Life has changed in a big way

It's 8:17 a.m., and my four-month old son Taavi just woke up, for the third time this morning. Life has changed in a big way. In case anyone was wondering where I've been these last few months, let's just say I've been at "daddy boot camp." Not that Taavi isn't worth it: the sleepless nights, never having time to do anything at home, the feeling of guilt when I'm on the road and actually GETTING sleep, the hit that my practice time on the viola has taken. And yet, life goes on when new life comes into the picture. My quartet is still going strong. I don't know how I'm finding time to keep everything together, but somehow things are (mostly) getting done. And there IS something kind of exciting about playing Op. 131 Beethoven on three hours of sleep and a prayer.

the little guy, chilling in the bouncy seat

So, my travelogue continues. (I HAVE kept traveling while I've been gone from the blogosphere...) Before and after my son was born, the quartet cleared out about nine weeks from our performance schedule. This was awesome. There are plenty of things that we argue about in our quartet, but family is not one of them. I think because we have all made big family decisions to live in the same place, we all have great respect for one another and our family needs. When we talk about it, we all agree that long-term sustainability is the most important thing. I was so thankful for my "paternity" leave, however short. 

Swedish Tour

Taavi is now playing with a football-sized white fluffy stuffed sheep from Sweden. I got it there on our first-ever Swedish tour. We got back only recently: eleven days, counting the travel. It was a great trip. We played in Stockholm, of course, and in Lund, a big university town, but we also played in a handful of smaller towns further north. As an American used to traveling to the "classic" European travel destinations (France, Italy, Germany), I found Sweden to be shockingly unforeign in feeling. Practically everyone speaks English. The food is fine, but nothing extraordinary (well, not outside of Stockholm), and the Swedes love their fast food. My hotel room in Söderhamn had a big ad on the wall for their sports bar, "O'Leary's," including a large picture of a football player (that's American football). I might have been at the Comfort Inn in Topeka.

But that's not to say that Sweden is the SAME as the U.S. Perhaps it is the U.S. as some of us wish it were. Early in our trip, I had time to write some journal entries about the differences, and about what it felt like to start the tour, or almost not start it:

Thursday, March 27-Friday, March 28, 2008:

I'm writing this from my hotel room in Falkenberg, Sweden, the first stop on the Chiara Quartet's eight-concert tour of Sweden with clarinetist Håkan Rosengren. It's a small miracle that I even made it here to begin with. Let me explain: The whole quartet was split up in getting from our home, in Lincoln, NE, to Chicago O'Hare for our flight to Sweden. Greg, our cellist, couldn't fly with the group because United was being weird about the name he had to give his cello to book a seat for it on the international flight! (no, the cellist traveling along does NOT get his cello's meals…) So Greg and Cello Beaver both ended up on American Airlines to Chicago. Meanwhile, Julie decided that her violin was in need of an emergency adjustment. She changed her ticket to head to Chicago early yesterday, so she could go to Bein and Fushi and have them tweak the sound of her fiddle. 

So that left Becca and me. We drove from Lincoln with plenty of time to spare before our 5:20 p.m. flight. When we arrived at around 3:30, the United rep informed us (with a smile, of course,) that our flight had been canceled, and that our entire itinerary had been rebooked for the next day. When we protested that this would mean missing our first concert in Sweden, she said that she was sorry, but that United could not do anything, and that snow in Chicago meant that our chances of getting there on a later flight were slim to none. She suggested that we buy (!) two tickets on Southwest to Chicago's OTHER airport, Midway, and take a cab. After a few minutes of agonizing, we decided to buy those tickets. But here was the problem: the only Southwest flight that would actually get us there to make our international departure was fully booked, but we could standby for that flight, while our luggage would go on. Not promising, but it was our best shot.

