d.s. al coda

My former upstairs neighbor is a friendly guy who used to be in a rock band that toured the world but now is a music teacher in the Reykjavík schools. He also has a band that he conducts in the evenings, sort of a community affair. He kept bugging me about playing with them, and I always had language lessons, or other excuses, but finally we ran into him in the Hrói Höttur when he was picking up a pizza, and I just couldn't say no. So a month or so ago, I dragged out my old wooden Kohlert bass clarinet and went down to a rehearsal.

The crowd of players is an odd mix, with the youngest clarinet-tweedling kid not looking a day over 8 and the oldest stoic trombone guy pushing 80. But all the normal dorky music personalities are there, and playing in a band like that again brings me back to my old middle and high school days, all that good Alfred Reed and Gustav Holst, the smell of the old instrument when it gets warm, the dusty floor underfoot, the drummer who forgot a pencil. It's amazing how well the motley assemblage of people in a wind band translates from a Merrimack Valley childhood to the side of the pond in downtown Reykjavík.

Except that it's all in Icelandic, which makes the whole thing kind of an even-more-bizarro world for me than the normal strangeness of a strange wind band world. Icelandic even has its own wacky names for the notes. (Where a B is an H ["how"] and a B-flat is a B. And a C-sharp is a C-ís and an E-flat is a E-es. Gott og flótt.) But I understand what's going down reasonably well, and when he says "hundrað-sextíu-og-fimm" I know that's measure 165 and that's usually enough to jump in and play some big, bad, bass-clarinet-style sustained whole notes.

And then this week I learned that this isn't just any wind band. Not just some concoction of my old neighbor, but the storied Lúðrasveit Reykjavíkur, the actual City Band of Reykjavík. Representin' the Vík, yo. With our own landmark building and everything. During post-rehearsal beers in our very own building's rec room (somehow beers were never a feature of middle school rehearsals with Mr. Thayer), I learned that not only do we represent R-town (yo) but occasionally all of the Land as well. Cause who do you think plays the Icelandic anthem at Bessastaðir when the Prez welcomes heads of state? Lúðrasveit!