lies like truth

It’s always exciting when a new cultural space opens up in a city, especially in tough economic times.

Holly’s, a new comedy club located in the same building that houses the multiplex movie theatre at 1000 Van Ness Avenue, launched last night with a lineup of comedians that included the San Francisco stalwart Michael Capozzola (who served as MC for the evening), a British ex-pat by the name of George Corrigan and headliner David Crowe (pictured) who hails from Seattle.

The space itself, which is a good, intimate size for comedy but lacks any individualizing details and feels a little bland with its non-descript cafeteria-style formica-topped rectangular tables and chairs, needs to be full of people to make it glow. The atmosphere in the room last night was lively and warm by the time the show started.

What I tasted of the menu, which offers shrimp cocktails, turkey and beef sliders, grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, fish & chips and other simple comfort foods, was delicious, despite the to-be-expected sluggish and erratic opening-night service standards. (I’m sure Holly’s will have no trouble ironing out this kink in time.)

I enjoyed parts of the show itself immensely: David Crowe is a comedian of quirky intelligence: His first appearance on stage came before Corrigan’s warm-up act as a “visiting” comedian and last-minute addition to the program named Lloyd Althauser. Lloyd, an efete and nerdy coin collector from the South, turned out to be an alter ego of David Crowe and a very funny one at that. The comedian’s characterization of the coin collector remains a highlight of the evening for me. I also loved the freewheeling nature of his humor during the main set. The comedian found refreshing ways to approach very familiar subjects such as pregnancy and online dating.

I was much less impressed with Corrigan, whose comedy revolved almost entirely around tired jokes about being a British person in America and the Anglo-American divide in general. And Capozzola, a comedian who is usually intelligent and daring, wasn’t very much of either last night. Perhaps he doesn’t enjoy playing the MC for these types of occasions.

If I have any criticism of Holly’s programming, it’s that there is not a single female comedian on the lineup between now and the end of the year. I hope that the club will rectify this issue in 2011.

P.S. Holly’s has a heartwarming story behind it which I’d like to relay by way of postscript: Holly Horn, the namesake of the club and a former salesperson at the luxury car dealership across the street from the new venue on Van Ness Avenue, had a long-time dream of opening a nightspot for comedians. Her boss, a 91-year-old luxury car salesman by the name of Kjell Qvale, was so impressed with Holly, whom he met in 1997 when she came to work for his company, that he decided to open a club with her. Qvale, who was holding court at a ringside table last night and even got up to do a sweet little standup routine himself, became the owner of Holly’s and Holly, the club’s proprietor. The rest, as they say, is history. Let’s hope that the club has a long a distinguished future.

I hate parades. Always have. I’ve avoided the Notting Hill Carnival back home in England and have been to Gay Pride, though of all the street parties in town, I imagine this must be the most culturally captivating and socially relevant. And I’d rather attend an insurance seminar than get behind Macy’s at Thanksgiving.

My bah-humbug aversion came to the fore yesterday when I was forced to battle the lunchtime baseball crowds at Civic Center on my way to teach a class in Berkeley. The train system (BART) was a mess. I ended up grabbing light rail (MUNI) to the Embarcadero and then hopping on BART across the water from there. Only too happy to escape to the sanity of the East Bay.

I am excited that the SF Giants won the world series. It was great to see so much euphoria in the city, especially since the elections had produced such lackluster results.

Yet the marauding, drunken crowds with their drunken shouts of “Go Giants!” and “Fock Yeah!” rang dull to my ears. The celebration spilled into trouble at various points with stories of people being beaten up and store windows smashed.

I don’t mean to be a killjoy, but all those people dressed in orange — the smell if not the full-on color of danger — make me feel nervous. There must be better ways to show civic pride than this.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that normal concert etiquette goes out of the window for lunchtime and commuter hour concerts?

I kind of think it’s a shame that the format allows people to wander in and out at will and read a book or take care of some work while having the live music on as “background” to their activities.

