September 10, 2008 · 2 Comments
update 6/13 — Recent Posts or the blogroll may have more details of these events.
All of Early Music society is up in Boston just now. But not me. (Or Ros Morley, whom I saw on Union Street an hour ago.)
AMHERST EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL, July 12-19 and 19-26. Music of England and Spain. I expect to attend the second week.
– - – - – - – - – PREVIOUSLY – - – - – - – - -
March 17-April 26, Cavalli’s La didone, St. Ann’s Workshop COMMENTS BELOW
Saturday, April 4, at 8, and Sunday, April 5, at 7, Hasse & Metastasio, Alcide al bivio (1760), Opera Repo at Columbia’s Casa Italiana, COMMENTS TO COME
May 1 and 2, Cavalli’s Giasone at the Yale Baroque Opera Program, University Theater, New Haven, 5:00; symposium Thurs evening, Friday, and Saturday COMMENTS TO COME
Tuesday, May 26, Sinfonia performs chaconnes (with dancers & special guests), Ethical Culture Society, 8:00.
Categories: early music · percussion · shapenote · world music
Spent a little time with the Young Farmers of South Brooklyn at the Greenhorns’ Goat Spit benefit this afternoon. Okay, they’re not officially the YFs of SB, but the healthy cheer, the gingham, the flowers in the hair of a lot of people between 22 and 33, the rooftop tomatoes, the campaign to legalize beekeeping in NY (I’m all for it, I signed the petition), the bike-powered blender, the grill full of goat, the Six Point beer in mason jars, even hay bales on the sidewalk — and all just three blocks east of me and the chicken slaughterhouse. The mysterious Vermont Pharmacy that’s stood tempting but empty for ten years at least was opened at last, a romantic tin-ceilinged location. (A sign said we might be filmed for a documentary, but I saw no cameras.) The sidewalk shed wrapped around the corner provided a useful rain shield for the flyers, petitions, and button-&-sticker sales. I loved the truck farm — a pickup truck with a planting bed in its bed, tomatoes staked against the window, herbs, broccoli, and I don’t know what all in neat rows (and a toy cow for scale confusion). I happened to be there at one of the rainless half-hours of the afternoon, coming home from the library with Howard Sturgis, Graham Greene, and Colette in my bag.
It was really kind of adorable, though I felt awfully middle-aged. If I find any good pictures, I’ll stick them in here.
Categories: brooklyn · food · this little life
It’s been a different tune every day this week. Friday’s came straight out of current events at the office, with the phrase “say farewell” and the word “title” in morning emails, so I had “Saint’s Delight” (114) mixed with a little “Primrose Hill” (43) on my mind. (There are actually five Sacred Harp tunes sharing this Isaac Watts text; “Ninety-fifth” [36b] has a nice little fugue.)
When I can read my title clear / To mansions in the skies / I’ll bid farewell to every fear / And wipe my weeping eyes.
“Saint’s Delight” is one of those rousing minor tunes that charges off towards death with glee. “I feel like, I feel like I’m on my journey home.”
(I tried to find a decent version on YouTube but they are all crummy, either badly sung or badly recorded.)
Categories: shapenote · this little life
that have to be chewed & swallowed after you read them: message toast.
Particularly effective for missions involving marmalade.
Oh: Coming attractions updated.
Categories: design
My friend Tom F asked me to mention that he thinks it scandalous that the new Met Bulletin, Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, does not transcribe the inscriptions on the medallions & larger reliefs in the collection.
Categories: MMA
Made it to shape note for the first time in over a month, the singing just a few blocks away, bearing white bean & tuna salad and freshly baked cookies for the pot luck that distinguishes the Brooklyn sing. Fortunately the unofficial but acknowledged leader of the local shapenote community was with us, averting the crisis of authority that sometimes arises.
