Tonight’s post will be short. Mira has been sick for a couple days, and spent a good part of the evening sleeping on my chest. I couldn’t get up to rip CDs, so I spent a little time organizing the mp3s that are on the computer that had been purchased over the past few years. In the playlist of ‘things to be categorized’ I came across Mari Kimura’s ‘Polytopia’. Mari is truly a virtuoso violinist, and a number of the pieces on this disc show off her stunning abilities and musicianship as a performer. My favorite piece on the disc though is Francis White’s ‘The Old Rose Reader’. It is a beautifully melodic piece, more meditative then flashy, and very classical in many ways. However, unlike most new music that is so strongly connected to past traditions, the piece is not derivative at all. In fact the piece is stunningly fresh even with its older musical vocabulary. The computer part of the piece features Mari’s husband (and his thick french accent) reading a list of different rose names, interspersed with the occasional vignette. The other sounds in the tape move between piano-ish sounds to bell like sounds that swell rather then decay, shimmering in the background then slowly becoming the foreground. The relationship between the violin and the computer is wonderfully balanced, and Mari’s performance is a key part to the recordings success.

Francis White is one of my favorite living composers… if you haven’t heard her work, it is well worth tracking down. And for those of you in Seattle, Mari will be here in Seattle at the chapel on March 4th. Definitely not a show to miss.