Yes, There Have Been Musical Adventures Too!

Some of the more recent things I have been up to include:

* The Early Music Dinner where I performed some of Uccellini's forest Symphonies with the Baroque Ensemble for all of the important people at the University

* Going to an Australian tune session at Harry Gardner's home

* The end of the semester Baroque Ensemble Performance at the Early Music Studio where I performed Uccellini again and also a work by Zelenka for bass voice, two violins, viola, two oboes and organ. There was also lots of wine and snacks and silly adventures afterwords. I even saw a fruit bat flying in the rain!

* Attending several Irish / other sessions around town

* I am finishing up my research project for Ethnography of Music on Australian Bush Dance Music so there is lots of reading and writing and listening going on right now.

* I have my Conducting practical exam on Thursday where I will rehearse an ensemble playingThat Smile which is a fun little piece that Clayton Moser wrote.

* I also have my Historical Performance Practice exam on Thursday where I will play a Canzoni by Frescobaldi, some dance movements from Marais Sontata Maresienne, the first Adagio movement from Corelli's Violin Sonata No. 5, and an excerpt from Corelli's La Folia.

I went to Maldon Folk Festival this weekend and had a wonderful time! We were there Friday through Monday and it was basically music non-stop the whole time. I think I was expecting it to be a lot more like Lake Eden Arts Festival than it was. The festival is spread out all over town. Actually, it is more like two festivals. One at the camping ground outside of town and one in the town at various schools, churches, and pubs. There are lots of impromptu sessions on the street in front of the shops and restaurants ranging from Australian tunes to Irish, Scottish, and American. There was one hall that had displays by different local instrument makers including harp, guitar, banjo, accordion, whistle, and flute. The population seemed to me to be a lot older than at LEAF. While LEAF has a large concentration of the 20-30 crowd and a relatively even distribution of other ages, this festival seemed to have a higher concentration of the 60-80 crowd and a lot more musicians than at LEAF.

As per usual this year in Victoria, it rained and thus camping in the rain occurred but luckily my tent stayed mostly dry. Friday night we went to the Bush Dance that was led by the Emu Creek Bush Band. The floor was quite slippery so dancing in normal shoes was much more effective than sliding halfway around the room in dance shoes. Pretty much anyone who wanted to could join in at the back of the band and since the floor was so slick I spent about half of the time playing with the band. I put up a brief video clip of it on Facebook so if you want you can check that out. There were a lot of accordions and concertinas, a few whistles and flutes, a resonator guitar played as a lap steel guitar, a piano with the front cover removed, a bass, mandolin, and a few fiddles. At one point a bunch of costumed and slightly tipsy ladies walked in so the next few dances were quite entertaining. We even played the cancan to keep them entertained!

Over the course of the weekend I attended several workshops including lap steel guitar, blues mandolin, spoons, and dance music workshops. I think the spoons workshop was my favorite and I am definitely going to go in search of a good pair at Goodwill when I get back to Charleston. The jam sessions on the street were so much fun. On Sunday, the Gay Charmers (a dance band that has been around 50 years) had a concert where they basically asked anyone in the room who had an instrument with them to play something and anyone who knew it would just join in which was a ton of fun.

Meals were mostly in the restaurants and cafes in town but there were also some food tents near the camp ground and the performance tents there. Later in the evening there were some raucous acts at the Guinness tent and lots of jumping around sort of dancing. I had so much fun standing right at the front taking it all in. Over the weekend I also attended a Beatles sing-a-long and we had some great late night jam sessions.

I was mostly too busy having fun to take pictures but here are a few decent ones that I got:

some of the band at the Friday night bush dance at the festival

one of the street jam sessions

playing along to some old time music

a glimpse of the town

sort of a picture of the Morris dancers that performed on the street whenever it wasn't raining

Bush Bashing

My next weekend of adventures started off on Friday with a delicious dinner at my aunt Sue's house and a tour of her new shop.

On Saturday morning I took off to Enfield State Park for a Rogaine with Victorian Rogaining Association and several of the members of the Mountaineering club. Rogaining is a cross country navigational sport that started in Australia in the 70s. It is kind of like a treasure hunt - you have a compass and a topographical map with the locations of checkpoints on them and try to find as many as you can in the time alloted. The one I participated in was 6 hours. The checkpoints are fairly spread out and are located at places like the head of a watercourse or a spur or a knoll. One thing you have to take into account when navigating in Australia is the magnetic declination or the angle of difference between magnetic north and true north. Where we were the declination was 12 degrees. I guess you actually need to take it into account in a lot of places but depending on where you are it can have a small or very large affect on your navigation. Take a look here to see what the declination currently is near you: http://www.magnetic-declination.com/

Anyway, I was on a team with another beginner so we had a lot of fun figuring out what exactly it was that we were supposed to be doing. Different checkpoints are worth different amounts of points so we had to figure out a route that we thought we could do in the alloted time and gain the highest score.

