Germany | Gillian Grassie - Singer Songwriter Harpist

Posts Tagged ‘Germany’

Counting the Places I’ve Laid My Head: 2010 in Numbers

// January 14th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cool Stuff, News, Travel

2010 was an immense year for me on many fronts, marking both the bulk of my Watson Fellowship experience as well as my first national tour. I’ve been struggling with how best to approach a year-end retrospective. Since most of my blog posts tend to be longwinded affairs and because January is supposed to be about both fresh starts and self-reflection, I’ve decided to examine the year 2010 in numbers, maps, and graphs. Mind you, I’ve never worked so hard to suck at anything in my life in quite the same way as Calculus, so this has been a bold undertaking. My rules in arriving at the figures below were that a location only counts if I spent at least one night there. Places I passed through in transit do not count. Enjoy!

Here’s a nifty google map marking the stops on my journey:

(You can view a larger version of this map with all the cities listed & twitter excerpts narrating each location!)

I thought it’d be fun to break down all that travel by modes of transport. The mile estimates, especially in terms car travel, err on the modest end of the spectrum. I actually put 16,000 miles on my car during the three months of the North American tour, but for the purposes of this blog post I was only calculating direct distances between cities. I didn’t feel that I could accurately track the miles I logged by autorickshaw in India, so, sadly, the long, hot, stinky, noisy, fume-filled hours I spent squashed under my harp & fearing for my imminent demise in those three-wheeled, two-stroke wonders of modern transport are not included.

miles traveled in various modes of transport. Notably, most of those bus miles were logged in Indonesia.

While my carbon-guilt is great for having flown over 13,000 miles, I was slightly mollified to learn that I actually logged MORE miles by public transport (those 600+ miles spent on boats & ferry’s really sealed the deal). The grand total for miles travelled in 2010? 39,155

Other Facts & Figures

Continents Visited: 3
Countries Visited: 9
Cities Visited: 79
U.S. States Visited: 28
Languages Spoken (mostly very badly): 8
Currencies Held: 8
Hospital Visits: 2 (one for rabies post-exposure treatment in Indonesia, the other for a mystery virus in India)
Passports Stolen: 2
Consular Interventions on My Behalf: 1 (Thanks for getting me out of Russia, Wilma!)
Human-sized Hampster Balls oggled in Tyumen: 1

Now, I know this is a far cry from the wizardry of an OkCupid Trends post, but cut me some slack, okay? I was a Comparative Literature major! That said, if there are other calculations you’d like me to try and approximate, I’m open to giving it all of my XKCD-loving spirit.

Happy New Year!
-Gillian

First German Review!

// November 27th, 2009 // 4 Comments » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Performances, Travel

Many thanks to Das Consortium, the wonderful Musikkneipe in Hamburg/Harburg who hosted me for my last performance in Germany. It was a totally lovely evening playing for you all and I’m completely blown away by these very kind words from the venue:

“Diese Frau ist wirklich Megaklasse. Die Kombination aus filigran gespielter Harfe zu einer Stimme, die sich mit weltklass Stars vergleichen lässt, und einer Titelauswahl, die einem jeden Zuhörer den Mund vor Staunen offen stehen lässt. Musik zu Versinken in seinen schönsten und/oder auch emotional einfühlsamsten Gedanken. Brillant! Danke.”

Can’t wait until our paths cross again (and I promise I’ll have worked more on my German by then)…

Vielen Dank,

Gillian

Recording by the Black Forest

// October 21st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Cool Stuff, Music, News, Travel

On Sunday night I returned to Mme Claude in Kreuzberg for their open stage and ran into Dorothea, a fantastic German singer-songwriter fresh out of the Jazz & Rock Schulen Freiburg – a contemporary music conservatory that has a popular exchange program with (and similar curriculum to) the Berklee College of Music in Boston. We got all fired up talking about the independent music scene in Germany and closed the bar at Mme Claude, met up the next night at another open stage, Arcanoa – where Doro wrote a new song upstairs in the smoking room on a borrowed guitar – and by Thursday I found myself rolling South on the highway with my harp for a weekend of recording at a studio in Freiburg where Doro’s been working on her debut EP.

Pippi!

