Klarinet Archive - Posting 000048.txt from 2001/08

From: "Rien Stein" <rstein@-----.nl>
Subj: [kl] Re: I'm baaack!
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 11:36:22 -0400

Dear Lacy

I envy you! So much time to play the clarinet! In very good weeks I manage
to study six hours a week and play two times two hours (effectively probably
less than 5 quarters of an hour) a week in the two bands I am with. I used
to visit weekends organised by the "Vereniging voor huismuziek", the Dutch
Home Music Association, two or three times a year, but prices of these
weekends have risen so much I cannot afford to go there any more so now I go
occasionally to play-ins.

The most intens I ever did was a weekend of wind quintets. We started to
play at ten in the morning, the program went on till ten at night with
intermissions for food and tea or coffee. After ten we formed duets,
quartets and so on and at two thirty in the morning we played with a little
group (nine people I think) the little symphony by Gounod. At nine the next
morning we all sat behind our stand and played again.

Another beautifull, very intens weekend was a weekend clarinet choir. That
Saturday the program ran only till nine at night, but then several of us
combined into clarinet quartets, -trios and so on, and we continued till
24.30 (00.30?). In the same building was a weekend of Jewish music and
dance, and when we were in the bar the leader of that group, Shura Lipowsky,
an all to unknown singer of Jewish songs outside this country, started
humming. Someone started dancing, another one took his recorder or violin,
and I, as I know something of Klezmer music, got my bass clarinet. Nobody
was in his bed that night before 5.30. And sit ready and fresh again at nine
the next morning ....! But the final concert, at five that noon was not
really a success, of course.

The band in Maartensdijk, where I live, will exist 80 years in 2003, and
especially one man and I are already very active in fund raising for some
great celebration. We will have much money by that time, somewhere between
15 and 20,000 dollars will be available. It was my suggestion, to make a
concert tour through some countries, play in market places in Freiburg (that
was before I knew David Glenn lives there), Basel, Prague and other places.
Alas reactions were very negative. Now we are making different plans, I even
started a composition for this particular wind band and a tale teller. The
tale teller is someone who lived in Maartensdijk several years and is a very
well-known tv personality.

My ideal would be to go to some music week. The weeks of the Home Music
Association are too expensive (I am jobless), but it seems Joseph Baloch in
Budapest organises very particular weeks the last week of July and the first
week of August, so maybe next year I will visit one or both of these weeks.
If my wife consents, of course.

But would I like to be a professional, and spend all my time on clarinet
playing? No. Because I simply don't have the talent to be a pro. If I would
like to be a pro, if I had the talent, I cannot say of course. At leat you
have a very important occupation in life: beauty. But then beauty not only
is an occupation, it also is an obligation ...

Rien

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