Assorted musical notes.... A#, Bb...
Last Friday night I went to the folksong singaround at Rachel's. After making it past an unexpected encounter I sat down with beer and fiddle and the group gathered in a circle. The evening was fun - once again I was the only fiddler in a guitar, banjo and mandolin orchestra. Tonight, a week late, having been gone about every night this week and with other people, I wanted to come home and spend some time alone, without cooking. So I stopped up at Rachel's and picked up the best pizza in Elkhart County - The Athenia - to go. While I was paying up, the pretty young waitress said "I hoped I'd see you tonight. Last week when one of the couples left after eating dinner they asked me 'Who is that fiddler? He is so good.' They were really impressed."
I love a compliment!
I promised to post the press release. Here it is:
Goshen, IN, February 14, 2007 - The Maple City Chamber Orchestra will offer the world premier of a new musical work, commissioned especially for the orchestra at their February 25th concert. The free concert will be held at Sauder Concert Hall, on the campus of Goshen College at 3pm. The new piece, ‘Fragments of Celestial Color’, was composed by Cornelius Dufallo. Dufallo, a New York City-based composer and performer, was tapped to produce the work by the Orchestra following a gift by area resident, Carol Miller, to commemorate her late husband, Carl S. Miller.
According to the composer, the title of the piece refers an ancient Maori myth about the creation of orchids. “In the myth,” said Dufallo, “a magnificent rainbow is shattered into pieces of color, which were caught by the branches of trees and transformed into orchids. Mr. Miller was a prize-winning orchid grower, and in the process of writing this piece I discovered the lore of orchids. It is a fascinating and wonderfully evocative subject.”
Brian Mast, Musical Director, explained that preparing a new work for performance has special challenges and rewards. “Normally when we prepare a concert we can go to any one of dozens of recordings to get an idea how a Mozart Symphony or a Vivaldi concerto ‘should’ sound. With this piece all we have to work with is the score and comments from the composer. We are delighted to be the first ones to breathe life into this new work.”
The concert will be held at Sauder Music Hall on the campus of Goshen College at 3:00 pm, Sunday, February 25. The concert is free, and there are no reserved seats.
The Maple City Chamber Orchestra was formed in 1997 to culturally enrich and educate our community by providing opportunities to experience great music, provide musicians opportunities to participate in quality music-making, and to help musicians grow musically. Community members who are interested in participating in the orchestra may write to the middle aged white guy (email address deleted).
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Brian's comments about the delight of working with a new piece are right on. Any given note in a piece like this has an infinite number of ways it could be played. Does the sound start small and bloom, or is it the same volume all the way through? Does it sneak in, or is it bold from the start? Just how short is a short note?
Then you extend that to two notes: how much space separates them? Is one louder or softer than the other? And, since it is a piece for strings, how do you bow it? Do you hook these notes together? Is the bow off the string? How gritty or airy should it sound? And then you extend that to the phrase... then a movement... to the whole piece. There are zillions of ways to shape this...
Of course you don't overanalyze it. We talk about it, but not too much. We play it.
It is a technically demanding piece. We can play it, but it stretches us a lot. And it stretches us musically too. One section has a G# that rings constantly, getting passed back and forth among the violins. As the violins play an arpeggio around that, one of the notes in the arpeggio is an A natural an octave lower. This 1/2 step from a full octave is very challenging. While we're playing we want to sneak that G# up just a bit, or play the A just a little flat. We have to play out of tune to be in tune. When we get it right, it sounds great. That because the musical story at this point in the piece is a story of tension, and this dissonance drives that. A few minutes later the tension resolves and we get this gorgeous melody that is, as the score suggests, like coming home.
I hope to see you there!
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