As of yesterday, I have been here for one month! The days are much busier in the studio now. Trevor keeps adding more and more exercises to our daily practice routines and on top of learning new repertoire and etudes every week, we can barely get through it all. He kindly asks if anyone needs a do-it-yourself suicide kit yet when he goes to the store. Yesterday he told us that we are all sounding better than we did when we arrived here which is a compliment that makes all the hard work worth it! We have weekly listening projects and are now starting to do the research for the big term paper on the history of the flute. This week, one of my assignments is to learn the fingerings on the baroque flute. We have attended two flute studio classes at the Royal Academy of Music in London now. One was Shashank, the Indian bansuri artist, and the other was William Bennett. It was great to finally hear the famous WIBB! Flute class at the academy lasts from 10am to 6pm. I think students just reserve the entire day for it!
If you’ve been watching the news, you may know that blue-tongue disease has hit the UK for the first time ever. It is very sad because once an animal gets infected by a fly it must be killed to try to stop the spread of the disease. It would die in three weeks even if the farmers didn’t kill it. Luckily for us, humans cannot be infected, but recently, it has been as close as 15 miles from our village and we hope it doesn’t come any closer!
Some people from the village (Sue and her 11-year-old son, Robbie) came over to teach us the card game, Whist. Students from the studio usually participate in the village Whist tournaments, and our first one is this Friday at the pub. This is how we will get to know some of the villagers. Our other big recreational event for the past couple of weeks was watching the French film, Jean de Florette. It took us three sittings to get through the whole thing because it’s about four hours long and because the electricity went out while we were watching one night. It’s sort of depressing, but very good so I recommend it. Last Sunday evening we had the other students over for taco night at The Dairy. Lindsay and I have been craving our staple Mexican food so we introduced it to the other girls and I don’t think they had ever seen anything like it. We even made sopapillas for dessert.
Last weekend we ventured to Preston in Northern England for a masterclass with Robert Dick. He’s probably the best-known composer of contemporary flute music and genius at extended modern flute techniques. The event was put on by the British Flute Society who invited us to come for free. His lecture was very interesting and he played a concert of seven of his compositions. It was extraordinary to hear him perform them. Since it was a small group, we got to go out to dinner with him and really spend time talking to the man who is helping to shape the future of the flute. The only downside was the seven hour train ride each way getting there and back, but we were excited to see more of the country and to stay in a hotel room for a night!
We also went to Canterbury a couple of weeks ago. It’s 9.5 miles from where we live, but we’ve only been once so far. The main road we took to get there was built by the Romans 2000 years ago and is still heavily traveled by cars today! We passed the Chaucer Hospital on the way. I did not know that Canterbury is basically a big outdoor shopping mall. The big cathedral there is the main attraction, but we have not explored that yet. Tonight we are going to a pub where we will hopefully get some authentic fish and chips. I’d better go finish practicing before we leave! I hope everyone’s doing well back home. As they say here, Cheers!