Chowan Alumni Event

On October 18th, I played a few selections from the anthology for a group of alumni of Chowan University. The particular group consists of graduates who attended in the first few years after the school reopened following World War II.

I played "Natchez on the Hill" and "Love in the Village" from the set of Virginia reels, the first of the two waltzes from Der Freischutz, the variations on Auld Lang Syne, the Battle of Waterloo. I concluded with a piece I wrote this year called "Columns." This Chowan etude commemorates the 160th year of our school. The structure of the piece is based on aspects of our main and oldest building, the MacDowell Columns. The middle section of my piece is a slow wistful waltz loosely based on the school's alma mater. This slow section is a musical thought for our resident ghost, the Brown Lady.

This mini-concert took place in the Mulberry Grove room after a nice lunch. There was a huge poster of the MacDowell Columns that emphasized the recent restoration. I played on a nice older Yamaha upright that was given to the school last year. It was first time playing on that particular piano.

I thought this was the ideal audience and occasion for music from the anthology as many of these alumni were from this part of the country and have an interest in the history of the region.

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.