Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

It’s been a long time, baby.

For any of you who have ever learned to play an instrument I’m sure you will understand the topsy turvy rollercoaster ride of enjoyment / absolute detestation that it can be, often if it has been forced upon you during childhood by a combination of parental pressure and the fact that you can’t play sports for shit. This was ME, circa 1990, a time when even thinking about playing a musical instrument tended to be de-prioritised in my daily life by such things as eating WHAM bars, listening to Bon Jovi, and wondering if Nadia, the clever girl who sat near me in school, would show me her knickers at break time if I gave her money. Actually, thinking about it, I still do those first two, and also through a decade of wisdom know that the last one can be accomplished without any money at all -you just need LIES.

Anyway, gradually as I got better at the violin, I started to enjoy playing it, started to perform more and I suppose my performing musical career reached a kind of plateau in 1997 when I LED the Surrey Youth Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. The Royal Albert Hall. Royal. Where was I. Frick. Oh yeah, after this point, I sort of dwindled down into a chasm of non-violin-playing hell, as I trotted off to uni, left my usual orchestra and discovered a different set of activities to take the place of the WHAM bars, Bon Jovi etc, such as LAN Gaming, pound-a-pint nights and seeing just how long you can use Febreze on your clothes for - instead of actually washing them - before the fabric starts to putrefy on a molecular level, causing horrible, burning rashes.

And so, fast forward to last weekend, where I had two culture festivals to perform the violin at, both small village occasions, but they were still my first public performances in years, and more than enough to make me cack my pants a lot beforehand.

However, thankfully, because I naturally decided to play one of the mere dozen or so pieces of music that I brought with me to Japan - songs that I know inside out and back to front regardless of how long I go between practicing - the performance was pretty good.

SHATTERING this illusion of grandeur though, was the new music teacher of one of my schools who, inspired by having a violin player at hand now (this is a fairly rare thing in the inaka) has decided that he is going to involve me as much as possible with the music club. This is GREAT because it gives me some way of involving myself in after-school club activities other than watching the baseball club and getting bored after 5 seconds because baseball is the most boring sport to ever be invented, or trying to keep up with the frighteningly fit athletics club and almost having a massive cardiac arrest after a few laps round the track. BUT it is also CRAP because it means I am being given a whole bunch of new music that I have never played before, meaning they sound truly awful the first few times I play them.

So today we had our first practice together - me, a handful of brass, a couple of flutes and clarinets (bless this tiny school) trying to make Barber’s Adagio for Strings sound like the quietly mournful yet dignified piece it needs to be, but managing quite effortlessly to take what we read on the page and mangle it with our instruments into a mess of sounds that bore more of a resemblance to the scratchy wailings of a thousand Satans, than it did to a piece of contemporary classical music.

And a large percentage of this could be attributed to me, sitting there manically trying to remember what the frick 4/2 time means, not really understanding any Japanese musical terminology, and thumping out a piece of music that I had the chance to practice exactly 0 times before, all of which resulted in my playing sounding about as good as if you were to fill my mouth with party blowouts and beat me with a stick until I died from it - and the violin isn’t a wind instrument so that simile doesn’t even make SENSE.

But you know- at the end of the relatively short 1 hour practice, there was a faint inkling in the then vastly-improved sound we were making, that this might all become rather beautiful to listen to-

Course, I could just be hugely optimistic.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2003 at 6:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.