FeNAM!

Well, just as quickly as it started, this year's Festival of New American Music draws to a close today. This one wasn't too bad actually, though I did have a 15 hour day yesterday and several other 12+ hour days this past week. But, that's pretty typical. Today I'm going for something that I don't normally do...I'm actually going to watch all three concerts today. It's rare for me to watch any concerts these days as I'm just too busy doing other things, but today I'm doing the hat trick.

The highlight will, I think, be the California Youth Symphony at Mondavi. They are an amazing youth group, better than a lot of college groups, and though my composition teacher is their director and I usually get free passes to their bay area concerts, I've never actually seen them live. Today's program features Copland's Billy the Kid and Bernstein's On the Waterfront.

This year's festival has been something of a stoner convention; I don't think there's been a day yet were clouds of vapor haven't trailed into the Music Recital Hall with our audiences. Maybe you need to be high to truly appreciate some of this stuff, I don't know. The theremin concert which opened the festival surely was a good candidate for that. The whole concert was like an acid trip from the 1960s. Seriously. I'm not even exaggerating.

I was fortunate enough to have a work played on the festival this year; the first two movements of my Trio for Oboe, Clarinet, and Viola were played both at the Student Chamber Ensembles concert and the Student Artists Performance Competition. It was good times really, and the innovation for this year was that many concerts were video recorded and streamed online at Live Stream, so you can go back and watch them again - or catch the ones you missed. It's pretty cool actually; folks have watched our concerts in over 20 different countries, including Japan, Korea, Thailand, Australia, Mexico, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, and Ireland to name a few.

Well it's just about 8:30 Sunday morning now, so I guess it's time to try and get caught up a little on the homework I've fallen behind on. This semester's graduate Ethnomusicology course will be the last class I need for my Master's degree, then it's on to my final project!