Meditations on Life and Music (Mostly Music)

Hey everyone,

Tonight’s program opens with me apologizing, for I have failed you. I was unable to be at the memorial concert for Professor Garyth Nair, and I’m sorry, for you and for myself. I did hear that it was beautiful and moving, as it should have been. I was at the Chorus in the Forest (oh boy was I), and so I can tell you that it went very well. It was a long, busy day, but we made some really cool music in a very short amount of time with some extremely awesome, talented folks of all ages, and it was a great experience. And I was only able to catch the first half of Chris Walters’s senior recital last night, because of RA duties, and that really is tragic because that guy is an excellent musician. What I did hear was incredible and demanding (it included a saxophone version of Bach’s “Cello Suite No. 2 in D Minor” which sure looked and sounded difficult to me), and I applaud him. He deserves it.

And now I’d like to take some time to plug our next event (before you even ask, no, I will not be able to make it): the final da Camera concert of the season, featuring SIREN Baroque. SIREN is a very successful and highly acclaimed all-female baroque ensemble from New York City, and man do I wish I could be there to see them do their thing. Their program, Siren Songs, features pieces from female composers in the 17th and early 18th centuries, an era you may recognize as “not one when women were allowed to do much of anything at all other than bear children.” I will admit, with a certain amount of shame, that I had never heard of any of these composers, who include Barbara Strozzi, Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, Antonia Bemba, and Maria Francesca Nascinbeni. Most of them were nuns or monks, though a couple operated as independent artists. The program includes both vocal and instrumental works, including a recitative and aria from Jacquet de La Guerre’s opera Le Passage de la Mer Rouge, and I really really wish I could go see it. But the world is not a wish-granting factory, as one of my favorite authors had a character point out once, and so I cannot. So go for me, this Saturday, April 5 at 8 p.m.

Now, I will be able to go to the Discovery Orchestra’s Laughing with Rossini concert on Sunday the 6th at 3 p.m., but that doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination mean that you shouldn’t show up as well. Because if you remember last semester’s concert, it was both informative and entertaining, and I think I compared Artistic Director and host George Marriner Maull to Billy Mays (in a good way, not a cocaine-based way). This time they’re turning their sights on the "Overture" to Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), which you definitely know at least one song from (Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, etc.) if you’ve ever watched cartoons in your life. I’ll be there because a) it’s my job, b) I loved the last concert’s combination of education about “stuffy, classical music” and fun, and c) we studied that opera in one of my classes, so I consider this extracurricular enrichment. And that. Is that.