On the other hand, there’s something very special about being able to come in off the street for an hour and forget the crazy world outside while immersing yourself in gorgeous live music in a casual setting.

Though some people around me were only half paying attention to the music (they appeared to be working) I spent a wonderful 45 minutes or so in the company of the Cypress String Quartet yesterday as the group played at Old St Mary’s Cathedral in downtown San Francisco as part of the church’s “Noontime Concert” series.

But I broke etiquette rules in that I was very late in getting to the venue.

The roomy church was pretty full of people. The part of the program which I managed to catch, Stravinsky’s spiky Concertino and Elena Ruehr’s playful and kinetic String Quartet No. 3 (2001), a new discovery for me, lifted my heart. The Cypress Quartet played elegantly and with a pristine sense of ensemble. The articulation in the Ruehr was especially delicate and precise. The players seemed very serious though. Their mood seemed not to go with the laid-back atmosphere in the church.

As I slipped my suggested donation of $5 into a box on my way out, I made myself promise to seek out more of these lunchtime events. I’m sure they’re happening all over the city. I just don’t get away from my desk enough in the middle of the day.

And as for the debate about whether people should treat such events with the same reverence as they do evening concerts or eat their sandwiches throughout, I think there’s a case to be made on both fronts. By their very nature, these concerts are meant to be less formal. But there are limits. Audiences should at least have respect for the performers. Cell phone conversations should be banned. And in cases where tickets are not sold, everyone in the room should feel obliged to leave a donation.

It’s been hard to avoid baseball in San Francisco lately. Last night in particular was a symphony of blaring car horns and shrieking, gimme-five-slapping pedestrians as citizens made their excitement about the home team’s victory over the Texas Rangers strongly felt.

One of the things that’s kept me in a state of semi-attention in recent weeks has been the mid-game singing of “God Bless America.” Some of the performances have been tuneful (such as the wife of a soldier who sang the song last night in Dallas with soulful tones). Others have had the opposite effect (the actress Martha Plimpton’s rendition lacked basic intonation accuracy a few days ago.)

But good or bad, all the versions I have heard this year have one detail in common: An obsession with being melismatic.

The florid embellishments of R&B divas have a lot of show-off appeal and they help to spin out lines and make them sound fuller and more wave-like. But they sound horrible when they’re not done properly. And even if such ornamentation is handled skillfully, it’s kind of boring to hear this approach used constantly in all of the games.

There is more than one way to approach a patriotic song. Sounding like Whitney Houston isn’t a prerequisite for putting “God Bless America” across in a sports stadium. Next world series, should I choose to pay attention, I’d like to hear singers give the song a different spin. They might consider taking out all the curlicues and simply sing it straight like a shaker hymn or shape note tune. This might not help the teams to hit more home runes, but it’ll certainly make the song stand out.

There are few better ways to spend Halloween, culturally-speaking, than exploring ruins. But to get the most out of the experience, you ideally need to visit ruins that aren’t really designated as such. Because to feel a proper chill down your spine, it’s better to be alone than surrounded by hundreds of other thrill-seekers. 

A wander around the ghostly remains of Ponderosa Ranch above Incline Village near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, yesterday afternoon proved to be the perfect Halloween experience, particularly because it’s a forbidden one: The place, which was once a bustling tourist attraction, has been bereft of activity since it closed down in 2004.

Between 1967 and 2004, Ponderosa Ranch was a theme park based on the 1960s television western Bonanza. It was the home of the affluent Cartwright family in the series. Portions of the last five seasons of the TV series and three TV movies were filmed at the location.

Today, the shuttered theme park isn’t the sort of place that welcomes snoopers. Forbidding chain-link fences and signs at the entrance just off the freeway keep curious passersby out. But if you hike a trail around the back of the site up the mountainside, you can sneak in another way easily enough.

