The Skinner Anthology Blog

Today is the first day of rehearsing the Overture to Boieldieu's Calife de Bagdad. The arrangement in the anthology is for violin and piano. The violin part doubles the piano most of the time, and the piano part stands alone quite well without the violin. But adding the violin should spice up the performance and I think it will also add some more energy to the experience of the work.

I'm diving right into this sort of commentary because I don't want to miss out on this bit of chronicling as this is the beginning of the process of preparing the performances. Much of the research was done a couple of years ago as part of a class I taught at the University of Richmond.

I'll be posting documents with a survey of the contents of the anthology a little later on.

The first time I played some of these pieces outside of the classroom context or outside my family was a couple months ago during a choir social at our home. I played The Huntsman's Chorus in Der Freischutz. I wonder if the folks who collected the music - my ancestors - were aware of the fact that the opera is about hunters and a shooting contest. I imagine that would have really sparked their imaginations as I know they did lots of hunting. I also played Battle of Waterloo arranged by G. Anderson. I'm not sure who G. Anderson was, but I used to work for Dr. Gene Anderson! As I performed this battle piece for our guests, I read the descriptive titles to them: Advance to the battle . . . The English Horse Guards advancing to attack the French Curassiers . . The Prussians advancing . . .etc. Perhaps my delivery was responsible for this, but my guests starting laughing. This experience made me wonder if it might not be the case that these pieces were actually intended to be a little bit humorous in the first place.