Dulcimer Recital

We were going to have a lion dance on the street today but we got scared off by the rain... that ending up stopping. I headed into Chinatown just in case our cancelled performance became uncancelled. But it is much easier to cancel something than to uncancel it.

When I got to the CCBA it turned out that my old Duclimer teacher and his students were having a recital. Jonah was already asleep. And Noah was surprisingly enthralled. He didn't even want to leave so I could check on the status of our performance.
I have to say these new students were really good. One in particular, who happens to be the daughter of a Professor who I traveled to Japan with as part of a study course in college was very good. When she was a little girl she already had a lot of the technical skills, and those skills have improved to the point that her the conveyance of emotion through her music has begun to flourish as well. I don't know the name of the song she played, because the flowing quick up and down waves of sound... know not just up and down, but also the more multi-dimensional back and forth flow of a current was able to be conveyed by her playing, The point was not just that the notes were hit fast and correct, but that it was smoothed out so as to appear as one soft living body of water instead of simply a series of notes. The dulcimer students of my generation were not yet at the level where they could play a piece that could weave the notes together like a fabric in the wind like that. Some of us had more emotion that could show through a simpler piece, but that development comes a little with life experience, and this girl is still young. Still a girl, not a young woman. So the emotion that she is already able to convey is amazing. The piece is famous. I have heard it on CDs and also in Wuxia movies, usually in beautiful gardens with some sort of courtship between well dressed Kung Fu powered semi-immortals flying about and perhaps even playing the piece... but usually on the Guzheng. Indeed there was so much hitting the few dulcimer strings that can be bent with the finger on the other side to vibrate the note that the dulcimer sounded a little like a Guzheng. All in all, it was a nice recital.