Adventures in Good Music

I honestly don't remember exactly what we did during the day on Wednesday except that I do know we slept late and spent a lot of time talking and some time playing. Actually I gave Monique a fiddle lesson -- she was interested in learning how to make "that sound" that comes out of my fiddle when I play so I showed her a bit about making the rhythm and we messed with it for a bit. Then she played some eastern European stuff and taught me to play rhythm on my fiddle to back her up. More very good fun.

Later in the afternoon we headed out to Zaandam again. Our purpose was to see if it was feasible to stream music from Rudo's place onto the internet and into Second Life. Now that Monique and I knew that we could play together, we wanted to fulfill a promise to friends from our Second Life community to play a live concert together and stream it into a space in the Confederation of Democratic Simulators where they could hear it. Monique's taverna in Alpine Meadow was the logical location, so we logged in and started setting up equipment. Alex showed up at some point, we all ate good Chinese food together (after I teased Alex mercilessly about the trouble he'd caused me the previous evening) and then we sent out messages to some of our friends to tell them that we were going to test this concept and needed listeners in the taverna to tell us if it was working. After that it was just a matter of playing together in front of the mics, so we did. It was just a jam session -- the three of us had never played together, we had three different repertoires, and we really were just messing around. I played some O'Carolan and waltzes and Irish tunes on autoharp with Monique playing along on fiddle and Alex finding the guitar chords. Alex sang Greek songs with me playing autoharp and Monique on bass or sometimes Monique on fiddle and me on bass. Monique played klezmer tunes with me backing her up on bass and Alex on guitar. And so on...we chatted and played with each other and with the handful of Second Life friends who were listening. The concept definitely worked: it was fun enough to listen to that our friends stuck around the whole time we were playing. So we committed to doing more of a concert on Friday evening.

After we got back to Monique's place, we had tea and talked until much later than we really should have. After we said goodnight and I got into bed, I wasn't sleepy so decided to pick up my email. When I turned on my iPod, I noticed that one of our Second Life friends was online, and realized that she was running a regular community meeting that I ordinarily attend, so I asked her to bring me to the meeting location since the minimal client on my iPod didn't allow me to transport myself. I was cheerfully greeting the others who were there when I noticed that Monique was also online. And the next thing I knew, she came flying down the stairs in real life, laughing hysterically as she realized that I was also "in world" and unable to believe that I could do that through my iPod -- she thought someone else was borrowing my login. But there I was, sitting in bed with iPod in hand :-) Ah, well, when you're crazy, I guess you may as well be completely crazy, eh? It was definitely a funny moment, and just as funny to our friends at the meeting going on in Second Life when they realized what had happened.

Thursday Monique and I had intended to go out and do the museum thing, but it didn't quite work out -- turned out that she got tied up with some work she had promised to do, so I amused myself for most of the day, helped her out a bit, and we worked out an arrangement of a piece of music I can only describe as monumental. More on that later. We went out for a quiet dinner together, then managed to get to sleep at a reasonable hour for a change.

Friday morning we got up relatively early because we had a date with two of Monique's band mates and Rudo to make a recording of an anthem that had been composed for the Confederation of Democratic Simulators. I had already worked on it a bit before I came to Utrecht, and on Thursday Monique and I had worked it over again so that we could play it together. But it was still almost a parody of an anthem, so what we had in mind was to make it as anthem-like and over-blown as possible. And we had just the gang to make that happen. Hans, Monique's Bulgarian/eastern European/gypsy accordian playing partner in musical crime was up to the task of putting an overblown support under her fiddle and my autoharp. So the three of us and Sevgin, a Romanian clarinet playing friend, headed over to Zaandam to make that recording.

It took a bit of doing, but with Rudo doing the engineering for us, by 1300 or so we had a recording we could live with. That was fortunate since I was due to meet my exchange daughter, Juliane, at the central train station at 1330. So I'll stop here for now and save that part of the story and the story of our live concert in Second Life until my next posting.