In Quebec, there are some ideoms that you don't find in France. For instance,
bonne journée = have a good day, or
bonne soirée = have a good evening.
Today, people have been wishing me "bonne année," which is equivalent to "happy new year," but you're all smart enough to follow the pattern and translate directly.
Alors, bonne année à tous!
On Christmas Eve we baked a turkey. We meant to eat at 5, but it wasn't ready until about 7. We turned down the lights, lit some candles, and put on James Brown's Funky Christmas. I woke up the next morning and checked my email to find out he had died early Christmas morning. Some YouTube finds:
A hyper version of Sex Machine, with Maceo Parker "makin' it funky"
J.B. crooning like I've never heard. It gets started about 45 seconds in.
Prisoner of Love.
Popcorn. And the smoothest footwork ever.
I've been thinking a lot about the audiences for classical music lately, and what performers and organisers need to do to reach out more. This afternoon I came across this post discussing an article by Randall Thompson on the classical music audience in 1950. Thought-provoking, for sure.
Update: I wrote Randall Thompson, but I meant Virgil Thomson, the friend of Aaron Copland (and part of the so-called gay-fiosi of American music).
I feel good.
My semester's done. On Tuesday I played a mock orchestra audition that went pretty well. Everything was acceptable- a couple of excerpts were pretty good, actually, and a few were a bit uninspired...
Earlier this evening I played a short recital. The first half was Bach's sixth 'cello suite. When I began the concert the audience was only 4 people - Capella, my teacher, my pianist, and a former student of my teacher who had just had a lesson. I had some trouble settling in & making music... By the fourth movement (the Sarabande- a slow elegant dance) a few more people had come in and that helped a lot. Capella said later that she didn't want the movement to end... which is cool for a few reasons- I was feeling pretty good while I was playing- thinking about how to play each phrase as it happened... so that Capella enjoying it the most means that I wasn't entirely fooling myself.
It made me very happy that some new Toronto friends came and enjoyed the concert. Jim, Anna, and Finn, who we lived with when we first moved up (for a few months, actually- from July to October), their neighbors (who listened to me practice all summer), a friend of Sage's that we met last week finally (hi Sage), and two pop musicians (by which I mean non-classical. not really pop at all, really... ) who are friends of Jim's - all these people came. It was awesome. Jim and Finn came in in the middle, and Finn listened quiet as a mouse until the fourth movement, when he started talking about wanting to go play hockey. Capella and I met Jim and Finn at the park two weeks ago when Finn went skating for the first time.
The second half was a sonata by Julius Roentgen, a Dutch/German composer who lived shortly after Brahms, and is some distant relative of the discoverer of the X-ray, Wilhelm Roentgen. And that's how I use my physics degree.
In other news, Nathan and I brewed a batch of beer about two months ago. Last week we finally bottled it, and tried a bottle then (the bottle was a funny shape and the capper wouldn't fit). It was warm, uncarbonated, and tasted like watery Molson with a really nasty kick at the end. Yesterday I put one bottle in the fridge for an hour, and it was good. Not watery, cold, carbonated, and the nasty kick has been largely subdued. I think we'll have a Coor's Lite blind taste test (which should give you a rough idea how it tastes). But it's recognizably beer, which is very, very exciting. And none of the bottles exploded.
Song of the week: (Only Wanna) Brush My Teeth by Mike Evin. One of the sweetest songs I've ever heard. And I'm not just saying that because Mike & Sarah came to my concert tonight.
I am sitting in an internet cafe in uber-trendy Plateau de Montreal. It is more difficult than one might think to write without apostrophes. If only this were a vanity thing, like that novel in English written without the letter a (or was it e? Anybody know?). Le Plateau is a francophone neighborhood; alors, the keyboard is in french mode, and I cannot remember how to type apostrophes. Ça est la vie (it must be possible, given the grammatical incorrectness of that statement. Damn!)
The thing that struck me over and over as I wandered around after I got off the train seems really stupid: people jaywalk. In Toronto nobody jaywalks for a very good reason: you are very likely to be hit by a car. Every city has its own style of driving. Boston has crazy and reckless, but tempered by crazy & reckless bike messengers; in Montreal everyone starts going when the light turns green (like, the whole column of cars at once, so that the inexperienced are liable to be rear-ended); in Toronto people just never took Drivers Ed, I think.
But now I am here for the weekend, with my ipod all loaded up with all the Beethoven symphonies (a so-called Drop the Needle listening exam monday), and not much to do except fill out some wedding paperwork. I am looking forward to the next couple of days.
