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Several our friends suggested that we try Contra Dancing and in January 1997 we went to the Gender Free Contra dance in Jamaica Plain (JP). We were hooked immediately. This dance was twice a month and we have hardly missed any since then (excluding the pandemic when it has been shut down of course). Unless there is an enticing concert or we are travelling we always go.

There we learned about the weekend gender free dance camps organized by Lavender Counntry & Folk Dancers (LCFD) - also gender free. We went to the first one in the fall of 1997. At these camp there iss lots of Contra Daning and some English Country Dancing and variouys other activities. They are twice a year until 2020 - and I haven't missed one - that's 45 + 1 virtual one. Robert missed one because he was ill. In 2008 the west coast group (people who were regulars in LCFD camps) started one - called Queer Dance Camp. We missed two of them - one because we were on an English Country Dance trip in Florence, and once because it conflicted with NEFFA - more about this later in the post.

And there is a gender free English Country Dance in Jamaica Plain - twice a month - and we are regular there. Robert and I are members of the organzer groups of both JP dance series and I am a board mmeber and treasurer of LCFD.

There is also a twice a month contra dance in Cambridge and we go there regularly as well. In Concord, MA at the Scout House there is a contra dance every monday and every thrusday night as well as one on the first friday of each month. We go to some of these. Other spinoffs of the JP dance are Village Contra in NYC and Rainbow Contra in Northampton and we go to some of these. And also to the occasional dance in Gloucester. And we did a litle contra dancing in Boston Pride - in the march, on Boston Common, and Boston City Hall plaza.

Every year the New England Fok Festival (NEFFA) is a weekend event near Boston with lots of all kinds of folk dancing including Contras and English. Our group has run a food booth there selling on-site made italian food, cookies, coffee, teas, etc. as a fund raising event for the gender free dance grouops - 3 days, about 30 volunteers and lots of fun. I always say I like my career as a food-service worker for one weekend a year with lots of nice customers.

At the JP dance we learned about a trip organizer, Ken McFarland (sadly deceased), who organized dance oriented and other trips. We went on 14 of them (sometimes several trips one right after another). Not all are dance trips - a contra dance trip on a boat in the Greek islands, English Country Dancing in Western Ireland, Florence, and a French Chateau. Many of the people on those trips are dancers and in some of the non-dance trips we did a bit of dancing: on Easter Island, in Tanzania, on a boat on the Amazon river in Peru, in Myanmar for example. Also we've been on George Marshall dance trips on St Croix and the Big Island of Hawaii. We went to a local contra dance in Paris and one in Melbourne - and English in Sydney; and several days in Merida, Mexico.

In a typical year we go dancing on about 90 days.

In traditional Contras or English the roles are labeled Ladies and Gents - in gender free Contra he current labels are Larks and Robins and people of any gender can dance in any role; in English positional terminology is used. Over time lots of other dances have been adopting gender free treminology.

Contra dances and English Country dances almost always have a small band - 3-5 musicians, occasionally 2. And a caller who teaches the dance and then calls for a few rounds. For English there is a direct relationship between tunes and dances. For Contras there are many tunes. Since in both cases the theme gets repeated many times and the musicians usually insert very interesting variations on the repeats so musically it is also interesting.

And one of these days dancing will restart again.

While at MIT I did listen to lots of records. I had a record player in my room and a small collection of records - and you could take records out from the MIT library. Also they had a pseudo-radio-station in the dorms - wires outside the window that you could connect to your amplifier. I went to a few concerts - in Symphony Hall. There was a piano room in the basement of the dorm and I occasionally played it for myself.

During the summers of high school and college I was a counselor at summer camp - first in Maine, and then in Vermont. The camp in Maine, Tacoma Pines is no longer in existance but was run by my gym teacher from Dalton. In nearby Monmouth, Maine there was a repertory Gilbert and Sullivan operetta company, the American Savoyards. A bunch of us went there every week. Most people sitting in the back of a truck and me driving for the last several years. One coincidental thing was that one year as a counselor one of the boys in my cabin was Robert' s rsc brother.

