Here in Ann Arbor we have a wonderful summer festival called Top of the Park. Every night for three weeks in a row (!) there is live music until it gets dark. Then they raise a big movie screen and show a movie like The Wizard of Oz. And it’s all completely free, and everyone comes down and mills around and runs into old friends and gets some food and enjoys the music. And tonight on the “Grassrootz Stage” guess who played their first gig? Rock Band 101!
Category Archives: Music
Weekend at music camp
One of the reasons I’ve been absent from the blogosphere lately is that I spent the last few days with my daughter at Suzuki violin camp. It was quite a roller coaster of a weekend, let me tell you.
Wondering what to read next?
I know, I know. Your TBR stack is teetering already. But on the off-chance that you’re at loose ends and don’t know what to read next, check out the Literature Map. You type in the name of an author and you get a visual representation of other authors that are (I guess) also liked by people who like that one. It’s endlessly fascinating to watch the authors’ names rearranging themselves on your computer screen.
A mommy moment
So, here in Ann Arbor Mich we have our very own Rock Band School. It’s run by this guy, whom I’ve known since he was a little kid running around with my best friend’s younger brother. Rock Band School is pretty neat. They offer private and group (i.e. rock band) lessons. They arrange gigs, they have workshops on how to promote your band, how to set up your stuff on the stage, how to feed the band for $10 (“nutrition for starving musicians”) and how to withstand what they euphemistically call “the pressures” of being a rock star. :)
The voices of children
Voices: Part One
Yesterday afternoon I went up to my kids’ elementary school for an assembly. One by one, each grade took the stage and sang a couple of numbers, starting with the first graders and ending with the about-to-graduate fifth graders.
What is it about children singing? They could be singing, oh, I don’t know, “Fat Bottomed Girls,” and I’d probably cry. And when it’s “The Happy Wanderer,” sung by second graders (including my daughter), who chose that song themselves, well, I’m a goner. Mush ain’t in it.
If the pure innocent sound of seven-year-old voices rising up in song isn’t enough for you, add this to the picture: they sang well. The music teacher at our school is amazing, a jewel in the crown of the Ann Arbor Public Schools. By the time these kids graduate they know the difference between their head voice and their chest voice, they can read music, they can sing in four-part harmony. Yeah, the fifth graders sang a round in four parts, a capella, in a minor key, with large intervals and some dissonance. Sang it beautifully.
But I’m not done, oh no. The assembly finished off with a slide show compiled of the baby pictures and current pictures of the graduating fifth graders (among them, my son). And while the slide show played, the fifth graders sang a medley of tear jerkers that included “School Days” and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” The only thing that saved me at all during this was the peals of laughter from the kids as each drooling toothless infant was revealed to be Eddie or Lizzie or, ha ha, the school principal.
All this by way of explanation for why, when my fifth-grader Joey arrived home with two of his buddies in tow and a request that they stay for dinner, all I could say was yes.
“What’s for tea, mum?”
So, last weekend we were hanging out over at my friend Leslie’s house. Les and I have been friends since fifth grade, through the trials and tribulations of adolescence and early adulthood, and now we find ourselves living in adjacent neighborhoods with husbands and children all simpatico. It’s marvelous.
Five things you cannot dispute:
Bamboo comes from a bamboo shoot,
Rutabaga comes from a rutabaga root,
Bananas are the funniest fruit,
Turtle always tells the truth, and
Toad looks funny in a bathing suit!
Guess what! They’ve made a Broadway musical out of the Frog and Toad books!