In the late October sunlight, Ponderosa Ranch was completely still and ever so slightly spooky. The skeletal forms of rusty old farm equipment resembled the remains of dinosaurs. Stacked picnic tables and benches appeared to be coffins in the lengthening afternoon shadows. Exploring the dusty barns and unswept trailers revealed a wealth of dormant treasures such as old wooden signs advertising horse rides and $2 cowboy breakfasts, defunct movie cameras and lights, heavy wooden wagon wheels and creaking ferris wheel horses and camels, their once-brightly painted coats peeling off.

I kept thinking that we’d come across a corpse amidst all that debris and quietude. Thankfully we didn’t. All in all, the clandestine visit still made for the ultimate off-the-beaten-track Halloween scare.

I’ve had the good fortune to experience so many cultural happenings this week that I’m quite behind on my commentary about them all. Just thought I’d use this opportunity to provide a quick roundup of three arts events that anyone in SF with a bit of cash to spend and some time on their hands should make a bee-line for:

1. Westside Story at the Orpheum Theatre: The new Broadway tour of the Bernstein classic is worth seeing simply as a reminder of the musical’s superiority to almost any contemporary counterpart. Almost every song is a hit. The choreography is virile and virtuostic. The orchestrations hit you in the gut. The characters are vivid. I only wish that the singing in this production were better. The nasal quality of Ali Ewoldt’s voice as Maria made my toes curl. And Kyle Harris, the production’s handsome Tony, could barely reach the many high notes in his songs.

2. Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and “Exposed”): The highlight of this major retrospective of the famed photographer’s career is the section devoted to the artist’s travels through American in the post-war years. This material isn’t as well known as much of Cartier-Bresson’s other works, but the images are as vivid as the best of his iconic street-life pictures taken earlier in the century in France and elsewhere. There’s a great photograph of a large family lounging all over a hatchback car in 1970 New Mexico. The car becomes the ultimate leisure vehicle. It’s like the family’s lounge. Another image I like is a photograph taken in San Francisco in 1960. It’s a view from above of ladies sitting next to each other with tightly-crossed legs. The legs look like features of the landscape rather than anatomical parts. Cartier-Bresson’s widow, the photographer Martine Franck, was at the opening at SFMOMA. There are two pictures of her in the exhibition. At one point, I noticed her stopping to steal a glance at one of her husband’s photographs of her. It was just a second’s pause. Then she moved on, spending much more time in front of the other portraits. A photography exhibition on the floor above the Cartier-Bresson show, “Exposed”, all about the different ways in which people see and are seen by the camera’s eye, is also very much worth a visit. The images range from the sexual (eg a Helmut Newton image taken through a mirror of him posing with a couple of naked female models and a clothed female) to the celebrity (eg an image of the Queen with her corgies) to the violent (countless horrifying pictures of lynchings, amputees, suicides and so on). The breadth and unflinching nature of the material make the show feel both compact and powerful.

3. Kronos Quartet at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts: The Bay Area’s preeminent experimental string quartet is embarking on a long-term partnership with YBCA. The group kicked off the relationship with a concert of short works featuring live string music set against a backdrop of ambient recorded and electronic noise and a new production of a spellbinding 1970 work by George Crumb entitled Black Angels. The first half of the program felt quite samey to me, even though there are great contrasts in mood between Bob Ostertag’s furious “All the Rage”, a piece about homophobia, Ingram Marshall’s creeping “Fog Tropes II”, the Middle Eastern-inflected lines of Sahba Aminikia’s “String Quartet No 3: A Threnody for Those who Remain” and Aleksandra Vrebalov’s stormy “Spell No 4 for a Changing World.” But it was the second half that really entranced me. The theatricailty of the new staging was startling, with its ceremonial hanging of the string instruments on bungies that look like tiny noose. I was also enraptured by the diversity of the musical influences which ranged from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet to a Renaissance sarabande to Asian scales. I’m not sure why, but as the musicians glided through this piece, I felt like I was receiving information about a variety of ancient and now lost, dormant cultures. I listened like a sleepwalker.

I like seeing performances in languages I barely understand or don’t understand at all.

