Jeffrey Quick's Blog

Concert

The Mac concert went well, and we had good attendence (I didn't count noses, but over 50 for sure).

It was WORK up there in the choir loft though, hot as it was. I have figured out that I can conduct and sing at the same time, but conducting and singing when it's my music is just a tad too much; I run into breath support problems from the stress of it all. Most things went better than they ever had, and there were no absolute disasters, except maybe for the Fazekas trio which was underrehearsed and difficult both pitchwise and vocally (Hilliard ensemble would have nailed it, but even they would have to work). Fred's motet had some dodgy passages in the bass :-(. All the pieces I condected went very well. The altos weren't with me at the beginning of the Responsoria, so the first measure was thin, but by the time I could have decided to start over, they were with me, so that's how it will be on the recording...oh well.

Fred had asked people to hold applause to the ends of halves...good for the recording and to move things along, but I can't tell you anything about public reception of individual pieces that way. Wilma Salisbury was there, but I don't know if that was in an official capacity...probably not.

I'm so used to Composers Guild, where there's always at least one piece on the program that says NOTHING, and you have to make polite noises about it; here everything had something to say and succeeded in greater or lesser measure in saying it well.

I didn't get home until 8:30...the family car took off, and Rusty was so good about turning her phone off for the concert that she forgot to turn it back on. 9 of us ended up at Bo Loong where Jocelyn Chang (harpist) ordered us (en Chinoise) the Seafood Dinner for 8. I ate the fried chicken's head, which caused some comment. Tom Broadhead was one of us; he's a copyist for Boosey and filled us in on the new Carter pieces (a horn concerto, a Wallace Stevens song cycle). Evidently since his wife Helen died, Elliott has nothing to do but get up, write music, and go to sleep. She was quite protective of him and evidently had a reputation similar to that of Pauline Strauss...supposedly, every time Aaron Copland would get a female dog, he'd name it Helen. He's also working on the Ives 4 critical edition....we were discussing the problem of the "high bells/low bells" part, and Tom's theory is that Ives actually meant handbells.(The parts usually get played on various combinations of glockenspiel and chimes.)

2 people have singled out my Responsoria for praise...but interestingly, not the canticles, even though they're in a more straightforward style. Don't know what that means. One of the two equated the chromatic but metric and mostly consonant music of Fazekas to "John Cage".

I played composer at Travis Scott's euphonium recital the next day, and took today off to catch up around the farm.