The first three checkpoints we found without a problem but after that things started going a bit downhill. You have to get your baring off of the map based on where you are to where you want to go but if you aren't exactly where you think you are or if you don't walk exactly in a straight line you can easily get off track. The trick is once you have found your baring to find a tree or something exactly in your line of travel and walk to that and then find a new tree. If you start going sideways by accident you will not end up where you wanted to. The fourth checkpoint we were aiming for was the head of a watercourse and we were so close but just couldn't find it. There was no water in the watercourse so that made things difficult because everything was sort of sloshy. We ended up spending at least 45 minutes looking for it but in vain. Moving on, we saw a red kangaroo and later three gray kangaroos and at least one had a joey hanging out of its pouch!

Some of the time the area was pretty clear of scrub or we even had a track to follow but other times there was undergrowth that was as tall as us and quite prickly and wet because it had been raining. When you are trying to walk very quickly in a straight line tripping on sticks, getting caught by blackberry brambles and getting a bit bruised up is inevitable. There were also sections that had been recently burned and so there was no way to avoid getting charcoal stains on everything but it was such a blast! We ended up coming back 3 minutes late and therefore were docked thirty points off of our score but it was so much fun.

one of the clearest areas we walked through - also recently burned

my teammate following the baring

red kangaroo!

On Sunday I went on an adventure to French Island with Alysha. We got up bright and early for a two hour tram / train ride to Stony Point where we caught the ferry over to the island. While we were waiting at Flinders station for the train, a fight broke out on our platform and it actually took quite a while for security to show up. Some very entertaining and hung-over high school boys decided they needed to sit next to Alysha and I on the train and talk to us the until they reached their stop about an hour down the line. Definitely an interesting trip so far. The ferry departs only about 200 meters from the train station at Stony Point so getting tickets and hopping on was no trouble at all. The water in Western Port Bay was surprisingly calm - calmer than the Ashley river is most days.

Once we arrived on the island we set off towards the General Store to hire some bicycles for the day as we had seen advertised online. Little did we know but there was also an information kiosk much closer to the ferry landing that also hired out the same bicycles for the General Store. Anyway, we collected the bikes and had a delicious raisin scone before heading off down the slightly hilly dirt and gravel roads of the islands. At some point we headed down a road that was on our map that just ended (not like on the map) in solid, prickly, mosquitoy bush that was nearly as tall as us. After bashing our way through for a while we came out on an old field and worked our way to the coast of the island where we walked our bikes over the rocks and sand heading back to the next road on our map. We were so happy to see the road again! Stopped for lunch on the beach and I had a yummy lunch of crackers with sweet chili cream cheese and apples.

the ferry

quizzical cows - they don't see much traffic

the road that eventually dissappeared

finally! an open area!

Alysha walking her bike along the beach in front of the mangrove trees

bikes resting on the rocks at lunch time

The island was a lot bigger than we originally thought it was and there were a surprising number of cows and sheep on the island. It was fantastic to be out there exploring without a care in the world and no particular schedule. We wandered past the very small primary school for the 10 or so pupils that reside on the island. It uses solar power and the general store / post office had a windmill out the back. On our way back by the general store I got an ice cream cone (homemade) and we petted the dogs that wandered around the yard by the store. Later on we collapsed in a field in the sun and took a wonderfully refreshing half-hour nap and even with the sun screen managed to turn a little pink. A little tired and sore from bicycling for eight hours on bumpy dirt roads, we returned home and I felt so refreshed.

Perseverance Primary School

windmill behind the general store

yum!

Alysha and some wildlife

Exploring Victoria

To catch up since spring break, I guess I am about 3 or 4 posts behind so here goes the first:

The first weekend after break was a pretty busy one. On Friday I went to a jam session at at pub called the Drunken Poet and then to the opening performance of the Melbourne Festival. The festival was started as a sister festival to the Spoleto festival in Charleston and the one in Italy. They were all founded by Gian Carlo Menotii and the Melbourne Festival was called Spoleto Melbourne - Festival of the Three Worlds. The opening performance for this years festival was outside in Alexandra Gardens near the river and featured a group of acrobats from Spain who did a bunch of ariel acts on a giant metal ball hoisted into the air by a crane in time with a live music act. It was great fun.

On Saturday I went on a day hike with a few people from the Mountaineering Club to the Cathedral Ranges. The area had been badly burned during the bushfires in February 2009 but it was already coming alive with tons of wildflowers and ferns and other small plants. The hike was mostly along the rocky ridge line so there was a lot of scrambling over rocks and it was a really nice hot sunny day.

