When I asked an acquaintance why he was having so much trouble committing to acquiring a new cat, even though it was something he repeatedly expressed a strong desire to do, he replied that, as a man ‘of a certain age’, he fully expected that, even if it didn’t outlive him, his next cat would be his last. In that frame of mind, he certainly didn’t want to rush into such an important decision and eventually ended up agonizing over it for more than a year. When our music director’s contract was extended until 2022, as a musician ‘of a certain age’, I realized that either he or his replacement would be my last. Fortunately for me, as a rank and file player, I won’t have a lot of agonizing to do, but the decision isn’t entirely without consequences. And the arrival of a new maestro is an interesting time to be in an orchestra - sort of a chance for the dispassionate observer to play Jane Goodall minus a trek through the jungle - certainly an experience to savor one last time.
Esa-Pekka Salonen came to town a few weeks ago, conducting some heavyweight repertoire - Mahler 9 and Verklärte Nacht were the mainstays - which might indicate somebody in the organization has their eye on him as music director material. I like Salonen for the post, both as a conductor and composer, but also for a more insidious reason. As the arrival of the current music director prompted a number musicians to take up the study of Italian, I wonder if a new era might see a similar interest in the Finnish language emerge. Unfortunately, the US State Department Foreign Service Institute lists Finnish among the group of languages most difficult for English speakers to learn. According to the FSI, in order to become conversant, a student of Finnish might expect to put in about 44 weeks, or 1100 hours of study. I think it would be very interesting to see if any of my colleagues would take up the challenge. Coincidentally, since Finnish is related to Hungarian, and both are from outside of the Indo-European family, there is a certain pleasing symmetry to the idea I might end my career just as it began, under the baton of a maestro speaking one of the Uralic languages.
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The Bass Blog now has a Facebook page. Nothing much to see there at the moment, but hopefully that will change in time.
2 comments:
Actually, 44 weeks of training is standard for most languages at FSI (that's five hours in class every day; it's your job for a year). Though some of the super-hard languages like Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean involve two years of study before you begin your assignment. OTOH, a few languages - notably French and Spanish - usually only come with six months training. The goal in each case is to get you to Level 3 speaking and reading, with 5 being the level of a well-educated native speaker. In any case, Finnish is hard.
Thanks. I’m breathing a sigh of relief that Finnish isn’t actually an easy language to master.
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