Performer Postlude from Alisa

Here is a picture of the author. Photo credit: Liz R's Amazing Camera

[Editor's Note: Even though this festival has officially ended, we were never able to hear from the performers - they were busy practicing or they were in rehearsal! As a composer, I am eternally grateful for their hard work, and I hope they were able to occasionally surface and enjoy Blonay. Anyway, here is violist Alisa Seavey's take on the festival. Enjoy!]

Before Jennifer and Kyle close the door on the MusicX blog- I wanted to represent my story as being one of the twenty-some young performers who came to MusicX for this crazy adventure! Led and inspired by eighth blackbird as our loving yet firm coaches we “doubled” the instrumentation of their ensemble with an added on bass and a singer! We were one of each- violin, viola, cello, bass, then two flutes, clarinets and the crew of powerful women (plus Paul) of pianists; and guys plus Yu-Chun of percussionists! I also wanted to acknowledge an awesome array of the composer-performers: “walk the walk, talk the talk”. I was impressed with this for two of the composers I was paired to work with- (Sarah and Ben) who were as great performers, as they were composers. Therefore no matter how “difficult” I thought parts of their works were- I knew they were putting in the same kind of work for someone else’s work. That was a really cool thing for me to experience.

Final Concert

[This post was written by Douglas Pew, one of the composers at the festival.]

To wrap up our experience at Music10, we had a wonderful final concert this evening. With a sense of family spirit after these two weeks together, we gathered to be treated one final time by Eighth Blackbird and several student performers.

Eighth Blackbird opened the concert with a charming work by Missy Mazzoli entitled Still Life with Avalanche. The piece has a very fresh mix of lyricism and rhythmic punctuation and I found it very youthful and enthusiastic. Particularly delightful were the thwacks of the kick drum and the hiccupping rhythms throughout the ensemble.