Busy times at school

Today is a four-egg day, so I'm happy!  The hens were on strike since maybe November, and then about a month ago they gradually started laying one egg every couple of days.  The last couple of days it's been three per day, and this morning I found four in the coop.  Good work, ladies!

On alternate Wednesdays I have no classes or students or rehearsals, so am at home, and I arranged to start my day with the reception of another load of firewood from a new vendor.  He lives less than 20km away and has a smaller trailer, about the size of Bryan and Kiana's, so can't do big deliveries.  But that's okay; it's probably best that we try out a smaller amount first and see how it stacks up (haha) against the competition.  This stuff is oak and beech and ash, and was cut three years ago so it's dry.  I've just lit a fire to see how it burns, and if it's good then we'll go with him for another delivery, instead of our previous vendor who has a larger dumping trailer that drops four times as much per delivery.

We needed the wood because with the unusually cold winter that we've had, we've kept the stove going all the time and have used up all of our previous stores of fuel.  It's been our main source of heat as our furnace is so old that it can't be repaired, and needs replacing.  I have one estimate already to replace it with an ultra high efficiency condensing furnace, which in addition to the primary heat exchanger on the combustion chamber has a secondary heat exchanger to reclaim heat from the exhaust.  I am looking into several other estimates before we make our decision, but this is right time of year to do it as Belgium has special offers in March for home renovation projects. There are "green" rebates from the government available to encourage lower gas consumption, and I have to apply for those.  In any case we were going to have to replace the furnace in the next couple of years, as the country is switching from a lower nitrogen gas imported from the Netherlands to a higher nitrogen type that comes from other countries, and so the older furnaces must be retired.

I must say it's nice to have a little extra money in the bank from working at the school, now that we are contemplating big purchases like furnace replacement... while I am mentally exhausted by teaching, the financial benefit is nothing to sneeze at.  We also have some other work to do to solve a moisture problem at one corner of the roof, and then there is some masonry repointing that needs doing at the back wall and also the chimneys need some maintenance, and we have bathroom renovations to consider, and the completion of the attic.

On the topic of teaching, it's going well.  I realise that now I've been involved in the same project (Grease) since late August, and as a teacher since the end of October, so that's the longest period of time I've worked with just one team since 2007.  Usually my collaboration with a group of people lasts a maximum of two and half months (opera) or a couple rehearsals and a few performances (concert), so I'm more of a sprinter than a marathoner when it comes to working in an organisation.  But I think I'm getting my second wind.

We are only partway through the video indexing, identifying our "keep" video tracks and synchronising them with the studio audio tracks.  Thom has been taking care of the video compositing, and he's completed one song, with two choruses, two solos, and a dance number to go.  It's still a long slog ahead.

Meanwhile we have been teaching all of the middle school music students a unit called "Auditioning Skills", which is all about learning music, memorising words, making interpretative decisions, costume, hairstyle, and location and lighting choices.  By the end of the week every one of those 100+ students will (hopefully) have video recorded and submitted one of the songs from the musical "13" that we've been teaching them since January.

The idea is that they should get comfortable with the process of rehearsal and preparation, whether they want to take part in the actual musical or not.  Then we have a video repository of every music student singing something, and can go through that archive to then select people for call-backs auditions in person.

I must say that it's great to see how the kids have taken to learning these songs... it doesn't hurt that the piece is occupied with adolescent topics like fitting in, being a geek, trying to get up the nerve to kiss in the movie theatre, friends and "frenemys" and so forth.  It's awesome to hear the grade eight boys trying to out-sing each other as they walk out of the classroom and down the hall to their next class...

Ok now I've got to get all of that wood inside the basement before it starts to rain... 

Snow Day; filming of Grease showreel continues; halfway through the school year

Yoshi in the snow

I'm at home today; every other monday I have a day without classes, because of the way my part-time teaching schedule is organised.  Maggie has a full-time contract so she took the car and went in for her classes, and had planned to try to get home promptly after classes, so that I could have driven back to Waterloo for the Grease filming session today.  But because of a small accumulation of snow, the school decided to suspend after-school activities today.  So that means that I have... a SNOW DAY!

Really it's a bit ridiculous: the roads are clear, and there's a very thin layer of snow on the sidewalks, roofs, and gardens.  There is a tiny bit of snow scheduled to fall this late afternoon/evening, perhaps as much as 1mm of accumulation per hour... 

This part of Belgium doesn't often get any kind of snowfall, and so they don't have the snowplows or the salt and sand required to handle the kind of weather that we normally experience in the Ardennes, or the Alps, or in our part of Canada.

I don't really mind the cancellation as I have been going at it pretty hard for three weeks, doing classes, private teaching at lunchtimes, and staying at school until at least 19:00 every night.  We completed the audio recordings in the last week of January, and started filming on the 29th, but we still have quite a way to go before we're finished video recording.

We hope that this week will see the end of filming; next week is the February "Carnavale" holiday, and after that we are going to have to spend a lot of time editing the video together.  I'm really hoping that we don't have to work at editing during the week off.

Danny and Sandy, social distancing

Then there is the middle school show, "13".  We had originally planned to start the auditions this week or last, but that has been delayed a bit because of the COVID restrictions.  The new rules for student activities mean that students aged twelve and under can still gather in groups for after-school activities, but in groups of no more than ten at a time.  The thirteen-and-older kids can only gather outside, which means that some of the grade sevens and all of the grade eights wouldn't be able to take part in the show, unless we can figure out how to rehearse in a marquee style tent, which we haven't yet acquired.  It seems that we're going to have to wait until the second week of March before we have anything resembling a real rehearsal, and even then, we will likely have to have the grade sixes on one day, sevens on another, and eights on a third, or rehearse them in separate groups.

All of these considerations mean that the May performances will likely end up being postponed until next year.  In the meantime we will still rehearse parts of the show in music or drama or dance classes, in the different grade levels.  We are planning to repeat what we did with "Grease" and do a similar kind of "13" showreel with selected numbers.  My grade tens and I have been looking at the scores, and I think having them play the music for those pieces is an achievable goal.

Duncan has been going into school every day for an average of about 4 hours per day, which is unfortunate, as he has to commute back and forth by bus.  But at least he has some in-person education, instead of distance learning, which everyone is sick to death of.  He has a week off next week, the same as Maggie and I do.  While his karate classes have not started up yet, the twelve-and-under karate students can gather in small classes of no more than ten, and the older students like Duncan and his friend Arthur are allowed to help lead those classes, so he's spending about six hours a week doing that.  Part of his black belt training involves teaching, ideally at another dojo, but that's not possible right now, so this activity is keeping up his skills.  He doesn't have his black belt exam until next spring, so he has time to prepare.

Malcolm's technical classes have continued full-time since September, and he's making progress on his various projects.  He has two steel string acoustic guitars on the go: both are commissions but one of the buyers has lost his job and so has put the order on hold.  He's going to build both guitars anyway, in the hopes that the original person buys it eventually, or Malcolm can sell it to someone else.  He's also working on my archtop guitar, and he's doing his restoration work.  He's applied for a job doing guitar repairs and setups at a large music store in Brussels, so we have our fingers crossed that he'll get hired there.

L5 style guitar with tailpiece and pickguard / finger rest

making the tailpiece and finger rest

I have been keeping up the running but at a slightly reduced frequency, and often don't have the time to do the long runs.  But that should change as the weather starts to warm up.  Yesterday I had an 8km with Bryan which was nice.

That's about all the news over here.. stay healthy and stay safe!

Robbie Burns; busy times at school; Belgian COVID situation

It's Robbie Burns Night tonight, on the 25th of January.  For the first time in several years we aren't hosting the Burns supper at the church, or preparing our speeches or poems or songs.  I think that I'll dig a haggis out of the freezer here at home though, and have it with bashed neeps and tatties, just the three of us (kilts optional)...

Since last I wrote I have had most of my time occupied with marking assignments and writing individualised report card comments for the music students.  This took up most of my Christmas holiday time and bled into the first two weeks of school.  Fortunately, that was all taken care of over a week ago, so I could settle down to getting ready for the Grease performances, slated for this coming Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday.

But as Burns wrote, in To a mouse:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

         Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

          For promis’d joy!

We resumed rehearsals on Wednesday the 6th of January, with the idea of preparing the show as planned, and then filming it scene by scene with the two different casts.  Then we would edit it together into one show for each cast, and had arranged to livestream the shows on two different nights.  We had abondoned hope of giving the kids a chance to perform in front of live audience, but thought that our plan would allow us to at least produce something like a full production, albeit one that was stitched together.

The local authorities had different ideas.  About halfway through our rehearsal on the 6th we saw an email from the school administration instructing us to shut down immediately.  Since school had resumed after Christmas holiday, in-person classes have been allowed to proceed, with one school year taking class remotely in weekly rotation to reduce the number of students present each day.  But the critical thing is that the grades have been restricted from any kind of group activity across grade "bubbles".  As we have students from grades 9-12 in our production it became clear that further group rehearsal was going to be impossible.

Needless to say we were all pretty discouraged, but soon came up with a plan: we will postpone Grease by a year from its original timing, and remount it with the same cast in November of 2021.  Most of the cast is in grades 9-11, with only five students in their senior year, so with some minimal recasting we should be able to bring the show up to speed quickly, and we also hope that by then the vaccination schedule and continued confinement measures might allow for enough of a reduction in COVID numbers that we could have a live audience.  

