Palaver Poppycock + Prattle 01

Home Life – Put my Llama Back!

"No, no.  You put my llama back!"

Symona hated it when anybody messed with her stuffies.  Especially when that anybody ended up being her kid brother, Sebastian.  Bastian could be a real pain sometimes.

"Since when are you allowed in my room anyway, Bastian?"

Bastian stuck his tongue out, but did drop the llama stuffie back on Symona's pillow.  "Llama llama was lonely."

"Was not!"  Symona really hated it when her little brother came in to her room.  This was her room, her sanctuary!  He had plenty of stuff of his own to play with, he did not need to be messing with hers!

"Sure he was.  Didn't you hear him calling?"  Sebastian cupped one hand to his ear and said in a sing-song lilt, "Baaaaaaaaaaaaa- stien!  I want to plaaaaaaay with youuuuuuuu!"

"Get out of my room, Bastian!"  Symona shouted.  Then, stomping her foot for emphasis, she added, "right now, or I am going to tell mom and dad that you were the one that broke the back patio door."

Sebastian edged past his sister, suddenly much more abashed, and said, "but Dad would skin me alive if he knew!  Don't tell on me!"

Symona rolled her eyes, and just said, "just leave Paco alone."

Symona never did understand why her dopey little brother wanted to play with her llama or her camel or any of the other weird, cool little stuffed animals her uncle Steve would mail from his travels.  She had carved wooden lions and giraffes from Africa, too, to go along with the giant stuffed sea turtle that actually did look kind of like a real sea turtle, just was soft enough she liked to use it instead of a normal pillow.

She had plenty of other things to think about that were a lot more important than keeping Sebastian out of her room, too.


Melody – Or, Naming Your Instrument

Symona had to decide on a name for her new flute.  She knew that everyone named their instruments.  It was something you spent so much time practicing and playing with that everybody she knew or had ever even heard of did it.  Heck, some people named cars!

Her old flute, the one she got after she had finally outgrown the Suzuki flute with that bend in the head joint that let the mouthpiece be in a pipe above the rest of the flute so her hands could reach the keys even though she was just a preschool kid.  That way, the flute could be full length, but she could still reach the keys.  It was not the most convenient way to hold a flute, but it was better than having to wait until she was old enough that her hands and arms were long enough to reach the keys on a full size flute.  And you could not just make the flute smaller, like they could do with violins or cellos and all.  There, they could use different stuff to make the strings so they would be the same pitch as their full size counterparts.  But if you made a woodwind instrument smaller, it got higher.  Like the piccolo being an octave higher than a regular flute.  That did NOT make it easier to play, either.  She had a piccolo, and she could play, but it was a lot harder for her to get a nice tone out.  It went shrill easy, and was harder to keep on pitch in tune, too.

She had been so thrilled when she graduated up to a so called real flute back then.  But just because she got a full size flute did not mean the one she got was the best.  It was just a basic band instrument made decades before she was born by a company called Selmer Bundy, back in nineteen seventy two.  It sounded okay enough, but did not really have the greatest tone quality.  It just sounded like the kind of flute kids would use when they started beginner band in elementary school, and she was even then at the ripe old age of six a lot better a player than most kids twice her age.  She knew, because she had a private teacher that kept challenging her, making her play pieces, whole pieces, instead of just sticking to the Suzuki books, though they did those, too.  Sometimes she would just have her do exercises that did not seem to be any music at all at first.  Playing scales, then intervals, going back and forth between odd fingerings.

Always it was about listening.  Listen to the tone you made, how it balanced with notes other people were playing, whether they were just doing duets for two flutes, or pieces for flute and piano, or in band, or finally even in the youth orchestra that met in the next county on Saturday mornings that she auditioned into last year when she was entering the fifth grade.  She had beaten out kids from high school to make that, and it made her feel so proud and special.  But she did not want to come off like she was too smug or thought she was too good for anybody else.  She knew she had a lot more to learn still, after all.

Besides, you could always find somebody who played better.  Like that nine year old from last fall's From The Top radio program.  She played like a professional, she was so good.  Symona thought it was cool that somebody as young as she was could have adults take her so seriously as a musician.  She herself still did not have that kind of acceptance, though she did get more comments about how mature her playing was all the time these days.  
Interlochen Vignettes – The Harp is On Stage

Katie played harp, and was always complaining that anywhere she went, everybody wanted to play with her instrument.

"It's a ten thousand dollar harp, people!  Not a toy!  Come on, are you really telling me you have never seen a harp before?"

Symona thought Katie should say something like, "You want to play my harp?  Just give me a minute to sharpen the strings up for you first" or some words to that effect.  Something cute to say "don't touch" while not being too mean.  But Katie was too sweet to say something like that.  No, last time she was on stage, Symona saw a line of fellow campers stretch across the whole apron of the stage all wanting to take a turn plucking the strings.  There was absolutely no way no how Katie was going to get her harp tuned in the fifteen minutes they got for break before the rehearsal would start up again!


     Bow Grip

     Let us take a closer look at the right hand.  One common mistake is to grab the bow too tight.
     You don't need to squeeze hard to hold it.  Use a "baby grip" that is just enough to keep the
     bow from dropping out of your fingers.

     The bow should only touch your fingers near the tips, never at the palm of your hand.  If you
     look closely at the image above, you'll see the bow is only touching the fingers in the lowest
     two phalanges.

