I just got out of 282, and I'm busy thinking about Tristan und Isolde. I'm not completely familiar with the story, so I'm not sure what all is said about the nature of their love, what with the (current) implication that love potion causes fake love. Thinking through it, though, it seems that the point is more the sameness of love and death. Falling in love, for the two characters, is the same thing as dying, just a slightly more protracted method. How Romantic. You know, I can't think of a real tragic love story, where it's tragedy because it's love. I have a kind of essay thing on my computer about how the Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliette is used to point out that love is Romeo's tragic flaw, or excess. It points this out by comparing it to more obvious tragic flaws, like lawyers who become greedy and soldiers who develop bloodlust. Yes, I wrote this for my own enjoyment. Shut up. In any case, though, this one feeble insistance is not really sufficient to bring the first half of the play into the realm of tragedy when it prefers to live in the realm of comedy. The idea of tragedy is predicated on an excess of something (for the context), and I've never seen that with love. Romeo and Juliette stops being a comedy when Mercutio dies because Romeo refuses to fight Tybalt, but there's nothing really tragic about it. With Tristan und Isolde, the notion that love and death are the same thing makes their deaths more pathetic (literally, not colloquially) than tragic, since the death isn't caused by the love if they're the same thing--the death is caused by the potion. I'll shut up about this now.
In other news, there's a masterclass tomorrow with Manon Lafrance, a new trumpet player with the Canadian Brass. I am greatly looking forward to it. Lafrance is a woman, too, which is something I don't really care about, but is still likely relevant to her situation, since I don't think she's *that* young. I can only think of three professional musicians who are female trumpet players that I've met and didn't go to school with. One was a teacher one year at MusiCamerose, one is Angela and the other is Wendy. Neither Angela nore Wendy make their living as trumpet performers. I remember Doug saying, once, when he was still at the U of A, that music is often thought of as a feminine pursuit in this day and age, what with the expressiveness and emotion and such. It's all so odd to me. I tend to think of myself as somewhat of an end product of feminism. You've convinced me that gender roles are not binding, and that I can enjoy being girly or not as I wish, and I am capable of whatever I want within the laws of physics. In most ways, this is a good position to hold. In other ways, it makes me want to yell at people "You got it done, now shut up!" I appreciate that many people overcame adversity, and, largely, they're better for it, but this isn't an adversity that every woman has to overcome, especially if they don't care about it. Now talk about playing the trumpet, or whatever it is you're good at.
(There's a guy sitting in the row in front of me in the lab working with Cubase. That was the only portion of my Music Technology class that I did poorly on. I got a 64% on the MIDI assignment and an A- in the course. Cubase did *not* like me.)
Lastly, Bob DeFreece handed in his resignation/retirement letter on Wednesday. Despite the fact that this is my last year, that kind of saddens me...
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