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krj
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Aspen Music Festival and School 2002
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Aug 5 03:08 UTC 2002 |
My wife Leslie/arabella is out in Aspen, Colorado, for the summer,
at Opera Singer Camp. She's a student at the Aspen Music Festival and
School. I came out for a visit and thought I'd just make a few quick
notes. The notes will be shorter than I'd hoped; Leslie has been
too busy with rehearsals to make many concerts, and then I had, um,
my little side adventure...
(I thought I'd written one of these items from our Aspen visit two
years ago, but I can't find it.)
Linked between Classical and Music conferences.
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| 21 responses total. |
krj
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response 1 of 21:
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Aug 5 03:08 UTC 2002 |
Leslie sang in a performance of Stravinsky's "Les Noces" ("The Wedding")
in the Benedict Music Tent on Sunday, July 21. The conductor was
Michael Stern, son of Isaac Stern the renowned violinist.
It's an interesting piece: four soloists, a small chorus, four pianos
and percussion. The text is drawn from Russian folk wedding customs;
there are three movements without a break about the preparations for
the wedding day, and then a fourth movement, the longest, about the
wedding ceremony itself. This is described as Stravinsky's most Russian
composition. The conductor gave a talk before the piece which was almost
as long as the piece itself, having the musicians play and sing short
excerpts while he explained various aspects of the piece.
The second piece on the program was Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto
No. 1, with the very famous opening. The conductor did say this
was likely to be the most Russian concert program we would ever hear.
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other
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response 2 of 21:
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Aug 5 04:45 UTC 2002 |
If you or she see any of the following people, please tell them I said
hello. They are faculty at The Aspen Fest.
David Geber (cello)
Julia Lichten (cello)
Laurie Carney (violin)
Peter Winograd (violin)
Dan Avshalomov (viola)
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krj
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response 3 of 21:
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Aug 6 13:14 UTC 2002 |
(Well, I'm flying home this morning, so I'll wave a generalized "howdy!"
as the plane takes off. As Leslie is in the opera program, I don't have
any contact with the instrumentalists, really, though I did meet one
instrumentalist faculty member in the hospital...)
OK, this is the non-musical part: why krj was offline for all of late
July. I got a nail in my foot while travelling out to Aspen and
didn't get it looked at fast enough.
After a couple days of trying to treat the resulting infection
on an outpatient basis I was admitted to the Aspen Valley Hospital and
I spent the next nine or ten days there on heavy-duty IV antibiotics.
So much for music and vacation. It's a very nice hospital, great views
of mountains out the windows, very good food and a very caring staff.
I missed a couple of performances I'd been looking forward to.
One was Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition;" the other was the
second of Aspen's operas, "Gloria: A Pig's Tale" by HK Gruber.
In the opera, Gloria is a barnyard pig who has foolishly fallen in
love with the farmer, while the sausages sing songs of warning and
a wild boar comes to rescue her. There was much skepticism about
this work in the runup to its production, but (I am told) it was
quite well received and it was pretty funny.
You can find a short review of "Gloria" in the New York Times.
Leslie worked on costuming for this show; everyone in the opera program
is supposed to work backstage for one opera.
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keesan
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response 4 of 21:
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Aug 6 19:47 UTC 2002 |
I hope they recorded the performance. Glad to hear you are still a quadruped
(and alive).
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mynxcat
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response 5 of 21:
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Aug 6 20:39 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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keesan
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response 6 of 21:
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Aug 8 00:55 UTC 2002 |
He has four limbs that still work.
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other
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response 7 of 21:
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Aug 8 01:05 UTC 2002 |
Yes, but only bi of his quadru limbs have peds.
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keesan
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response 8 of 21:
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Aug 8 01:36 UTC 2002 |
So what do you call someone with four functioning limbs (as opposed to someone
with four non-functioning limbs, who is a quadriplegic)?
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other
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response 9 of 21:
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Aug 8 03:59 UTC 2002 |
An oxymoron.
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other
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response 10 of 21:
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Aug 8 04:01 UTC 2002 |
oops. i read that close parenthese in the wrong place.
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mynxcat
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response 11 of 21:
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Aug 8 14:42 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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orinoco
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response 12 of 21:
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Aug 15 01:25 UTC 2002 |
perseus.tufts.edu gives "membrum" as meaning "a limb, member of the body."
Ken is a bipedal polymembrate.
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md
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response 13 of 21:
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Aug 15 11:48 UTC 2002 |
There's an old rule governing word formation that's been forgotten and
ignored for so long it hardly merits mentioning, but . . .
You're supposed to avoid "barbarisms," which is the practice of
combining words from different languages. For example, one barbarism
that used to drive the purists crazy is "permafrost." "Polymembrate"
is another example. "Poly-" is Greek, and "-membr-" and the "-ate"
ending are both Latin. A simple fix would be to change the "poly-"
to "multi-" and form "multimembrate."
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davel
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response 14 of 21:
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Aug 15 12:40 UTC 2002 |
Heh. But English is a fairly barbaric mixture of so many languages that it
seems like quibbling to object to something like that.
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md
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response 15 of 21:
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Aug 15 15:38 UTC 2002 |
Absolutely right, but ever since I first read about this (in Fowler, I
think) I've always tried to keep the languages together, at least in
the same word. It does make a kind of sense, I guess. The truth is
that "polymembrate" is perfectly understandable, "barbarism" or not,
and that's really what matters.
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md
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response 16 of 21:
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Aug 15 16:02 UTC 2002 |
http://www.xrefer.com/entry/441152
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dbratman
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response 17 of 21:
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Aug 15 20:49 UTC 2002 |
"television"
"homosexual"
Too late now.
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krj
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response 18 of 21:
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Aug 15 22:46 UTC 2002 |
I do have another pair of Aspen music reviews, not sure when I'll
toss them off.
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md
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response 19 of 21:
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Aug 16 11:54 UTC 2002 |
17: I don't know what an all-Latin TV would be called. Transvision?
Proculvision? Try and imagine it being anything other than
television. "Too late now" -- that's pretty much what the Fowler quote
in the xrefer article says.
18: So sorry for the silly drift, Ken. Glad your foot survived
(especially glad the infection didn't turn systemic). Please do toss
your reviews off when you have the time.
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md
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response 20 of 21:
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Aug 16 13:11 UTC 2002 |
Btw, as long as we're waiting for Ken... ;-)
The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature not only allows
hybrids, including Greek-Latin ones like polymembrate, it actually
forbids changing them once they've been accepted (except for simple
misspellings or subsequent identification of some violation of the
rules of taxonomy). It's true that if the author of such a hybrid
submits it for publication, he's likely to get a correction from the
editor. But if the hybrid slips past both author and editor, it can
become permanent.
Also -- and I descend now to the lowest level of pickiness --
even "multimembrate" might violate the rules of nomenclature, because
the "-ate" ending seems to be reserved for the names of phyla
("chordate," from "chordata") and subphyla ("vertebrate,"
from "vertebrata"). I don't think the ICZN covers rank above that of
family, so who knows? But I'm guessing that unless there is already a
phylum or subphylum named "polymembrata" or "multimembrata," the names
are probably invalid.
I realize this is as boring as can be to most people, and I apologize.
If you want to see what I call pure poetry, look at
http://zeus.ruca.ua.ac.be/EvolutionaryBiology/coll/doc/iczn4txt.htm
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tpryan
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response 21 of 21:
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Aug 16 21:26 UTC 2002 |
I would like to say that
"That frell is total feldercarb", but it really isn't.
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