"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

ASU Concert (Sing Joyfully! Music of the Jewish Tradition)

Patricia and I attended a concert at Katzen Hall at ASU on March 31, 2007. I picked her up after work at Mayo Hospital, then we threaded our way through some surface streets due to a road closure on the 101. Ended up missing the first half hour of the concert.

But we really liked the portion that we heard. This concert is part of a series culminating in the performance of Bloch's "Sacred Service" that our ASU Choral Union will be performing on April 26. So the program was themed to music with Jewish connections (broadly defined).

Big crowd, primarily Jewish. Very involved in the music. Two works were by contemporary composers who were in attendance, so that was neat. I liked that the program had lots of variety - solo mezzosoprano, piano-with-cello, chorus-accompanied-by-violinist, etc.

They performed some Jewish folk music at the end, and the crowd clearly enjoyed those songs a bunch. A lady sitting near us was explaining things, she was from Rogers Park (Chicago) and had grown up with this music.

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