⇦ FOLLOW? ⇨

I think yesterday was the first time my friends and I had a disagreement with Neil. T, H and I had extra practice last friday because Neil called for it the night before and told us it would be better if the 3 (out of 4) of us rehearsed first. Flawed logic because a quartet needs 4 people, but we agreed nonetheless.

When the quartet met yesterday, he asked C (who couldn't turn up) to play and let him hear. She played the part accurately and correctly, but TC kept saying, "No, it's too slow." "Why does it sound wrong?" "Can you try again?" "No, what I meant is (starts singing what he wants to hear from C which was super hard to emulate)". Even after a while C was starting to get mildly irritated because she had tried so many times and kept wondering what's wrong (when there's nothing wrong).

Eventually, it was getting no where and I told Neil that C was playing correctly. She wasn't playing too slow nor too fast; she was playing at the same speed we played when we rehearsed on Saturday. He started becoming very irritated as well because it seemed that we did not understand what he was hearing from his perspective and he was like "...Amanda can you explain what I mean?". OMG.

As we were all disagreeing over the tempo (the quartet vs Neil), I suggested that we pick a fixed tempo, for example crotchet = ? to act as a reference so that we know approximately what tempo to play in. You could see Neil trying to control his temper when he said that he didn't want the piece to be played in strict tempo and it should be akin to how a person would sing it (ie. more 'free'). I said yes, I completely understand, but it seemed that we were all in different tempos so a reference would be better since the tempo marked on the score (crotchet = 80) wasn't the tempo we were using. Then he was like "The tempo is crotchet = 80. Don't ask me about the tempo."

By this point all 4 of us were quite riled at his attitude and responses so we decided to let Neil give us the tempo he wanted (faster) and he clapped while we played. In the end he said "It sounds better. But  now it's too fast." When we gave feedback it was actually manageable and more fun, he said "But it's too fast and the individual instruments aren't really 'singing'." He f-ing gave us the new tempo -.-

Since C had the solo at that point, I suggested that she picked the tempo where she felt she could manage the solo, and we would follow because it wasn't hard for the rest of us since we worked on that on Saturday. When everyone agreed, Neil finally said "Oh yeah. Ok."

We got it on the first try and it was perfect.

Sigh what my teacher said about how working with Neil could be potentially difficult was right.