I've been playing, and it's going to be amazing. Everything I used to be able to do with oboe is coming back, and fast!
I think I'm going to like playing with these four people. I feel it leading to a discipline that I've let myself get away from these last couple of years, not just in music, but in a lot of things in my life. For five somewhat goofy, distractable people, we all seem to have this stealth work ethic about the music, and I like it.
The sound is already good, and I think it will get very, very good. One of the things we worked on was an arrangement Daniel had done of a Mozart piano quintet. If you had asked, I don't think it would have been possible to capture the essence of all those double-stops, not to mention the piano scoring, but it worked! Daniel warned us not to get too attached to the present voicing, because after hearing it this afternoon he has plans to change parts of it to better suit our particular balance.
It's still a remarkable thing.
We took a break for a while, and I got to talk to everyone some more. I came very close to giving out the URL to this web page to them, but I thought better of it and stopped short. I think they'd appreciate reading it all, but I'd feel a little onstage, and I suspect I'd tend to edit myself to tone down whatever I might have to say about the group. I don't want to do that.
Someone asked me in email whether I edit myself, and really, no, I don't. I correct typos and occasionally rewrite a sentence to make it clearer, but mostly what you all read here is exactly what came up in my mind a few moments before. The uncut article.
The discipline thing, though. Since my parents died I feel most days like anything could happen and I'd let it. I cook things when I want, I eat whenever, I don't work as hard on some of my pieces as I think I should. Bills all get paid on the last possible day. I call people back, or I don't. It's become so "whatever" with me that I feel like a sloth. When I realize that, I hate it, but I haven't done anything to correct it. But perhaps the rigor of rehearsal, the "I depend on you" feeling of playing with these four unique people, is the spark I need to get back the discipline I had in that picture on my home page.
I've missed it. I want it back. I want a lot of things back.