Tomorrow, most of the world will finally be able to enjoy the release of Peter Jackson’s film, THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (based on the book by J.R.R Tolkien, of course). The prequel to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, this movie will follow the story of Bilbo Baggins 60 years before Frodo leaves the Shire for his adventure of a lifetime. For fans of the books and/or the movies, this is a long awaited beginning to another trilogy that is sure to set box-office records and net Jackson many awards.
The website has a lot of great information if you’re a big fan of the movies, including downloads, videos and games. It’s a great way to immerse yourself in the movie or reacquaint yourself with the book (it’s slightly changed) if you want to be ready. I don’t think I’ll hit the theatre on the release date but I’ll certainly go to see it over the holidays at some point. It’s kind of nice to expect movies for the next few Decemebers.
If you’re in New York City this December, Radio City Music Hall will be hosting the final installment of The Lord of the Rings in Concert, a live performance of the score while the film airs onscreen! There are also numerous performance dates across the US, so visit the site to find out more information. I can’t even imagine how difficult it would be to time the music to the movie in a live performance, but it would be incredibly exciting to see/hear it all happen at once. Such a special way to round out the holidays.
These two events may not be your cup of tea, but you could also go lo-tech and settle down with the original novel, THE HOBBIT, and become immersed in the story for the first time, or the tenth time. Enjoy!
We’re excited that musical group Turkey Rhubarb is coming to Carleton Place on Thursday, August 13th! The Carleton Place Public Library will be welcoming this diverse group from Guelph, Ontario with a show at the Carleton Place Town Hall Auditorium at 10am. Tickets are already on sale at the library for $4.00 each or you can buy them at the door the morning of the show. We are expecting a nice crowd that morning so come and join us for some music, fun and laughter. This program is appropriate for kids ages 3 – 12 and parents will enjoy it also. You can find out more about the group, listen to some music and even purchase a CD at their site Turkey Rhubarb.ca
Last week, I was cataloging a new book for the juvenile section about learning to play the guitar and I was thinking that we don’t carry many books for kids about learning an instrument. We do have a wide assortment of books in the adult section about playing the guitar, piano, and various other instruments, but fewer for children. I guess that is because children who start an instrument are not doing so on their own, but rather are shipped off to music lessons by their parents. Adults, on the other hand, often pick up an instrument later in life and try to learn on their own, which is why they need instructional books. Music has been such a large part of my life that I am always on the lookout for a great music story.
Google and YouTube recently began a contest of sorts whereby amateur musicians submitted videos of themselves playing their instruments for people to view. Thousands of people across the world were vying for their one chance to play at Carnegie Hall with what is being called “The YouTube Symphony”. Ninety-six people from 30 countries were chosen, sent music to learn and on April 15th, will gather in New York City at the world’s most famous musical venue to perform.
Google, who owns YouTube, generously paid for the tickets for each performer to join the rest of the symphony, which was decided upon much like American Idol. Over 3000 submissions were narrowed down by music professionals to 200 finalists. Then, YouTube watchers voted on their favourites and the 96 winners were decided.
CNN has a great video describing what went into the process, along with a few interviews with some of the winners that you can watch right here. But if you’d really like to get into the minds and hearts of the people that submitted their videos, you’ll have to spend a few minutes watching this great video:
You can purchase tickets to this bound-to-be-great event from the Carnegie Hall website if you’ll be in New York on Wednesday night. They’ll be performing a very eclectic program from Mozart, to Villa-Lobos to 20th century composer John Cage and a piece by Tan Dun known as his Internet Symphony #1, the “Eroica” movement. You can hear this movement in its entirety performed last year by the London Symphony Orchestra.
Will there be more events such as this where people from around the world can do something amazing together, all being brought together through YouTube? Probably. Watch your computer screen for more….
Do we really listen in this day and age? Do we really hear what is being said to us when we’re dropping off our drying cleaning, for example, or picking up dinner from a fast food restaurant? Or do we just hear the things we really want to hear? That is something we were discussing just the other day at work when yet another person came in to pay for a room rental.