The camp in Vermont, Camp Killooleet, still exists. It was run by John Seeger, Pete's brother, and my geography teacher in Dalton; now run by his daughter. I went to Killooleet as a kid from 1947- 1951; outgrew it so I went to Tacoma Pines from 1952-1958 - evolving into a counselor. Tacoma Pines went out of business so I then was a counselor at Killooleet from 1959-1961. There was lots of folk music there - my co-counselor one year was Ed Badeaux -(deceased) a close friend of Pete, Sing Out! editor... So I learned to play the banjo. On my way home from camp that year I stopped in a used-stuff store and bought a banjo - which I still have. It's not in very good shape and I can barely play it - should try again.



In 1962 I left the academic world to start a career in software engineering. I had a roommate for a while who was very interested jazz and he got me into it. We went to a few live performances: John Coltrane, and others. To this day, Dave Brubeck's Take Five is one of my favorites.

I never was much into pop music, but then there were The Beatles - that opened my mind. And their wearing long hair began to make it acceptable. And who can forget Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival (no, I wasn't there) with an electric guitar? These events got me into a much broader range of musical performance that I liked. And yes, I still like classical music and occasionally dabbled at the piano.

And thus my record collection - and CD collection - has a wide range of classical, folk, jazz, Beatles, etc. And more as you'll see in future posts.

One of the few good things about the current Pandemic is that the Metropolitan Opera streams a different opera every day.
This is what we watched since July 6:

Puccini: La Bohème
Mozart: Cosi fan Tutti
Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin
Puccini: Madama Butterfly
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde
Puccini: Turandot
Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Berg: Wozzeck
Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro
Wagner: Tannhäuser
Strauss: Der Rosencavalier
Puccini: La Fanciulla del West
Mozard\t: The Magic Flute
Mozart: Don Giovanni
Bizet: Carmen
Wagner: Die Walkure
Verdi: Aida
Wagner: Parsifal
Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Weill: The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony
Berlioz: Les Troyens
Wagner: Götterdämmerung
Puccini: Tosca
Verdi: Il Trovatore
Bizet: Les Pêcheurs des Perles

We also watched L'Orfeo by Monteverdi put on by the Boston Early Music Festival.

Since May 18 we have watched 26 evenings of MetOpera streams. 27 operas since one night had two of them. That is in addition to the 22/23 we had watched before. And more to come. Although in 3 weeks from now we will have probably have the nightly showing of the RedSox opera.

Mozart: Idameneo
Wagner: Lohengrin
Mozart: Don Giovanni
Gounod: Faust
Berlioz: La Damnation de Faust
Verdi: Ernani
Bellini: La Somnambula
Strauss: Salume
Gluck: Orfeo ed Euiridice
Puccini: Tosca
Adés: The Exterminating Angel
Verdi: Otello
Tchaikovski: Iolanta / Bartók: Bluebeard's Castle
Corigliano: The Ghosts of Versailles
Handel: Rodelinda
Gluck: Iphigéni en Tauride
Verdi: La Forza del Destino
Verdi: La Traviata
Saint-Saens: Samson et Delila
Massenet: Manon
Massenet: Cendrilla
Mozart: Die Zauberflöte
Wagner: Die Walkũre
Shostakovitch: The Nose
Bizet: Carmen
Mozart: Don Giovanni

As a part of our Road Scholar trip to Southern Africa we went to lunch at a restaurant, Mzansi, in Langa, one of the neighborhoods in Cape Town that was designated as a place to move black people during the apartheid regime to make way for white people in other sections of the city.

At the end of the meal the owner and operator, Nomonde Siyaka, gave a fascinating talk about the history of the place. It was originally a very small house in whch her family lived in extremely crowded conditions.

The food was excellent - it is rated #1 in Cape Town on TripAdvisor - clearly for both the food and the experience.

There were marimba players in the front of the restaurant entertaining us and at the end they were quite loud and everyone joined in dancing.