We stayed with some old friends of Doro in this awesome student complex with a big mural of Pippi Longstocking on the front wall and an elaborate squatter camp next door, complete with organized art events, political demonstrations, and its own wash-your-dishes-and-it’s-free “Café,” where I had one of the best cups of Chai in my life (ask me again after India). Across the street was a very modern office building powered entirely by solar panels, which, fittingly, housed a group of dedicated environmental organizations. To say that this university town near the French border is preoccupied with saving the planet is an understatement; Freiburg has become one of the de facto capitals of the international Green movement. Environmental issues dominate the daily news in both print and radio, and the city elected Green Party member Dieter Salomon as their mayor. Bikes rule the streets and a short trip outside the city will lead you into the heart of the Black Forest (think Brothers Grimm).

the patio/balcony. a sign hangs above that reads 'Occupied' in German, and a large banner with a quote from Brecht hangs on the fence

I got to see a bit of the Black Forest in all its winter glory on a drive to a town an hour outside Freiburg where we rehearsed with Doro’s guitarist. As the road climbed up into the mountains we suddenly found ourselves pulling out of the thick clouds into a world of white, snow dusting the conifers and fallow fields and trapezoidal barn roofs. I had the best meal of the trip so far that evening, though it’s hard to say if it was the delicious food or the three bottles of wine or the new friends or the fact that whenever I looked outside I felt like I was living in a fairytale gingerbread land. Before we headed back to Freiburg to lay down some tracks, we took a drive out to see an old castle and stood along the banks of the Rhine River, looking across into the Swiss Alps (don’t worry, Watson, I didn’t cross the border!). The water had that gorgeous glacial glow, a sort of blue-green that seems somehow milky, like frosted sea-glass.

Schwein!

Growing up on a farm, animals –lots of them – have basically surrounded me all my life, and one of the few downers of this year of travel so far has been the critter-withdrawal I’ve been going through. So I was elated when Doro got a phone call from another old friend and asked me if I’d be interested in visiting a little farm nearby that afternoon. I think I was probably even more enthusiastic than the two year-old we were with about seeing the piglets, and the goats, and getting kisses from bulls (seriously, these were the sweetest, gentlest bulls I’ve ever met, a whole pen of affectionate Ferdinands).

the Koes in Normandy weren't into Knufflen, but the bulls in Freiburg were all about the kisses

If anyone can identify exactly what kind of pig this poor, unfortunate-looking dear is, I’d be very curious to know. We found two of these guys in a pen, with curled tusks, a big, bristled back, and kind of squashed, pug-like faces with a serious brow-bone.

poor dear, what are you?

Later that night, we went out to a performance by Lindsey Blount, a jazz singer who came over to Freiburg from the U.S. through the Berklee exchange. If you have a chance to see her perform in the U.S. (Philadelphia, I’m talking to you), you really must. She is a total treat.

doro laying down some piano in the studio

The trip to Freiburg finished with an inspiring day in the studio, tracking accordion, piano, and harp for Doro’s songs. I feel really grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Doro, who writes beautiful, interesting, strong songs with both German and English lyrics. As soon as she finishes mixing down a few of the tracks and posts them online, I’ll put up a link here and you can listen for yourself. It was exhilarating to have the good fortune to meet such a cool artist and be able to take her up on such a wonderfully spontaneous offer – all within the span of a week! Serendipity has been on my side lately, and I hope it sticks around, because one of the most incredible things about the Watson Fellowship is that it has freed me to accept fantastic, last-minute opportunities like this one, and granted me a spirit of flexibility that I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed before.

setting up mics for the harp

Berlin has been extraordinary, in part, because, despite a long history, it’s still a very young city in many ways (November 9th will mark only the 20th anniversary since the fall of the Berlin Wall). There is an energy here of constant change and reinvention and opportunity; it’s a very creative atmosphere, and this combined with the fact that it’s still an affordable city to live in lends Berlin a gravitational pull for artists of all sorts. The general consensus is that the arts and music scene in Berlin now is comparable to that of New York City in the 1980s. But there is also a sense here that the moment is fleeting – how long will it be before Berlin’s housing market becomes gentrified and beyond the reach of low-income artists? Do we have five years? Ten? Once a city’s rent climbs past a certain point, the creative arts scene invariably changes; artists become less experimental and collaborative and more competitive, accepting the types of commissions and bookings (and day jobs) that pay the bills. The low-rent factor that helps permit Philadelphia’s music scene to be more community-oriented is one of the reasons I prefer it to New York’s.

But this acknowledgment that Berlin’s creative heyday is probably not indefinite lends its own sense of urgency and earnestness. Doro, and I, and the other artists I’ve met so far agree: it’s exciting to be here, now, at this age, in this moment.

