William James "Count" Basie was born on August 21, 1904. I remember seeing the Count Basie orchestra at Bethune-Cookman College when I was about fifteen years old. I sat in the front row, and the Count himself was just a few feet from me. Amazing!
Count Basie Orchestra, "Jumpin' at the Woodside"
Last week we found time to can some tomatoes just before school started. We got a large box of tomatoes from the farmer's market in Sylva, and they yielded twelve quarts that we'll enjoy in chili and vegetable soup during the winter.
Today I had a rehearsal on a piece I've been practicing for a while; the piece, Gradient, is for alto sax and piano and was written by Baljinder Sekhon, a composer in Tampa. The piano part involves placing books and sheets of paper inside the piano to create a "buzzy" sound that matches, more or less, the sound of the slap tonguing in the saxophone.
In our rehearsal, we soon found that choreography will be a major issue in this piece! Within a fairly short time, I need to remove three books from the inside of the piano and replace them with two large sheets of corrugated paper. The books must be placed so they cover all the strings in the piano's lower register; I'm still working on finding a way to side the paper in that doesn't make any distracting sounds, since the saxophone is playing. Fortunately, we have a video of the piece to refer to; I've been studying this performance on YouTube to see how this pianist manages the logistics of the piece. The differences in my performance will be that I will have a page turner (I'm not sure how this guy manages to turn his own pages in this particular piece!); the music desk on the piano I'll be playing doesn't lie flat like the one in this video; and since the pianist here seems to be rather tall, it's a bit easier for him to reach into the piano to place the books (I will probably be walking around to the side of the piano).
We have a few more rehearsals before the performance, and we need to get all the logistics ironed out, in addition to the music, which is quite challenging! It's a great piece, and completely worth the work we're putting into it.
Ugh. Not too much to say about this article on sexist dress codes in high schools. My hope is that girls heading back to school this year are able to dress comfortably, and that their male classmates are held accountable when it comes to self control.
One of the things I miss about living in Black Mountain, NC, is the regular visits I would make to see my friend Leslie at Nice Threads Fiber Studio. Leslie, an accomplished artist with an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, creates all kinds of pieces to sell at festivals, and she also teaches classes and lessons on everything from felting to dyeing to hand carding. In Leslie's studio I learned different techniques for dyeing wool, and learned how to comb and card wool. It was a real treat to be able to work with someone who has so much experience!
Western Carolina University started our fall 2015 semester today. Our campus is in the Smoky Mountains, and is one of the top outdoor adventure campuses in the U.S. Right in our own back yard we have opportunities for kayaking, rock climbing hiking, mountain biking, and just about anything else you can imagine.
For today, I wanted to share a link to a map of some of the walking trails on campus. It's so nice to slip on a pair of sneakers, step outside my office door, and take a peaceful walk in the middle of a busy day!
Yesterday I had the honor of playing the organ at a friend's funeral. E. was a friend from church, and had died suddenly in an accident a few days before on the way to work. It seemed so strange that we had all just seen him last Sunday, and now, here we were at a funeral service for him. Like many funerals, there was a great deal of sadness, but also humor and joy; E. still seemed to be with us, and his kindness and gentle sense of humor permeated the occasion.
I've played for several large funerals and memorial services; this one seemed special. Everyone there seemed eager to celebrate E.'s life through a worship service. They sang the hymns with gusto, and nearly everyone took communion; the homily was a lovely tribute to E.'s life. In the coming days and weeks, E.s friends and family will certainly be grieving, but we'll be grieving together in a loving, supportive community.
Oscar Peterson was born on August 15, 1925. Here is a recording of his rendition of George Gershwin's "Summertime."
For no particular reason, I've been in the mood for pancakes lately. Pancakes are perfectly possible on a vegan diet; recipes just need to be tweaked a bit. We've found that our favorite pancake recipe is one for banana pecan pancakes. Here is a similar recipe for banana pancakes.
The fall semester is about to begin at Western Carolina University, and the Pride of the Mountains marching band has already been rehearsing. Along with the beginning of a new semester comes the reminder that we all need to work together and share our rehearsal spaces. Yesterday I had a rehearsal in preparation for an upcoming concert. While we were rehearsing, the sousaphone section from the marching band quietly entered the recital hall, placed their horns on the stage, and sat down to eat lunch. They were so quiet and careful not to disturb us that I hardly noticed them until we finished our rehearsal and I saw their instruments all over the stage!
I've heard it too many times: "You don't look like a professor!" And yes, I realize these comments may be intended to flatter, but this kind of flattery somehow misses the mark. What does a professor look like? The stereotype wears a tweed jacket with elbow patches, smokes a pipe, has a beard, and, of course, is male. Regardless of my accomplishments, to many people (including many of my students), I will never "look like a professor."
These women engineers are facing the same sorts of stereotypes.
