Mending the Deck Chairs on the Titanic – A Plan of Action

06:44 So, where are we in the scheme of things? Forthwith, for your delectation and enjoyment, some of my thoughts as I was getting up, on June 3, in This Year of Grace, 2023… 🤔

Got about a third of the way through the following: Debunking Viki Male: Part 1 and opined the following:

Reading off a computer screen is a miserable business, only got a third of the way. Going to have to print it and read it. But even just that far, for this failed musician who thinks too much I find I’m asking myself my stock question – the one I’ve been asking myself for three years now – over and over and over:

“How can I trust a medical doctor, or anything they tell me, ever again?”

06:49 Meanwhile what was I thinking on arising…?… It’s Saturday = the yard will be quiet and largely absent of personnel. Why not take the d’amore with me and get to work on it?

Trouble with that swell plan is where do I practice it otherwise? In this shoebox apartment with its paperthin walls? And thinking as well I don’t have my copy of Evelyn Rothwell’s Bach: Difficult Passages (lost somewhere in the move, hopefully I’ll find it again some day) nor do I know what happened to my copy of the excerpt from Ravel’s “Bolero” (ditto)… and I can’t help but wonder at Evelyn’s selection, because “Bolero” isn’t in Volume 3 (Modern Works) of Difficult Passages, anywhere.

(Boy, that was fun! NOT. Just wasted 30 minutes looking for the Oboe II / Oboe d’Amore part online.. and I couldn’t find it! The above is a cellphone picture of the graphic I found last week.. “Share, and enjoy”🙄…)

Come to think of it, neither is the oboe solo from Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin” – hands down the most difficult oboe solo in the orchestral repertoire.

‘Course I’ve wondered about Evelyn Rothwell (the one recording I had of her was reminiscent of a comb and paper), ever since I bought her Oboe Technique when I was 14, and gasped at how she could write a book with such a title… and amongst other things, include no fingering chart, of any description… 🤯

Never mind a recommended progression of studies or pieces…

07:04 Be that as it may… Bloody Hell.. How.. How!? Have they managed to make the Internet so bloody useless? Do a search for the oboe d’amore part for “Bolero” …

Scroll down a bit to get past the obviously useless stuff, find a bunch of links that look promising.. but none of them will take you to the actual music. Try Google “Images”? Sure, a whole bunch of interesting-looking tiles. The second one was an instant “favorite” for me:

The first image looked the most promising, it’s got “Hautbois II aussi Hautbois d’amour en La” on it and despite my best attempts not to learn French growing up in Quebec, I’d somehow managed to absorb enough to grasp that…

But click on it, it takes you to this:

Always. Wherever you go, whatever you do, there’s some sleazy sticky-fingered grifter with their hands out for your money.

Had to resort to the Linux Screen Capture tool which I discovered recently quite by accident.. press the “print screen” button (unlike Windows it actually does something) and you get this lovely little rectangle you can adjust the size of and an on-screen button to click on to give you an instant picture. The result was fuzzy. But usable… and I continue to rejoice in the thought that, having used Ubuntu Linux almost exclusively since July 2020, I am no longer contributing to Bill Gates’ bottom line – don’t think for a second he truly let go of Microsoft. He’s not that philanthropic. 🙄

So I seem possibly to be starting on one of my “Mending the Deck Chairs on the Titanic” endeavours; working up a pile of stuff from the solo repertoire and posting it on YouTube:

• Bach’s Partita in A minor for Solo Flute – on the oboe d’amore. High A’s going to be a bit tricky.
• Bach’s Sonata for English Horn arranged from his Viola da Gamba sonata BWV 1027. Ordered, should arrive from Europe in a couple of months.
• Telemann’s “Method Sonatas” for Flute – on oboe.. well, some of them anyway.. 2 fat volumes of 12 sonatas I paid a small fortune for ($120.++). He probably churned them out in a day or two. But they’ll take me on the other hand weeks if not months to build up.
• Bach’s monumental (actually just about everything he wrote was monumental, even the trivia…🤔) G Minor Sonata for Oboe – on which the Flute B Minor sonata was based. The G Minor was lost to history but one Raymond Merylan reconstructed it.
• Krebs’ Fantasia for Oboe and Organ.
• Poulenc’s Sonata for Oboe – For some reason listening to this piece I find myself thinking of some tenor saxophonist playing in an smokey, intimate 1950’s-era jazz club at about 2 in the morning…
• Hindemith’s Sonatas for Oboe and English Horn… was there ever a composer more cerebral than Hindemith? J.S. Bach, possibly. But I can’t think of anyone else.

• Saint Seans’ charming Oboe Sonata – alas, nowhere near as serendipitous as his bassoon sonata. But I don’t have a baritone oboe so I can come close, nor am I ever likely to own one. Maybe work it up on the baritone saxophone once I’ve resurrected that one I inadvertently bought off eBay… ? In the immortal words of Monty Python: “Sure, no problem.”
• Schumann’s Fantasiestücke originally for A clarinet, on d’amore.. That written low B♭ is going to be a bit tricky though… 🤔 Wonder if there’s someplace with a square piano I could do this with.. and give me an excuse to buy an ensemble from “Steampunk Emporium”.
• Schumann’s Three Romances for Oboe … ditto…
• How about Clara Schumann’s Romances ? (originally written for violin?)
• And let’s round everything off shall we, with Georges Gillet’s Studies for the Advanced Teaching of the Oboe… 😱💣🤯

Altogether? A mere bagatelle, should only keep me busy for at least the next 2 – 3 years.. and I need to find an accompanist, a pretty blonde girl of 22 – 23 with huge breasts, or at least unusually large ones… that way the viewers will have something nice to look at, my corpulent 64-year-old frame pleasing no-one, least of all myself.

Puerile and libidinous fantasies aside, a far more salient concern is finding an accompanist who hasn’t taken The Lethal Injection. Besides her spreading spike proteins to me, I have no need nor wish for her to drop dead from a vaccine-induced myocardial or stroke in the middle of a recording. 🤔

The other vexing question of course is “where do I find the money to pay her?”

*…..*…..*

09:04 Glenn from Dispatch called, could I sub from 11 o’clock on? These calls seems to be ramping up as The Lethal Injections begin to take effect; thus a 12-hour shift coming up, time for a little lie-down, before heading off to work…