Perth

21. Perth, north of the Firth of Forth (Sep '05)

Get out your Scotland maps, it's time for another geography lesson. This time I'm in the Fair City of Perth, in the centre of the country, north of Edinburgh and Glasgow, south of Inverness, and convenient to cities, mountains, and ocean (so says the tourist guide). I've decided to keep moving until I've sketched out a connect-the-dots picture, joining all the places I've lived in Scotland. So far I've made a sea cucumber. I'm aiming for a flamingo, but that would require some heavy mountaineering, to pitch camp on the top of the Grampian mountains, so I may have to settle for drawing something without a central nervous system. Like a stick.

So: Perth. A small city, only 40-50 thousand people, but huge compared to where I've been. Compact-yet-bustling town centre with numerous shops, eateries, and even a live theatre (which is where Ewan McGregor got his start). I haven't seen a single sheep wandering through town, alas, let alone up on the stage, but I haven't given up hope.

My reason for being here is that I'm doing a music degree course at Perth College. It's a fairly large program (75 people in my year) and it will give me a solid foundation in theory, music history, recording, ensemble work, improvisation, music business, etc, with the eventual goal of possibly performing, but more likely teaching. And maybe some composing. Or composting. I couldn't quite read the small print, and there's a suspiciously lush garden in back of the school. Although with some people, their composing and composting turn out to be one and the same. Hopefully it won't be that way with me.

I've had one week of class so far. My favorite bit has been the instrument lessons (of which mine is keyboard/piano; there's no harp teacher, alas. But really, a piano is just a harp with an exoskeleton). The teacher is a character! He's only 5'4" tall, but he's impossible to overlook, because his personality is like a popcorn popper without a lid: spouting music knowledge and trivia into the air, tossing kernels behind the stove as he goes on wild tangents, and cracking your teeth on the unpopped kernels of his painfully bad puns. He's given us a Herbie Hancock piece to work on, which I'm sure requires an extra hand to be grafted on in order to play the thing properly. There's no mention of hand surgery on the syllabus, though; maybe that's not until next year.

And just because this first week hasn't been busy enough with meeting everyone, finding rooms, and going through the first-day-of-class-bureaucratic-rigamarole, I played cello in an orchestra all weekend. It's an amateur group called (appropriately enough) Scrapers and Tooters. They're based in Edinburgh, but came up to Perth last weekend for an intensive workshop. Professional performers coached us in small groups from 10-5 on Saturday, and then we all met together for a full orchestra rehearsal on Sunday morning, and performed two short pieces at the new Perth Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon. We were, I think it is fair to say, a bit like a herd of wildebeest; all galloping in the same direction, and at roughly the same speed, so that from a removed perspective you would say we were a homogenous whole. Zooming in to a close-up, though, you would hear all the various beests bobbing up and down on their individual trajectories in the mass of bodies, snorting and huffing, and every now and then crashing into one another and taking a dissonant tumble. Thankfully, nobody was snatched up and eaten by a lion, so the weekend turned out all right.

Add into the general confusion the fact that the house I'm staying in doesn't have a phone line (the phone company puts me on hold for 15-20 minutes every time I try to get things sorted out, and plays horrible musak, on a 50-second-long loop, Grrrrrrr! I must be in Dante's 3rd level of hell, the one reserved for musicians who can't keep up with the other cellobeests in their orchestra). So my emailing abilities have been severely curtailed. I'm only getting through now because of a highly creative and technologically sophisticated logistical solution...ie. staying with a friend and plugging into her phone line.

And finally, my little car, which has been an uncomplaining trooper for all the miles I put it through finally gave up the ghost in one shuddering, heaving, fluid-spurting breakdown. So any travels I do in the near future will have to be via bus or train. Which is fine, really, because I'm content to be immersed in all of this musical creativity; practicing my scales and working on growing that third hand!

Love,
Andrea

p.s. My new contact info (again, write it in pencil; Perth is great, but this abode is not ideal):

23 Crammond Place Perth Perthshire PH1 3BN SCOTLAND

+44 (0)1738 444 877

Andrea Blumberg