Friday Miscellanea--Special Travel Edition

I will be in Montreal for several days which I think will result in more posts than I have managed lately! For years I tried to put up at least one post a day, but recently that has fallen to just a few a week. This past week all I managed was the Friday Miscellanea. Hey, you get what you pay for! I have just had too many other demands on my time and I worry about repeating myself. I started this blog in June of 2011 and back then I had a lot to say. But lately I have a bit less to offer. Some of my energies go into composition, but most go into my non-musical work.

So I am off to Mexico City this morning to catch a flight to Montreal. I haven't been back for quite a while and I have some friends I will be catching up with. I will be paying a visit to my old alma mater, McGill University, where there are some impressive new buildings for the School of Music courtesy of a large private donation. I am looking forward to seeing how things are with the School of Music these days. Is it still the largest in Canada? Do they still have three orchestras? Do they still put on over three hundred concerts a year in various venues? What is happening in the Composition Department? Theory? Musicology?

I hope to attend some concerts in the new concert hall where the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal perform and see as many other concerts as I can. Montreal has several universities and at least two others have significant music departments. I am going to drop by Archambault Musique, a giant music store, and browse their scores.

On the non-musical agenda will be visits to the Mecca of smoked meat, Schwartz's Hebrew Delicatessen, now known as "Chez Schwartz's Charcuterie Hebraique de Montréal" due to French language requirements. Yes, there are certainly more chi-chi establishments, but Schwartz's has a unique appeal.

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Blogger Jessica Duchen wrote a nice review of this years Last Night of the Proms concert. The site won't allow selective quotation so you will just have to go there to read the whole piece.

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Here is some news from my other alma mater, the University of Victoria. Three professors there have just been awarded 2018 fellows of the Royal Society of Canada. I actually know two of the three! The musical one is tenor Benjamin Butterfield, head of voice at the school of music who I knew when I taught there. His brother, Chris Butterfield, is a composer I worked with many years ago. Also honoured is philosophy professor Eike-Henner Kluge with whom I took an introduction to philosophy course way back when I was an undergraduate. It was his first year at the university. That course is what gave me a life-long love for and fascination with philosophy.

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There are lots of other fascinating items in the news today, but I just don't have time to hunt them down for you as I've literally got to "get packing!" But here is one final one, an item about Leonard Bernstein by Alex Ross in the New Yorker:

How posterity will judge this volcano of a man remains to be seen. His career offers a lesson in the perils of hero worship: the future of classical music cannot consist in waiting for another telegenic superstar. The fact that major works still emerged from Bernstein’s later years—“Mass,” “Songfest,” “A Quiet Place”—is a tribute to his residual creative fire. Harmon, in his book, describes hearing a “timid knock” on his door in the middle of the night. Bernstein wanted to try out a newly composed passage from “A Quiet Place.” When Harmon asked a couple of skeptical questions, Bernstein answered them patiently and persuasively. For Harmon, that hour of musical exchange, shy and serious, justified the chaos that surrounded it. Even so, he fled after four years.

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And I have to leave you with that. Here is the Montreal Symphony with Petruschka by Stravinsky conducted by Charles Dutoit. I would have put up a performance by the current conductor, Kent Nagano, but I couldn't find a suitable one on YouTube: