Janos Starker Radio Tribute (Streaming) 7:00 PM ET Tonight

I just confirmed with WIFU FM that their show Artworks will be devoted to Janos Starker (who passed away Sunday morning) this evening. Nothing’s up on the website about it as I write, but should be soon. It’s at 7:00 PM EDT, and can be listened to online at http://indianapublicmedia.org/radio/. Just click on the “Listen Live” link.

Menahem Pressler, Emilio Colon, and Charles Webb will be guests.  Excerpts from Starker interviews and recordings will be included.

It may or may not be available for downloading later, because of copyright issues with recordings used. So listen if you can!

What Difference Does Marriage Make?

What difference does “marriage” make to same-sex couples? Here’s the difference it makes for me.

I was probably 21 or so.  My parents were horrified at my attraction to men, and my defiant embrace of a gay identity. We were arguing after dinner, tensions coming to a head, tempers fueled by too much alcohol.

I forget what awful, angry thing my dad had said. He seemed to be convinced that I had decided to be attracted to men, that that I was doing this despite warnings that it wasn’t good for me, or the family, etc.

Something snapped inside me.

But instead of screaming at him, instead of attacking him, instead of denouncing him yet again for being a homophone, I burst into tears. “How do you think I feel? What do you think it’s like for me knowing I can’t get married, knowing I can’t have children, that I can’t have a family?”

That changed the conversation.  I wasn’t rebelling against their values.  I was, they finally saw, to some extent anyway, that I was trying to figure out how to get by in a world where I excluded from embracing them.

It was a turning point for all of us.  I was shocked–I hadn’t realized that was there for me.  Eventually, it led to me getting married to a woman, despite both of us knowing I was attracted to men, and having a family.  As wonderful as our marriage was in many ways, as great as our children are, as much as I love my family, aspects of it were a living hell for both my wife and I.  Sometimes our sex was great–no kidding.  Other times, too many times, I had to fantasize about a man, and she knew I was.  That sucked. It was horrible, and it lacked integrity, and eventually we realized it.

To keep it going I kept telling myself that I was actually straight and that my attraction to men was a symptom of something else.  (After being out, I became a non-religious ex-gay, you might say. I can expand on that another time.)

The point is that at the height of my angry gay young man telling off his parents phase, underneath it all I wanted to be married and have children and have a family.

It just never occurred to me that I could do that with another man.

Well, now it has.  And it’s occurred to a lot of people.  Our society is finally getting it.  We’re people. We love. So many of us are called to love and commit to a spouse.  So many of us are called to love and raise children.

Unmagical

Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes when it doesn’t, it does.

What am I talking about, you ask?

It’s the magic of getting a discount hotel room, then slipping the desk clerk a $20 bill.  I’ve gotten some amazing upgrades that way.  To a suite, the last two times.  I was bragging about that to my friend Donna at lunch today.  My partner and I were on our way to a night in Cincinnati, and had stopped in Bloomington for lunch.

I’d scored a $130 room at hotel that would have been $199 otherwise. At the coolest place–it’s a contemporary art museum as well as a hotel.

We parked at a garage around the corner–I was being a bit of a cheapskate.  As we checked in, Dan (I’ll call him), the young desk clerk, told me we would receive a complimentary upgrade to a “deluxe” king room.  Hmm, I thought.  Maybe I don’t need to tip him.

Oh, what the heck.  Let’s see what happens.  I hand him my credit card with the $20 underneath.  Smile.  ”Please pick out a nice room for us.”

“Sure, sir,” he replies.  He starts tapping at his keyboard, and I’m thinking this is going to be good.   He finally hands me the key cards.  407.

Fourth floor in a ten story place? Doesn’t sound that great.  Well, we’ll see.  He escorts us to the elevator, offering to carry my bag.  ”This is a nice room?” “Yes, sir.”

We find it. Beautiful-stunningly beautiful.  But small.  Not a great view.  

Not a room that you give a tip to get.  And then I realize–maybe this kid doesn’t know how this game works.  He seemed a little nervous; probably new. Maybe he just thought I was a nice generous guy. I was a little pissed.  Oh, what the hell, I think.  You win some and you lose some. I can’t call the desk and bitch that he didn’t upgrade us to a something spectacular, can I?

We’ve got 90 minutes until our dinner reservation nearby, so I change into my workout clothes. In the elevator on the way down to the fitness center is a penguin sculpture.  Cool!  The place is amazing.

