A funny thing happens when you return to a teenager after a year. You realize they’ve changed. This may be obvious, but it’s worth noting the kinds of changes that happen – especially when original music provides a window into developing minds and personalities.
Read more →Last spring, I spent just a couple of days with a rental car, chasing down sites in North and South Dakota where my paternal grandparents grew up in the 1890s/1900s. It was late March and still frigid cold. Snow was drifted everywhere, and had an alarming tendency to blow as a skim coat hiding the roads I drove. I spent a day in Aberdeen, where my grandmother grew up, and another day finding the site where a town called Wiprud briefly stood. There were deeply meaningful moments and sights in all of this. Beyond telling the tale to relatives, I felt a need to say something more, something more lasting, through music – piano music that I can actually play. But how? What does it actually mean to take an experience
Read more →Music turns me on. Often, it’s music in the tradition I understand deeply. I cannot sit still during the finale of Mozart’s JupiterSymphony. Bach’s b minor Mass puts me into another realm. Messiaen’s Des Canyons aux Etoilesis an out-of body experience. But sometimes, tellingly, inexplicably, it’s music I don’t understand at all that turns me on. Something new hits me like a ton of bricks – an immediately thrilling sound that gets stuck in my head and gets me thinking, like an itch that needs scratching.
Read more →The Creekside Singers hold nothing back. Four to six big men sit around a big drum beating in unison. They uncork big, raw voices higher than you ever thought chest voice could go. Phrases begin with gutsy swoops, notes waver with exertion, lines weave downward and end in expressive drop-offs. This is Northern Plains singing – fierce, dauntless, proud.
Read more →I’m not sure I would have gotten it, if I hadn’t been through it already, or at least begun to go through it. But now I’m excited and optimistic about orchestras beginning to examine themselves internally for unconscious bias, non-inclusive culture, outmoded policies, and more.
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