     Also, your thumb should be curled so the top corner of your thumbnail is touching where the
     frog and bow meet.  You want the thumb to be like a spring.  

     DO NOT press with the flat, fleshy pad or let your thumb collapse.  Keep the knuckle joint bent
     like this:

Symona let the book cover drop.  That was just too weird, reading what looked like some kind of instruction manual that Chad had left on his chair.

Symona had to get back to packing anyway.  This year, she was going to get to go to Interlochen for the whole summer music festival.  So what if she had to wear dark blue shorts and hideous colored socks that came all the way up to her knees.  So did every one else, too.  The camp uniform was those corduroy dark blue knicker pants that fastened at the knees and a light blue or white shirt.  At least the shirt was short sleeved.  And the socks.  Color coded by what age you were.  Symona kind of wished she was a boy, at least the boys pants were long and went all the way down to their shoes.

Interlochen National Music Camp had been going on for years and years.  Over eighty in fact.  It was one of the coolest summer camps Symona could imagine, and she'd gotten in.  Yeah, she was only in junior division last year.  Fifth grade was not sixth after all.  If she was intermediate, the socks would have to be that bright red color that just screamed out "I'm a dork" from fifty feet away.  At least she wouldn't have to worry about that for a couple more summers.

Funny how the boys color coded by their belts instead.  And they let you wear Capri's or shorts too, as long as they were the right dark shade of navy blue.  Chad was forever forgetting to tuck his shirt in, last year.  Symona thought he did it on purpose, because he didn't like the red belt.  He was real nice, though, not running her off because she was so much younger than him.

Symona loved wandering around the Interlochen campus.  Pine trees were everywhere, and so were the squirrels.  She had never seen so many different colors of squirrels before in her life, either.  Gray ones, sure, but here at the Interlochen music camp, they had red and black ones, too.  Well, red was really just a dark, ruddy brown, but it was still a color she had never seen back home in Clarksville.

And they were fearless, those squirrels.  She would be coming out of a cabin or practice room and the little critters would dart right in front of her, chasing each other heedless of any people around.

Symona had found some cool treasure spots, too.  Like the Pan statue.  That one was tucked away on the back side of one of the paths, surrounded by a cluster of pine trees.  He looked almost like he had grown up out of a tree stump, even.  But it wasn't a just tree stump.  This statue was just a little smaller than a normal human man, but since he was perched up on top of what looked like a tree trunk with rough bark still on the outside, he ended up taller than any of the grown-ups.

He had a cute little set of pan pipes raised to his lips.  Just a single rank of closed pipes made up the syrinx.  Symona figured if it was real, it would sound more like a piccolo, they were so small.

She knew that the pan pipes were also called syrinx, which was syringes in the plural, which was the same word for a sharp needle like the one they used to give out flu shots every fall.  Symona hated those shots.  It was not because they hurt.  Truth was, when the nurse pinched her upper arm, then jabbed the needle deep into her muscle, she didn't really even feel the shot.  Maybe that was because the needle was so thin it didn't even have to poke through much.  Symona wasn't sure.  But the last time she got one, she had a messy purple green bruise on her shoulder for three days after the shot.  And she'd even gotten a smaller greenish purple triangle shaped splotch that mysteriously appeared at the base of her thumb the second day after the shot as well.

Why would she get two bruises from one shot?  That did not make any sense.  Sure, blood flowed, but it didn't make any sense at all that she would end up with traveling bruises.

Sebastian never got bruises.  He was a weird kid, too.  He would actually sit there and watch the nurse prepare the needle, and then give him the shot.  Like he didn't even feel it.  Or maybe it was that he got so used to needles when he was in the hospital when he was little that it didn't phase him any more.  Sebastian had had a bad case of pneumonia when he was two.  He'd been in the hospital for weeks because of it.

Sebastian didn't get bruises, but he did get under her skin sometimes.  At least here at camp she could get away from him for a whole lot of time.  Even with him being another camper.  First off, he was a boy, and boys had their own cabins.  And she was taking lessons with Jill Heyboer.  Dr. Heyboer actually.  She was actually from Missouri, where she was a teacher as Missouri State University and principal flutist of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra.

Symona knew she would love to be an orchestral flutist one day.  Most orchestras only had two full time regular flutists after all.  You had to be really good to get one of those jobs with a major symphony orchestra.

She had been playing flute ever since she was three years old.  Back when she first started, she had one of those Suzuki flutes with the u-joint that doubled back so the mouthpiece was actually a bit closer to the finger holes.  Actually, a whole lot closer.

She had been so proud the day she got her first "real" flute.  It was just a Selmer Bundy that had been made back in 1972, decades before she was born.  But Melody was a real flute, not one that doubled back and was too heavy in the wrong places.  Melody, of course, was the name she picked.  It was either that or Ariel.  And Ariel was a cute mermaid, but Symona didn't feel right calling her new flute a mermaid.  It was a sweet melodic instrument, so Melody just seemed more right to her.

Now, these days, Melody was long put away and replaced with an actual silver Burkhart sterling silver flute.  She would love a gold embouchure, but her Mom and Dad weren't ready to shell out that kind of money for her, even if her teacher said she deserved a better instrument.

Judges had written comments that actually said it was a shame she didn't have a better instrument.  It was so weird.