Book completed

Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley. This was her second novel based on "Beauty and the Beast," twenty years after the first, Beauty, which I read some time ago. I hadn't read this one before, and it featured so many roses and so many cats that it was absolutely perfect to read it in my front yard at the beginning of June. From my seat I could see at least a dozen different types of roses, and my semi-feral friends played and napped in my company. The writing was fine as well, and I liked the twist at the end... ( Spoiler )

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Audition week

It's really fun to volunteer to help run the auditions for the youth orchestras; this is my third or fourth year doing it. Today was the first day - woodwinds, brass, and percussion. This year it was even more hectic than usual because we were in an entirely different and unfamiliar space, the church on Friendly St. We didn't really have warm-up rooms, which I know caused one girl a fair amount of stress; I think she ended up warming up in her mom's car. One 7th grade flute player was strikingly good.

I left that halfway through the evening and rushed over to the final class in the "history of the string quartet" course. Tonight we did Shostakovich, Cage, Reich, etc. Wyatt performed Cage's famous work, "4:33" on the violin. Normally it's performed on the piano. We were all greatly amused, and now far more familiar with the HVAC sounds in that room. ("4:33" is an entirely silent work.) At the end we had a "final exam" and my partner CB and I did tolerably well - not great, but not worse than the rest.

Tomorrow will be the afternoon strings class then the "low strings" auditions, and Saturday's auditions will be for something like 52 young violinists...