Who Is Storm Large?

Photo by John Rudoff (2014-02-14)

She’s big

By Moristotle

[Originally published on May 11, 2015, as “Second Monday Music: Who Is Storm Large?”]

I had never heard of Storm Large until a friend in Oregon wrote me that she and her husband were going to a Storm Large concert for their wedding anniversary last week [eight years ago]. It was performed with the Oregon Symphony in Portland on Friday, May 1 [2015], and was, my friend reported, heavily attended by people of all ages:

In Pursuit of Ecstasy

By Chuck Smythe

[Editor’s Note: I posted Chuck Smythe’s musing, “Second Monday Music: In pursuit of ecstasy,” ten years ago, on April 7, 2013. I repost it today, on my father’s 118^th birthday, not only in remembrance of my father, but also in recognition of ecstasy as a forever pursuit.]

“The Tao of which one can speak is not the Tao.” Thus Lao Tzu began the Tao Te Ching—then went on to speak of the Tao at great length.

Second Monday Music: Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610

Claudio Monteverdi
by Bernardo Strozzi, c. 1630

Performed by the Seicento Baroque Ensemble

By Chuck Smythe

Five years ago, Evanne Browne, the music director at Boulder’s First Methodist Church, made a great leap of faith. Her chancel choir, augmented by ringers such as myself, were occasionally performing major works. She decided, at that time, to do Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. She is a specialist in early music and knew the piece to be fairly difficult, not least because it used musical styles strange to the modern singer. It also requires a full orchestra of 17th century instruments and a large corps of virtuoso vocal soloists. And it had never been done in Colorado before. Still, we did it, and it was a great hit.

Second Monday Music: A lyrical inspiration

When a man loves a woman

By Morris Dean

Percy Sledge’s 1966 song, “When a Man Loves a Woman” has had a hold on me for weeks. The melody^* has run through my mind so much, I’m wondering whether it’s more than a coincidence that the song came out the same year I met and married the woman who has been my wife for going-on 50 years. I figured I had to write another lyric for it. This is it:

Second Monday Music: Stringed humor

Quartet #2

Edited by Morris Dean

First violin: “Haven’t I seen your face before?” a judge demanded, looking down at the defendant.
    “You have, Your Honor,” the man answered hopefully. “I gave your son violin lessons last winter.”
    “Ah, yes,” recalled the judge. “Twenty years!” [suewidemark.com]

Second Monday Music: Stringed humor

Quartet

Edited by Morris Dean

Quartet #1

Second Monday Music: Bulgaria intensive

Source

AISU students travel abroad for music and other arts

Edited by Morris Dean

[Editor’s Note: In the March 9 edition of this column, Christa Saeger introduced us to two-week intensive programs for students at the American International School of Utah. The school’s latest performing-arts intensive involved a trip to Bulgaria. With permission, we’ve taken some excerpts from the blog “AISUBULGARIAINTENSIVE,” where participants recorded their impressions. Bloggers are identified by their initials.]

Second Monday Music: Who Is Storm Large?

Photo by John Rudoff (2014-02-14)

She’s big

By Morris Dean

I had never heard of Storm Large until a friend in Oregon wrote me that she and her husband were going to a Storm Large concert for their wedding anniversary last week. It was performed with the Oregon Symphony in Portland on Friday, May 1, and was, my friend reported, heavily attended by people of all ages:

Second Monday Music: Geology lesson

Courtesy a quick googling of the web

Edited by Morris Dean

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean

Second Monday Music

A performing-arts intensive at the American International School of Utah

By Christa Saeger

One of the things I do besides direct orchestras in the Department of Performing Arts at the American International School of Utah, in Murray, Utah, is to help out with performing arts “intensives” for its students each trimester.

Second Monday Music: Johann Sebastian Bach performed in Memphis

Six suites for unaccompanied cello

By André Duvall

On Sunday afternoon, February 1, I had the pleasure of hearing all six of Johann Sebastian Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello performed live in succession. Brazilian native Leonardo Altino, an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Memphis, presented these masterpieces in the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music’s Harris Recital Hall.

Second Monday Music: Two reviews of Baroque performance

The Seicento Baroque Ensemble of Boulder, Colorado

By Chuck Smythe

The first Seicento Baroque Ensemble concert of the new, 2014-2015 concert season was titled “Dies Irae” (days of wrath). It was held on Halloween weekend, and featured some appropriate seasonal music: Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in d (you know, the one in all the movies!), and the Witches’ scenes from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” Act II, Scene 1. There were also motets by Cannicciari, Bertulosi, Byrd, and Kuhnau.

