In the slow cultural season in these parts, it's been all too easy for this blog to drift a bit from its main function, the one described in its title. That purpose has always been to give a "heads-up" on events and happenings in the arts taking place in our city or at least in our geographic neck of the woods.

So it's a pleasure to be able to report on a very intriguing upcoming concert this Sunday at the Newberry Opera House. The Enso String Quartet, one of the bright young groups making a splash in a crowded field, will be performing at the Opera House at 3:00 PM with pianist Caroline Stoessinger...that's this Sunday, August 6. Do click on the quartet's website...it can truly be said to be kickass. Aspiring musicians: take note and see how a website is done, that is if you have either the money or the html savvy yourself. (Visitors to my website will see that I don't exactly have a surplus of either. Hey, what can I say, it gets the job done.) Plus you get treated to the Enso's perky rendition of Hugo Wolf's "Italian Serenade."

Speaking of the Enso's website, I did notice however that on their schedule page, Newberry is misspelled "Newbury." Just goes to show that bells and whistles are no substitute for research.

And talking about websites and blogs, I'm tardy in welcoming Marvin Chernoff to the blogosphere. Mr. Chernoff's longtime involvement and contribution to the cultural life of our community is very well-known, and I'm happy to report that he has a new blog on the Columbia Record site entitled Columbia Arts Blog. He's only posted a few times this summer but that's probably mostly a function of the aforementioned slowness of the season around here...once the cultural calendar fills up, I'm sure we'll hear more frequently from him and we look forward eagerly to another voice discussing the arts in the Midlands.

I knew I shouldn't have slammed that backstage door so hard at that gig in early July.

"...playing Schubert's piano sonatas well is one of the hardest things in the world. Especially this, the Sonata in D Major. It's a tough piece to master. Some pianists can play one or maybe two of the movements perfectly, but if you listen to all four movements as a unified whole, no one has ever nailed it....that's why I like to listen to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of---that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging...."

from Haruki Murakami's novel, "Kafka on the Shore," translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

Tributes to the late Gyorgy Ligeti continue to flood the blogosphere. From the American Music Center's essential website, NewMusicBox, three composers (Martin Bresnick, Roberto Sierra, and Anne LeBaron) offer their recollections of time spent in the presence of this most important of late twentieth-century composers. Wonderful, evocative stories from all three of them...what struck me the most in what they wrote? Sierra says of Ligeti, "Here was a man...longing for that music that nobody has written before." That's a beautifully pure way of portraying a mindset that I could only express clumsily in other posts.

LeBaron remembers a seminar four years ago at which Ligeti was asked what subjects should be taught in music conservatories...she quotes him answering that among other essentials "it's very important to have a high level of knowledge of non-European music: Asian, Javanese, Thai, Australian, the whole African complex south of the Sahara, Arabian, Iranian, and North African. I’m extremely interested in polyphonic music so I gravitate toward the African musics. For me, popular culture is very important, such as the blues..."  That's an intellectually and aesthetically omnivorous outlook that I would venture to say is not terribly prevalent in American music schools and conservatories in general.

...before you think to yourself, "Gee, this must be a person really worthy of attention in the classical music scene, somebody's whose body of work merits an interview in this respected publication..." you might want to check out this post on Orange County Register music critic Tim Mangan's excellent blog.

Pay particular attention to the section that includes the phrase, "...if you place either a full-page color ad or two consecutive half-page color ads, I'll arrange to have you interviewed."