how difficult this is,” the conductor said to the audience. “It worked this morning.”

Finally, Welser-Möst got his meters straight, and the music proceeded to its inevitable, touching end. One suspects the weekend’s remaining performances will go more smoothly.

Berg’s score deserves the attention. It is a masterpiece of construction and emotional content, albeit one of the most intricate works in the repertoire. The composer flirts with 12-tone techniques as he incorporates hidden codes and the musical names of his close Viennese colleagues Schoenberg and Webern into the fabric.

The opening theme and variations introduce the primary motives and develop them. The second movement is a palindrome that also serves as an impassioned memorial to Schoenberg’s first wife, Mathilde. Material from the first and second movements are combined in the finale, whose tricky textures and rhythms — the cause of Thursday’s distress — are major challenges.

Despite the discomfort, the performance wasn’t an outright disaster, though it also wasn’t very good. Mitsuko Uchida’s forceful, alert pianism and concertmaster William Preucil’s silken violin solos gave vibrant voice to Berg’s profusion of ideas even when the interplay of solo instruments and fine winds failed to achieve coherence or urgency. Welser-Möst’s helpful comments before the performance about the work’s “meaning” often didn’t transfer to the music-making itself.

How mortifying.

Coincidentally, the music (and more) blog, Dragons and Princesses, posted a similar story this week:

Big applause the other night, but the conductor kept going. Low strings didn’t…violins did for a couple notes.

Awkward short silence, then huge cue which most of us correctly understood to be the next forte entrance-so we had skipped a few bars. Fun. Maybe that’s the musical equivalent of things getting lost in cyberspace.

We finished the act, and conductor waves hands in front of face…but we couldn’t figure out if that was an international gesture for “You should really watch me closer next time”, “Something strange just happened on stage”, or “I’m sorry, that was completely my fault”.

It’s only a matter of time for me.

The modern American church does a poor job of conveying what Jesus taught and who he was. These videos, known to me as “the Jesus videos,” are a satirical look at the concept of Jesus that many people have today. It’s meant to be funny, feel free to laugh.

In light of recent additions to Lakeland traffic safety, I guess it’s time to re-examine my driving style.

I am very reticent to slam on my brakes at any time because, 9 times out of 10, my double bass is in the car when I am driving. I often run yellow lights and occasionally see red before I’m through the intersection. I’ve always told myself I could talk my way out of it, informing the officer that I was concerned about the safety of my $16, 000 bass and the possible damage it could cause to me.

Well, this poor member of the Memphis Symphony was unable to use this defense (only with a $60,000 viola) to get out of the ticket.

My favorite part is the fact that his response was, “My dissatisfaction with Judge Brannon’s ruling can be summed up in three words: procedure over substance. This is not honorable.” Sounds like a viola player, huh?

He deserves respect for a valiant effort, though! Guess I better come up with a new excuse.