I have fallen in love with this group. I find their arrangements very interesting and attractive to me to the point of compositional envy. The last two mornings I have spent a good part of my morning routine listening to them. First, the Library of Congress concert and secondly their album.

I love finding new music.

I have also been thinking about music I have loved since i was a young man. I am thinking specifically of Satie and his nocturnes.

These came back on  my radar recently when I recommended them for consideration in an AGO virtual presentation.

I fell for this music in my late teens. I learned one of these when studying at Ohio Weslyan with Richard Strasburg. Here I am, almost seventy, and much of the music I loved then, I still love.

While I have not had the benefit of a true  mentor in my life, I have been privileged to somehow connect with Satie, Bach, Bartok, Miles Davis, and other music (not to mention poetry and fiction). It’s not clear to me how I arrived here, but I am grateful that this stuff keeps on drawing me in.

I continue to work with the Bach F major invention. I basically have it memorized. But I continue to learn from working with it.

I have noticed in my playing and conducting that often I understand music as elegant gesture. This relates to my love of dance.

I have been going over the F major invention several times a day. It’s short so this takes only a matter of minutes daily. I notice that sometimes I stumble in odd places and early in this process I would sometimes have a memory lapse. Both of these things give me something to think about.

What I have discovered is that the more I relate to what I am playing from memory as musical gesture the better I play it and of course remember it. This is much more concrete in my mind than I am able to convey with words.

I see it as another valuable lesson I am learning from memorizing.

Did they mention the music? | John Rutter

Rutter reviews Prince Phillip’s funeral music. A bit pompous, but interesting.