This is the time of the year when things get busy, musically. Tonight is the second and final performance of Beethoven 9 and Chris Brubeck's new piece "Music Is the Power." Last night we had tickets to the big Dave Brubeck concert at the Conservatory as part of the annual Brubeck Festival. Thursday evening was the first Beethoven/Brubeck concert and the three previous evenings were spent in rehearsal for them. Tomorrow evening is the final Sunday regular rehearsal for the all-Brahms concert with the Master Chorale, and rehearsals for the final concert of the big Chorale resume on Monday. Did I say it was busy, musically?

An update to the last Beethoven post: it's quite a different piece when you're inside a performance of 300+ singers and instrumentalists. The choral section is still shouty and screamy, and Beethoven still isn't a vocal composer, but it's hard not to be impressed by the aesthetic experience of actually performing the Ninth.

Brubeck the Younger has also written a good work, and it gets the difficult job of opening for the Ninth. Well, someone's got to do it. You can read more about Brubeck and his new work in the preview article.

Last night's concert by Brubeck the Elder was quite nice. Dave and the Brubeck Quartet opened with over an hour of music. He's 87 and pretty frail, but it's pretty amazing to see that he's still 100% there rhetorically and in terms of his interactions with the other guys in the group. About halfway through, the quartet was joined by vocalist Roberta Gambarini. She sang a few very old Brubeck songs quite nicely, as well as doing some scat singing during other numbers (such as the venerable "Take Five"). Not a fan of scat singing, and that's all I'll say. After intermission we were treated to a wonderful performance of "Cannery Row," a very recent work by Dave (and lyrics by Iola). Brubeck the Younger sang in it and played bass guitar and bass trombone, while two of the Beethoven soloists also performed. It's basically a song suite, unstaged though there were basic costumes. It's very short and there isn't any drama or story, just four or five vignettes on the characters in Steinbeck's novel. Still, it was great.

Ok. Enough for now. It's Saturday and I get to wallow on Saturdays. Bye. 

Interesting incident at work a few days ago with a student I was helping. He came into the studio and asked for my help with, of all things, his vocabulary assignment. He's an advanced non-native English speaker who is in a remedial reading course and I'd helped him before while he was working on a podcast recording of an previous vocab list. This assignment consisted of a list of vocab words and next to each were four choices. From them he was to circle the word that was closest to being the vocab word's opposite. He did very well on the vast majority of the words (though the choices were sometimes really strange and only distantly related to the vocab words).

However, one word that tripped him up was "authoritarian." He had circled "fictional" as the word's opposite. I then asked him to tell me what authoritarian meant. He sort of stumbled and couldn't really. I then explained that authoritarian was basically about concentrating power in the hands of a few (or one) with no meaningful way for others to object, etc. I even mentioned Saddam Hussein as an example of an authoritarian leader -- whatever Saddam says, goes. At this point I expected him to see the correct answer -- "democratic" -- but he didn't. I then pointed out that democratic was the correct answer and he actually asked me what the word meant. In ensuing comments it became clear that he'd never actually heard the word "democracy" before and couldn't use it to identify the U.S. as a "democratic" nation.

After looking over his work, we got to talking and it comes out that he had spent several years in the U.S. Army and had even served in Iraq from 2003 to 2005 where he'd been on the front lines. That he wouldn't have been able to explain one of the main motives for the war is ironic to say the least. Of course soldiers being unable to explain why they're at war is not necessarily new, but seems odd in this day and age. More shocking I suppose is his presence at a university when he can't describe the concept of democracy.