Second Monday Music: A curious kind of signature

Bass (below) and treble clefs

Treble clef signs

By Anonymous Brian

[Editor's Note: A treble clef is the most common clef used in musical notation. It was historically used to mark a treble, or pre-pubescent, voice part.]

Second Monday Music: Something special

U.S. cover

Beethoven's Archduke Trio

By Morris Dean

In Colm Tóibín's latest novel, Nora Webster, the title character pulls a new life together during the three years immediately following the death of her husband [Maurice] of twenty years. The perhaps most significant strand of her new life is her deeper discovery of music, beautifully told narratively as a series of accidents and benevolent interventions of friends and others who care about her, or take pity on a widow with children.

Second Monday Music: Interpretative layers

Young Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

Of the music of Antonín Dvořák

By Geoffrey Dean

The Czech romantic composer Antonín Dvořák gained international popularity in the late 1870s, when his first set of Slavonic Dances was published at the recommendation of Johannes Brahms. Like so many other works by Dvořák, the Slavonic Dances use characteristic folk rhythms coupled with catchy folk-like tunes that were invented by Dvořák rather than being quoted from existing music. Dvořák used a similar combination of borrowing and invention when he came to the United States in 1892 and set out to show American composers how they might create an American-sounding classical music – a national school of composition similar to the ones that had emerged in Russia and Dvořák’s own Bohemia.

Second Monday Music: The marvel who was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Two anecdotes

Edited by Morris Dean

[The following anecdotes I found in a short search of the World-Wide Web.]

Mozart's young memory:

Part of the service used in the Pope's chapel at Rome is sacredly guarded and kept with great care in the archives of the chapel. Any singer found tampering with this Miserere of Allegri, or giving a note of it to an outsider, would be visited by excommunication. Only three copies of this service have ever been sent out. One was for the Emperor Leopold, another to the King of Portugal, and the third to the celebrated musician, Padre Martini.
    But there was one copy that was made without the Pope's orders, and not by a member of the choir either.
    When Mozart was taken to Rome in his youth, by his father, he went to the service at St. Peter's and heard the service in all its impressiveness. Mozart, senior, could hardly arouse the lad from his fascination with the music, when the time came to leave the cathedral.
    That night after they had retired and the father slept, the boy stealthily arose and by the bright light of the Italian moon, wrote out the whole of that sacredly guarded Miserere. The Pope's locks, bars, and excommunications gave no safety against a memory like Mozart's. [Web source]

Second Monday Music: An amateur opera

No, the reviewer, not the opera!

By Chuck Smythe

[Editor's Note: Chuck did say in his most recent character update: “Want an amateur opera review?”]

I recently attended a performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Colorado’s Central City Opera. This was, if I recall rightly, only about the eighth opera I’ve ever attended. I hope you will be entertained by the impressions of a neophyte. The location alone makes this an Experience. Central City was one of the richest of Colorado’s gold rush towns.

Second Monday Music: Movement in musical performance

More than meets the eye

By André Duvall

2014 marks the 25th anniversary of the release by Virgin Records of Roy Orbison’s final album, Mystery Girl, which went public a few months after his death in December of 1988. He was first signed in Memphis, Tennessee by Sun Records, just a few minutes from where I live. Orbison’s voice is markedly different from most voices I have heard, lending a haunting and warm quality to his music. Elvis once said that Orbison’s voice was one of the most beautiful voices that he had ever heard. Others have described his voice as sounding otherworldly, operatic, and powerful.

Second Monday Music: Voices

Make or break

By Morris Dean

Sam as a kid sang sweeter than he spoke,
but after age thirteen, when his voice broke,
    no matter how he squeezed his throat,
    he couldn't croon a single note;
he could, though, squeak and squawk and screech and croak.

[Authorial Note: I drafted the limerick in a dream between approximately 3 & 4 a.m. on Tuesday, May 27, after which I abruptly woke up, seemingly worried that I wouldn't be able to remember it. After going over it a few times to try to make it stick, I proceeded to write a limerick commenting on what had happened. Unfortunately, I have no recollection of the second limerick.]
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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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Second Monday Music: Seicento Baroque Ensemble

In consort

By Chuck Smythe

The Seicento Baroque Ensemble, a semi-professional early-music group from Boulder, Colorado, recently ended its third season with a set of performances titled “Voices and Viols.”