thirteen ways

On March 17, after our final trip to Richmond VA for the year, 8bb played a fundraising benefit for the Yellow Barn Music School and Festival at the home of Sasha and Thais Mark. Sasha is a good-hearted, music-loving doctor – the sort of generous benefactor that helps small but important organisations like Yellow Barn continue their good works.

The ensemble was minus percussion (for the second time in two weeks), simply because the Duv and all his bang-y bits of plastic, metal and wood wouldn’t have fit in the modest living area that was our concert stage for the evening.

The program included two works from our touring program: Stephen Harke’s exploitation of all that is off-balance, The Horse with the Lavender Eye; and Derek Bermel’s Coming Together, or, as the Phot explains it, a conversation between “two adults from the ‘Peanuts’ movies”.

Here is the Phot introducing the latter, gesturing wildly when clear and lucid thought escapes him:

Climactic Coming Together gyrations:

I decided to resurrect Australian composer Brett Dean’s schizophrenic solo flute piece Demons for the concert, a piece I played a handful of times early in the season. I had performed it from memory in those earlier performances, but it took me a good solid week of works to get the notes back in my head.

As my first season with 8bb has progressed, my process of memorization has undergone subtle but important changes. Instead of relying, as I did in the past, on sheer repetition during practice sessions, almost literally pounding the musical gestures into my muscle memory, I find myself memorizing names of notes as well, to give me a jumping-off point for any given section. This may be a subconscious reaction to the advice that The Kap has been giving all year: always have two types of memorization operating; if one fails, then you have the other as a fall-back.

We were plied with wonderful desserts after the concert, and met a fascinating cross-section of benefit atendees.

The Kap, Sascha, Thais and a little bub in the kitchen, late in the evening after the concert:

You can find more photos from the benefit (and my afternoon side-trip to the National Zoo) here.