Organ Concert

I had commented to Debby last year that I hoped to hear an organ concert some day at Benaroya Hall's 2500-seat main auditorium, which houses a Fisk concert organ (tracker action, 83 stops, 4,490 pipes, three manuals). The organ was delivered shortly after the hall was built and had its first performance in 2000. The organ required 50,000 hours of labor.

Debby found a classical music program she thought I'd like that involved organ music and we got some nice tickets for Sunday afternoon. Music Director Gerard Schwarz (retiring after this, his 26th season) conducted the Seattle Symphony in four pieces: Brahms' Shicksalslied, Strauss' Thus Sprach Zarathustra, Saint-Saëns' Organ Symphony, and a new world premiere offering.

The Strauss piece is inspired by Nietzsche's philosophical allegory of the same name. Its opening theme, octaves over fifths, was used as the opening theme of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a fitting setting for Strauss' musical dramatization of human evolution. The Saint-Saëns Symphony #3 was written as a tribute on the death of Franz Lizst, which explains the inclusion of both piano and organ.

These three noted romantics number among my favorite composers. We got to hear the acoustics of the hall being well-exercised by the Symphony Chorus backing the orchestra in the Brahms and the organ supporting the Saint-Saëns and Strauss. The hall and its organ were conceived on Maestro Schwarz’s watch, as much a part of his large Seattle legacy as is his music making. We are pleased to have been to two of his concerts in our short time here. Sunday’s was a treat.

Awaiting the Maestro

 

We showed up an hour early to hear a talk by a local music critic attempting to explain the difference between classical and romantic music. In a nutshell, he thinks classical music deals with external reality as it is, while romantic music deals with internalized fantasies of the real world. Also, it appears that much of classical music tends to the formulaic.

We enjoyed the lecture and the concert. That big organ rocks. Afterward, we grabbed an early dinner at Wild Ginger, an Asian fusion restaurant across the street. That worked well for avoiding the crowd exiting the hall. The Vietnamese hot and sour fish soup, together with a Boom Boom Syrah, capped a really nice afternoon. (Flamboyent ex-rock promoter and now Walla Walla vintner Charles Smith has been likened to a wine cartoon, and it is said he is about to be immortalized as a Pokemon character, but his outfit makes deliciously affordable Syrahs.)

Further concert notes are posted in Areas of Interest, under the Reviews page, where I allow myself to wax obsessively about details.

From Portland, It's C is for Cookie

Cool evening, Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery, great venue, rain held off, hundreds of 50 and 60 somethings under the stars, crowd well-behaved, nice syrah to wash down chicken tikka masala kebab, songs in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Mandarin, Ernest Bloch duet, Sesame Street song medley with Emile Delgado, China, and 14 of her friends, hot trumpet and guitar, bone-rattling bass, friends to share with, and guess what - play the accordion and go to jail - not! What better way to end the summer than with Thomas Lauderdale, China, and Pink Martini live?

Some of My Favorite Music

Back in the early 90s I was perusing the vinyl collection at our local library and found an apparently unplayed album called American Eyes by a group called Rare Silk, a jazz vocal quartet backed by bass, percussion, and keyboards and other soloists. I played it repeatedly and became hooked on the sound - to me unique and eclectic.

Rare Silk was founded as a female vocal jazz trio in Boulder CO in 1978 by local jazz vocalists Marguerite Juenemann, Gaile Gillaspie, and Marylynn Gillaspie. Benny Goodman in a 1980 interview claims to have 'discovered' them. Whatever the story, they opened for the 71 year old Goodman and his septet in a Boulder concert and toured for a while, appearing with Goodman at Carnegie Hall, Boston Symphony Hall (aired on PBS), Aurex Jazz Festival in Tokyo, Chicago Jazz Festival, Playboy Jazz Festival at Hollywood Bowl, a USO tour of the Far East, and possibly others. By 1982 they had added a fourth member Todd Buffa, who was to influence their artistic direction. This mixed quartet and backing three piece band performed at the Breckenridge Jazz Picnic in 1982 and the next year entered the studio to record their first album in 1983, New Weave. It was nominated for a Grammy in 1984 as both best new jazz vocal group and best jazz vocal arrangement. The recording augmented the seven person core group with outstanding session musicians Bruce Forman, Gary Bartz, Ronnie Cuber, Larry Feldman, Dave Charles, Michael Brecker, and Randy Brecker.

