| Rant: Neighbors
I live in a pretty nice two bedroom apartment in St. Paul with a roommate (bassoonist) and dog (beagle). There are a couple of units in my building and I'm on the bottom floor on the corner. The first thing I did when looking at the place was ask my landlord if it would be ok to practice. She said yes, during reasonable hours. When I moved in, the first thing I did was introduce myself to the two people who share a wall/ceiling with me (one above, one to the side). I gave each a business card and told them to contact me if it were ever too loud, or if something came up and they needed silence (visitors with a little baby, somebody is sick and trying to rest, etc...) That was in September.
In November, the neighbor upstairs came down and said that the dog was doing a lot of barking and it was disturbing them during the day when I wasn't home. I took a number of steps to solve the problem, the problem has largely gone away (out of curiosity, I left my computer microphone on at lo-fi and recorded about five hours of the little guy at home by himself).
I don't practice a whole lot, maybe 2 hours a day, during the day time. Sometimes I have friends over for duets. Very occasionally I have a few people over to play through Mancini quartets. Never a word from the neighbors. Again, I've been living here for five months.
Today I had a friend over to run through a Bach cantata that we're playing in a few weeks. About a half hour into our practice session, I get an angry knock at the door. I open it to find my upstairs neighbor, looking frazzled and pissed off. She launches into a rant about how she's been "suffering" through my practicing since September. Apparently there life has been a living hell, all because of me. Mind you, this is the first I've heard. She demands I stop practicing. Period. She never wants to hear the sound of the trumpet again. Apparently her husband is sick and couldn't sleep, and that was the last straw. I offer to stop practicing until her husband feels better. Not good enough. "You have to stop. This can't go on." Suppressing my gut instinct, I bit my lip and didn't strangle her.
I called my landlord and this is the first she had heard of this, no complaints to her either. My landlord has also heard me practicing, from outside and inside (while doing repairs) and has never said anything about it being too loud.
I have my recording equipment set up, and there's really nowhere else I can go to practice. I could have scheduled time at the schools I teach at, but that's a lot more difficult to do in February than it is to do in September. Argh. They have an irregular work schedule, as do I, so it's more than an issue of practicing during the day when they're not home. Hopefully we can work out a compromise. Otherwise they're going to find out very quickly that the trumpet is an instrument of war....
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