We rent out the Barbara Walsh room in our library to anyone who wants to use it for an event, meeting or program and we have certain room rental policies which we explain in great detail when someone asks to rent the room. We require a deposit cheque that is separate from the room rental paymentin case of damage to the room. 99.9% of the time, we give the cheque back or rip it up because there is no damage to the room, but the need for a separate cheque is our policy and we clearly state this when people rent the room. More often than not though, renters will bring only one cheque with both fees included. How are we supposed to give back the room rental deposit? This is where we figure that people listen to us, but they don’t really hear (or is it hear us but they don’t really listen?).
This got me thinking about how often we do this as a culture. Maybe our lives are far too fast-paced to really take a moment to listen, or maybe we really just don’t care as much of our lives are centered around what we want, not what others dictate we must do. And maybe we really should take more time and listen. I think we might be missing out.
The perfect example of this comes from a recent experiment by the Washington Post. They sent a young man to a very central location early one January morning , a busy commuter metro station in Washington, D. C., and asked him to play his violin to see how many people would stop and listen on their way to work and how many people would just walk on by.
For 43 minutes, he performed 6 pieces of very difficult classical music while a total of 1097 people walked by. Most of those just ignored him, a few stopped for a moment or two to listen and some even threw coins into his open violin case. The music wasn’t well known to most people so as not to draw a crowd by sheer familiarity, and he didn’t have a sign on his case asking for money in return for the music. He was probably just like any other street musician that any of us have seen in our lives and walked past. Except on this day, he wasn’t.
The violinist was world-famous Joshua Bell and he was playing a Stradivarius violin thought to be worth about $3.5 million. Two days before, he had sold out a concert in Boston where the average ticket price was $100, but no one walking through the metro station that morning realized they were being treated to a concert for free, not even the people who worked in the station.
It turns out that only one woman recognized Bell and waited until the end of a piece to say she had seen him play at the Library of Congress before and really enjoyed it. The whole hour was secretly videotaped and even though a lot of the video is played at a fast speed so that you can get a feel for how many people just walked by, it is amazing that there were some revelations about people in this secret video.
First of all, Bell himself found that he was nervous playing in front of the commuters that morning because he knew he was trying to earn their respect….they hadn’t just come to hear him play. He also found that the most tension filled moments were right after each piece ended. No applause. No recognition at all. Something that Bell is not used to, and very humbling.
It is also interesting to note that Leonard Slatkin, the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra was asked prior to the experiment if he thought that over the course of an hour with a world-class musician performing in a crowded hall would draw a crowd, he said yes. He also thought in that hour that the musician would most certainly make at least $150 in donations.
Did he draw the crowd? No, only a few people stopped and only briefly. And how much money did he make? $32 and change. (What is more interesting is that Bell was surprised by the fact that he could make $30 an hour performing in a metro station…enough to make a decent living if this was the average.)
The whole fascinating article can be read here. Take your time reading through it. There are wonderful moments and great insight into how we ignore beauty in our lives even when it is right in front of us. Also take a moment to read the article on Bell’s website regarding his first performance for President and Mrs. Obama. The revelation about the violin he uses is amazing!
Maybe we really should stop and smell the roses more often!
When I was in high school, I attended a gala event in Toronto put on by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to pay tribute to Walter Homburger, the retiring manager of the TSO. It was a three-day affair called The Great Gathering with amazing musicians from around the globe performing on one stage. I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of 300 music students from each Ontario school board to attend and we spent two days sitting in on all the rehearsals before the big night. One of the performers that I remember being thrilled to hear was the amazing cellist, Yo-Yo Ma. (You can read more about The Great Gathering and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in the new book entitled Begins With The Oboe : A History of The Toronto Symphony Orchestra by Richard S. Warren, which our library owns and you can actually preview this book here.)
