Thoughts | Sometimes a girl needs a pair of drumsticks...

The Rad Cam from the window of Jesus' music room... My view from the drummer's seat...

 

Last Monday, I was desperate for a pair of drumsticks. 

 

 Let me start from the beginning… 

 

 

 There’s a lot of music at Oxford. It is a feature of the city that I don’t think I’ve been able to appreciate properly until very recently, and I think that’s because everything about Oxford is so different from every other place I’ve ever lived at before. At Newcastle, for instance, I frequently had the opportunity to see some of my favourite bands at local venues, something that just doesn’t happen here. The Oxford O2 hosts a lot of covers, and bands I never heard of before in my life. One could argue that Oxford is more of a “classical music” sort of place, but even when I take this into account, back in SP, one of my favourite things to do was going to see the Symphony at the old Station Julio Prestes. I was watching to one of the best orchestras in the country, at one of the most beautiful concert halls in the world. The Oxford Philharmonic just doesn’t have that stature. 

 

 And yet, Oxford has a lot of music. Mostly classical music, sure, and mostly at venues that are not as grand as what one might expect, but still… There are dozens of churches in town, most of which have their own series of concerts and recitals. The Holywell music room (which I haven’t visited yet) puts up free concerts every Sunday, and the Sheldonian (although it is not, by any means, a comfortable venue) has a packed schedule, particularly at term time. There’s more choral music here than I think I will ever find in any other place where I live in the future, and every now and again, the University is able to lure world class performers to this town. Twice I watched to Steven Isserlis at the Jaqueline du Prè music room, and a couple of weeks ago I watched a singing masterclass by Humanitas Visiting Professor of Voice & Classical Music Joyce DiDonato.

 

Joyce DiDonato...

The event was sold out by the time I heard about it, but I showed up at New College Chapel anyway, and managed to get a spot… I had watched masterclasses in person before… A cello masterclass by Pieter Wispelwey at São Paulo… Benjamin Zander’s at Boston. But it had been a while, and this one was extra special, because I have been learning a lot about singing since I came here, and Joyce DiDonato was the one performer the music teacher at Jesus College recommended I learned from. That’s he said, when he told me to start practising individual pieces: Voi che sapete, by Mozart; Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix, by Saint-Saëns; or any liede song by Joyce Didonato. So yeah, I was pretty happy to watch her masterclass.

 

It was a day full of firsts… I had lunch at the alternative Tuck shop for the first time (an experience I am eager to repeat, for it was truly an excellent sandwich), watched to a classical singing masterclass for the first time, visited the T.S. Elliot auditorium at Merton for the first time… That’s where they held the talk with Joyce, after the masterclass, which had the expected audience of mostly elderly people and a few enthusiastic aspiring artists. But there was a chance to ask questions after the first part of the talk, which is always nice, and the thing I asked her was whether she incorporates other art forms – other than music – into her life as an artist.

 

New College's antechapel... I have to keep getting back there... The picture doesn't do it justice.

I noticed how taken she was by the ambience at New’s antechapel. I think I’ve become accustomed to being surrounded by these types of buildings now that I live here, but every now and again, seeing that type of wonder in somebody else’s eyes has the potential of reminding me that this is a great place in which to write a part of one’s life. That being said, the most prominent thing on my mind when I asked the question was myself, and my struggles with my novel… How part of the reason why I was even there was because I am (at least in part) an artist, and I think there is value in exposing myself to forms of art other than my own. But her answer didn’t really speak to me all that much… She talked about how she enjoys things like dance and photography, because these are forms of expression in which she is not required to make a sound, and therefore there’s no responsibility to excel. It’s just… liberating… Which is fine, I suppose, but it’s something I can’t relate to at all, because even when I dabble into something that was never meant to be my main thing (like I do with the cello, and with singing for that matter…), I always strive to be good. I always believe I can be good, very good, and I don’t think I would want to be a different person when it comes to this (a person who doesn’t believe they can be good at anything they try), but it does mean that I have a hard time finding that… that freedom, that professor DiDonato described.

 

Well, then the weekend came. 

 

That weekend, I spent several hours at the College’s music room with Jacob. I had no idea how that was going to go. He plays the drums (later I found out he plays a bunch of other instruments as well), and I play the cello (sort of), and if he had suggested this merely a month or two ago, I would have said no… But since then, I joined an orchestra, despite my better judgement, and it’s been better than I could ever have imagined. So I’m keeping myself open. Taking chances. And our jam session that Saturday was a blast. 

