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Ed's Notebook: Baroque Week

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Line drawing of a violin.

Baroque Week is trundling down a cobblestoned street towards you very soon, so it’s time to crack open some non-alcoholic mead and get the party started, wig or no wig.

Do you remember the first piece of baroque music you heard? A Bach Brandenburg Concerto? Or maybe that tumble of the "Arrival of the Queen of Sheba?" (by the way, who walks that fast, especially if you’re wearing a crown?) Or maybe it was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with the shiver of winter and the shimmer of summer?

That was the one for me. But the bark of Spring.

It was the summer of ’78. The same year Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta were dreaming of Summer Nights, but, as a baby viola player in Shropshire, there were no summer nights. Being England, it meant an average temperature that year of 15 degrees (at least that’s Celsius). Vivaldi’s Four Seasons could reasonably be reduced to one.

Winter.

The only way to stay warm in the chill of mid-summer was to play my viola. At least I didn’t need the fingerless mittens my grandma had knitted me. Well, not after lunch.

It was summer music camp and I’d just been shoved over to the viola because I had “big hands.” Teacher-speak for “We need at least one viola in the orchestra so let’s get that big kid who plays at the back of the third violins.”  Yup, violin 3. The music equivalent to being the team water carrier.

So here I was with a bright orange viola, made in a country with a lot of consonants (Czechoslovakia), and I had moved from violin 3 to viola. Not even viola 2, just … viola! And yes, I was the only one. Which meant that every note I played was a solo.

The first rehearsal. I sat wrestling with the BOV (Big Orange Viola) and some weird way of writing viola music. Plus, I was sitting AT THE FRONT, after what seemed like years of just managing to not fall off the back of the stage at the very back of the band. 

Orchestra tuning over before it probably should have been, we struck up Vivaldi’s "Spring" concerto. 

The slow movement.

Sorry, I should say, the very slow movement.

You’ve never heard it so slow. Those shepherds were not just napping, they were in an induced coma waiting for autumn to swing by. Which it did momentarily about 3pm, after which the temperature dropped back down to winter-like single digits. 

But who cares about the speed when you get the part of the shepherd’s dog? I never got that in the third violins. I was lucky to move beyond a long screechy open G string.

But now, as those poor tiny violins got to do some boring twiddling, I got to bark.

 Woof Woof, woof woof.

I’d never been happier than playing those two notes. To be honest, violin 3 was probably more challenging, but this was way more fun.

And baroque music has stayed the same for me in the multiple decades since then.

Because baroque music says it all. Baroque music lifts our ears, just as the spires and bell towers of baroque cathedrals lift our eyes, and it inspires us to open our hearts and be joyful. And for a 12-year-old little trans kid, that saved me.

What’s your first time baroque?

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Ed Ayres presents Weekend Breakfast on ABC Classic (Saturday and Sunday 6am – 9am). He also presents The Art Show on RN (Wednesday 10am.)

Posted 
Music (Arts and Entertainment), Orchestral, Baroque