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Yacht Club Gig |
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Members of the Youth Orchestra (flanked, in darker suits, by Jonathan on one side and Cheryl on the other) at their Palm Coast Yacht Club performance on March 27. Nature cooperated: Clouds gathered and rumbled as the orchestra played Vivaldi's "Ocean Storm." [Photo courtesy of the Yacht Club] |
Let Us Tug at Your Heart Strings
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Instruments are meant to be played, not collect dust. Clean out your closet and give the gift of music to a young child. The Friends of the Youth Orchestra in Flagler County are asking for string instrument donations for students who want to participate in the district’s after-school orchestra program, but cannot afford to rent or buy instruments. We are looking for violins, violas, cellos, and doublebasses in all sizes. Instruments can be dropped off in the Daytona Beach area at the News-Journal (ask for Pierre at ext. 2536), 901 Sixth Street or in Flagler County by calling Cheryl Tristam at (386)263-2543. Cash donations are also needed to support our “heart strings” fund, which helps pay for additional instruments. Checks should be made out to: Friends of the Youth Orchestra, and mailed to 33 Postman Lane, Palm Coast, FL 32164. For further information about making a donation, contact Cheryl Tristam, executive director, at (386)263-2543 or by email at Cheryl@flagleryouthorchestra.org.
FYO wants to help every child who wants to play but can't afford the cost of an instrument. Please search your heart, and give the gift of music by making a donation today.
Study: Practicing Pays Off for Young Musicians
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If the economic crisis is making you think twice about investing in music, think again before abandoning your investment. From Science Daily: "A Harvard-based study has found that children who study a musical instrument for at least three years outperform children with no instrumental training—not only in tests of auditory discrimination and finger dexterity (skills honed by the study of a musical instrument), but also on tests measuring verbal ability and visual pattern completion (skills not normally associated with music)."
The study, originally published in an online journal so academic most of us would need three thousand hours of practice to understand it (you can read the original work here), took 41 eight- to eleven-year-olds who'd studied piano or a string instrument (that's you) for at least three years through private music lessons of at least 45 minutes per week plus additional time spent practicing at home. (Monday and Wednesday rehearsals, adding up to 120 minutes per week for each of you, plus time spent practicing at home, certainly matches those criteria.)
Those 41 students were compared to 18 children who'd had no sustained musical instruction other than the 30 to 40 minutes a week they spent in music classes at school. (The students who studied strings or piano also had those same general music classes in school).
The results? "While it is no surprise that the young musicians scored significantly higher than those in the control group on two skills closely related to their music training (auditory discrimination and finger dexterity)," Science Daily wrote, "the more surprising result was that they also scored higher in two skills that appear unrelated to music—verbal ability (as measured by a vocabulary IQ test) and visual pattern completion (as measured by the Raven's Progressive Matrices). And furthermore, the longer and more intensely the child had studied his or her instrument, the better he or she scored on these tests. Studying an instrument thus seems to bring benefits in areas beyond those that are specifically targeted by music instruction." See the full article here...
Bell Springs Forward to Summer Fever
So, our Spring Awakening concert has come and gone, it'll be a few weeks before the next (and the year's final) performance at the Flagler Auditorium in May. If you're sensing any kind of performance withdrawal, fear not: limber up those arms, unwax those ears and have a listen (and a look) as the fabulous Joshua Bell gives a shout-out to summer in this terrifically exciting performance of the presto movement from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Bell is playing with musicians of the Academy of St.Martin in the Fields—one of the greatest ensembles of our day . Bell and the Academy recorded all four concertos that form Vivaldi's Four Seasons cycle for a Sony Classics album released last fall. You can buy it here. (And after watching this performance, who could resist? You can also see a performance of Beethoven's entire, lesser-known but beautiful 4th Symphony, some Elgar and more after that video.)
Happy Requiem for Mozart
To this day scholars, doctors and conspiracy theorists wonder aloud: was Mozart murdered? Did he take ill by accident? Was he poisoned? What we do know for sure is that he got slightly sick while working in Prague in September 1791, then got much sicker on Nov. 20, when he was back in Vienna and working, ironically, on his Requiem. Fifteen days later, on Dec. 5, unrecognizable from being all swelled up, rashed up and stinking to the very high heavens he was writing his Requiem for, he died. He was just 35 years old.
Judging from his genes, he wasn’t supposed to have died that soon. His father, Leopold Mozart, was 67 when he died, an ancient age in an era where people usually died in their late 40s or early 50s. Mozart’s sister lived to be 78. So what happened? The most likely verdict, according to the New York Times, is “streptococcal infection, renal failure, terminal bronchial pneumonia and a matrix of other illnesses, some dating from his childhood, when the Mozart family spent years touring Europe to show off the boy genius.”
Not that it makes a difference in the end. Imagine if Mozart had lived as long as, say, Haydn, or Telemann, or Bach, all of whom made it to (or past) the current official retirement age of 65. Bach barely made it, but Haydn lived to be 77, which explains those 104 symphonies, and Telemann lived to be 86, which explains why he could spare time to write background music for chow time, some of which was played at our Youth Orchestra concerts. Not that Mozart was a slouch in comparison: He wrote some 650 works, including 40 symphonies, 23 piano concertos, 203 dances, 61 divertimentos, 24 string quartets, 35 sonatas for violin and piano, 20 piano sonatas, too many operas to count, and a few hundred more works on top of that. The year he died he’d just completed “The Magic Flute” and the beautiful motet, “Ave verum corpus,” and he was trying to finish the Requiem.
He lives on. A day without Mozart is an incomplete day. So here are a few bits of Wolfgang to mark his death, which never really happened anyway if his music lives on, as it most surely (or, as they say in the halls of Buddy Taylor Middle School, “awesomely”) does.
- The third movement from Mozart's 15th piano concerto
- The third movement from the Piano Trio in E major, K542
- A Credo from one of Mozart's great masses
- The wonderful piano variations on Ah vous dirais-je Maman
Listen to us play! From May 2007:Take Five