Experimental Music at Mme Claude, Berlin

// October 14th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Music, Travel

Last Monday I headed out to Kreuzberg to check out the experimental music night at Madame Claude – a small, quirky bar and music venue off of Skalitzer Strasse. When I got to the club, I paid a nominal, three euro entrance fee, got my hand stamped and walked down the stairs into a room that had been decorated so that everything was topsy-turvy, with all sorts of objects stuck to the ceiling and walls to give the appearance that you were in some sort of Alice in Wonderland World where everything was upside down. A row of pots and pans hung upright on the wall behind the bar, along with a backwards clock. Elsewhere in the room there were all sorts of things stuck to the ceiling (bolts? Super-dooper glue?), among them a pair of white high-top sneakers, a coffee table set up with chairs, and a David Bowie record.

pots and pans hanging up behind the bar

I bought a delicious bottled beer at the bar (for under 2 Euros – beat that, Paris!) and followed little black signs with “Live Musik” and arrows printed in red type through the lounge/bar area to a tiny, cobblestoned, blackbox basement of a room where a dark-haired, serious woman sat at a table, lit by a single old-fashioned lamp. She was fiddling with two Macs (a laptop and a desktop), a keyboard, and a few other pieces of equipment, making soundscapes of pulsations and fuzz – like deep space radio static, or a pack of hornets at the end of the world. I kept waiting for her to add in other sound elements, but she did so very rarely; a snip-it of a French woman’s voice announcing at the train station, then nothing for at least ten minutes, then an Asian flute, some chanting.

Emmanuelle Gibello performing her electronic soundscapes at Mme Claude's

I’d been exposed to music like this before, during an electro-acoustic composition workshop at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival back in 2001, but the notion of it as a live performance art was new to me. I kept looking around at the other audience members to try and find some cues for how to go about appreciating this sort of performance. Some seemed as baffled as me, our eyes catching across the room. They looked down quickly with embarrassment while others flashed tentative smiles, hoping for someone else to confirm their assessment that “this is really weird.” The wandering eye contact acted as a catalyst for a mass exodus of sorts from the room – people left in groups of two over five minutes.

Listen to \"Bleu\" by Emmanuelle Gibello

But others sat on the floor with their heads between their knees, reverent, or perhaps seasick. This is how I felt – the latter – as though the sound waves reverberating against the fluid in my eardrum were enough to give me motion sickness. Maybe it was. Still, this was not violent sound in the way of some music. I watched one young man in a checkered flannel shirt fold his coat on an overturned wastebasket – a recently vacated seat – and lay his head down on his arms. Another guy in a bright green sweatshirt under a sports coat leaned back in his chair with his head against the wall and seemed to fall asleep. One young man left the room quickly, as though he too was overwhelmed and seasick. In his haste, he knocked my foot quite hard from where it rested, crossed over my knee. He didn’t pause to notice the sudden contact. Others filtered in and took his space.

live musik

I remembered the time a man passed out at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. From the balcony, I saw him slump in his suit in the center of the fifth row during an aching, slow movement (I wish very much I could remember the piece). The woman beside him called his name a few times, each repetition growing in volume and panic, until she cried out for somebody to please, call a doctor! The pomp and circumstance of the classical music world was, however, so ingrained in tradition that neither the orchestra nor the audience was quite sure what to do. The notion of interrupting a performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra was such a taboo that it actually took a long minute for the musicians to stop playing and the audience to start moving to help this man and his frantic date. After the man had been carried out on a stretcher, the conductor seemed stumped as to whether he ought to re-start the movement, skip it, or try to pick up where they’d left off in the score.

In a strange way, sitting on the grimy floor in the basement of Mme Claude’s felt a bit like going to the orchestra. There was a familiar anxiety among much of audience, an earnest desire to do the right thing but not certain what that might entail. The Classical music world can feel rigid to audiences because of its long-steeped tradition, but this experimental music is tense for the opposite reason: it’s so new, with so few rules, that all the freedom can create feelings of awkwardness too. Do we clap between “movements”? Can we leave in the middle of the “set”? Can we enter? Do we have to watch this woman fiddle with her knobs, or can the performance become more of a physical experience? Are we supposed to feel seasick? We all look to each other for indications of appropriate aural consumption behavior, wary like the person unwrapping a cough drop in a concert hall, the miniscule movements of crinkling paper deafening.