Friday, November 18, 2005

Stravinsky SNAFU/Bungling Brilliance

It's always good to double check things. My folks taught me that and I try to be prepared in any situation. So it wasn't completely disasterous when I found that 15 minutes before my talk on Stravinsky and Shostakovich that my 3 compact discs of the 16 musical examples (seen in the previous post!) were evidently .WMA files instead of .WAV files, and would NOT play on my cd boombox. D'oh.
Luckily there were a few cds of Shostakovich I had in my bag. I momentarily freaked out...thinking what am I gonna do? My last talk (very successful from the response) on the Mighty Russian Five was comprised of two cds of examples I found (24 pieces.)
Plus, I believe you should hear music, I'm nothing if not a demonstrative teacher, violinist, broadcaster...
So, I'm glad I had looked at my notes (written and musical!) well and asked forgiveness if I talked a little more than I planned. I also sang a bit (D-S-C-H motive: d, e-flat, c, b) and even if I had the CD example of Shostakovich's 8th Quartet I still would have knock 3 times very hard on the podium - the KGB knocks at the door. (I ended up singing the quartet mimicking that too!) [Luckily noone asked me to sing late Stravinsky!]
No one threw rotten vegatables, slept or put me in the gulag...in fact several folks came up afterwards (there were 40 in the audience, +/-3) and talked about a few items and congratulated me. Also the folks who invited me to speak in the first place (originally I had agreed for one talk, not two) said they would let me know the next country in their focus - they will want more music talks.
It's hard to narrow these broad topics down, and to know what to share with people. That said, it is also incredibly fun.

Afterwards I was quite close to the new Giant megastore, so I picked up a few grocery items (my fridge & I are quite happy to have a good stock of Diet Coke in it again - its even the cute Christmas Bears boxes!) - so now I can say I've been. Rumor has it that Wegman's Market is coming to the area, which would be cool...I've been to the original in Rochester and I tell you they rock!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,
I see that you are quite a classical enthusiast.
I participate on a part of a music forum which specializes in classical music. There are many posts that I am sure you'd find interesting. For example, I'm in the middle of posting the complete recordings of Heifetz--just finished posting the solo violin and partitas of Bach, for example.

My specialities are 20th century classical music, but there's another poster who pretty much exclusively posts opera, etc.

You can find the site here:
www.skafunkrastapunk.com/forums/
then look in the Classical - Jazz - World section. I'm "philipglass" on that forum

Anonymous said...
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