Of course Yo-Yo Ma is a world-renowned classical cellist, but in recent years, he has done a lot of work outside the classical genre. You can find some very interesting recordingssuch as his duet album called Hush with singer Bobby McFerrin (you’ll remember him as the singer who brought “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” to our ears), and now, just in time for Christmas, his amazing new album called “Songs of Joy and Peace”. If you are looking for something interesting to get for that eclectic music lover, I’d highly recommend this album which casts music greats from all over the world including Canada’s Natalie MacMaster and Diana Krall as well as people like Dave Brubeck, Allison Krauss and James Taylor.You can hear more from this album at the official Yo-Yo Ma website here.
I saw the special on Bravo this weekend about the making of this album, which is not all Christmas music but rather music which expresses the hope of the season and I had to go and download it from iTunes right away! It is a gorgeous collection of jazz, classical, and world music, all done with great creativity and most of all, joy. You can watch a session with Yo-Yo Ma and trumpeter Chris Botti performing “My Favourite Things” below:
If you’d like more informationabout The Toronto Symphony Orchestra, you can visit their interesting website where you can watch video, download music and podcasts and even get tickets to their latest season.And pop over to iTunes to download the album, Songs of Joy and Peace.
Today is my birthday, so I’ll tell you a little about something close to my heart. I was going through our new bin this morning at the library and came across an interesting book called “A Romance on Three Legs : Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano” by Katie Hafner and it struck a note with me, so to speak.
Before I started working at the library, I was actually a musician. I suppose I will always be one, although I must admit that as of late, I haven’t even touched an instrument, so I’m a rusty musician. My whole life revolved around music from the time I was a little girl. My mother is a singer, so as children, we sang in the car everywhere we went, there was always music playing in the house and my sister and I just naturally gravitated towards doing musical things. (My sister would argue with you and say that she isn’t musical, but ask her about learning to play the piano in three weeks for a Christmas concert when she was about 12 and you’d have a hard time believing she’d never played before.)
I owned a tiny plastic keyboard when I was young that had coloured keys and made a loud hissing sound every time you turned it on, but that’s where I learned to play songs by ear, eventually plunking out so many that my parents decided to send me to a piano teacher. We didn’t even own a piano for the first year or so of my lessons. I’d play on the one at school and wherever I could find one, and my piano teacher allowed me to visit his house and practice once a week before each lesson. My small world at the age of twelve was all about the piano and music.
Eventually, we got an organ, which helped immensely, but I still needed to learn the touch of a real piano, so when I was about 14, a family friend gave me hers, as she had stopped playing altogether. I’m sure my family grew tired of my endless playing, but to me, the piano was my little slice of heaven and an object that I understood better than anything else. It was my place of solace, frustration, bliss and excitement and I grew to know every little squeak of the pedals and every funny “twing” of the strings inside.
My practice and love of music allowed me to pursue my passion, and I went off to university to study music. There, I learned the meaning of real practice, spending upwards of 6 hours a day at the piano, just working and re-working pieces until I could see each mark on the music even when I closed my eyes. I earned my music degree and came back to Carleton Place and taught music for 10 years before needing a bit of a change. You can take the girl out of the music etc., etc……..
Glenn Gould was one of Canada’s most gifted musicians that ever lived, and probably one of the most interesting musicians due to his crazy habits both on and off the stage. If you’ve ever listened to one of his recordings or watched him play on television, you’ll have no doubt heard him humming along while he played, although in some secret musical language understood only by himself, as you could never quite figure out just exactly what part of the music he was humming. The great one often do this sort of thing, though, hearing some inside melody or harmony that guides them along.
The whole premise of this book is his search for the perfect piano. Every piano has its own touch, its own pedal stiffness and its own sound. The wood, strings and craftsmanship put into each instrument makes it unique, similar to all instruments which are made by hand. You only need to play on a “bad” piano to know the difference. Gould searched for years to find the perfect instrument that suited his needs and finally found a Steinway CD 318 grand piano. You can watch Glenn Gould playing here:
Author Katie Hafner delves into the search for the prized piano, as well as the maintenance and construction of the instrument. You can find more on her website here.
I am going to take this book home tonight and spend a few hours just lost in music again. What a nice little find today!
