Old Town School - On The Road

Dispatches from the road from our wayfaring travelers.

Bau’s Random Observations

Lots of good anecdotes and rich food for thought at every turn on this journey. A few snatches:

Sharing music. There are people everywhere who love American music, and some of them are passing experts in specific subgenres. But encounters with country singers abroad inevitably bump up against our ingrained knowledge of what that music is really supposed to sound like. For me, the more satisfying encounters are with those who are carrying on their own local styles: Geordie fiddle tunes, English music hall numbers, Finnish polskas. And here is the thrill of discovery: something steeped in its own place with a long history standing behind it and with more meaning and nuance than we as outsiders can comprehend. We’ve been very fortunate to experience several virtuoso level performances, most delivered in the most casual, relaxed manner. A delight.

Old Town School folks. Our teachers are excellent traveling companions. Curious, tolerant, flexible, ready for whatever is around the next corner, fun to be with. But getting seven of them aimed in the same direction at the same time is like herding cats!

Public spaces. We’ve been in some very interesting — and vastly different — public spaces on this trip, which of course make me reflect on the nature of the public space we’re about to create across Lincoln Avenue. The Sage Gateshead is an enormous new public performance facility. The lobby is about the size of two football fields, lots of glass and marble, a little chilly to my taste; the concert venues are all trimmed with wood, making them warm spaces to inhabit. But in all of it the scale fights against the intimacy of face to face interactions. For that everybody retires to the local pub, a very different kind of public space. Small, narrow, crowded, almost haphazardly decorated — and totally delightful. Somehow, we require both, the arena and the pub. A day at Durham Cathedral offered another kind of space, this one deliberately constructed to impress individuals with their smallness in relation to the grandeur of God. But again, one feels that the big church may have been good for inspiring awe, but the real interactions took place out in the comparative confines of the cloisters and side chapels — or down the street at the pub.

Ensembles. We had the chance to sit in on some ensemble classes at Sibelius Academy, and they are working at a very high level, far more polished and professional than anything we have at Old Town School. Granted, these are students in a degree program preparing for their performance critiques, but still it makes me wonder whether we could create mechanisms for allowing advanced students to immerse themselves in sophisticated ensemble playing that is up to professional performance standards.

The Old Town School sitcom. While riding the three-hour tour of a train from Newcastle to London, our crew fell to casting ourselves as the stars of Gilligan’s Island. The results: Bau Graves as the Skipper; Maria McCullough as Gilligan; Joe Filisko as the Professor; Robert Tenges as Ginger the Movie Star; Boogie McClarin as Mary Anne; Barb Silverman as Thurston Howell the Millionaire; and Steve Levitt as Lovey, his Wife. “Lovey” might even stick as a nickname for Steve…

Lots more to come, but we’re headed back over to Sibelius Academy soon and I need to go have a little smoked reindeer meat for breakfast.

Bau

Filed under: Uncategorized by Robert | April 9, 2008 |


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