K@osmos at the Melbourne Festival

lunch break on the rocks

wildflowers

up on top

view of the ridge line

really tall gum trees on the walk back to the car

That evening I went to the Victorian Folk Music Club 40th Anniversary Woolshed Ball. I had a lot of fun dancing and even played a few tunes with the band!

The next weekend I went to the Grampians with the Mountaineering club for a two day bushwalk on the Major Mitchell plateau. The hike was a lot of fun! We rolled in Friday night at 11:30 and went straight to bed. It rained a lot that night but we stayed perfectly dry in my tent. When I woke up there were like 20 eastern grey kangaroos wandering around munching on grass and maybe 30 sulfer-crested cockatoos making a huge racket.

I think over the course of Saturday and Sunday we walked 23 kilometers with a elevation change of around 550 meters. The Grampians are a funny mountainous area that just sticks up out of nowhere almost. They were heavily burned in the January 2006 bushfires so it was interesting to see the progression of growth a few years later from what I saw at the Cathedral Ranges the weekend before. It rained and sleeted and snowed on and off on Saturday but the snow didn't really stick because the Grampians aren't high enough in altitude. The higher parts of the plateau looked very similar to the Hartz Peak area in Tasmania. I guess usually the Major Mitchell plateau and the Grampians in general are very dry so it was kinda special to see them flowing with water.

After we set up camp in the rain on Saturday and were cleaning up after dinner, some lost day hikers wandered through our camp. They had taken like 6 wrong turns and seeing as the trail was not too well marked and it was dark, we had to find a way to squish them in to the 4 two person tents we had brought for 8 people. Sunday the weather was actually quite decent with the exception of the freezing wind at the higher altitudes. We pretty much walked downhill the whole day and actually got some sunshine!

Eastern Grey Kangaroos just outside my tent!

snow covered logs on the hike up

somewhere on the plateau

a rainbow just after climbing straight up a cliff

back on top

a ridge across the valley

Tasmania the Beautiful

For the second part of my mid-semester break, I went to Hobart, Tasmania where Ian and Logan are studying. I had an amazing week and a half there - we did so much in such a short time!

Some of the highlights:

* Trip to Blackman's Bay for some beach walking and cliff scrambling on Friday.

* Search and Rescue Training with the Tasmania Police and State Emergency Services on Saturday and Sunday. We had a series of lectures about search techniques and different equipment and then went out and did some practice searches and even got to take a ride in the Police helicopter!

* An amazing Bush Dance with the Folk Federation featuring the Bottom Pub Ceilidh band on Saturday evening.

some of the cliffs just past Blackman's Bay

scrambling around

The Bottom Pub Ceilidh Band

'rescuing' someone and carrying them closer to the helicoptor

riding in the chopper!

* Multiple jam sessions with Ian and Logan - Ian has a beautiful new Didgeridoo and a Jaw harp and even tried playing my fiddle. They have borrowed a mandolin while they are in Hobart.

* Hiking up to Signal Station on Mt. Nelson with Logan on Monday.

* Playing a Bush Dance with the Hot String Band on Monday night.

* Adventuring out to Opossum Bay with Ian on Tuesday.

* Exploring downtown Hobart on my own and visiting the Tasmania Museum and going to two excellent jam sessions on Wednesday. Cathy also drove me out and around the Derwent river and we saw a bunch of Tasmanian native hens (really neat flightless birds endemic to Tasmania) and black swans.

looks pretty good right?

playing with the Hot String Band

Opossum Bay

* Watching the sun rise from snowy Mt. Wellington Thursday morning.

* Walking down to Sandy Bay and Blinking Billy (a lighthouse) on Thursday.

* Going to a rehearsal with the Hot String Band Thursday evening.

* Taking a trip to Bruny Island with Cathy and David and John and Logan on Friday.

sunrise from Mt. Wellington

some tall-ships in the harbor

snow covered Mt. Wellington from Sandy Bay

A lookout on the bit that connects North and South Bruny Island

footprints in the sand. not sure what the are from.

Fluted Cape on Bruny Island - we hiked all the way to the top!

* Having a delicious dinner and amazing jam session at Cathy and David's home on Friday evening.

* Going to the Salamanca Market and to the Botanical Gardens with Logan on Saturday morning.

* Playing a Bush Dance with the Heritage Fiddles on Saturday evening.

some beautiful flowers at the Botanical Gardens

playing with the Heritage Fiddles at a Bush Dance

* Going to the beach near Calvert's Lagoon on Sunday afternoon and then cooking up some delicious kangaroo roast.

* Hiking up Hartz peak with Logan, Cathy, David, John, and George on Monday.

Beach!

walking on the cliffs near the beach

hiking up to Hartz peak

that is the peak in the distance

wallaby footprints!!

Cathy is almost to the top