JASON WEINBERGER

A response from one of the thousands of students who attended the WCFSO Hearing Pictures Youth Concerts last month. Another wonderful comment from the same class: ‘You sounded extraordinary and you made everyone be inspired. I love orchestra and I was amazed listening to you.’

As I wrote over on our Tumblr we’re inspired and amazed by these and scores of other thank you notes from our 4th and 5th grade audiences.

Hello, Levi Alba!

[Born today at 12:30pm, weighing in at 8lb 3oz, Mom and baby are healthy and happy.]

Happy to share marquee space with these artists!

Extremely proud to read this assessment of last month’s Rite of Spring from a longtime observer of the WCFSO, George Day. Audio proof coming soon …

[via wcfsymphony]

Portland! I’ll be doing this with your fine orchestra on Friday night. And you don’t even have trust me that Brandi Carlile and crew with symphony is a tremendous experience – just have a listen.

[Photos from Brandi’s October 2010 appearance with the WCFSO by Noah Henscheid]

Hallelujah, David Shields. If only more of my colleagues in the music biz – particularly those engaged in the futile and counterproductive enterprise of locking down media – would see the light.

[via Explore]

In 1958 Dick Cole snapped this shot of Buddy Holly right here in Waterloo, Iowa. We’re thrilled to have Dick joining us at rehearsal tonight to photograph our preparations for tomorrow’s Buddy Holly tribute shows.

[via wcfsymphony]

Very proud to announce that the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony website is now a Tumblr! In the immediate term we will focus primarily on current activities and communication with our terrestrial audience but plan to get ourselves more involved in Dashboard culture soon. I will post to the site weekly, as well as our awesome staff and musicians.

Seth Godin touches on a theme I’ve addressed here before, and one I wish orchestras would embrace with greater purpose. If we did we’d be creating much more important and relevant art than we are now.

[via cameronmoll]

I was just telling our local paper how much I dig Buddy Holly’s music; definitely dig his steez as well!

[via nerdboyfriend]

Just for fun: An iPhone timelapse of 1200 elementary school students arriving at last week’s WCFSO Youth Concerts, accompanied by a bit of the performance they came to hear.

[Shot with Frameographer]

Iconic Iowa

Thank you Levon Helm for your deeply authentic and generous music and spirit.

WCFSO Instrument Petting Zoo

Here at WCFSO we are busy wrapping up this season’s offerings for youth, hosting over 3500 elementary school students for a program focused on hearing and seeing and giving the last of our free Lollipops concerts for first-time concertgoers. I’ll have more coverage of our schools concerts in a few days; in the meantime have a listen to another of our very popular offerings for kids, the WCFSO Instrument Petting Zoo, which clearly lives up to its name in sound if not smell.

[Recorded last month at the Cedar Falls Community Center; my two-year-old is banging away on the percussion somewhere in there]

‘When I was a child, I used to jump with my friends for joy and happiness … we have all forgotten the beauty of the games we had in childhood.’

Recapturing seemingly lost joy and happiness, a young Iraqi music maker goes airborne in Jamal Penjweny’s series Iraq is Flying. Penjweny, an Iraqi-Kurdish photographer based in Baghdad, shot this and other inspiring images between 2006 and 2010 while covering the conflict there.

[via timelightbox]

All of my posts related to Igor Stravinsky, ahead of tonight’s WCFSO performance of Rite of Spring. Or, if you prefer the photo highlights:

• Composer
• Conductor
• Puppetmaster
• Neoclassicist
• Six-eyes
• Dandy
• Criminal

According to Stavinsky, conducting catastrophes were visited on Rite of Spring with some regularity during its first decades of existence. With the increasing prevalence of mixed meter music since that time such deficiencies of execution have generally become a thing of the past. And perhaps Stravinsky was being a bit tough on his fellow conductors – below are Leopold Stokowski’s metrical subdivisions of the Sacrificial Dance revealing the original rhythmic conception of the passage [most modern editions of Rite have the first 5/16 and 4/16 bars divided as they are here]:

[Stokowski score from the wonderful collection of musical material at the Penn Library]

Stravinsky on the premiere of Rite of Spring

Recorded in 1967 during the composer’s visit to Théâtre des Champs Elysées, site of the infamous 1913 premiere.

[Download]

‘Although I had conceived the subject of the Sacre du Printemps without any plot, some plan had to be designed for the sacrificial action. For this it was necessary that I should see Roerich. He was staying at the moment at Talachkino, the estate of Princess Tenicheva, a great patron of Russian art. I joined him, and it was there that we settled the visual embodiment of the Sacre and the definite sequence of its different episodes.’

Igor Stravinsky explains the inception of Rite of Spring and reveals his first collaborator on the work, the painter Nicholas Roerich. Pictured are several of Roerich’s 1912 set design variants for the premiere production one year later. [He subsequently conceived scenery and costumes for two other productions of Rite, documentation of which is archived here.]