Around Melbourne

As I get busier with living here and the blog posts seem to get further and further apart, I probably end up leaving out a lot of things. Some of the things I don't believe I have mentioned in the past few weeks include:

• Making homemade pizza and watching Love Actually with Sophie and Cathleen and some other great people. Roast pumpkin is apparently a relatively common pizza topping here!
• Going to the Esplanade Crafts Market in St. Kilda with Alysha and wandering around the area and eating some fish and chips for lunch.
• Wine tasting at the Queen Victoria Market with Alysha. I bought my first bottle of wine - a rosé from South Eastern Australia. If you return the empty bottle to the same stall at the market, you get three dollars back!
• Playing in the Melbourne Scottish Fiddle Club concert. It was so much fun! There were about 600-800 in the audience, maybe even more, and about 50 people up on stage. There is a lot of power with an ensemble that large and you could just feel everyone's energy all joining together.
• Eating lunch at a realy neat cafe near campus called Seven Seeds with Jamie when we were both to busy with school work to have a real Tuesday Adventure.
• Having some great baroque violin lessons with Rachael Beesley and rediscovering La Folia.
• Playing in Baroque Performance Class (masterclass) for Cynthia O'Brien.
• Making Indian style dahl with lentils, sweet potato, carrots, and spices with Jamie.
• Going shopping for pretty dresses with Alicia and Jamie as a "stress reliever."
• Finally getting to bake! I made two kinds of cookies with Cathleen at her house on Friday. Regular chocolate chip and oatmeal chocolate chip with currents and some walnuts added to half of both the recipies. Yum!
• Going to some great Irish sessions at the Dan O'Connell Hotel and The Drunken Poet with Cameron.
• Writing an essay for Music and Health class discussing my top 15 songs and what they do for my health.
• Working with musicians in conducting class! We take turns playing and conducting. I am working on conducting and arrangement of That Smile that Clayton Moser wrote last year for a 24 hr composition competition.
• Going to the National Gallary of Victoria with Alysha. We pretty much saw the entire museum except for the touring exhibit.

Here are some pictures from the Esplanade Market adventure:

The beginning of the market. I got so distracted by the items for sale that I forgot to take any more pictures!

The enterance to Luna Park - an amusement park in St. Kilda that first opened in 1912.

The Palais Theatre - the largest theatre in Australia. It first opened in 1914.

Kite surfers!

Walking out on the St. Kilda pier

Look at all those pretty sail boats!

Someone stuck a pirate flag by the marina... I found it amusing.

Look how huge those palm trees are!

Mmmm. Fish and Chips.

Jamie with coffee at Seven Seeds.

I had a blood orange soda.

Sorry for keeping things so short this time! If you would like to hear more about anything, just let me know and I'd be happy to tell you more. I am heading off for two weeks of Spring Break adventures tomorrow morning at 4:50 am - first to Alice Springs and the outback and then down to Tasmania where I will see Logan and Ian!!

An Ceili Mor

Two weekends ago I went to an Irish dance festival called An Ceili Mor in Port Fairy.

Instead of taking the slightly faster route along the Princes Highway, we drove along the scenic route: The Great Ocean Road. The Great Ocean Road was built following WWI by returned soldiers and also serves as a war memorial. It was absolutely beautiful. There were hills, and trees, and parrots, and sheep and huge limestone cliffs, and most importantly - the ocean. I love water and beaches and crashing waves - salty air changes everything.

The Great Ocean Road is fairly windy as it follows the the shape of the coastline. There are sections of the coast that are very rocky and others that are very sandy. I was actually pretty surprised at how calm the waves were for the most part. The day we were driving was about half sunny and half rainy - pretty usual for this winter.

I thought this sign was pretty amusing. We saw it every where on this road - but I haven't seen it anywhere else. Since this is one of the most popular tourist destinations I guess they must get a lot of people who forget.

Some parrots at one of the gas stations.

Speaking of parrots, there were several flocks just along the side of the road. One flock was bright pink! Apparently they can be a real pest for grain farmers. Also, the gas stations are interesting. Almost all of them don't have pay-at-the pump capabilities, and instead of pre-paying you pump first, and then pay.

The second part of the Great Ocean Road is almost entirely along side great limestone cliffs. Some of these cliffs have been warn away by the wind and waves, leaving huge limestone stacks in different formations in the surf.

cliffs along the shore

one of the first stacks we came across.

there used to be 12 stacks in this location so they were named

the twelve apostles - but the wind and waves took their toll

some of the stacks formed bridge-like formations

this one had a double arch but the first arch collapsed a few years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ocean_Road has more information.

Anyway, about Ceili Mor - it was a smallish weekend festival with about 75 people in attendance I believe. There was no live music, which absolutely shocked me, but they brought in a great teacher and caller from Ireland, Joe Manix. The Friday evening we did a lot of dancing. Saturday morning and afternoon were mostly workshops on learning some new dances. The Ceili dances are usually in sets with several "movements" - like a string of square dances that always follow each other. There is a break between each "movement" to remind the dancers of and/or teach the next "movement" which is like a whole dance on its own. One of the workshops was the broom dance - kind of like what the chimney sweepers in Mary Poppins dance on the rooftops. I had always thought that the chimney sweepers dance was just something made up for the musical, but I guess there is a tradition of dancing with brooms!

