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Day 948: Totally awesome!
Oct. 24th, 2022 11:58 pmBack in 2020, our symphony conductor (Francesco Lecce-Chong) hosted a weekly online social time for the two communities he works with, including interviews with various musicians. My favorite of the interviews was with David Krakauer, a clarinetist, and his pianist partner, Kathleen Tagg. Krakauer had all sorts of thoughtful things to say about dialogue between traditions (as contrasted with cultural appropriation), and it was fascinating. Last year, Francesco's other orchestra had a concert with my childhood favorite work, Scheherazade, and a new piece by Krakauer and Tagg, and I tried to sign up to see the concert online but it was just too expensive. So I was thrilled to find that Francesco would be repeating the same concert here, this year, and in fact, this week!
So today was Symphony Happy Hour, and I was there and eager, and J and DG joined me. David Krakauer was there with Francesco and showed off the fun difference between regular clarinet and clarinet as played klezmer-style for a wedding, and they also told us more about the upcoming concert. Then we got to ask questions, and I mentioned his talk and asked if he happened to have a blog where it was all written up somewhere? (Alas, no.) Then they did a rather long and involved trivia event. I'd postponed buying J and AA's tickets for the concert on the chance that we might win one at trivia, as they'd done back before the pandemic, but that had been a much simpler trivia then. This was four rounds of increasingly difficult questions that we had to answer on test sheets, for scoring.
Well, I knew about Scheherazade and Rimsky-Korsakov (at least much more than J or DG), and I was prepared to make informed guesses about klezmer, so I just took out my pen and answered all the questions, even though technically we were a team of three. Then came the scoring, and they announced the top three in reverse order, and when we won first place I kind of shrieked I think (ha ha), and we got a bag of miscellaneous symphony stuff and three ticket vouchers! Then we got to go up front and get photographed with David Krakauer and Francesco, and talk with them directly. I was so excited! I gave them each our time-fractals book, since I still had some in my bag. YAY! I kept giggling all evening, every time I remembered.
So today was Symphony Happy Hour, and I was there and eager, and J and DG joined me. David Krakauer was there with Francesco and showed off the fun difference between regular clarinet and clarinet as played klezmer-style for a wedding, and they also told us more about the upcoming concert. Then we got to ask questions, and I mentioned his talk and asked if he happened to have a blog where it was all written up somewhere? (Alas, no.) Then they did a rather long and involved trivia event. I'd postponed buying J and AA's tickets for the concert on the chance that we might win one at trivia, as they'd done back before the pandemic, but that had been a much simpler trivia then. This was four rounds of increasingly difficult questions that we had to answer on test sheets, for scoring.
Well, I knew about Scheherazade and Rimsky-Korsakov (at least much more than J or DG), and I was prepared to make informed guesses about klezmer, so I just took out my pen and answered all the questions, even though technically we were a team of three. Then came the scoring, and they announced the top three in reverse order, and when we won first place I kind of shrieked I think (ha ha), and we got a bag of miscellaneous symphony stuff and three ticket vouchers! Then we got to go up front and get photographed with David Krakauer and Francesco, and talk with them directly. I was so excited! I gave them each our time-fractals book, since I still had some in my bag. YAY! I kept giggling all evening, every time I remembered.