 

View from my spot when I played with the Turl Street Orchestra last term. That was such a high!

But here’s the thing: one of the things we did that day was show each other a little bit of our instruments. That means that he showed me how to play the drums, at least a little bit. And it was great. It was easy… I don’t mean the instrument was easy – it’s not. There’s a lot of coordination to it. But it felt easy and fun, and I didn’t really mind that I was messing up. It was easy to just let go of the prescribed rhythm and start pounding the drumsticks against the skin of the toms. It was that feeling of freedom I think that professor DiDonato described, which up until that point I had not really experienced.

 

Which brings me back to Monday. 

 

Things have been rough lately. I mean, things have been good, but also rough at the same time. I wrote about it before… And this Monday, I was itching for that feeling of release I got from my brief experience with the drums. I went back to listening to my hard rock ballads playlist and noticing the drums in the songs. I found a couple of drums covers I thought I could try and it help that the lyrics matched my mental state in the past few days. So I booked the music room for the end of the day, but when I woke up on Monday I realized: I didn’t have a pair of drumsticks. 

 

This was a problem. This is oxford. A brief google search pointed me towards a number of music shops, but I know those places, and I knew I would be 100 times more likely to find a piano or a violin than a pair of drumsticks in any one of them. But there was this place in Cowley called “The Music Box”. The pictures showed a lot of guitars. It seemed like that was the place I was looking for. Before I headed there, I stopped by HMV, which was on the way, but they didn’t have what I needed – not did the guy behind the counter know of any place that might. Off to Cowley I went. 

 

What you must remember now is that Oxford is not really a city. They call it a city, but it’s really more of a town. And towns close during public holidays. So, by the time I got there, I found nothing but a closed shop. 

 

The Music Box on Cowley Road... Sadly for me, closed during the Bank Holiday...

 

 

Not everything was lost, I thought. I was already at Cowley, might as well do another google search to see if there was someplace else, and indeed, a few blocks further there was a record shop/music cafè that advertised itself as a place that also “sells musical instruments”. Since it was a cafè there was more of a chance that it would be open, so I walked there, and it was open, but unsurprisingly: no drumsticks. 

 

Inside the cafe/record shop... I know someone who would love to spend some time in a place like this...

 

This was disheartening. I hanged there for a while, looking at the records, thinking that I haven’t been to this kind of shop in a while, and I really miss that, despite it being a little sad that I will now be doing this kind of thing on my own. But eventually I left, and when I left there were nothing but unkind thoughts on my mind. I thought back to my times in SP, when I lived a few blocks away from the music shops at Teodoro, and how this would never have happened if I still lived in a proper city. Thought about all of the ways in which Oxford can be disappointing and tiresome, and got angry, so angry indeed, that I was decided I would be slamming my anger on the drums even if I had to tape together some colored pencils in an improvised stick. 

But then, before I got back, it occurred to me that I might stop by Blackwell music shop at Broad street. The conductor of my orchestra mentioned that they sold music stands there. I knew the place caters to a more classical crowd, but still… it was worth a try. 

And what do you know, they did have drumsticks! 

 

Blackwells' Music... I should have known that lady Callas' album on display like that would be a good Omen...

 

They had just gotten a shipment, the sticks weren’t even out of the box yet. Oak, made by Promuco. I even picked up a free copy of Nightshift on my way out. And when I got home, about an hour before my time slot at the music room, I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. 

 

When I took this picture, I was balancing my new pair of drumsticks while holding the phone ;)

And just a few hours later, my brand new sticks were full of the indentations that only the sticks of a real drummer have. 

 

That was a good day.  I’ll be doing more of that. And I hope to enjoy more of the specific musical experience that Oxford has to offer. Watch some of the chamber concerts, the organ recitals,… See some of the covers at the O2 sometime. Appreciate the reasons that make this place special, because one day soon I will be done with it. And I wanna be the kind of person who lives in the present, not the kind who’s always waiting for something else. 

 

 

 Which of course means I’ll have to get the kick drum right at some point in the future :) 

 I must be feeling brave because here's about a minute of my day two as a drummer. Let's register this for posterity: