Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Away from home
Greetings from Western Mass. I'm currently at Greenwood Music Camp, (actually at the moment I'm in the Java Net Cafe in Northampton) where I've been on the faculty for several years. Greenwood is a wonderful place, and is what makes it possible for me to get through the rest of the year. The camp's been going for 73 years, and there are some pretty illustrious alums by now, including Gilbert Kalish, Joel Krosnick, Lucy Shelton, Pamela Frank, and more recently Nick Tzavaris from the Shanghai Quartet, and Becca Fischer and Jonah Sirota of the Chiara Quartet. There are c.60 high school kids here, who play amazingly well. They spend most of their time doing chamber music. This week I'm coaching groups doing a string quartet of mine called Faith-Based Initiative, the second movement of the Tippett 3rd quartet, and the Mendelssohn e minor quartet, first movement. They got the music yesterday and they'll play on Saturday night. The orchestra is doing, on the final concert, the first performance of a piece by Luna Woolf which was commissioned by the camp (they do a new piece written for the orchestra every summer). Other things possibly in the works for later are the first of movement of Schoenberg 3rd quartet, the Schulhoff first quartet, a wind octet by Gideon Klein, Cancel My Rhumba Lesson (from the Horse With the Lavender Eye) by Stephen Hartke, also an octet by Yung Hsiang, who's a regular visitor to the place. Lots of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, of course, but new stuff among it all, and the kids like doing it. It a pretty effective way to do something about getting people to like newer music--on however small a scale.
posted by Rodney Lister
9:00 PM
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