Trip to San Jose

My youngest son was recommended by his band teacher for an honor band at a conference for music educators. So off we went to San Jose for a day and a half. He played music for seven hours on Friday, while I wandered around the city and brought him food at intervals. I made two trips to Bijan bakery, which I had read about online, and savored every buttery crumb of my pastry and foamy drop of my cappuccino each time. The photo above is the new San Jose city hall. There are a lot of new buildings, pedestrian walkways, and public art in San Jose. I never knew the two 1968 Olympic athletes below were from SJ State.
On Saturday my son rehearsed some more, and then played a concert Saturday afternoon. The concert was stunning and the parents and the gathered music teachers gave the student musicians a standing ovation. When my son came back to our hotel on Friday night, he was humming the themes from the pieces they played, and kept describing his favorite moments in the Mahler excerpt. He told me he had never played in an ensemble where everyone was that good. The day after we came home, he had downloaded the entire Mahler symphony that the excerpt was from onto his mp3 player. I think the best thing about the whole experience for my son was that he discovered Mahler.
For me the best part was planning what I was going to do in San Jose for a whole day by myself. I had no one else to accommodate (except meeting my son for lunch). There's not a lot to see in San Jose, but after researching the options, I chose the Hakone Gardens and the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum, both places devoted to aesthetic and spiritual contemplation.
The Hakone Gardens were completely empty at 10 am on a Friday, nothing was in bloom except one tiny pink blossom on a plum tree. The scene was wintry and austere; there's a word in Japanese to describe this quality but I don't remember what it is. It's not a big garden, but it exerts a powerful effect. It is a place that demands slowing down, looking closely, listening, smelling.
The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum took me back thousands of years in the planetarium show about the links between astrology, astronomy, and the Mithraic religion. The collection of Egyptian artifacts in the museum is surprisingly rich, presented with a slightly more spiritual focus than a traditional museum: how people worshiped, what they believed, how the concept of the divine and of beauty evolved through different periods. I loved the items from the Amarna period of Ahknaten.
At night my son and I went to the outdoor spa at the hotel. As I leaned back into the heated water, I looked up and saw the constellations I had just seen on the planetarium ceiling: Orion, Taurus, Perseus. They are no longer central to our lives; we hardly notice them now. But I was glad to look up and be able to see them that night. And after he read the info about San Jose that our hotel room provided, my son told me why I was able to see those constellations: the city of San Jose is one of the first cities to use yellow sodium street lights to cut down on light pollution (in part because of the nearby Lick Observatory).
By the time we left on Saturday, I was beginning to get a little fond of San Jose.

What Boredom Brings One To

One of my sons (the trumpet playing one) took apart all three of his trumpets and gave them all a bath in the bathtub. He assures me that this is the proper way to clean one's trumpets.
The other son (the chicken tikka masala making son) wanted to cook chicken tikka masala, but since we didn't have the ingredients, he made homemade vanilla ice cream and homemade chocolate cookies, and put them together as homemade chocolate ice cream sandwich cookies.

Just another day in the midst of the Unstructured Summer Experiment.

Playing the National Anthem

Last evening I was wrapped in a blanket at the ballpark, watching the N.Y. Mets whip the S.F. Giants on a cold and windy night. But the real reason I was there was to watch my son, my youngest this time, play the national anthem with his middle school band. Also I had coordinated the logistics of getting the instruments there and selling the 300 tickets we were required to sell for the privilege of playing the anthem. It was a lot of effort for 2 minutes of playing. But...it was great to see the look on the kids' faces as they lined up with their instruments and the guard opened the gates, and they stepped out onto the field. And it was great to get stopped by two different Giants employees afterwards, on our way to our seats, who told us proudly that they had gone to my son's school, too, a long time ago.

The Middle School Band

This year I'm the band parent for our middle school band. We have lots of band families--nearly 200 of them--who work the carwash and the bake sales and send in checks and chaperone the field trips. They are great, and constantly surprise me with their generosity. But I'm the one who sends out all the emails, writes the fundraising letters, and coordinates with the band teacher. To be honest, it's more work than I thought it would be. But then it's something I support unequivocally. I have no mixed feelings about it. The band is great! Participating in band has been a huge part of both my sons' experience in middle school. And the band teacher gives 150 percent every day to his students, and often more.
On Friday, the band teacher took the advanced band, all 55 of them, down on a charter bus to a high school in San Mateo to play in the CMEA festival. There ended up just being three adults chaperoning: me, a woman whose son wasn't even in the advanced band but just wanted to help, and a stepmother of one of the band members who toted along her two-month-old baby in a snuggly. See what I mean about the generosity?
At the festival, the band played for judges who rated them and then gave them a mini-workshop on improving their performance of the pieces they had just played. The students were a little cowed walking through an unfamilar high school, and stared enviously at the swimming pool in the center of the suburban campus (as did I!). But once they started warming up they were their usual focused, distracted, wise-cracking, serious, giggling selves--in short, that whole mix of contradictions that middle schoolers are. The only mishap was the student who discovered he had brought the broken baritone horn and couldn't play. Their performance for the judges was crisp and energized, and they earned a unanimous superior rating. We were all proud.
I watched them get off the bus back at our school at the end of the day. They are all shapes and sizes, some midway through their growth spurts, some eagerly awaiting them. Long hair, short hair, short and pudgy, tall and awkward, sagging, too-short pants--it's all there. Mostly the girls are poised and seem several years ahead of the boys in maturity. (The important word here is "seem.") But each of them already looked a bit more mature than they had in the morning, getting on the bus. They looked like they had accomplished something and it felt pretty good.

Sibelius in Color

My son's youth orchestra just performed Sibelius' First Symphony and blew everyone in the audience away. Here is a description of the piece by Robert Bagar, quoted in the program notes, that sums up what I heard:
"...The young composer pours great melodies into his work, melodies that sing with the exultant joy, melodies that rise and fall with tremendous intensity, and also melodies that are nostalgic and mellow and suffused with a tender pathos. There are grace and lightness in the music as it comes rushing to the creator's pen. There are also wild, barbaric shouts, outbursts of tremendous passion, raging unbridled utterances that hurl themselves forward like the roar of giants winds."
Sibelius was one of the rare people who sees musical notes as colors (synesthesia). Experiencing this rich, complex piece just as sound was quite enough for me. I think it must have been hallucinogenic--maybe even frightening--to "see" it as well.
After the concert, my son reflected that a lot of the music we hear today Sibelius would find pretty strange. I said, "Don't you think he'd be pretty amazed that his music is still being performed all over the world in lots of different places by lots of different kinds of people?"
"No," he answered. "Composers are pretty vain."
Maybe he's right. Maybe one has to be to write music like that.