MMM

A sweet story by Justin Davidson, who wrote up AWS's performance of my Revolution 9 arrangement at The Kitchen, about his experience taking his son to the various concert he sees and reviews.

He mentions the performance:

So, for the past year, Milo has become my semi-regular escort. Before each outing he worries that he will be the only child in attendance, and sometimes he is. He has heard the Berlin Philharmonic open the Carnegie Hall season with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; Gustavo Dudamel make his electrifying New York debut with Beethoven’s Fifth; and tenor Juan Diego Flórez nail his nine high C’s in the Met’s new production of La fille du régiment. He suffered through an amateurish evening of Renaissance dance music in a church, and was baffled by a live orchestration of the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” by the group Alarm Will Sound. He loved South Pacific enough that he could sing most of it from memory after one performance. He will wait a year or two for the full-throated tragedies of love and fate. He has heard me remark how much his beloved J.R.R. Tolkien absorbed from Wagner’s four-opera excursion into Norse mythology, Der Ring des Nibelungen, and he’s expressed interest in seeing it. Not yet, I think. In the meantime, the Met has plenty to offer a 10-year-old: the creepy, saccharine horrors of Hansel and Gretel, the over-the-top wizardry of Julie Taymor’s Magic Flute, and the antics in The Barber of Seville. Whether all this stimulation will coalesce into affection or merge in an undifferentiated memory of sitting silently among rows of old people in red velvet chairs, I have no idea.

To be honest I would have been baffled at that age as well. In fact I'm baffled by it now.

Read the whole article though. It's a cool description of a childhood saturated with exposure to many varieties of music. I often wish I had this type of upbringing. Had I grown up with an innate interest in cars I would have been in hog heaven, as I'm sure my brother was, who eventually joined the family business. But I was lucky enough to have parents that encouraged my fledgling interest at a young(ish) age, even though they had no experience with the performing arts. So while it may have been unexpected for me to ask my parents to take me to the ballet (unspeakable to my friends!) they totally obliged me. I often think about the education I would give my child, though. My kid'll be programming synths at 8 years old!