Saturday evening there was not much dancing. A part of Ceili Mor is a competition for the Hillee Cup. Teams form and answer questions and make up and perform crazy skits (without rehearsal). There was a huge dinner feast with roast lamb, veggies, wine, and a delicious lemon tart dessert. Actually the whole weekend was dance, eat, dance, eat. There is breakfast then dancing then morning tea then dancing then lunch then dancing then afternoon tea and more dancing etc. There was not a chance of going hungry. It was a very silly, relaxing evening.

The Hillee Cup.

All the young dancers (Borderline Kaylee) dressed up for the

Saturday night dinner and dancing.

Bec and I both wore crochet-backed tops!

some of afternoon tea cleanup crew.

Over the weekend, we all stayed in a bunkhouse in the middle of a large caravan park. They put up the six of us young people in one room with three bunk beds. At one point I got to try driving a stick shift car around the park. It was interesting but I don't think I should go out on any real roads in a stick shift without more practice. Port Fairy hosts a huge Folk Festival in March that brings in a ton of people so the caravan park was very huge - and very empty since it is not camping season yet. There were a ton of rabbits all over the place. I decided to get up early on Sunday morning and took a walk down to the beach. It was pretty amazing how quickly the scenery changed. One section was really rocky with large, dark pumice rocks covered in lichens. There was another really sandy section that was pretty flat and then just around the corner there were great big sandy cliffs.

one rabbit out of about 1,000.

looking across the caravan park.

the rocky shore with tide pools.

the trail over the hill.

sandy beach

sitting on the rocks - my camera has a timer :)

It is a brief summery, but hopefully that gives y'all an idea of my weekend in Port Fairy. It was such a fun time!

Some recent musical adventures

I just turned in my first paper in Australia on Friday! I am so glad to have that over with. I have been seriously lacking in keeping this blog up to date. Here is a summery of some of the musical things I have been up to in the past few weeks.

A few weeks ago we had a Baroque dance class during the Performance class time where we learned the steps to the Minuet. It takes a lot of balance and leg strength but it was a ton of fun.

One thing that I am really enjoying about Baroque ensemble is having the space to be creative. Unlike the Classical cannon and Romantic music where the tradition is to play exactly as the composer and the conductor dictates and as your teacher and teachers teachers have instructed, with Baroque music, performers have more freedom to add in their own voice with personal ideas of affect, some ornamentation and creativity. It is expected for performers to research and really understand the context in which the piece was written - the performers have a personal influence on music.

On August 12 I went to a concert by the University of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra a the Melbourne Town Hall. They performed Shostakovich Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major, and a world premier of Passing by Katherine Rawlings, a graduate student at Melbourne Uni. It was a really good concert. The Town Hall is a really neat performance space. There is a huge pipe organ at the back of the stage. The orchestra was so large that they had to add some platforms to the front of the stage to fit everybody. The hall itself has two floors and a huge beautiful ceiling with large chandeliers. The ground level is a ballroom floor that had movable chairs arranged for the concert. The balcony has a large section at the back and smaller sections along the sides. There are huge stenciled panels and wood carvings on the walls.

I have also been playing with the Melbourne Scottish Fiddle Club. They are a performing group that kind of reminds me of Na Fidleiri although there is a huge variety of ages and technical abilities. They are going on a tour in New South Wales over spring break so the rehearsals right now are more performance oriented but still a lot of fun. Any sort of rehearsal or dance gathering around here seems to involve a tea break with lots of food. The weekly rehearsals for the fiddle club are at a home in one of the suburbs so I get to take the train out of the city. They are having a performance this Sunday at the Hawthorne Town Hall that I will probably play in. Should be fun!

The Early Music Studio at the Uni has a Tuesday Soirée Series. The studio is in an old Victorian era house. Kind of like the Charleston singles, it is long and narrow. The performers are in one room and the audience stretches back through the next two (there are double doors between each room). It really is a house concert. The concerts are all started with a small reception with wine and goodies and then people settle into their seats to listen to the music. The first one I went to was duet concert with Greg Dikmans on baroque flute and Lucinda Moon on baroque violin. It was really neat because they lectured in the performance class that afternoon about the music they were performing that night.

Last weekend, I played with Borderline Kaylee at the Ringwood Colonial Dance. We didn't really play much of the music before we got there so it was a lot of fun pulling up each piece and discovering either that I already knew it or finding something brand new. One of my favorites from the evening was playing Doudebleska Polka. Looking at it, I had no idea I knew it. The second I started to play it, I realized it was one of the dances that we learned in the folk dance classes at the Oregon Suzuki Institute! When we got to the third section of the music, I was kind of confused - later I figured out that when dancing this section, I never listened to the melody because the dancers clap here. It was a lot of fun.

I also have some pictures of some of the Borderline Kaylee musicians from the Monday night Ceili dances at the Quiet Man.