English Country Dancing in JP on Nov 8
Moonlight on Nov 9
Berliner Philharmoniker in Symphony Hall on Nov 11
Harvest Ball (Contra dance and elegant dinner) in JP on Nov 12
Boston Lyric Opera: Greek on Nov 16
Contra Dance at the Scout House ion Concord on Nov 17
B Minor Mass on Nov 18
Emerson String Quartet in Jordan Hall on Nov 20
BIDA Contra Dance in Cambridge on Nov 20
English Country Dancing in JP on Nov 22

Over on Google+ someone posted about Sandy Bull. I remember seeing him at Club 47 in Cambridge in the '60s and really liked him. So I went and searched my record collection and found three records: E Pluribus Unum, Fantasias for Guitar and Banjo, and Demolition Derby. I have a lot of Beatles, Bob Dylan, the original South Pacific and others…

And while searching for these I found the record I made in 1951 of me playing Argonnaise by Massenet. I thought I had lost it.

Now to figure out how to get my USB turntable to work.

Last night we went to a great Celebrity Series Concert. It was Inon Barnatan's solo piano Boston debut. It was in Pickman Hall at the Longy/Bard School.

The Program started with a Bach Toccata (BMV 914). He then followed with César Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and then Samuel Barber's Sonata in E-flat minor - Opus 26. For both of these he spoke to the audience about the Bach influence in these pieces. And at times the influence certainly was very clear,

After the Intermission he played my absolutely favorite Schubert Sonata: A Major, D 959. He also talked a bit about this piece and Schubert - emphasizing how it is weird to talk about Schubert's "late years" since he died at the age of 31. In the last month before he died he completed three incredibly great sonatas, Schwanengesang (a song cycle), and a string quartet.

The second movement of the A major Sonata is an amazing piece since it starts out slow and then goes wild in the middle and returns to the original theme and speed. Once when selecting a copy of this to buy on the iTunes store I listened to the first 30 seconds of about 50 of the recordings (I just looked now and there are 149 recordings listed - they vary in length from 6 - 9 minutes - perhaps some extra repeats, but mostly the speed at which they are played).

I looked about the audience and remarked that there was hardly anyone under the age of 50. And probably it should have been 60. I really wonder if there is going to be any audience for classical music in the future. Another observation about the audience: other than a few asian people every attendee was white.

I liked the fact that he spoke to the audience. Most classical music concerts have this aura of formality (tuxes, fancy dresses, and tails) and no connection to the audience - other than occasional bows. I've read that this is very off-putting to some people, particularly younger ones and so different than most Pop or Jazz concerts where performers talk to the audience (often nonsense…).

Last night we went to another enjoyable and enlightening Rob Kapilow: What Makes it Great performance at Jordan Hall. This one was Britten's Ceremony of Carols.

They follow the same pattern. In the first half he lectures about the piece with demonstrations on the keyboard and by the performers. He'll play a passage in a boring fashion and then show what the composer did to make it more interesting - e.g. major/minor keys, surprising notes, rhythm changes, etc.

Then after the intermission the piece gets performed in whole. And then he and several of the performers sit on the stage to answer questions from the audience. The last question was to the choir director about auditioning and how he chooses who is in the chorus. He said if the person really wants to be in the group, can sing, and will commit to doing the practicing, all the rehearsals and performances they are in. I like that attitude and it reminds me of the approach that the late Marleen Montgomery who was the director of The Quadrivium - an early music group that no longer exists - that I was a member of for a bunch of years. She really brought the best out of people. Some of the people have gone on to have serious careers.

The Ceremony of Carols is based upon some late medieval carols. My absolutely favorite one is There is no Rose. And it brings back another memory. When I was in 8th grade I had a role (I don't remember the role - it was a while ago...) in the Annual Christmas Pageant. What I do remember is the High School (girls only at the time) Chorus used the Britten work for the music and I can still remember the sound of There is no Rose.

Here is Chanticleer singing the early version:


And here is the Britten version: