Have You Been Selling Your Fanny?

It’s been a while since I’ve had the experience of going to a school and knowing not a single one of the students. Even going to college, I knew a handful of people going to Tulane, yet there wasn’t a single problem with me getting to know the students at the conservatory. In fact, in nearly every class, students came up to me and started to introduce themselves. For the first few days, I wondered how I had stuck out as such a sore thumb, when I soon realized that the conservatory is both small, and that all students have a predetermined set of classes for each year at the school, and most students must have recognized that they’d never seen me in one of their classes. I was very very excited to start my first week at the conservatory (the glass building on the right).

But the friendliness is enchanting: every person I’ve met at the conservatory seems genuinely interested in maintaining a positive relationship with all the people around them, and regularly musicians ask to meet up for jams and to hang out. The first day I was there, there was an Israeli student present in the lecture and we talked for a little while, and I giddily tried to use all the Hebrew that I know, which got me in with all the Israeli clan at the school. Certain small, yet distinguishably present, groups of students from the same country form these tight knit bands, that although not exclusive, are very strong. The Israelis, the Latvians, the Icelanders…

The class that struck me most had a great introductory guest artist lecture attached to it. This semester, I’m taking a class called Advanced Rhythm, which solely focuses on the Indian Solcattu system, a method of examining all the possibilities of the segmentation of a beat. Each segment has a syllable associated with it that depends on how many segments are represented per beat. One way of describing one is the 16^th note, which seperates the beat into four equal segments, and in this system is represented by the symbols Ta-Ke-Di-Mi. There’s seperations of 5 (quintuplets, Ta-Ke-Ghi-Na-Ton), 3 (triplets, Ta-Ki-Te), and so on and so forth. Then these different patterns can be laid on top of other patterns to get complicated polyrhythmic or polypulse combinations.

This class had a guest artist come in to the conservatory to do 3 lectures, which progressively got more complicated. B.C. Manjunath, a Mridangam virtuoso, talked about the various possibilites of Solcattu and how the oral tradition of Indian Music passed on such rich and intricate sounds.

While going to the school, Sean was still in Germany. Coincidentally, not having someone around for the first few days of school was beneficial towards me getting acquainted to my schedule and getting situated, so that when he came back on Wednesday, I was settled in as comfortably as I could be. 

The next day was my Thursday schedule, a day of class that starts at 11 am and goes all the way until 6 pm. Upon coming back to the Funenpark, my apartment building, I was trapped, along with 3 others, in the elevator after it jolted several times. While I spent 45 minutes locked in an elevator with a girl who was starting to go into hysterics and two musicians with dark senses of humor who were coyly making remarks to the aforementioned girl, I tried to get an idea of what Sean and I were to do that night. That night we went down to a lovely Thai place, Sawadee Ka, and topped off the evening with Gluhwein, a spiced hot wine popular in many parts of Europe during the winter, sitting on the balcony overlooking the Leidseplein, one of the centers of night life in the city of Amsterdam.

Friday, I went to an ensemble and the moment it ended biked to meet up with Sean, where we travelled to the museumplein, which houses our next stop: the Van Gogh museum. We first stopped at a cafe in the plein and I had this goat cheese panini, as it was described in the menu. When it arrived, I was presented with a large hot slab of warm goat cheese, roasted vegetables and fresh bread. As the picture showed, it was delectable. 

We made our way to the museum and I took in some of the most beautiful art I’ve ever seen. Though parts of the museum were under construction, there were too many beautiful Van Gogh prints and occasional masterpieces by some other painters, including some by Monet, which were just fantastic. The textures and detail in each print were exquisite and unmatched, and where still life can be just so bland from most artists, Van Gogh’s were unbelievable.

We departed the museum 3 hours later and made our way to the Museum of Optical Illusions, which Sean had read about, and was located on the 6th story of a book store (which included Schindler’s Lift…). The 2 euro entrance fee was the most worthwhile fee I’d paid the entire trip, with the interior of the museum containing original MC Escher prints and some mind-boggling images. There was a certain levity in the museum’s presentation that indicated some sense of humor and humility, and made for the most pleasant experience. Included in the museum was a room that had these foam black shapes laid out on a table with several photos of various formations that the pieces could be arranged to on the walls…I think. The thing was, is that Sean and I were unable to get close to matching anything that was up, and nothing in the museum had any description, so if you couldn’t figure it out, you were at a loss.

Afterwards, we went to the movies and saw a film called Tyrannosaur, actor Paddy Considine’s feature film directorial debut. It was unfortunately a mess in response to the direction, with truly poor sequencing causing some of the most disjointed and uneven filmmaking I’ve seen in a long time, though there were extremely strong performances in the two leads, who were actors that I’ve never heard of. In the film, an old social outcast widower living somewhere in Britain angrily threatens a group of rude youngsters at a bar and in running away meets a woman who owns a shop whom he befriends. The film tackles some social taboos pretty face on, and there are some strong moments and monologues, as well as great scriptwriting, but its all detracted by the shitty direction and the misuse of film score.

The end of the movie signaled the end of our night, as early the next morning we were en route to Bruges.