This feeling came back to me a couple of nights ago when I was in Berkeley seeing a great interpreter of Anglo-Saxon stories and music, Benjamin Bagby, perform Beowulf in the  old English in which the epic poem was originally set down in writing centuries ago.

Supertitles are obviously helpful. But, just as with some of the best theatrical productions I’ve experienced in my time in Russian, German and a variety of Indian tongues that didn’t provide assistance with translations, I don’t believe the supertitles  significantly increased my enjoyment of the show.

Bagby is such a consummate storyteller: The intensity of his gaze and his delicate harp accompaniment, speech modulations and emotional, lusty singing voice conveyed a great deal of meaning. It is sufficient, I think, to go into the theatre with a general understanding of the plot of Beowulf. Parsing every word isn’t necessary for one’s enjoyment. I was completely transported by the performer’s narrative.

In other news: A friend of mine who lives on the other side of the country saw my recent New York Times piece about the Bay Area cabaret scene and was inspired to write to me about his experiences in a not-very-authentic martini bar in Traverse City. I’m hopeless on the theme of cocktails. I’m a wine drinker almost exclusively, so asked for John’s help in knowing how to order a martini next time I go to the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel to see Chita Rivera — and what to expect.

John’s advice was so artfully articulated that I asked him if I could share it on my blog and he agreed. Here it is:

A real Martini is not made with strawberry juice or Cointreau or as in any other of the frou frou girly monstrosities.  If you go into the Cabaret in the Fairmont and ask for a classic martini with Bombay Sapphire gin, Tanqueray,Hendricks or one of the other top shelf gins and you want it say 10:1 or 16:1 you will get a classic martini. Vodka came much later in Martini history.  Many persons who say they want a martini really only want gin or vodka straight, with the garden vegetables. They will only allow vermouth in the same room, but no closer. Try it in the above proportions and you will find a very nice blend of flavors ( but see below).  Observe the bartender. If she/he macerates the lemon peel ( no flesh) and rubs it on the rim and puts a tiny bit of the juice from the olive jar in the drink with the olive, you will get a sense that she/he knows how to make one. If you ask for just a drop of single malt scotch in with the gin and vermouth, you will be noted as a cognascente. It should be served very cold.  If you have your 3″ stilettos on and one leg over the other on a stool at the bar make sure you get it “up”, that is in a icy chilled conic section stem glass. If you are going to hunch over the bar or be at a table, then I guess an old fashion glass will work. In any event don’t chug it but drink it while it is still cold. Warm martinis are deathly. The drop of single malt came from the bartender at the Oak Bar, or so my father said. It really rounds out the taste. The limit on Martinis is well established at 2, that is 2. Beyond that you are asking for trouble.  I recommend that you round out your education in Britishness by hieing yourself to the library and borrowing a copy of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. Therein lies the origin of the phrase “Shaken not stirred”. Martinis are delicious with a doz. raw oysters. Life just cannot get much better.

The all-male, a cappella vocal ensemble Clerestory was one man down for last Saturday’s concert in Berkeley. The ensemble usually has nine members. That night, thanks to some last-minute redistribution of parts and the wise decision to move one piece forward in the program and cut another entirely, the men of Clerestory acquitted themselves exceedingly well with eight. (Countertenor Jesse Antin, a key member of the group, had suffered a family bereavement and had to leave town at short notice.)

Regardless of this fact, the event was to my mind a model of what a great choral concert should be. Here’s why:

1. Many choruses, even good ones, outstay their welcome, thinking that audiences are desperate to sit through an entire mass and about 20 other pieces. But Clerestory’s concert, which featured a selection of mini song cycles and short individual songs organized around a single theme, was just the right length.

2. There was a little bit of casual talk from the stage in between a few of the songs. The choir members spoke to us comfortably like we were friends. They didn’t ramble, over-articulate as if speaking to a group of toddlers of the hard of hearing (which is so often the case in choral concerts) or preach to us. The information they imparted was helpful and concise.

