Freude!
Tonight I sang Ode an den Freude with these guys. It's a bunch of people who are interested in playing the fourth movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony on whatever instrument it is they play and can bring, and in singing it with whatever voices they have, with highly variable amounts of actual preparation. Predictably, it did not sound anywhere near as polished as the performance I went to last week. But I got to make some attempt at singing, and that made a significant difference.
The first time we went through it, I thought hey, maybe I like listening to people learning a piece because this is the way I'm accustomed to hearing myself play. Then gosh, wouldn't it be interesting to have a post-apocalyptic bunch of musicians sustain Beethoven through isolated study and a performance whenever enough of them are gathered in one place, with whatever instruments come to hand and whatever techniques of performance they know (and if one of them has developed his own idiosyncratic method of reading music, maybe you educate him to the majority view, or maybe you sigh and say yes, diese Toene will just have to persist, because his heart's in the right place). Also oboes and clarinets, by nature, look very steampunk.
After the break, we had slightly more of a hang of things. And this (possibly combined with a cup or two of wine) got me thinking, wouldn't a tikkun leyl Freude be a neat thing. It's a totally wrong phrase during the Nine Days, but it's what came out and works better than symposium for me. For the uninitiated, a tikkun leyl Shavuot is an event that happens on the holiday of Shavuot, in which people stay up all night reading Ruth and studying and generally geeking out on anything Torah related, and consuming cheesecake and ice cream and coffee. Tikkun == perfection, completion, fixing up; leyl == night; Shavuot == feast of weeks / sevens / look, I don't have to count in Indo-European for you, do I?
So a tikkun leyl Freude, or Freude Symposium, or whatever, would obviously involve a bunch of people practicing playing and singing the 9th symphony, over and over, until by dawn they'd have the hang of it and sound pretty good. Or maybe everyone would be too tired to tell, in which case they'd still sound pretty good. And consuming coffee and snacks, limiting ice cream and cheesecake for vocalists of course. And, of course, people doing prep work enough to have talks and discussions on Beethoven's life and work. Or Schiller's. Or on music theory and form. Or on 18th/19th century German romantic poetry. Or the European Union. Or apocalyptic music in anime. Or anything you can define as related, really. And of course more
singing and playing and fighting over who gets the triangle this time.
I think that it would be fun. Then again, I should sleep.
The first time we went through it, I thought hey, maybe I like listening to people learning a piece because this is the way I'm accustomed to hearing myself play. Then gosh, wouldn't it be interesting to have a post-apocalyptic bunch of musicians sustain Beethoven through isolated study and a performance whenever enough of them are gathered in one place, with whatever instruments come to hand and whatever techniques of performance they know (and if one of them has developed his own idiosyncratic method of reading music, maybe you educate him to the majority view, or maybe you sigh and say yes, diese Toene will just have to persist, because his heart's in the right place). Also oboes and clarinets, by nature, look very steampunk.
After the break, we had slightly more of a hang of things. And this (possibly combined with a cup or two of wine) got me thinking, wouldn't a tikkun leyl Freude be a neat thing. It's a totally wrong phrase during the Nine Days, but it's what came out and works better than symposium for me. For the uninitiated, a tikkun leyl Shavuot is an event that happens on the holiday of Shavuot, in which people stay up all night reading Ruth and studying and generally geeking out on anything Torah related, and consuming cheesecake and ice cream and coffee. Tikkun == perfection, completion, fixing up; leyl == night; Shavuot == feast of weeks / sevens / look, I don't have to count in Indo-European for you, do I?
So a tikkun leyl Freude, or Freude Symposium, or whatever, would obviously involve a bunch of people practicing playing and singing the 9th symphony, over and over, until by dawn they'd have the hang of it and sound pretty good. Or maybe everyone would be too tired to tell, in which case they'd still sound pretty good. And consuming coffee and snacks, limiting ice cream and cheesecake for vocalists of course. And, of course, people doing prep work enough to have talks and discussions on Beethoven's life and work. Or Schiller's. Or on music theory and form. Or on 18th/19th century German romantic poetry. Or the European Union. Or apocalyptic music in anime. Or anything you can define as related, really. And of course more
singing and playing and fighting over who gets the triangle this time.
I think that it would be fun. Then again, I should sleep.