ursamajor: people on the beach watching the ocean (Default)
I started writing about our May concert weeks ago, and then got caught up in the swell of all of our June concerts. Three down, two to go!

[personal profile] hyounpark's mom and sister came out for our May concert - they'd wanted to come for Bocelli, but we took a look at ticket prices and required hotels and were like "even for a once in a lifetime thing like this we cannot in good conscience ask you to shell out mid-four-figures for a weekend in Napa." So instead, they came out for the reprise of Here I Stand: Paul Robeson, which also included Jasmine Barnes' Sometimes I Cry, and Brahms' 2nd Symphony. The performance went well, and was recorded! So I'm looking forward to being able to share that when it's released.

We also stuffed ourselves silly that weekend, but it was a good chance to just hang out at Leonard and Sara's and be lazy and have family time. Takeout sushi from Miyozen and wings from Wingstop while we worked on puzzles; curries for dinner from House of Curries; an excellent Hunanese dinner at Wojia the following evening.

H might have been a little more strategic on the eating front; 36 hours after we were onstage at the Paramount, he ran Bay to Breakers. I happily raced him across the city on the train per usual; devoured soda bread and a ganache cold brew on the beach at Sunset Dunes while waiting for him to catch up.

After that, we launched straight into prep for Beethoven and the symphony gala fundraiser. While we were waiting to go onstage for the gala, my little corner of sopranos was by what was very clearly The Party Table at the fundraiser. Highly amusing. We made ABC News for like half a second, and I was mostly blocked by the piano; perils of being a short soprano, lol.

Beethoven's 9th last Friday was the official wrap on our season, and I'm glad our director said what he did about it in his introduction, referencing that Beethoven was writing it in a time of much upheaval; that no matter the challenges, in our community, we seek and elevate joy; that this is our calling as musicians. An die freude, indeed.

*

We're approaching six years out here in California, now; as of yesterday, celebrating 20 years together with [personal profile] hyounpark. (25 years on LJ/DW, at least off and on.) It seems like the universe is recognizing it, nestling into that theme of growing community ties. Just in the last week alone:

- H and I went to an a cappella concert on Sunday at the Freight, and one of the musicians was a college classmate.
- one of the additional singers we brought on for B9? Turned out to be my elementary school music teacher, who now lives less than a mile away from us. She was like, "Oh my god, I was so strict in those years!" Me, ever the diplomat: "Eh, I'd call it orchestral." Everyone in listening distance cracked up.
- on my way to rehearsal on Tuesday, I ran into one of my biking friends as they were going into BART and I was coming up out of BART. I'm finally starting to run into people serendipitously more often!
- at bike brunch last Friday, one of my friends from the food writing class I took in March was at the cafe we'd ridden to, and apparently they bike too, so of course I invited them to join us on future rides.
- at the B9 concert, friends in the audience included new biking friends, old fandom friends, and even older elementary school friends.

And now, we just got a last-minute song added to our setlist for the Bocelli concerts this weekend about 45 minutes ago, so I go cram. And make sure my clothes are washed. And check the Wine Country weather. And overhydrate. And make sure of our carpool. And that I have coughdrops. And sunscreen. And shoes that are both concert-dress-appropriate and walkable for tromping across the vineyard grounds.
ursamajor: Tajel on geeks (geeks: love them)
Bay Area friends! We've got another concert coming up with Oakland Symphony Chorus a week from Friday (February 16, 8 pm at the Paramount; The Artist As Activist), and we'd love to see you there. The Symphony will be performing Joan Tower's Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No 6 and Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No 5, and we'll be joining them for the world premiere of Carlos Simon's Here I Stand: Paul Robeson.

And then in April, OSC will be collaborating with Pacific Edge Voices for their The Sound Garden of Love concert at St. Mark's in SF. On the program: Elgar's Lux Aeterna, luminous and crystalline; it's new to me, but I'm looking forward to floating up there, supported by close harmonies. And to my utterly ecstatic joy, a piece with which I am quite familiar: Vienna Teng's The Hymn of Acxiom. Yes, when I found this out, my squeals could be heard clear across the bay. :D (I know! I still need to write about her Freight concerts in December, but suffice it to say for now that I am glad those shows have become part of my end of year rituals, grateful for every year she's managed to find a way to come back since my first time in 2019, or done an online concert the years she couldn't.)

There is something very now-ish about taking a song created with electronic voices based on one person's voice, and extracting it back out to a group of human voices to perform with all of our quirks and foibles, and the power of community enabling a group performance where we as individuals will need to take breaths unplanned, will make mistakes, but will make art, beauty, together. It feels zeitgeist-ish, similar to how I've written 100,000 words' worth of stories in the last six months, as if I'm rebelling against the mainstream embrace of large language models as authors, algorithms as intellects, corporations as people. Now-ish, even on the accelerated schedule of technology changes, because the forces Teng described in the early 2010s have had more than a decade to entrench themselves into our lives.

*

Sometimes, the advertising algorithms get stuck in a rut. Like Lily Diamond, I, too, have been inundated with lingerie ads in my social media in the runup to Valentine's Day, now barely a week hence, and I'm mildly curious if it's the usual spray and pray targeting feel of most ad campaigns, or if any signals I threw out being a person online have contributed to so intensely refocusing the ads that I'm being shown.