3. The theme for the concert, “Night Draws Near” (also the title of the group’s new CD) tackled the popular Halloween-time subject of death, decay, the cycles of nature and related ideas, in a fresh way. The music veered between a short movement from a Medieval Requiem Mass by Claudin de Sermisy and “Three Short Elegies” by the 20th century composer Gerald Finzi to the contemporary Finnish composer Jaako Mantyjarvi’s ghoulish setting of “Double, Double Toil and Trouble” from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and an electrifying battle song, “War Music: On Horseback,” by the contemporary Bay Area-based, British composer Paul Crabtree. In other words, the ensemble’s broad approach to programming had a cumulative effect on the listener: The singers tackled their chosen theme with breadth so I never got bored. On the other hand, the choice or repertoire was so inspired and the singing so beautiful, that I felt the kind of depth of connection with the music and people in the room that I more often feel when a concert is more narrow and focused in scope.

4. The intonation was perfect and full of emotion yet restrained when it needed to be. The sound was gorgeously balanced and the singers evoked a wide variety of moods.

If there’s anything that didn’t work quite right in the program, it was the contemporary composer John Musto’s “Nunc Dimitis/The Birds Have Vanished”. The decision to move this languorous, knotty, and sustained piece from the finale position forwards in the second half was a good one: The singers didn’t want to leave it to last because of the difficulty of singing it without their ninth member on stage. And their lack of confidence in being short of one vocalist showed in the slightly hesitant nature of their performance.

But even with Antin on stage, I don’t think that Musto’s work would make for a good finale. I’m guessing that the group put it there because they wanted a quiet and thoughtful ending to the program. When I listened to a recording of the track on the group’s new CD the following day, the composition struck me as being a bit half-hearted. It’s an after-thought rather than a memorable expression of closure. I wonder if the Clerestory clan might consider positioning the song earlier in the program for its concert in Sonoma this coming weekend? Whether one man down or not, the robust yet stern sound of the shape note tune “New Morning Sun” by S. Whit Denson, creates a potent and less clichedly elegiac ending.

I wish I had enjoyed my tour on Saturday afternoon on The Magic Bus more than I did. But I didn’t. The experience left me feeling deflated and slightly nauseous.

“Magic Bus?” said the friend who joined me for the 90 minute ride through time and space back to 1960s San Francisco organized by the normally innovative site-specific theater company, Antenna Theater. “Tragic Bust, more like.”

This is perhaps overstating things a bit. The conceit is a marvelous one, at least. What better way to explore a time in this country’s history when groups of flower children traveled around the land on brightly-painted buses than by hopping on a bus tricked out to resemble the type of vehicle that the hippies rode in? And knowing whether you were “on the bus” or “off the bus” in the metaphorical sense defined you as an American in some ways during the era, so watching the story unfold while traveling on a bus makes sense.

But despite the strength of the core idea, The Magic Bus fails in two ways: 1) It doesn’t go beyond presenting stock notions of the 1960s that people have seen and heard millions of times before such as footage of the Beatles singing “All You Need is Love”, the murder of President Kennedy and hippies lounging on the roofs of buses, and 2) Because the entire ride through such touristy neighborhoods such as North Beach, Chinatown, Golden Gate Park and The Haight happens with video projection screens covering the windows most of the time, you feel like you could be seeing the presentation just as easily in a regular movie theater or at home on TV. If you did, you’d certainly feel less sick.

It wasn’t all bad: I liked the fact that many of the people on the bus sang along with the songs. Handing out candy and flowers for us to wear in our hair was a nice touch too.

But by the time we returned to Union Square, I was only too happy to get off the damn bus.

Berkeley Repertory Theatre‘s presentation of The Great Game: Afghanistan, a cycle of plays about the war in Afghanistan and its historical and political roots written by 12 playwrights and commissioned by the UK’s Tricycle Theatre, is an ambitious undertaking to say the least. Directed by Nicholas Kent and Indhu Rubasingham, the plays are organized into three parts and can be viewed on separate evenings, or, as was the case on Friday when I attended, a full-on, all-day marathon with breaks for lunch and dinner.

