Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everybody! It has been an excessive absence from this blog. Since I last updated this page, I got a house, got engaged, finished my Ph.D., and got married. It’s been a wild nineteen months, with continued Twitch streams on Thursday nights, a couple of publications, and plenty of gigs and freelance editing and teaching to keep me busy.
Potentially the only good thing about the COVID-19 quarantine procedures that have been put in place by various states is a chance to reevaluate personal and professional projects and to reshape our lives as we telecommute and find ways to make up for our lost income as gigging musicians and teachers. I am luckier than most in that my income stream has been pretty diversified for several years. My gigging, though an important component of my career, is not my sole source of income. The balance will have to shift for a while as I teach private lessons via Skype and Facetime and bid on more editing jobs to make up the difference.
In the past few months, several illnesses swept the school where I teach (before Coronavirus had started its rapid spread, we experienced a wave of various flu viruses and stomach bugs that kept many kids out for a week at a time). Some of these bugs got to me from the sheer proximity, and they forced me to slow down. In those moments, I recognized that I still wasn’t in an ideal work/life balance, and that, like most academics and working musicians, I was going to need to constantly re-draw my boundaries for myself. It’s not easy, and it starts with learning to say no–painfully turning down projects and focusing on what’s best for me in the long-run instead of in the short-term.
Now, Coronavirus is forcing all of us to build a new pace, a new mode of working and interacting, while we self-quarantine to slow the spread.
THE NEW NORMAL
I think we’re all quaran-teeming with ideas of what we’d like to accomplish (too soon for such a terrible pun?). For me, that means several things, but one of them is this blog, and working through my collection of antique sheet music to create arrangements for string quartet for our ever-expanding repertoire.
It began with inheriting the contents of my paternal grandparents’ piano bench (the piano itself lives at my aunt’s house–I’m lucky enough to have possession of my great grandparents’ piano, a gorgeous spinet that saw me through nine years of formal piano lessons, and which I am preparing to move to my house in the next couple of months once we get the living room carpeting replaced). There were sentimental songs from the early 20th century that possibly belonged to my great grandparents as well as popular music that my grandparents owned.
I started arranging many of these pieces for string quartet, since that’s my preferred ensemble, and I’ve been preserving and finding new avenues to perform this music. These pieces have a lush, romantic harmony–even if my brides and their families are too young to know this music (heck, I’m too young for it!), it ends up serving as a gorgeous prelude or backdrop for a cocktail hour at a wedding.
So, in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I wanted to share a couple of these tracks with you today; and, in the spirit of the holiday, I decided to share some Irish songs. These are from a book I found in an antique store a couple of weeks ago called Echoes from Erin: An Album of Ballads, Novelties, Comics (Old and New), compiled expressly for and dedicated to those who love Irish Songs.
Fun fact: If you are looking intently through a stack of sheet music in an antique store, and it’s apparent that you’re reading through the music instead of picking pretty covers to potentially frame and hang in your home, the owner of the antique shop will usually strike up a conversation about it. I’ve even gotten discounts on more beat-up sheet music before, because the owners are so excited to know that the actual music will be put to good use.
This is also how I got an incredible deal on my toy piano–the antique store owner told me that they would give me $50 off if I could play a piece from the stack of sheet music I had set aside to purchase, so I plinked out the melody of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” Sometimes it pays to be a classically-trained musicians, y’all!
The first one I wrote out for string quartet is called “You Brought Ireland Right Over To Me” by Ernest R. Ball (lyrics by J. Keirn Brennan) from 1917. I like to include the lyrics on these songs as flavor text for the musicians, even though we wouldn’t be singing them in performance.
The other song I wrote up for today is “My Irish Song of Songs” by Daniel J. Sullivan (lyrics by Alfred Dubin), also from 1917.
I should note that these tempo markings are totally arbitrary; they were just bpm markings I used during playback. Neither one had a metronome marking; both are to be played “Moderately, with expression,” and the sheer number of fermatas in each suggests that the singer/first violinist could employ quite a bit of rubato and rhapsodic flair with these, so long as they give clear cues.
Hope your St. Patrick’s Day evening is full of family and fun, even if you can’t go out and celebrate. Erin go bragh!
