A Little More Illumination

Light in Winter Festival weekend is over. I had a blast! Day three was fabulous. Overall, I think that Fri and Sunday rocked and Saturday was still fun, but not as good as the other days. So, Sunday the day started with a trip out to good ol' PRI for a talk by our Artist-in-Residence, Mr. John Gurche. It was similar to some of his other talks I've been to, but it was still fun to be there just to see the crowd we drew. There were 80-90 people!! Go PRI!

Then I was off to Ithaca College. It was nice to be back on old familiar turf. I should get up there for lectures etc. more often. We started with a performance of works composed by Bruce Adolphe that were inspired by the artwork of Gaugin. The lecture parts were interesting and the music was good, enjoyable all around. Then we had a really spectac performance and lecture by David Sloan Wilson on evolution and the musical group Water Bear. Everything David had to say was fascinating and I'll have to go check out his book, Evolution for Everyone I believe it was called. One interesting tidbit from him was about the evolution of personalities. David gave an example that two sisters in a family of bush babies had completely different personalities, one was outgoing and went off to establish its own range, the other was shyer and stayed with the mother, and probably would inherit her range. By having these different personalities, the sisters were occupying different niches. I'm not sure I'm explaining it correctly... Have to get the book to remember correctly. Anyway, the musical portion of the presentation expressed some of David's ideas in a really interesting way. The group's founder has a system where each note on the instrument is assigned to a different letter of the alphabet, A-Z. Then she takes the notes that correspond to a word, in this case, the player's names, and makes a piece around these series of notes. So, each instrumentalist was playing their name and it was really fascinating to see these disparate sequences weave together to make a pleasing song. Really great.

Next up, symphony pieces inspired by The Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Scotland (or Ireland...I can't remember). And finished off with Cyro Baptista and Beat the Donkey. This one was pure Ithaca....dirty hippie Ithaca. They were good, but sometimes the percussion heavy sound devolved into pure noise. I think they would have been more fun at Grassroots were there are no seats and you are just freer to move with the music and really get into it. A bit too free spirited for the State theatre.

A nice surprise was that my old boss and friend, Bridget came to town. It was fun to catch up and have a drink with everyone after the performance. Nice to have someone I knew come to the events instead of continuing to be surrounded by a sea of strangers!