This meant that the seniors (two of which are playing Danny and Sandy, the romantic leads) we decided to create a filmed showreel with a few selected songs:

• opening dialogue scene that introduces the different characters
• Summer Nights (the big opening duet for Sandy and Danny and chorus)
• Greased Lightning (Kenickie solo with male chorus)
• dialogue scene that introduces Hand Jive
• Hand Jive (full cast dance)
• dialogue scene that follows the Hand Jive
• Hopelessly Devoted to You (Sandy solo)
• Sandy (Danny Solo)
• You're the One that I Want (closing duet for Sandy and Danny and chorus)

The complication is that we can't rehearse the kids together, or film their performances in a group.  So all last week after school we've been staying late in the improvised recording studio that we've set up in the technician booth of the theatre, recording the kids voice parts one by one.  As you can imagine, it's exhausting: most of the kids have never recorded with headphones and a backing track before, and a lot of retakes and retouchings are needed to get their tracks in a useable state.  Not all of them are confident to sing on their own, and they haven't been able to rehearse for a while, so their harmony parts aren't so secure.  I went in to the studio beforehand and sang each and every harmony voice part myself to make "ghost tracks" that each student would be able to hear it in their ear while they were recording their part.

As well, I have to conduct each one of them with the score on my lap; that is tiring as well!  For example, with the fifteen boys in Greased Lightning, in the course of a single three hour session, I must have conducted the piece about fifty times!  After a day of classes, and private voice students at lunchtime, to then go into the studio for three hours leaves me incredibly tired.  But hopefully it will all be worth it, and then we will have a decent audio track for each of them.  Fortunately Laurent our theatre technical director is handling the audio recording and the technical side of mixing, so by next week we should have audio tracks that sound good enough to use.

mixing the tracks with my lucky lab coat,
an homage to the early days of studios,
where the sound engineers were scientists

At that point the work of filming the kids individually will begin, and for synchronisation purposes we'll play back the recording while they lip-synch it, then separate the audio track from the video, and use our clean studio version instead in the final edit.  The editing of that video is going to take a lot of time, and that will be primarily Thom's job but I will help him with it also.

All this is going on while classes are happening.  Today I'm lucky that I don't have classes my monday is open on alternate weeks) so have stayed home to rest until I go in for the recording session, and so have been cleaning the kitchen and baking loaves of bread for the week.  The weather has actually been pretty good here for the last little while with temperatures usually a little above zero, and today it's sunny out.  Last weekend Bryan and Kiana and Lawrence and I went to a nature reserve south of Liege for a nice 17km run on some fairly aggressive trails, and I ran here midweek, and again yesterday, so I'm keeping up the kilometrage, and Yoshi likes the exercise.

 

Anyway, I hope that all of you are doing well, and keeping healthy.  We received some very sad news that Sameh, the partner of our dear friend and conductor Peter Tomek, has died in Berlin from COVID complications.  While Duncan, Camille, Thom, and Marie-Pierre have all had COVID and recovered, I realise that Sameh is the first person that we know directly who has died from this illness.  We send our condolences to Peter, and pray that we won't add any more names to the list of personal friends who have passed due to this pandemic, and I have the same wishes for each of you.

Our numbers in Belgium are relatively good... as you can see by this graph, the new cases seem to have leveled off since early November, and are more or less stable at about 2000 new cases per day.

new cases October 17th - January 17th

That seems high, as the peak of the first wave in Belgium in April was around the same number, but it's a great improvement over our second wave numbers at the end of October, where we peaked at around 22,000 new cases per day.

St. John's has gone a couple of months now without a case at our school, so we're hoping that continues.  The first vaccinations have started, but at present they have covered only a tiny percentage of the population: 1.67% of the general population, and 2.09% of the adult population have received the first dose of the ModeRNA vaccine.  We're not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.
 
I have started discussions with the school about staying on for another year as music teacher; that seems wise given the fact that we are still in the thick of this pandemic, and a return to live performance is still a complete question mark. 

Yesterday the Flemish Baroque concert scheduled for April 25th, and meant to replace our cancelled Homilius passions from last March, was again cancelled, this time because of an administrative difficulty with the commune...  That means that the only other thing on the books is the Beethoven Mass in C this November in the Netherlands, and maybe the faculty artist recital of Winterreise with Dina and Bruce, sometime in 2022, at Queen's?

In any case, we are both lucky to have our work, financial income, a safe home, good food, and our health.  It's important to be grateful, because as my late grandmother used to say, "It could be worse."  Sending you each our warm greetings and hopes for your continued health...