The Fredösphere

Brian Sacawa is a saxophonist at the University of Michigan.  He is blogged and dangerous.  I especially liked his description of a session with a "famous composer" playing through a work-in-progress for bari sax.

Something else with a U. of M. connection:  this, uh, thing.

Alex urged me to give Messiaen's The Canyons of the eToilettes another try, so, not daring to cross him, I rushed to the library to borrow the CD.  It's gone:  lost or stolen, but it's gone!  As a substitute exercise in self-abnegation, I picked up Messiaen's equally-impenetrable opera St. Francis the Sissy.  Well, sheee-oot!  I can actually sort of listen to this music now.  It's severe, with long stretches of recitative equilibrium punctuated by blasts from the brass.  Messiaen relies on exotic tone colors rather than harmonic progressions to provide variety, but, for my former self, that trade-off would not have worked.  Some change really did come over me around the time of my 40th birthday.  Now I can pay attention much longer to things that are not immediately comprehensible.  Formerly, when music like Canyons or Saint François would begin, it would only take a few seconds before my mind would begin to wander.  This marvelous transformation doesn't have a name, so far as I know, so we'll have to make one up for it.  Let's call it ... oh, I don't know ... let's call it puberty.

My mother plays the accordion, but she tends to use it to accompany country & western yodeling numbers, not to perform the Goldberg Variations.