The workout room is beautiful, with the best array of cardio machines, free weights, and even complicated-looking machines with pulleys and stuff I’ve seen in a hotel.  Because I’m not familiar with these machines, and strained my right arm with dumbbells a couple of days before, I decide to get on the treadmill.  It asks me for all sorts on data–age, weight, etc., and then wants starts up.  It seems to want to measure my pulse continually, which would be holding the handles non-stop, and also keeps speeding up–like the assembly line in the famous I Love Lucy chocolate-factory episode.  I can’t find a way to slow it down, so I stop it and figure out how to do a manual program.

40 minutes later, I’m really sweaty.  Didn’t have much stamina, but, hey, I worked out.

As I enter our room, the phone rings.  It’s Jacob (as I’ll call him), from guest services.  Apologizing because there’s still no hot water and they don’t know when there will be any. There may not be enough water pressure for a shower.

I tipped the desk clerk $20 and he didn’t even tell me there’s no hot water????  While I was checking in, a guy passed by the desk and said, “The water running?” Someone at the desk replied, “Oh, yes.” 

“Water is good,” I said to Dan. “Yes, sir, it is.”

So now they tell me there’s no water.  When I’m soaked with sweat and it’s time to change for dinner.

“We’re not going to charge you for the room, sir,” Jacob says. “And if you’d like, we can moive you to the Westin, on us.” We decide to move to the Westin after dinner. 

Well, I say to my partner, I can just towel off. “When I washed my hands before, there was hot water,” he says. I turn on the shower.  It’s warm.  I get a nice shower.  The water starts out warm and gets gradually cooler, but it lasts long enough.  great towels, too.  Sorry I didn’t get to try the robe.

We check out.  Dan (at whom I want to scream, “Why didn’t you tell me about the water?” and “What do you think the fucking tip as for?” but am pleasant to) and his colleagues assure me that they’ll get me a refund through Hotwire, and after about 15 minutes produce a letter to the Westin (“Hey–is there letterhead in the printer back there?”).  

We get the car and drive to the restaurant. My partner inadvertently say something that hurts my feelings, and I snap at him.   Some relationship frustrations boil over. 

We get what should have been a wonderful Korean dinner, but, barely speaing to each other, it’s not much of a spring-break party for us.

When we get to the Westin, I don’t bother trying to tip the desk clerk.  Any room is fine.  And it is. It’s nice.   Ordinary, pretty big, better view, and “nice.”  Nothing spectaculer.  

He went right to bed.  I do some work on my iPad, and write this.

So the tipping magic didn’t work.  But we did end up with a free room.  That’s the magic that did work after the first magic didn’t.  And now we can use a little more magic.

 

Getting Over “Gymtimidation”: How I Did It

It’s quite remarkable, and in some ways unfortunate: I can sit on an airplane and post things on the Internet. I subscribe to a monthly service, Boingo (the focus groups that led to that name must have been quite something), which must be charging some account of mine somewhere a monthly fee, and it turns out it gets me Internet access not only in a number of airports but also on Delta. So even here, after 10:00PM, a mile or so above Pennsylvania, I imagine, I am not free.

My daughter and I were watching television for a while, taking a little break from from the truly extraordinary views from our corner “junior” suite in the Millenium Hilton, and an ad for Platnet Fitness came on. A shy woman sat wrapped in a towel, while other women in tight spandex workout clothes talked to each other about how hot they were. “Break free of gymtimidation !” the ad offers. “It’s not a gym, it’s Planet Fitness.”

“Gymtimidation.” I love it. Turns I’m not the only one–the spot has been written up in the NY Times and other places.

This ad is aimed at women, obviously, but it will echo for many men.

I think I may actually have something resembling post-traumatic stress disorder, so humiliated and shamed was I by failing all but the sit-up portion of the Presidential Physical Fitness Tests in fourth grade, getting picked after some of the girls for games in elementary-school phys-ed games, and the subsequent humiliations and harassments.

I was the worst tormentor of all, I now realize. I bought into the idea that a boy’s worth was based on how muscular and athletic he was. I believed I was seriously defective as a person and as a male because of my, well, condition. And through a combination of hopelessness and laziness I didn’t do anything about it, like exercise or really try to get better at sports.

My “exercise365″ project, which I mentioned in my last post (with all this Internet time on an airplane and two days ago most of a day in the Minneapolis airport, I seem to have taken up blogging again), in which I’m doing some form of exercise every day, is part of my adult self healing the little boy who hung on the pull-up bar, unable to hoist himself up. I started it with no goals other than to get more energy, release some stress, help out my blood sugar, and hopefully ward off Alzheimer’s Disease, which has turned my mother into a cheerful lady with a toddler’s vocabulary, and which I diagnose myself with regularly.

Amazingly, I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m beyond “gymtimidation,” where I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about my body, and where I’m realizing that people really don’t care all that much about it anyway. So I’m quite comfortable going into the the Fitness Center at the university where I teach, and lifting lighter weights than the college guys.

I’ve made earlier forays into exercise. 25 years ago I was swimming regularly; when I got busy with work and a new child I got out of the habit. I’d gotten over my gymtimidation then, but it had come back by the time started working out seriously about 2000 or 2001. I remember being immensely uncomfortable going to work out with weights–something I’d never done much of–when I started a “transformation” program called Body for Life. I got over it then, too.

Once again I stuck with it for quite a while, many months in fact. I lost about 40 pounds, and my doctor was really impressed with my spectacular blood-sugar and lipid levels. Feeling too busy, I cut back and, oops, got out of the habit all together. It happens to a lot of people.

There was something more. It was that I still felt there was something wrong with my body. That it was inferior. I felt it needed to look a certain way, lean and muscular. And the more I worked on it, the further I felt I was from it. I’d weigh myself, I’d look in the mirror, and I just hated what I saw. The striving made the body-image problems worse. I just didn’t know to recognize that that’s what was going on. So I stopped hitting my head against the wall, so to speak.

Finally, a little over two years ago, I was on sabbatical in NY, and from the window of my room I could see people running on treadmills and working out on elliptical machines in the windows of the NYSC gym up Broadway a block. I was had teacher’s burnout and caretaker’s burnout, and was thoroughly exhausted and depressed. So I went in and joined.

I knew I might not go regularly. And I knew I had to do something. I’d had a session with a terrific personal trainer, Chris Fernandez, and I bought a very expensive package of training sessions with him–expensive enough that it would really hurt if I didn’t show up for one.

All my body issues came up. Especially because I was burned out and depressed. By now, though, with even more therapy under my belt, I knew what was going on. So I just told Chris everything. And he’d just listen, non-judgmentally, and gently encourage me.

After a while, I was feeling a lot better (and in a lot better shape). When the dark clouds had lifted, I told Chris, and he got tougher with me and pushed me harder.

When I got back from my sabbatical, I kept up the running I’d taken up. Weight lifting or other strength training I let slip. By the time January 1, 2013 came around, I realized I needed more energy and that my weight was creeping up.

So I made a commitment, inspired by Michael Moore’s walking every day for 30 minutes, to do some kind of exercise every day this year. Something Moore wrote really clicked for me. it was about walking every day to feel better, not walking to lose weight or look better–even though those things happened as by-products.

It’s not about “getting better.” It’s about not trying to get better. It’s just participating in a process. And it has been tremendously liberating.

I went back to the gym without the old intimidation feelings being triggered. And without the “there’s something wrong with my body [and therefore me] and I need to fix it [and thereby me]” crap going on. It’s been quite fun.

Sometimes I slip into comparing my body to those of others, or getting mad at myself for not having reached an impossible ideal. But I recognize it and can step out of that internal quagmire.

And I have lost some weight. And I do have more energy.

And as of today, I’ve done some kind of exercise every day for 69 days. Not bad.

To Blog, to Tweet, or to Facebook?

When I first started blogging, which I think was in 2005, it was new and exciting and a great way to connect with people. My inspiration was a series of sabbatical trips to New York, and I wrote about my experiences going to concerts. Once back to full-time teaching, the pace dropped off. Two years ago, I was living in NY on my next sabbatical, and wrote again about going to concerts. The blog had some brief popularity; I’d meet people in NY new-music circles and they’d say things like, “Oh, you’re a writer,” and “I read your blog.”

“Life, the cello, and everything,” I originally subtitled the blog, which migrated from Blogger to WordPress and became my temporary website. I’d gone through various phases of frequent writing–often when I have time on my hands–and infrequent writing (when I’m busy or depressed or both).

When I write here, it usually takes some thought. Very often it’s an internal wrestling match, because ideas form while I write and they don’t present themselves in a nice linear fashion. It’s all twisted and turned and convoluted and I’m not sure what I’m trying to say.

The short life-and-everything sorts of things that I would post on the blog now go on Facebook (I only decline FB requests from what appear to be fake people who have no friends; often there’s a photo of a pretty young woman with a foreign name, and I know it’s someone fishing in the wrong pool). I tried Twitter out for a while, and occasionally I go through a bit of a Twitter burst–once again, when I have time on my hands, especially too much of it.

When I write here, it gets posted on Facebook and Twitter automatically. It’s interesting to see that blogging, unless it’s serious reporting or extensive commentary, seems almost anachronistic. I’d tell a young performer she needs a great Facebook fan page and Twitter account long before a blog, and maybe doesn’t even need a blog.

I’m involved in a big personal project, one that’s been going on for over two months. I post about it on Facebook every day–that’s actually part of the project–but I’ve never been moved to write about it here. Facebook has taken over a lot of what I used to blog about.

The project, exercising (heavy or light, but something) every day in 2013, is something I want to make more public. Where a few years ago my immediate response would have been to start a new blog or website, right now I’m thinking more about a Facebook page or group and a Twitter feed. Times change, I guess.

If you have read this far, you have probably deduced that I have too much time on my hands today. Yep! I’m having a nice long break in an airport, courtesy of snowy weather in New York.

What’s a “well-prepared lesson”?

How do you, whether student or teacher, define a “well-prepared lesson”?

I mean, in this case, that the student is so well-prepared that after the lesson, the teacher says to a colleague or friend,”Wow, so-and-so was really prepared for her lesson today, and it was a joy to teach her.” And the student feels really good about how ready she was for the lesson.

A seven-year-old beginner’s well-prepared lesson is going to look/sound different than a doctoral student’s, of course.

I’m particularly in undergraduate college students, since they make up the vast majority of my students.  My cello students and I have started talking about this, and working to write something up.

I’m interested to hear thoughts on this regarding any age and level of experience.  Please add a comment.

 

 

Hey, waiter, there’s a barcode in my soup

At the lunch buffet.  Open the lid for the soup of the day and there’s a barcode sticker floating in it.  Get the attention of a server, who dips a ladle in, uses fingers to pull out the sticker, then puts the ladle and the soup that had the fingers stuck into it back in the vat. I can’t stop laughing, my partner rolls his eyes. 

That’s life in Indiana, I think.  Adjusted to it as I am, I had a cup anyway, even though another server said a new container of soup was on its way. I was hungry!

(By the way, there are four places in my town that have serve-yourself soup at lunch, and I’m not saying which one.)

Adventures in Customer (Non) Service

Marketing, business, and entrepreneurship: they’ve always fascinated me.

My dad’s dad, Hugo, after having worked a bit as a lumberjack, eventually became a stock boy in a “dry goods” store, then a traveling salesman, and finally a department store buyer.  He loved to tell me stories about sales deals and marketing triumphs.

His favorite, I think, was when he bought so much of a certain fabric for the J. L. Hudson company that he told the marketing/advertising people that it would stretch all the way from the downtown Detroit Hudson building to the Detroit Zoo, which, two miles north of Detroit, was miles away.  They made a newspaper ad showing the fabric stretching from the iconic building to a giraffe holding the other end (I’m trying to find the image).

For years I’ve read a lot about these subjects, and now, as I’ve begun teaching entrepreneurship classes and am particularly interested in how classically-trained musicians can actually make money, my interest level has zoomed.

Dan Kennedy, who I first heard at a marathon, multi-speaker event years ago, writes often in his compnay’s newsletter about many topics, including customer service. He often points out how salespeople and servers can mess up a business–or make it.

On a weekend trip, I’ve been particularly aware of the service I have and haven’t experienced.  I’ll blow off a little steam–and there are some lessons musicians can draw from all this.

High-end (for this area) restaurant, inexperienced server: My $30 steak comes with potato or rice, but they won’t substitute a green vegetable (I can order one as a side dish).  I teasingly push the waitress a bit, so see if she can do something.  “That seems kind of cheap to me,” I say with a smile.  “Oh, well, you know that vegetables are more expensive than, like fries,” she explains in a somewhat patronizing tone.  It irritated me.  First, it seems like a counter-productive policy, because a baked potato loaded with butter and sour cream can’t be that much more expensive than some spinach or broccoli, and why in a place where with appetizer, drinks, etc., easily run $100/person would you not want to make people happy? Well, whatever.  It did get me wondering how I’d train servers to handle someone cranky about the policy better than this one did.

Huge music electronics complex: Outside the city I’m visiting is the extraordinary campus of one of the biggest sellers of electronics for musicians. Retail store, warehouse, teaching spaces, café, atrium, auditorium, arcade, even mini-mini golf.  I never saw anything like it.  There’s even a gym, which I assume is for employees.

I want to buy a portable digital recorder (to replace one that died), and a new pickup mic for my cello(s) (again, to replace one that died).  This firm, which has a strong online presence, has higher prices than online discounters. What they promote is knowledgeable salespeople who will give you advice and steer you in the right direction.  So I decided to go there and pay more than I would online just to have good service.

A receptionist directs my boyfriend and I to the retail store.  A salesperson, posted at a desk with an iMac, greets us and I explain what I am in the market for.

“Do you know what model you want to buy?”  No.  That’s why I came here, to get some help.  She asks me what I’ll use it for.  I explain I’m a classical and improvising cellist, and want something to record workshops I give, using the recorder’s own mics, and that I can connect microphones to.  She shows me a Tascam, one of two units on top of a display rack.

I ask her if it has phantom power (which powers the microphones).

“No it doesn’t,” she tells me.

I look at the box.  It says there is phantom power, and I point that out.

“Oh.”  She frowns.

“Well, what I meant was that someone else bought one and plugged in mics with quarter-inch plugs and phantom power doesn’t work for that.  You have to use XLR connections.”  OK, now, inadvertently, she’s told me not only that she’s confused but also that I must look like someone who, although I asked about phantom power, doesn’t know how it works.

“How’s the recording quality of the microphones?” I ask, moving on.

“I think it’s supposed to be pretty good.” Yep, that’s going to sell me.

There’s one other model, a Zoom, on display, at a big sales price.  It doesn’t do everything I want, but I love deals, and it does some sort of surround sound recording, which would be great in workshops.  So I look at that box, and she goes to check on pickup mics.  I can already tell she doesn’t know anything about them.

She comes back to tell me they don’t have any cello pickups, which I find hard to believe.  Maybe she’s searched the wrong way: what she’s done is to look on the website, on a big iMac out in the lobby.  Hoping that somehow she might understand me (I guess I just wanted to tell somebody), I tell her I have a Fishman pickup which I’ve found doesn’t work so well with Belgian bridges, and that I had a Realist pickup which was great (until it died, or more accurately was killed by a student), but I want to use it with multiple cellos and of course the Realist goes under a foot of the bridge.

She gives me a blank look, and searches their website for violin mics.

She shows me a photo of a plastic gadget that attaches to the side of a violin to hold a mic. “Would that help you?”  No, I don’t think so.

I ask about other models of digital recorders. She looks on the web, and tells me they have some other ones available online that aren’t in the retail store.  She leaves me at the computer, on which there are multiple open windows, including someone’s email, to look at the online reviews.

I learn a few things (from the reviews, not the email, which I did not browse!).

Then, since I’m shopping online anyway, I pull out my iPhone and compare prices with the Amazon app.  (I couldn’t bring myself to use their computer to look at Amazon.)  Everything is much less expensive.  Here my experience has been one of pleasant non-guidance. Why should I pay $40 extra for the privilege of telling the sales person that the one unit does have phantom power?

“I’m going to think about it,” I tell her, and we leave.

The hotel: Well, actually a motel.  Once we are back from not buying a recorder or microphone, I spend 30 minutes running on the treadmill and end up very sweaty.  Since we’d gotten up late, I figure our towels will still be damp, so I go to the front desk.  The clerk gets off the phone and I ask for two bath towels.  She asks for my room number and puts it on a Post-it note.  “If you come back in 15 minutes, they’ll be here on the desk for you,” she tells me with a smile.  Unlike earlier, I’m not annoyed, just amused.  “But I want to take a shower now,” I say, smiling back. “Oh. I’ll be right back.  She grabs a key, and in 45 seconds is back with the towels.

This morning:

10:00 AM: knock at the door.  “Housekeeping!”  “We’re still here, I yell from the bed.”

