If you are in or near Nashville, and feel like treating your ears to some virtuoso saxophone playing, you might consider visiting First UU tomorrow morning (services at 8:50 a.m. and 10:50 a.m.). For this year's Music Sunday (a tradition at our church), the choir has been working on Paul Halley's In Sideribus Domi - At Home in the Stars, a cantata celebrating the interconnectedness of art, science, religion, and creativity.

This morning was the dress rehearsal, and the cadre of instrumentalists is stellar (so to speak):

soprano saxophone: Jeff Coffin [see here for a video that includes, among other delights, him trading riffs with Victor Wooten. And here's another one that eventually shows him playing two saxophones at the same time.]
guitar and cello: Richard Smith and Julie Adams
drums: Brian Foti
piano: Susan Snyder
synth: Michael Harrison
electric bass: Michael Hiller

(I may have lucked into the best spot on the stage - right behind the sax player and right next to the piano, which gives me a great view of what's going on instrumentally.)

There's a space in the fourth movement where the choir will cut out and the septet launch into an improv. There were a couple runs through that part this morning, and each version sounded stupendous.

That said, my very favorite stretch - and that of several other people, I gather - is the double-fortissimo "Sanctus" of the fifth movement. At the risk of sounding irreverent, it is classic movie music - the part where, after having been on the edge of your seat as the story alternately ebbs and accelerates towards its climax, the screen and soundtrack explode into full-color triumphant joyousness. (Which, come to think of it, is probably why I enjoy singing Sanctuses in general - they tend to be loud and joyful and magnificent....)

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All that said, there were about three hours earlier in the morning where I'd actively resented the rehearsal being on my schedule - the hour before I gave up writing and succumbed to sleep, and the two hours before rehearsal, when I dragged myself back up to get the writing done and get myself ready for rehearsal. (No, that didn't add up to a full night's sleep. I'm going to stay away from both caffeine and tequila tonight so that my head is ready for bed when the rest of my body insists on it.)

Sideribus being a dense, textured piece, I suspect practicing it has amplified how often I'm analyzing musical textures these days. One of the CDs I listened to on this latest trip was Heritage: on it, there's a rendition of "Pretty Polly" by Mary Chapin Carpenter that's hair-raising because the strings are so unsettling (especially when they suggest the pulsing of a human heart). In Handel's Israel in Egypt, there's a movement where the violins buzz furiously as the chorus sings about flies and lice. The whole Enfoirés show offers lots of opportunities to ponder textures - since everything is a cover (and oftentimes also a parody and/or a rearrangement for multiple voices), the way the timbre of a voice can affect the emotional temperature of a song (as does tempo, as do the instruments involved) has been catching my attention a lot. For example, the Enfoirés version of "Luoxor J'adore" is awesome driving music; the original, not so much (warning: the video of the original might not be worksafe, depending on where you work. It's not quite in John Waters territory, but definitely with that sensibility). Then there are songs like "Education Sentimentale" where the sensibility remains in the same general realm, but a change of instrument (from guitar to harpsichord) and balance (original: one light tenor + soprano harmony; Enfoirés: two older men, one young one, and a woman) - the changes suggest different things about memory and fragility, and the full chorus that comes in at the end of the Enfoirés arrangement amplifies its fairy-tale aura).

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From the Department of "All Things Are Related to Wordsmithing":

A 2007 interview of Jeff Coffin in which he discusses (not) being defined by genre, about creative confidence, and other things that strike me as relevant to writers as well as musicians

A 2004 Danny Gregory post on starting guitar lessons. This part leapt out at me:

And yet, in my one lesson, I have already begun to feel the door inching open. One of the points that Russell emphasized to me was take the time to listen and savor the note. While my body is learning and stretching, my tendons lengthening, my bones shifting, I should give my mind the time to feel the music, to hear the decay of a note, to see how the sound emerges and then how the harmonics fall away. What I find fascinating is that, yet again, the lessons I learned in drawing are at the core of all creative effort.
To suspend time and to appreciate the moment.
To be gentle with myself and feel comfortable with 'errors'.
To realize that no matter how few hairs I have and how grey they may be, I can always learn new things and that once I open my mind to learning, everything becomes a fresh lesson.