The cycle is compelling enough to hold our attention: Most of the performances are well-observed and some of the writing is dramatically compelling. I particularly enjoyed “Miniskirts of Kabul” a play by David Greig, for its playful creation of an imaginary meeting between an English female writer (played by Jemma Redgrave) and Mohammed Najibullah, the fourth and last president of the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Unlike many of the others in the cycle, this drama attempted to go beyond teaching a history lesson to theatre audiences. I also enjoyed the ways in which the separate mini-dramas (created by such well-respectedplaywrights as David Edgar, Lee Blessing and Colin Teevan) occasionally reflected upon each other, thus bringing certain themes and ideas to the fore. For example, I was very much taken with how some of the plays explored the notion of cartography — whether a map merely describes the world or is an attempt to create it in some respect, ie by delineating borders between nations. Another interesting theme comes in the form of a recurring question that pops up in several of the playlets: “Why are you here?”. This is perhaps the binding motif of the plays. I liked the way in which some of the plays balanced asking this question in the spiritual/metaphorical sense of the expression with thinking about the different methods people in Afghanistan, both native and foreign, use to rationalize their actions in the country.

Yet despite the few interesting ideas that floated to the surface of this sprawling theatrical journey to a forbidding and socio-politically complex yet culturally rich land, I didn’t get a whole lot out of The Great Game in the end. The plays touch on too many cliches regarding modern war zones and trade in conventional ideas about history, eg that it tends to repeat itself, without going beyond the surface. A friend of mine, who attended the cycle on the same day that I did, pretty much summarized his feelings in an email to me the next day. As his thoughts are so very close to my own, I asked him if I could share them on my blog and he kindly agreed:

“Ultimately, it made me feel not at all mad but sad and disappointed that so much time, effort and money would go into something that really doesn’t have much impact at all that I can tell and is rather underwhelming. With such an important subject, it is a particular shame. That said, I do still feel it’s a bit much for us to expect any artist, even David Edgar, to come up with anything profound to say about the situation or history of Afghanistan. It is a cliche now, that’s a part of the problem. What’s new to be said? Stay? Go? Let them draw their own borders? Draw borders for them? Poetic, wise locals? Barbaric locals? Blustery Brits and dumb Americans? Well-intentioned Brits and Americans? It’s all true and cliche and old news.”

My friend also shares my view that if Tricycle had created one long, focused play that went deep into the heart of the subject rather than a cycle of unrelated and diffuse short dramas, the impact would have been greater. “We could have gotten to know some characters and gone through something with them,” he wrote in his email.

But we’re both glad to have spent the day at Berkeley Rep nonetheless. It was an adventure and I take my hat off to the company for bringing this theatrical behemoth to the Bay Area.

It was a tough decision to make — and stick to. The Giants were heating up AT&T Park and inching ever closer to victory (for the first time, I am told, in years); The Alonzo King Lines Ballet was packing them in for its fall season at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. There were all manner of rehearsals, performances and late-night art exhibitions I could have been at last night.

And what did this culture critic do? I went to see a documentary about singing puppets.

Sing! The Music of Sesame Street is a sometimes touching and often hilarious romp through 40 years of songs from the famous children’s TV show. The little movie theater at YBCA was only half full of people like me in their 30s and 40s. But I got a lot out of the experience beyond the obvious nostalgia factor.

The film, which is part of a month-long movie tribute at YBCA to Muppet creator Jim Henson, consists of footage from the series interspersed with occasional title cards to denote how different songs have been organized by the filmmakers. It’s ridiculously simple in scope. There is no narration and no “behind-the-scenes” footage. All we get is 82 minutes of musical numbers performed by a mixture of marionettes and humans. I would have enjoyed more substance to the film beyond the songs, but I also enjoyed the way in which the documentary lets the music really speak for itself.

