Better Than Nothing in Trichotomy

Chasing a lost cause

I started feeling stuffy down my chest on Friday, and stayed on the sofa for the whole day yesterday watching, amongst other things, FA Cup Match Of The Day and re-run of the Vienna Philharmonic NYE concert on TV. It may have to do with the low-grade ear-ache I’ve been feeling for a while. Nowadays, every time you catch anything respiratory, you worry about Covid. I’ve tested negative, but still bailed out of rehearsal today. We’ll have another rehearsal next week before a concert (hope I’ll have recovered by then), though it’ll just be me and a violinist and cellist. and then the week after that is the audition. The quartet won’t get a chance to all be together before the audition day, so it’s going to be… interesting.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had tested positive though, with Omicron running so rampant nowadays.

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You’ve Got a Match!

ENT pianist closed the audition sign-up today, so we get a sense of how many people are auditioning. It’s shorter this year, with 16 soloists and 8 chamber groups. By comparison, the last audition, we had 15 soloists and 13 chamber groups. I think we lost so many chamber groups because of covid - people can’t get together to rehearse - and that we didn’t publish the collaboration exchange. I’m thinking we should productionise the Online Collaboration Exchange (aka Tinder for Chamber Musicians), but I’m not sure how useful it’s going to be in its current incarnation. The problem is that it doesn’t notify users when they have a match - I am loath to write software that sends e-mail to people because it’s so fraught with risks (spams, leaks?) - but when I think back to when I used the dating site to find La Professeure, I don’t remember getting a notification about matching with her. So maybe notifications aren’t needed.

In any case, having some collaboration exchange is better than having none.

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Money plans

We’ll have a board meeting on the day of the audition too, and I”m sure we’re going to discuss the future of the orchestra. Despite losing a few thousand dollars (don’t know how much; hoping it’s less than 10) it looks like there is still interest in continuing the orchestra project. Maybe there’s a lot of demand for it? I don’t know.

But there had better be a plan to pay for it.

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