{"id":121,"date":"2006-09-01T16:12:37","date_gmt":"2006-09-01T16:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2006\/09\/01\/kcyo-stage-3\/"},"modified":"2006-09-05T09:31:16","modified_gmt":"2006-09-05T09:31:16","slug":"kcyo-stage-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2006\/09\/01\/kcyo-stage-3\/","title":{"rendered":"KCYO Stage 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

End of Day 5 at <\/span>Kent<\/span> <\/span>County<\/span> Youth Orchestra.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Good news- Wasp sting is in retreat!!!!!!!!\u00a0<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

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Other good news- Band sounds good!!\u00a0<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

Last night was Curry Night. If you haven\u2019t seen it, you cannot imagine what happens in a quite village curry house when 70 musicians between 18 and 21 descend on the place a <\/span>9PM<\/span> looking for lager and tikka masala. I missed it last year, but it was quite a spectacle. The definite high point was the whole orchestra singing \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d over and over again (in four-part harmony, no less), in vain hopes that the owners would give them a free cake. Alas, they were dealing with seasoned pros, and no cake appeared.\u00a0<\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>In addition to being a long and difficult program, this is one of the more emotionally draining I\u2019ve worked on in a long time, and I\u2019ve been pretty wiped out after each rehearsal, especially as the week has gotten busier for me.\u00a0<\/span> <\/span>Geoff and I really built this program to be musically rewarding, playable, somewhat unified musically (hence all Eastern European composers), and accessible to the audience. However, a unifying theme has emerged, which does tie the concert together in particularly tragic terms.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Martinu\u2019s Memorial to <\/span>Lidice<\/span> is, as I\u2019ve mentioned before, a meditation on the destruction of the Czech <\/a><\/span>village<\/span> of <\/span>Lidice<\/span><\/a> by Nazi soldiers. Eight-eight children were murdered. Coming after the Martinu, Dvorak\u2019s Noonday Witch becomes much more harrowing than it might normally be. It is basically a macabre fairy tale- a little boy misbehaves one morning, so his father warns him of the tale of the <\/span>noon<\/span> day witch. Apparently, she comes for naughty children and murders them at <\/span>noon<\/span>, stealing their souls.\u00a0<\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/span>Thinking that the child will now behave, Dad sets off for work, leaving Mom and child behind. Of course, the witch does appear, and torments mother and son, demanding that the mother turn over the boy to her. The music vividly depicts her grotesque dance and the desperate and defiant screams of the mother. Finally the witch vanishes and the mother collapses, clutching her son to her for safety.\u00a0<\/span> <\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Father hears the <\/span>noon<\/span> bell toll, and merrily makes his way home for lunch, arriving to find mother asleep with the child in her arms. He wakes her gently, then they both realize, to their horror, that she has suffocated the boy in her arms. As they collapse in anguish, the witch reappears to mock them. It\u2019s Dvorak at his most modern and visionary, and, heard after the Martinu, the fairy tale seems all too horrifying.\u00a0<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>Rachmaninov\u2019s Second Symphony is a true, classical symphony- wonderfully abstract to it\u2019s very core. While Dvorak tells us a very literal story, and Martinu commemorates an actual event, Rachmaninov, in this piece, lets us make our own association. My own association, and that of many of my friends, changed forever last year, and I\u2019ll always think of the slow movement as dealing with loss and with consolation. After thinking about it all summer, I decided to tell the students about that association today; not because I want them to see the piece in this light, but because this very tragic story gets to the heart of what music really is for and about. I\u2019m still not sure it\u2019s right to tell it here, but maybe tomorrow.\u00a0<\/span> <\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>c. 2006 Kenneth Woods\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span> <\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

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