Sinfonietta

Mary Beth and I went to the symphony in the early afternoon. It was the conductor's first time back since he'd been away for a little while after his husband suddenly died, so it was good to see him again (though it's all pretty sad and all). It was kind of a weird program. It started with a Pink Floyd medley from Dark Side of the Moon. I was hoping at least they'd do "On the Run", the one song from that album that I really like but no such luck (I mean, I can understand why they didn't, but still it'd be fun to see how an orchestra could pull it off, and actually in my head I was picturing it with all the strings doing the fast sequencer part, but moving through the orchestra for the change in textures (and so one instrument didn't have to play that one fast run over and over) and then the other instruments doing fun tonal noises and stuf...but, of course this was all just my imagination, they didn't do it!). Overall, it sounded like a typical pops orchestra thing and I was terribly into it, but the rest of the concert was really good. Next they did Leoš Janáček's "Sinfonietta" and that was really good and they ended with Gustav Holst's "The Planets" which was also really good. (We went to the talk before and the q&a after and he talked about changing the order, but I agree with Holst's original vision of ending with "Neptune".) Oh yeah, and both those pieces call for a huge fucking orchestra, they said 95 musicians were on stage for the Janáček (and the Holst had to be at least close, it looked about the same size just eyeballing the whole thing). And they had these giganormous chimes that were at least twice as tall as normal chimes, where the percussionist who played them had to get up on a big platform. Never seen any like that! Oh, and all this reminds me that the night before, at the opera, two of the musicians playing those baroque instruments were the two string players that played with Nonconnah (once) when Zachary was trying to expand it but they didn't gel too well with the lack of a stricter structure. Later at night I worked some more on that remix. I recorded some playing with the original song loaded on the Morphagene and doing some chopping up and some effects with that. Now I'm cutting up bits of those recordings to mix back in with the base mix. Still have a good ways to go but at least that final part is started and on its way.