Haha, so lately I’ve been, erm, I dunno, behaving like a 50 year-old, and listens to many, many classical pieces.
OK, Olivia is officially AWESOME. The actress playing her is named “Anna”, she played the oboe (albeit for only 6 months), and she can turn lights off with her mind!!!
If you have been admitted to UCSC, congratulations! I don’t envy high school students these days; getting into colleges, universities and conservatories is getting more and more difficult. You all are under so much more stress than I was back in the dark ages.
If you are thinking of a music major, or even if you are just interested in oboe at UCSC, please feel free to contact me at pmitchel [at] ucsc [that dot thing you put here] edu. I’m always happy to meet with prospective students if we can make schedules work. (I am on campus on Tuesdays, so if you are making plans, do keep that in mind, please.)
You just can’t beat the beauty at UCSC. I really need to post more pictures from the campus.
Here is my starting page for UCSC students.
It’s a twist of dramatic irony worthy of the stage: Major Bay Area arts groups are, surprisingly, having a robust year at the box office, but slumping donations, absentee tech giants, and diminishing government and foundation funding have left many of them limping out of the long, hard recession.
“This is shaping up as our most difficult year yet,” says Andrew Bales, president of Symphony Silicon Valley. “We continue to fight the good fight.”
… and who is expecting a deficit or not.
Too True!
I think if you take any trained musician (be it pianist, violinist, singer – yes, we’re musicians, too!) they will all marvel at the dichotomy that is Mozart. His music bares a complexity that boggles the brain, and yet it requires the utmost simplicity to execute. It somehow carries a mastery of mathematics and symmetry, and yet it wafts off the page into something airy and indescribable, achingly human in its entirety. I think part of the equation involves simply getting out of our own way, and letting that perfect balance of complexity and simplicity work it’s magic. But that’s a tall order, because it takes a mountain of technical mastery to even make it through the phrases: too much emoting, and it somehow becomes self-indulgent; not enough purity of line from both the voice and the orchestra, and we become too aware of the difficulty at hand.
-Joyce DiDonato
I read it here.
Ride On King Jesus
Georg Schumann: How Great are Thy Wonders
(Sorry, but I just didn’t find any Palm Sunday work I wanted to put here.)
I’ll just let these speak for themselves, aside from saying these are happy people (and some are a wee bit … um … interesting!):
so me and my friend were really bored one day and i decided to let him play on this really crappy marching oboe i had just sitting in the corner in my room. hes playing on an extremely old reed….
PLEASE …
Do not march with an oboe! Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever.
Got it?
I read it on this YouTube video page:
