Winter Music

Ah, today I had the privilege of attending a 2 hour class titled "Winter Music". The course was offered through Oasis, a national organization for the chronologically gifted folks. This class presented a broad palate of richly evocative, cold and icy music including the majestic sounds of Vaughan Williams' "Antarctic Symphony", one of Arnold Bax's piano symphonies, "Winter Legends", a Chinese composer, Zheng's aural interpretation on the zither, Gustof Hulst's "A Winter Idyll" which was heavily influenced by Wagner, Tchaikovsky's "Symphony 1- Winter", Vivaldi's "Winter", and a Portugese symphonic-heavy metal tribute to Vivaldi's piece entitled "Winterfall". This was actually very interesting. The group is cleverly named SymphOnyx.
We listened to contemporary composer John Rutier's choral masterpiece "When icicles Hang", "Winter Weather" with Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman, Jethro Tull's "Winter Landscape", a celtic interpretation on the bagpipes, and Simon and Garfunkel's "A Hazy Shade of Winter." A 20th century composer, Benjamin Briton presented a beautiful piece sung by a boys' choir, "In Freezing Winter Night", in which he utilized 16th century lyrics set in the Gregorian scale. The instructor was well versed and witty. I don't know if there are any readers of my blog left reading at this point; probably only Charles is interested enough in music to actually read my enthusiastic ramblings. I thoroughly enjoyed this class and look forward to participating in more of this instructor's offerings.