There�s no place like home!
12:04 a.m.
First of all I must relate a very funny thing that happened at the Montreal airport on the way out. Going through security I placed my coat, purse and knapsack on the conveyer belt to go through the X-ray machine. The man asked me if I had anything in my pockets, so I dug my hands into said pockets and pulled out a �Melon Medley� Blistex Fruit Smoothies and announced in what was probably a too-loud voice, �Lip balm!� He said that was okay and waved me through the metal-detection arch and I was on my way. It wasn�t until I was relating this incident to Hubby a couple of days later that it occurred to me how funny and potentially serious it was. I think if I had been anywhere else, security would have been on me in an instant.
At the Calgary airport this afternoon I walked through the arch with nary a peep and said jokingly to the woman with the wand that the metal plate in my head hadn�t set off the alarm. She said to me, just as Hubby walked through the arch, also silently, that his buns of steel hadn�t set it off either.
Because we were at the conference to perform, which meant we had to practise and rehearse, I didn�t get to very many papers. But I did hear the ethno-musicological session on Thursday morning and found it extremely interesting. Tom has been researching the Moravian Innu in Labrador, and his presentation was entitled �String Quartets and Seal Oil�. A woman from another university delivered a paper on drum songs and how they are passed from generation to generation through the mothers, even though the songs are predominantly male produced. The key-note speaker for the symposium is also an ethno-musicologist, and talked about how the act of recording has biased the recordings themselves, even among the earliest attempts to get aboriginal songs onto wax cylinders. It was fascinating. This is a field that I think I could get very interested in.
I also attended the composers round-table discussion, and got all heated up adding my two cents� worth about how we should not have to rely on government funding for composition commissions, but should be approaching the private sector which seems to have no qualms about plunking several thousand dollars down on paintings and sculptures of questionable artistic value. There was one composer at this session who talked in a rather self-aggrandising way and I could just feel the undercurrent in the room that he was causing. He was extremely annoying. That night, at the competition winners� concert he had a piece played which the players hated and which the audience received rather cooly (albeit politely). Hubby�s piece, on the other hand, got rave reviews from the players and the audience, and this particular colleague would not talk to him for the rest of the duration of the conference. Some people! Sheesh!
Our own concert went incredibly well. I remember complaining last fall when I was preparing the Rossini arias because they were so damned hard! They�re still hard, but I must have improved, or at least they have settled into the voice. The two that we performed, along with the Giuliani piece, just went so effortlessly. Now I would like Hubby to transcribe the arias from the other Rossiniani by Giuliani, and maybe even plan a series of concerts, just as string quartets perform Beethoven cycles.
On Friday night we attended the banquet, held at a lovely Italian restaurant. Unfortunately we got there a little late and couldn�t sit together, but on the other hand it gave us both an opportunity to talk to different people. He had a lively discussion with the Toronto composer John Beckwith, and I got to talk to one of the voice teachers at LU, the clarinettist, and the president of CUMS. Wonderful warm people. The tenor and I discovered that we have many favourite movie actors in common. I tried to convince him and Peggy that they really ought to try Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, since sopranos shouldn�t have a monopoly on that one. He was skeptical. Last night there was a closing party at the home of one of the LU profs, a fitting end to the conference. I got to enjoy some more adulation, which is always nice. But as much as they liked me, they loved Hubby and his guitar playing.
The drive from Lethbridge to Calgary was extremely pleasant this morning, except for my having to make a rather desperate pitstop at Ft. McLeod (a glass of orange juice and two cups of tea at breakfast, I need say no more). The same countryside that we traversed in the dark in a blizzard just a few days earlier was a beautiful sunny grassland with the promise of mountains in the west. Ah the Rockies! Our flight was uneventful, arriving on time in Montreal, where we dropped off Isabelle�s case and retrieved Hubby�s, and then arrived home at around 10:00 p.m. I am looking forward to sleeping in my own bed tonight. There really is no place like home.
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