A return to the blog
April 26th, 2017
This site has lain dormant for many years, and yet, I haven’t stopped doing things! In fact, I’ve been doing more than ever.
Most of my professional life is now dedicated to tuning – I’m taking care of all the harpsichords and the fortepiano at McGill University, which is a huge job. There are 19 instruments that I tune regularly, some only every few weeks, but some of them get done two or even three times each week. This time of year, there are also several extra tunings each week for end-of-year recitals. The undergrad exam period is just about over though, and then just a few graduate recitals in May before the school year officially ends. The harpsichords won’t stop going out of tune though!
Besides McGill, I’m tuning regularly at Bourgie hall, for the Fondation Arte Musica, Ensemble Arion, and others. In the past two weeks, I’ve been moving around a lot – tuning in Boucherville, on Montreal’s South Shore for the Orchestre Symphonique de Longueil, a few repairs in Ottawa, and this week for a run of shows at the TOHU – a show blending Monteverdi operas with the circus! I’ve often had to tune with distractions from other musicians warming up, technicians arranging the stage and testing out lights, audiences arriving… but never with people doing backflips right in front of me!
Along with the tuning, I have several other projects on the go that I’ll be writing about shortly, if all goes well. Some programming, some woodworking, some performing. What made me want to get back to this web page and blog was the realization that I’m doing some interesting things these days – interesting to me, anyway. Some of it might be interesting to others as well! Even more though, it’s that in all these activities, I’ve benefited immensely from things other people have put online. Programming tutorials, how-to videos, performances, etc. I’d like to give back, if I can, so that someone else, trying to do similar things to me, might stumble across my writings and maybe get some help to move their own projects along.
