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.

21 responses total.

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.

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)

(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.     

I hope they recorded the performance.  Glad to hear you are still a quadruped
(and alive).

This response has been erased.

He has four limbs that still work.

Yes, but only bi of his quadru limbs have peds.

So what do you call someone with four functioning limbs (as opposed to someone
with four non-functioning limbs, who is a quadriplegic)?

An oxymoron.

oops.  i read that close parenthese in the wrong place.

This response has been erased.

perseus.tufts.edu gives "membrum" as meaning "a limb, member of the body."
Ken is a bipedal polymembrate.

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."  

Heh.  But English is a fairly barbaric mixture of so many languages that it
seems like quibbling to object to something like that.

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.

http://www.xrefer.com/entry/441152

"television"

"homosexual"

Too late now.

I do have another pair of Aspen music reviews, not sure when I'll 
toss them off.

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.

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

        I would like to say that
"That frell is total feldercarb", but it really isn't.

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