See the Reviews:Music pages on my Areas of Interest site for further details of this group and their music.

Stream of Consciousness Connects Some Dots

We watched a movie last night, The Devil's Miner, a streamer from our Netflix instant queue. It was our second streamer on our new Netflix box for receiving movies over the Internet, a birthday present from Ben and Zhanna. Thank you guys so much.

The movie is a documentary about the harsh life of a Bolivian family living at the mines at Potosi. The story concerns the amazing coping ability of a fourteen year old boy who works the mines on the late shift to support his family, while attending school in the mornings. The sub-story is about the religious duality of these miners. They are Catholic outside the mines. Yet each mine has an idol of a devil god, called a Tio (because the Indios' native alphabet has no D). The miners give ritual sacrifices and daily bribes to appease the Tio inside their mine, for they fear God’s influence ceases at the mine's entrance.

This duality brought to mind a book I read recently, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, a surreal Faustian tale inspired by the surreal life of Muscovites in the 1930's Stalinist CCCP, dealing with the different faces of good and evil, if they are really different. Notes on the book can now be found on the mo'foo blog, under Books page.
 
Back where I started, the Netflix box is connected via our wireless DSL modem to the internet. I ordered online an HDMI cable for video between the box and our 720P display. The stereo audio is streamed via optical digital pipe to the AV processor, which does a 5-channel conversion of the stereo input for 5.1 effect before forwarding to the speakers. Right now we have 1.5 mbps maximum downlink speed which gives 3 out of 4 dots on the quality meter in the box. This gives acceptable video, but the manufacturer suggests a minimum of 2.0 mbps downlink speed. After we move, we will get the higher bandwidth service and see if we can get all 4 dots on the meter.

This leads to a final observation on retail marketing sleaze. Not wanting to wait to order the HDMI cable online, I called both Radio Shack and Best Buy to see if they sold HDMI cables. Yes, they do, but they are excessively greedy; their price ranges from $50 to $80 for one cable, their price tag for instant gratification. So I ordered from the Internet for $3.18 including shipping. My new cable gets an A+. Best Shack gets an F-.

Music Education

I made two small decisions last night, to resume piano studies and to get my music studio somewhat functional. The latter decision was prompted by the keyboard not being connected the studio, requiring me to unplug my headphones from the studio and plug them into the keyboard synth for each practice session. Problem solved, after some re-cabling and moving of furniture to get cables to reach. Now I can hear myself practicing on either studio monitors or studio headphones. See the Studio pages of my other blog site for studio details.

Practicing some chords and scales after a year layoff from my studies, my fingers at first didn't seem to remember what to do. But in five minutes, their muscle memory came back perhaps half way. Amazing. I had taken three semesters of group lessons at the local JC a while back, and will continue with self study for the immediate future.

My first goal is to be able to play well some simple pieces that my children played in grade school. One of their books, Eugénie Rocherolle's Simple Pleasures, always appealed to me. I had a couple of these pieces well in hand before I last set aside piano work, so perhaps this spring I will have some success (success at the 3rd grade level, that is. sigh.) My intermediate goal is to be able to play something by Brahms well. Hah, I'm still searching for something simple enough (in its original un-simplified form) that I can reasonably take aim at. Such may not exist.

In conjunction with keyboard practice, last week I purchased the music textbook Tonal Harmony. I checked some college bookstores online to see what book was in vogue, and TH is The One. I found a nice used 5th ed. with CDs for under $30, in unread condition. Also, yesterday I purchased a old 3rd ed. of Kennan's Counterpoint book for $1 to use as a change of pace. It's in pretty nice shape, looking unread except for some highlighting in the intro, and with bumped corners. Thanks, Amazon used books.

Overall, I know most of the information in TH, but not at a crisp, working level. That's my goal. I used to have Walter Piston's book on Harmony from my college days, but I recall not getting much out of it and apparently gave it away at some point.

It seems I have many interests that I visit cyclically, as I am revisiting keyboard practice today. When getting absorbed intensely in something for a period, it starts to get old. Then I leave it temporarily and move on to the next. I envision my interests in a circle, and I eventually get back to the one I just set aside, at which time it seems like a new adventure again. I did not start out with this large circle of interests, but have added them along the way. The circle may get larger yet. I don't see it contracting.