Fast-forward through a long security line, and we found ourselves at the Southwest gate. We were settling in to wait when we saw an earlier (much-delayed) United flight to Chicago actually boarding, and even taking some standbys. We cursed out our original United rep under our breaths, and carefully asked if we could be put on the standby list. They put us there, and a minute later we were getting on a flight to Chicago.

But not without some hesitation. Our new decision meant that our luggage was traveling on a Southwest flight to Midway, while we would be headed to O'Hare.  Chicago is a big town, and the airports are far apart. We were concerned (each cab ride takes about forty-five minutes, under good conditions…) that we might make it to Chicago only to get stuck in snowstorm traffic trying to get our luggage while the connecting flight closed to new check-ins (and our reservation had been canceled, remember?)  Should we forgo the flight to O'Hare and stay with the luggage? But what if we can't get on that one?

Our guts told us to get on the plane, and as the United flight pulled away from the gate we started to pat ourselves on the back. We were feeling good. Great, in fact. There had been some setbacks, but both of us and our luggage were headed to Chicago. We had played the system and WON. Sometimes, these minor setbacks happen, but ultimately, things work out for the best, and all you really have to do is sit back and…"CHHHSZ, this is your captain speaking, we have just been told that due to ice on the runway in Chicago, our slot has been pushed back forty-five minutes. We'll just sit here and wait. But, you can use your electronic doodads…"

Clearly, we were in the thralls of one of those really cruddy travel days. And we started to second-guess ourselves: why are we sitting on the tarmac stuck on a plane, while another plane that contains our luggage and maybe could have contained us (?) is taking off for Chicago?…

Sometimes, the hardest part of a concert is getting there.

Long story short: We arrived at O'Hare (after some additional in-air delays), raced to a cab stand, zoomed to Midway, found our bags, said a few "Hail Marys," and zoomed back to O'Hare. We re-booked our flight to Copenhagen, twenty minutes before the flight closed, got on, and here we are. Total cost of this fiasco? $280 to book tickets on Southwest (maybe we can refund them?), plus $120 in cab fare, just to get to the flight we were always booked on to begin with. But it's okay, I'm sure United will pay us back for our troubles!

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Got up late. I am not yet in the right time zone. I had a free Swedish breakfast from the dining room of the hotel: crisp-bread, cheese, ham, beet salad, seafood deviled eggs, tea.  Then we left at 11:00 to rehearse for our three o'clock concert. Håkan kept telling us that we were playing in a school that wasn't very nice to look at, but that the hall sounded good. Well, I don't know what I expected, but the school was probably the most beautiful middle school I have ever seen. Everything in it was in the right place, tasteful, and friendly. We had the teachers’ lounge as a warm-up space, and this was NOT the teachers’ lounge that I know from my wife's work at a high school in Nebraska.  It looked like a model room at IKEA, with beautiful, well-tended plants everywhere, coordinated and cozy furniture, with places for people to actually relax, a fancy coffee machine (espresso, lattes, hot chocolate, etc.), and a full and pleasant kitchen. Were we in an alternate reality? Yes, it's called Sweden, and as we are starting to learn, things are just better here. 

We had a decent rehearsal (considering that we were all zombies still from the jetlag), and had some downtime to eat the baguette sandwiches and cardamom bread the presenter had brought for us.

I changed and started to warm up. The viola still felt a bit foreign in my hands, a symptom of the long travel day. But it was grounding to play it. As I played some Bach, and started to touch a couple of passages in the Brahms quintet, I started to become excited about what we were about to do (and do for eight more days): play for people, total strangers in a new place, and communicate without words.

The concert was a great success. Turnout was very high for this series (nearly two hundred), and the audience loved each piece. They honored the first work on the program, the Mozart quintet, with rhythmic unison clapping. We played [Gabriela Lena Frank's] Leyendas for them, and we felt their intense listening. At the end of the concert, even after the Brahms with its autumnal, resigned ending, we received a standing ovation. And—the biggest surprise of all—on stage we were brought, not flowers, but a local Falkenberg specialty: a clay ocarina shaped like a bird, made by the oldest pottery company in Europe. Then we signed CDs in the lobby and heard from many sweet people who care very deeply about music and had chosen to spend their afternoon with us. What an honor. We are very lucky.