School will be starting soon here in Jackson County, NC, and students will be returning to preschool, elementary school, middle school and high school, to Southwestern Community College, and to Western Carolina University for undergraduate and graduate studies. At church today we had a special prayer time to bless children's backpacks and to bless teachers who will be starting a new academic year. The children spent Sunday school time making cards with special prayers on them to keep in their backpacks and read whenever they need reassurance during the school year. During coffee hour, several of us who teach at the university compared notes on how much work we have left to complete before we see our first classes of the fall semester.
Here is a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer for schools and colleges:
O Eternal God, bless all schools, colleges, and universities, that they may be lively centers for sound learning, new discovery, and the pursuit of wisdom; and grant that those who teach and those who learn may find you to be the source of all truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Bryan spends as much time as possible watching baseball on tv during the summer, especially when Pirates games are on. We try to get to at least one minor league game every summer (the Asheville Tourists are great!), but we didn't make it this year. For this week's music, here is Carly Simon's rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," complete with the verses, which you don't usually get to hear.
Rosa, my best friend, lived next door to us when I was a little girl, until we moved to another city just before I started kindergarten. Rosa was exactly six months, to the day, younger than I was, and we played together constantly. Her family was from Taiwan, where her mother had taught home economics. I always managed to be at Rosa's house around either lunch or dinner time, and became accustomed to steaming bowls of broth with rice noodles and plates of vegetables with scrambled egg mixed in. Her parents and older brother taught me to eat with chopsticks like the rest of the family, and by the time I was five years old I had even picked up a few words in Chinese.
Lucky for me, Rosa's aunt and mother agreed to come over and teach my mother how to cook a few Chinese dishes. One of my favorites has always been fried rice. I have no idea whether the fried rice Rosa's mother made for us was exactly what she would have made in Taiwan or how much she had adapted her recipes to what was available to her in Chicago; I just knew this was good stuff. Eggs were featured in just about every dish I remember eating at Rosa's house, so when I recreate vegan versions of some of these recipes, I often turn to tofu as a replacement for the eggs. A while back I found this recipe for vegan egg fried rice, and it reminds me of when I was four years old and eating lunch with Rosa in her mother's kitchen.
Yesterday I had a rehearsal with some colleagues on a Beethoven piece we'll be performing next month. The piece was the op. 11 trio for clarinet, cello, and piano; we are substituting a bassoon for the cello, and it works quite nicely. Our rehearsal focused on the third and final movement of the trio; we worked through fined details of tempo, dynamics, and articulation. One of the resources that we relied on was a set of first editions and sketches of the piece from the digital archives at the Beethoven Haus in Bonn. Whenever we had a question about any kind of marking in our scores, we consulted the first editions and the sketches before making a decision regarding interpretation.
I once had a discussion with a friend who is a history professor at a liberal arts college; we were talking about how musicians' performances sometimes aren't regarded as highly in academic communities as scholars' books and articles. She thought for a while and said, "Historians make and present deductions based on evidence they've studied. Is that what musicians do?" I explained to her that of course, that's exactly what musicians do. The evidence we study includes sketches, historical editions, recordings, and our own and our colleagues' practicing and performances. We present our research in the form of performances. Other musicians can tell if a pianist's performance is influenced by Art Tatum, Alicia de Larrocha, or Emmanuel Ax.
When does safety and confidentiality trump accessibility in a professional organization? Read this article about Binders Full of Women Writers.
Last year, for the first time, I entered three hand-spun items in the Mountain State Fair. Call it beginners luck: everything I entered won a ribbon! This year I'm determined to win at least one ribbon. Tomorrow I'll be taking my entries for this year's fair to the Jackson County Agricultural Extension office; someone there will take entries from Jackson County to the fairgrounds in time for judging. My entries for this year are a striped shawl, a skein of multi-color hand-spun yarn, and a skein of hand-dyed hand-spun yard that was dyed with natural plant materials. I'll find out how things went when we go to the fair in September.
Back when we lived in northern New York, every August we would look forward to Dog Day at the Adirondack Museum, which was always the first Saturday of August. The museum would have special exhibits and demonstrations about dogs in the Adirondacks (one year we watched a sheep herding demonstration), and best of all, dogs were welcome at the museum on that day. The photo above shows our canine head of household Cookie exploring an old train at the museum on August 1, 2009. Since the museum is near Blue Mountain, we usually hiked the mountain in the afternoon if the weather was good.
Just as we were leaving church this morning, our pastor came down the hallway with two little girls whose parents were chatting in the Sunday school room. "We were playing school," she announced, "and we decided now it's time for recess." Bryan and I have been attending St. John's Episcopal Church in Sylva for a year now, and we feel like once again we have won the lottery in terms of being blessed with an absolutely wonderful priest, The Rev. Pattie Curtis. I can't even count all the different things (in addition to playing school!) Pattie does in the course of a week! She is a wonderful shepherd to our flock at church and is light and salt in our community. We love you, Pattie!
Jerry Garcia was born on August 1, 2942. For today, here is some of his music: High Time.
