Barnard writeup

 ...is now posted. 

I made a resolution to complete new writeups within days of the concert, even as I have a large backlog to work through, so as to avoid adding to that backlog. Also so that we can create timely post-concert social media posts. In support of this I reminded myself that not all writeups need to be elaborate and multifaceted, like the prior one I did for Landgrove. 

However, I felt compelled to make a decent video (below) of the collaborative piece I did with artist Pamela Fraser—because it was cool, but also to help the new UVM School of the Arts document the interprogram collaboration that leadership is so keen to promote. This meant compiling a split screen from different source videos, incorporating good stills of the before and after art pieces multi-source, aligning the audio from the different sources, etc. Nothing state-of-the-art, but a solid day’s work for me and my still newbie video editing skills. Maybe the next writeup will be a quickie.

I was pleasantly surprised at how the collaboration worked out. Free group improvisation always presents the challenge of coming to a satisfying ending together. In a musical group effort, the players can communicate through sound and gesture. In this piece, Pamela wasn’t making any sounds, and I couldn’t see what she was painting from where I sat. At the outset, Pam said she’d need at least 5 minutes, and my spouse and on-stage videographer had the presence of mind to give me a sign when Pam was wrapping up. That end cue was very valuable, but it was of no help in letting me know when I was (say) one or two minutes from wrapping up, making it hard to shape the improvisation accordingly. But if it was a little rambling, I was nonetheless happy with how pleasant it sounded and how much I caught the stark angularity of Pamela’s piece with my opening idea.

I was also satisfied with the Scarlatti and my intro, for a change. It sometimes got a bit brash—the piano was nice but astonishingly loud and bright—but overall I felt like I achieved maybe 85% of my happy, at-home, in-my-sweats pianistic potential, as opposed to the typical ~60% of my potential I felt I reached in most performances when I played my first project concert 16 months ago.