Another Holiday, sort of

“Is this is what you do with Eter­ni­ty?” asks Andie Mac­Dow­ell.

It’s Ground­hog Day, again. As I’ve often said, it’s one of my favourite movies of all time, part­ly because I think that Ground­hog Day with Bill Mur­ray is actu­al­ly a very seri­ous movie mas­querad­ing as a light, fun­ny movie. If I were ever called upon to teach a course in say, ethics or karmic redemp­tion, that film would def­i­nite­ly be on the syl­labus. I par­tic­u­lar­ly love it because it man­ages to ‘teach’ a les­son with­out being preachy or con­de­scend­ing.

It was a good day today, one I would­n’t remind reliv­ing (although not for­ev­er, to be sure).
There was the review in Geor­gia Straight. And it did­n’t rain today. A pat on the back from the boss did­n’t hurt either.

Expe­ri­enc­ing a law of Musi­cal Eco­nom­ics
I’ve been going to Game­lan rehearsals twice a week now, because of our upcom­ing con­cert on Feb­ru­ary 21^st. It’ll be at the UBC Muse­um of Anthro­pol­o­gy. In fact, I’m learn­ing first­hand a rule that my father has cod­i­fied after many years of per­form­ing music:

Arno’s Law of Remu­ner­a­tion
The amount of mon­ey that you will receive for a con­cert is inverse to the amount of effort expend­ed in prepar­ing and giv­ing the per­for­mance.

This means that if you don’t work hard on a con­cert pro­gram, if it’s some­thing you’ve played many times and comes togeth­er eas­i­ly, you’ll be paid well. If it’s hard music that you have to prac­tice and rehearse a great deal, for­get about any pay­ment. My father played Gersh­win’s Rhap­sody in Blue many times. So many times, that the last 10 or so per­for­mances were prob­a­bly a snap, and sure enough, they paid well. But if he played Schoen­berg’s Pier­rot Lun­naire, or per­haps Leon Kirch­n­er’s Sonata Con­cer­tante for Vio­lin and Piano (I remem­ber that was incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult because I turned pages for it but I real­ly liked it nev­er­the­less), he did­n’t get a pen­ny.

The music for this con­cert that I’m play­ing in on the 21^st is very hard. Yup, I’m get­ting bup­kis.