10:45 AM: knock at the door. “Housekeeping!” “We’re here,” I call.  “Do you need service today?” “No, we’re checking out.”

11:12 AM: knock at the door. Actually, really aggressive knocking.  “Housekeeping!” This time I go to the door.  “We haven’t check out yet,” I explain.  “Well, checkout time was 11:00 AM!” How do I describe the tone? It’s when someone is angry, trying to seem nice.  Contempt and accusation masked with a smile.  “Well, we’re still here,” I point out.

I call the front desk and ask for a  12:00, hey, better make that 12:30, checkout.  “Sure, no problem.”  And she’ll try to tell housekeeping.

12:15 PM  We are out.  And hungry.  There’s a Bob Evans, and it’s jammed.  Across the street, we find Willy’s Cozy Nook. Seated right away.  A great waitress who keeps the coffee and water filled, laughs at my jokes, massages my shoulders, and is amazed at the video of the sword swallower at last night’s downtown Busker Fest.  Great omelet.  They happily fill my big plastic cup with ice water.  I tell the waitress I’ve had this run of customer-service experiences and how much i appreciated her skill.  She gives me a knowing and understanding look.  All these undertrained kids who mean well–we get each other.

“Honey, I’ve been at this for 45 years.  I know a thing a two about it.” She gives me a sincere smile. Tells me her name and that I can ask for her next time.  “It’s always nice to be thanked,” she says, and reaches out her hand.

I take it.

And I know the one place I will definitely be back to.

If you’ve read this far, congratulations.  I’m filing this under “audience building” (and just noticed that “audience is misspelled in my category list) because for every individual artist and for every arts organization, it’s all about the relationship you have with your audience, with your fans, your friends, your followers.  It’s about the experience they have when they interact with you.

So I’m asking myself:

When am I the waitress who explains vegetables are more expensive than fries to a customer ready to spend a a lot of money?

When am I the salesperson who gives wrong information about a product and puts the customer on a computer to look things up?

When am I the desk clerk who doesn’t infer that the sweat-soaked resident asking for bath towels probably needs them right then?

And when am I the experienced, friendly waitress doing a great job, truly taking care of people, and in an engaging yet unobtrusive way?

 

In the village of the fiddlers

I really should be writing a press release for Wednesday’s concert, but by the time I’m done with that I may not have any blenergy (for blog energy–did I just make that up?).  Something on Andrew Sullivan caught my eye yesterday or so–blogging to generate ideas, and how that’s an essential difference between blogging and writing an article.  The distinction clicked for me; I get stuck with blogging because I want to write an essay or other piece, and then it can feel intimidating.

Wonderful time at the Indiana Fiddler’s Gathering yesterday evening/night.  At the Tippecanoe Battlefield park in Lafayette, there’s a central performance space.  There is also a big camping area, with hundreds of fiddler’s and families in tents, with people sitting around in small to medium sized groups jamming, sharing ideas, passing down traditions, etc.  You can walk around the camping area, and the sonic experience is amazing.  When I was leaving, about 11:30 PM, I got myself positioned equidistant from two groups, so I heard one in the left ear and the other in my right.  So Ivesian.  Turn my head towards one, and it was in aural focus wit the other in the background.  Hearing them at equal volume in each ear, in different keys and in different meters, was stunning and did things to my brain.

By virtue of where I happened to park, I had come in through the tent village and was touched by the communal nature of it all, and by all the groups making their own music.  So different than a classical music festival event.  Can you imagine an acre or two of tents with people playing chamber music? And then a big performance area for professional shows?  What a different set of relationships.

 

Greencastle Summer Music Festival Begins Wednesday with Rachmaninov/Chambers Shuffle Concert

The Greencastle Summer Music Festival, which I founded and continue to organize (if I was in New York, I’d say “curate”) opens Wednesday night with a “shuffle” concert in which movements of the Rachmaninov cello sonata will be interspersed with “Come Down Heavy”, the wonderful four-movement, folk-song based trio for violin, saxophone and piano by Evan Chambers. I’ll write more soon about the shuffle-concert idea, which is becoming increasingly popular.  Meanwhile, details on the concert are here. I’ll be performing along with my DePauw colleagues Scotty Stepp (saxophone) and Katya Kramer-Lapin (piano), and Katya’s husband, Matvey Lapin (violin).  It’s free, it’s fun–you should come!