What I primarily got from the film was a remembrance of how much I learned from these songs as a child. I remembered learning to count with The Count and the difference between ‘around’, ‘over’, ‘under’ and ‘through’ from Grover running around a pair of swinging saloon doors. I’m also certain that I learned how to distinguish between different ideas and objects in part by singing along with the ditty “one of these things is not like the other…” In short, this was a trip into a corner of my early educational process, a journey into the roots of my cognitive process, if you will.

The simple melodies are very singable. And the messages are often educational without being boring and didactic. Listening to these songs with grown-up eyes, I see how funny and clever they are. In a song that Kermit sings from a perch in the middle of a pristine lake, for instance, a chorus of bug-eyed, orange fish join the frog in singing about the pleasures of greenery, clean air and quietude. As they’re singing their bucolic song, a noisy family shows up and starts to throw trash around and drown out the frog and fishes’ bucolic song with loud music from a ghetto blaster. Then a speedboat roars past, blocking our view of Kermit and almost killing the fish. As such, the song provides a witty and hard-hitting way of explaining the importance of environmental care. Adults and children alike learn quickly from this and have fun in the process.

In short, despite my feelings of guilt about sitting in a cinema watching footage of Oscar the Grouch singing a duet about unpleasant people with Johnny Cash, I don’t regret last night’s decision at all.

I’m teaching a class this semester on 21st century composers and their music at UC Berkeley. The class is being run under the auspices of the Osher Learning for Life Institute (OLLI), an organization which specializes in offering educational courses on a wide range of subjects to older members of the community, and the Berkeley Symphony, which recently appointed me as its resident dramaturg.

My class is full of interesting characters. One of the most colorful is an energetic 80-year old woman from South America whom I shall call Valerie.

Valerie was apparently very taken with last week’s class all about how we can approach listening to new art music, a music which usually doesn’t follow the same rules as the “classics” that most of OLLI’s audience are familiar with ie the works of Mozart, Beethoven and Bach.

Valerie was jumping up and down with excitement at the end and practically danced her way through a practical exercise in which the students were instructed to use paper and pencil to create a graphical representation of a short piece of music by the Bay Area-based composer Gabriela Lena Frank as they listened. I was excited to see how moved Valerie was by Gabriela’s music. She responded to it in an overwhelmingly visceral way.

Fast forward a week: Yesterday, when I turned up to class, one of the assistants delivered a letter into my hands. It was from Valerie. Before I had time to read it, Valerie herself showed up, with more words of unmitigated enthusiasm about the class and about the music that had so moved her in particular — Gabriela’s music. At one point she said, “I love your music so much…” which at the time struck me as slightly odd, as I had clearly mentioned that the pieces I played during the class were all by Gabriela. But I dismissed the comment, thinking perhaps that Valerie, not being a native English speaker, had simply used an ambiguous turn of phrase.

When I finally got a chance to read her letter, though, it became clear to me that somehow Valerie hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that the entire class was based on the music of Gabriela Lena Frank, even though I had made that point very clear throughout. (Gabriela was supposed to have given the lecture herself, but being delayed in Houston owing to flight issues, I had taught the class solo on her behalf and used samples of the Grammy Award-winning composer’s music to illustrate the main points we planned to get across.) For some bizarre reason, Valerie thought that I was the composer of the music she heard that day. “Your music, Ms. Veltman…can help me,” Valerie wrote. “Please, continue your work. Your piece can be choreographed. It would integrate feelings, movement, colors and singing.”

It’s funny how muddled I feel by Valerie’s words. Her letter is so passionate and beautifully written. I want to share it with Gabriela and my colleagues at the Berkeley Symphony and OLLI. But Valerie clearly somehow got in a muddle and mistook the person who presented the class (ie, yours truly) with the composer herself. I’m really not quite sure how this happened. I certainly never misrepresented myself to the students but I’m slightly embarrassed about the whole thing!

Sheesh. Well, I guess Valerie is 80 years old. As vivacious as she is, perhaps some details pass her by. When I see her next, I’ll try to set her straight. Or maybe I’ll write her back and include some of Gabriela’s recordings on CD for her to dance to whenever the mood takes her.