Another local singer invited us back to her house after the singing, and four of us ended up going. A.’s house on Third Place is terribly skinny, just two windows wide, and divided from the train viaduct rising just there from the ground only by another two-bay house. But we sat in the garden – the border between the two skinny plots marked chiefly by a clothesline – admiring the cardinal and yellowthroat and the irises coming into bloom, inhaling the thick sweet scent of lilies of the valley, and talking (except when the train went by). Among other things we spoke of “couth,” the presumed opposite of “uncouth.” One of us remarked that it meant “known,” and that it survives in the pairing “kith and kin.” I remembered it from the General Prologue, where palmers journey “to ferne halwes kowthe in sondry landes.” When it got cool we went indoors, to sit in the skinny front parlor, and eventually to sing. The parlor has what I mistook for an upright piano and is in fact an organ, and odd old guitars hung on the walls, and a giant painting of Cleopatra with her maid that A. said was painted by a relative from a postcard-sized reproduction of an original she’d never been able to find. “An original chocolate box” was my suggestion. There’s a lot of character there.
Next Saturday, Garden State Convention at the Quaker meetinghouse in Upper Montclair — always a good time. And so exciting to actually cross state lines, even if one is underwater while doing so. A(2) reminded me that I have accepted the awful responsibility of food chair for the New York All-Day Singing in September. I hope I am up to the job.
Categories: shapenote
In her funny and thoughtful blog, mappa mundi, my friend Lisa (that’s Bronx Lisa, for those of you aware of the multiple Lisas in my life), asked this question:
What’s your favorite trait? Of yours, that is, not one you like to see in other people. And an actual one, not a quality you wish you had or would like to cultivate. Something that, when you’ve had a shitty day and can’t say anything particularly good about yourself, there’s that one thing you can come up with and repeat to yourself in the dark so you can go to sleep.
I find I have no answer to this question. (Lisa herself has a great one.) Do you?
(Coming Attractions updated.)
Categories: this little life
The Mannes Collegium’s Spring concert will be this Monday, April 27, at 8:15 in Goldmark Hall at Mannes, 85th Street east of Amsterdam Avenue. It’s free, but don’t be late, it’s also short. Our subject this semester is Fortune, as portrayed in music from late 15th and 16th century Italy (and dipping into the early 17th). I’ve written some rather rhetorical notes, and they, along with the program order, are below. Keep reading →
Categories: early music
This is the last weekend for the exhibition of drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna at the Metropolitan Museum, and I finally got around to it last night. It is, as Carmen Bambach said in her curatorial talk, a pretty show with pretty pictures– not in itself a bad thing; but there’s no particular idea in it. In the first room, mostly Italian drawings, the standout for me was still the Hans Hoffman wild-boar piglet, the gasp-inducer from Carmen’s slideshow.
Hans Hoffman, Wild Boar Piglet, 1578
I reflected and smiled at a little demonstration of how we see through our own microscopes, as a couple, evidently devoted to yoga, commented on how the angel in a little Italian drawing touched “the heart chakra.” “Oh, and so does Saint Paul, very interesting!” responded her companion, looking at a neighboring image. They loved the piglet as much as I do.
In the second room, mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French, my favorite was a little trois-crayons triple view of a young woman by Watteau. The third room is 19C drawings, mostly French, again, but there’s a slicing little double-sided Goya I liked, along with a Manet pastel portrait of a woman friend in her invalid’s bed and a minimal Delacroix sketch of a North African scene that holds Matisse’s striped exotic figures (which can be seen just a couple of corridors away) in embryo.
I got a quick look at Roxy Paine’s installation on the roof, Maelstrom, which opens next week. It’s spectacular. (Roxy is a man? Ken Johnson says so.) It fills and responds to its place better than any roof show I’ve seen, it’s gorgeous and threatening, and it calls into question the whole commercial drinks-on-the-roof enterprise by leaving almost no space unfilled. From the insider’s position I have to regret it, but from the art-lover’s I equally have to applaud.
Oh, and today’s Artwork of the Day is one from the Watson Library collection: George French Angas’ 1847 The New Zealanders, showing decorated stilt-houses for food storage.
Categories: Last chance at the Met · MMA · art
There are a bunch of concerts (and one play with music and one opera) in the offing, posted at Coming Attractions; among them, next Monday (4/28)’s end-of-semester concert by the Mannes Collegium, featuring sixteenth-century Italian music alluding to Fortune, her power and her variability.
Categories: early music
