Band Camp for Adults — 2015

This is not a scientific post, although it contains a lot of scientific types. Adult amateur chamber musicians are an interesting lot. The festival just concluded contained two people with books coming out, two organic chemists, two math profs, an english prof, multiple MDs, a retired foreign service officer and those were just the people I played with. Not everyone attending these things is so fancy and one of the best amateur cellists I ever played with was a moving man and probably the best violist ever was a 300 pound jail matron.

I’d not been to this one for 11 years or so, and it was amazing how people remembered the things I’d done back then. One classic neurotic back then was quite worried she was crazy. Her friend said she’d repeat over and over what I told her — I know crazy and you’re not crazy. Unfortunately she died an awful death of metastatic ovarian carcinoma, far too young in her 40s, as did another good friend, an RN.

Someone else brought up what I’d done for her at her first time at the festival. I’d totally forgotten about it. The first time my wife an I went there, I wasn’t assigned a group the first day and we didn’t know a soul. Everyone else appeared to know everyone else and had play dates arranged for the rest of the week. So the evening of the first day my wife and I were moping about in a local bar, when a gregarious participant came up to us, found out what was going on and set up the Dvorak piano quintet for me the next day.

The following year after the general initial assembly was over, I and the gregarious one got up and announced that we wanted 7 first timers for an immediate session — the Schumann piano quintet for me and a Mozart string quartet for her. The process has since been institutionalized.

I even met a reader of the blog, an excellent young violinist and organic chemist who I tried to steer into drug design. Probably not a good idea given the employment upheavals appearing nearly daily in Derek’s blog. One of the things we played was Vaughn Williams 6 studies on English Folk song. They have been scored for piano and violin, piano and viola, piano and clarinet and piano and cello. Few seem to know of them. They are each two piano pages long, extremely interesting musically and just not that hard to sight read.

Another great thing about the site, is that there is a whole piano and percussion building and many rooms have two pianos. This means two pianists can get together and play without squeezing onto the same bench. I strongly recommend trying two transcriptions of Bach concerti in C major and C minor. Both parts are quite interesting and well done musically, and you can switch so you’ll get to play each part. It’s  Peters edition #s 2200a, 2200b (BWV 1061, no BWV # given for 2200b). Start with the slow movements of each, the back and forth of the voices is great. I heard it today scored as a concerto for oboe and violin.

Unfortunately many of the people I played with 11 years ago had passed on, including Edwin Gould a violinist. Organic chemists of a certain age know him has the author of the ‘bible’ of physical organic chemistry back in the 60s.

Just by chance, two of the MDs were at places I’d trained — Colorado General Hospital and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and it was fascinating to hear how they’d changed.

Also just by chance there were two graduates from Brown who would have been near classmates with my son, had he chosen to go there. Fascinating to hear about paths not taken.

One of the math profs has a book coming out and the other explained what a Toric variety is (David Cox, from whom I audited a course, wrote a 600 page book on the subject).

All in all an intellectually and musically stimulating week.