We're big in church!

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Today was our only day off on the tour, designed to help us get acclimated to the time zone (adding insult to injury was that daylight savings began in Europe last night; I already "sprang forward" six hours, thank you very much).We took the X2000 high-speed train from Falkenberg to Lund and experienced the joy of European rail-service.  There was high-speed Wi-Fi Internet access from the train! I mean, Becca was able to have a Skype video chat with her husband and daughter in Nebraska while we were racing through rural Sweden. This is pretty crazy. 

Greg, the cellist in my group, masters the Falkenberg ocarina aboard the X2000

When we got to Lund, the quartet wanted to do some rehearsing, so we asked the hotel to use the conference room. It was in a basement, whitewashed-brick space, very cool looking, and showed the age of the building. Windows near the ceiling faced out on to the street, and as we started rehearsing Shostakovich's 8th quartet (a piece we are performing on Tuesday in Stockholm), we noticed a small group of onlookers listening from the sidewalk.

The Chiaras warming up before a concert in Sweden

We certainly weren't playing as if for an audience, we were rehearsing small sections of the Shostakovich, but it was neat to see the interest that these listeners had, even in watching us go through the messy process of rehearsing. This boded well for our audience the next night. It is nice to feel that no matter where we are, even in a place where we don't share the same language, that we can connect with people through music. The audience on the street listened to us try a dozen different ways to play the stark fugue that opens Shostakovich's 8th quartet. We didn't decide how we're going to play it tomorrow. In fact, we can't. We have to just trust in the shared experience of our rehearsal time, and hope that what comes out is inspired. And maybe it will be and maybe it won't. That may be one side-effect of a creative act: the outcome has the potential to be MUCH better than the intended, or fall flat on it's its face. We're fine with that, but we don't much like the middle ground between those two.

For dinner, we were invited to eat at the home of Eva Granstedt, the Director of Chamber-Music for Sweden. I'm going to repeat that, in case it didn't sink in: we had dinner with a woman who works for the government, organizing chamber music concerts around the country. Can you imagine if the US had a "Director of Homeland Chamber Music"? Or a "String Quartet Czar”? Certainly, some folks would oppose the idea as an example of wacko socialist policy. "Do you want to become a social democracy like Sweden?" they might ask. Um, yes.

Eva and her husband made a lovely dinner for us, including fresh fish from the ocean (less than a mile from their house). We talked (in English) about music, and the primary race in the U.S., and about reaching out to younger audiences, and about food. In short, it was a great evening. After dinner, we sat in their "listening room" at one end of a nineteenth century farmhouse, lit only with candles, and listened to a recording of the Borodin Quartet playing the Shostakovich Piano Quintet. They made good choices! They sounded like they would never be settled in their sound. The naked and uncomfortable reality of Shostakovich's life was laid bare in their recording, and we talked and listened, and it felt as though the Borodins were giving us a lesson in music and life through the stereo system. Not a bad way to cap our one day off. Now it's seven concerts in seven nights. No breaks, no sightseeing. But we are doing what we love.

That's where my journal ends. The rest of the tour got busy! The performances were exciting, the audiences great. Even in the smaller towns, the crowd was knowledgeable, appreciative, and engaged. Being away from my wife and son for eleven days was hard, but having experiences like these make that time away from home not feel wasted. One of my great wishes for Taavi, as he grows up, is that he finds work in his life that gives back to him as much as I feel I get back from playing music. That would make me one happy daddy.

P.S. On a quartet trip through Colorado in late February, I had a chance to connect with my old friend (and outgoing JAVS editor) Matthew Dane. He was wondering when my next blog entry would be complete. Well, Matt, it only took me another couple of months… Here we are, having brunch in Boulder.

Jonah and Matthew Dane