(someone is gathering every crumb you drop )

But what's being advertised even more avidly to me at the moment than even the seasonally predictable lacy red and pink and black trousseaux? These Friends of the Boundary Waters x Hippy Feet Merino Wool Hiking Socks.

they are cute ... )

look, I know I tend to evangelize about wool socks, but also 'now we possess you, you'll own that in time'? )

(o how glorious, glorious, a new need is born)

*

Later in that piece, Diamond confesses:

Aside from feeling bullied by an ostensibly omniscient algorithm that's supposed to know me and anticipate my needs better than I do myself, I feel a bit let down. It feels good to be known. I've made many a joke about my phone being a pseudo-surrogate boyfriend, but it's the algorithm we rely on to feel understood psychologically, spiritually, capitalistically.


(someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to (say just the right thing and) show that you're understood) )

(leave your life open, you don't have to hide)

And yet I'm posting this publicly, anyway - rolling the dice, seeing who will read, engage. (Hoping for who, rather than what. Betting that silence means what.) Going on four years of having our social life circumscribed by circumstance, our social media interactions bound by ever tighter limits.

Posting this here, while knowing that everyone is tired of creating Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of, and burned by the corporate mainstream options that are tolerated enough, if limited in other ways. And, too often, too worn down by the demands of twenty-first century life to conjure up the activation energy to engage, either. (Who has time for 2000 words of my rambling observations?) Yet I'll still link to this on the mainstream social networks where I know people, because. (I guess with Bluesky opening up this week, I ought to look again and see who's made digital homes there, on Threads, on Mastodon. I gave up last year because, again, Yet Another Account To Keep Track Of.)

*

I've also been reading Rebecca Solnit this weekend. Her latest for the London Review of Books, In the Shadow of Silicon Valley, weaves together a lot of loose threads. It's long, but worth the read. What caught my attention most was how she talked about the social pandemic both predating and coexisting with the current medical pandemic, a crisis of extractive technology impeding human connection, exacerbated since the first stay home orders. The loneliness Diamond expressed above, too.

(let our formulas find your soul) )

The piece ends with even Solnit sounding weary, she of changing the story from despair to possibility.

"I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity and affordability, demonise its poor, turn its politicians into puppets and push its politics to the right. They have produced many kinds of dystopia without ever deviating from the line that they are bringing us all to a glorious utopia for which they deserve our admiration.

I used to be proud of being from the San Francisco Bay Area."


Valentine's Day will mark 4.5 years since [personal profile] hyounpark and I arrived (back) in the Bay Area. It is a markedly different Bay from the one I left for college; I am a markedly different person in my 40s now from who I was in my teens. But even with the 13-month interruption of staying home curtailing our plans to establish our Bay-based social life, see old friends more regularly, make new friends? The best parts of being here have been the relationships we're forging and reviving, the community we're finding our way into. And among our community, among the people we know, we're all trying to make things better for all of us.

We're all a chorus here, doing the work, needing to breathe at points when the sound must go on. Staggering our breathing as individual singers so we can sustain the sound as a whole. If you're feeling like Solnit here? Breathe. To end by quoting Vienna Teng again: "We've got you."
ursamajor: strumming to find a melody for two (one chord into another)
Oakland Symphony Chorus has started up again! I don't know why it feels early; when I sang with Chorus Pro Musica in Boston, we did Summersings every Monday of August to attract new potential members. We've done two weeks of open rehearsals so far this season, and we're hoping the singing we're doing at the Lake Merritt Pergola this weekend with the SoulBeatz drummers will get peoples' attention.

Maybe it's because this has been the first truly warm week of summer here. I've been appreciating whatever the hell buffer we somehow managed to have here all summer keeping temps 70F and below while it seemed like everyone else in the northern hemisphere was reporting record high temperatures or wildfire smoke or both. This week, our luck seems to have run out - it's been in the 80s, it got up to almost 90F today, and now we've got AQI issues with wildfire smoke drifting down from Oregon. Hooray. So our masking for choir tonight had a dual purpose: continuing to try to dodge COVID in an increasing wave, *and* trying to minimize the amount of smoke we inhaled. Unfortunately, masking for choir is currently optional, unlike last season, so I was disappointed to see that maybe 20% of us were masking. Le sigh. The windows were all open; I guess they decided trying to keep the rehearsal hall a sane temperature and allow for at least some airflow was more important than smoke concerns, but no real winning scenario here for anybody's lungs, the ultimate irony for a singing group.

Still, it's fulfilling to be singing with others again, and after four years out here, three and a half of them under pandemic constraints, we're willing to take a few calculated risks to build stronger ties with our community.

There's quite a bit of Beethoven in this year's concert lineup. In November, we'll open our Truth to Power concert with the overture from Beethoven's Fidelio, along with selections from Margaret Bonds' Montgomery Variations, and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. We'll skip Beethoven for our Tina Turner tribute concert in December; likewise, our February concert "The Artist as Activist" will be a commission by Carlos Simon - Here I Stand: Paul Robeson. Our final concert in May will bring back Beethoven's 5th, as well as some of Aaron Copland's Old American Songs. Given how much I loved singing Copland's In the Beginning back in the day, I'm looking forward to more Copland! And we actually open our season in October, singing a to-be-revealed song for Angela Y. Davis' "Playlist," where the guest of honor chooses music to be performed that inspired her own works.

Profile

ursamajor: people on the beach watching the ocean (Default)
she of the remarkable biochemical capabilities!

July 2025

S M T W T F S
   12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 2nd, 2025 07:45
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios