Sunday Melange

We stayed at a friend's house overnight along with another couple, celebrating a birthday. This morning there are three laptops being used on the kitchen table and another two plugged in along the wall behind me. Happily many printers can run wireless like the three being used, via the home network. Otherwise there would be no room for knees under the table because of printer shelves.

Half of us will be playing a concert this afternoon, one of the reasons for this overnight stay. The couple that was staying on the bed in the office just got evicted to print a few hundred program inserts before the concert. The owners of the house have a bank of six printers, with various paper size and color options, to handle jobs like this. Was there an ulterior motive in offering to have the birthday dinner here, to have ready hands for the inserts? Maybe, but it's all for the sake of the orchestra so arm twisting is legal.

Today's performance is the annual Youth Concert, featuring performances from violin concertos by three seniors at Bennington College and several works composed by area high school students with the support of a professional musician as a mentor.

As always with this kind of program, I am floored by the talent and maturity of all of these students. The college students are bold, strong players that are easy to follow.







But the high school students are truly amazing.

Most of the high school students lack a musical vocabulary to talk about how an instrumental section should play their part. This is partly due to experience and partly due to how people compose these days. Many composers now work out how their compositions on a MIDI machine. This is an electronic device that plays back the parts and creates sustained, flat notes of absolutely precise length. That is, a quarter note is always the correct length to the millisecond; the volume will be the preset level from the first to the last instant. The problem in translation is that this is not how humans play the music. The strings may or may not play vibrato, notes will rise and fall in volume as the player's wind or bow speed changes, musicians will automatically play note lengths based on what sounds right in the ensemble rather than what is written on the page. These details on how to play the piece get worked out at the first rehearsal with the orchestra.

It is here that we see the maturity of high school students. To a person, they know what they want to hear even if they don't know how to say it. A couple of them are very particular. One young woman of Korean extraction has created a quite beautiful piece, called Embracing Memory, which was hard for me to play last night at rehearsal. It was an accessible, more romantic work that made the events in Japan seem very close. At last night's rehearsal, she spent a long time telling the conductor how she wanted some sections played. My guess is that she plays an orchestral instrument herself.

Breakfast is on the table and it is time for me to stop. This will be a fun concert.