following up on last night's concert

After writing yesterday about our performance of the Hummel Piano Quintet (see below), I realized that two other musicians in the group, violist Davis and violinist Morgan, also blogged eloquently on the same subject. We're still searching for the blogs of the page turner and the noisy marker art guy in the audience, but at this point it seems safe to say that in terms of web visibility, we pretty much kicked that Smetana quartet's ass.

I've recently adopted a policy to restrict my blog profiles to people who are dead or can't read English, so that I won't offend anyone or incite stalkers. (I might need to be careful of zombie foreigners, though.) I'll make an exception for Morgan and Davis - these are two of the smartest and funniest people I have had the good fortune to meet. And both from Kansas, oddly enough.

some memorable Kent graffiti

Davis is an evangelical Christian, which caused some awkward moments when I first started raving to him about Jose Saramago's novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which is fantastic and quite blasphemous. However, he explained to me that he could not be offended - whatever anyone might say, he could either accept it as true and learn from it, or dismiss it as false and forget about it. I suggested that maybe if someone told him they were going to go burn his house down, that might be offensive; so we agreed that the only really offensive statement is one that presents an imminent threat of harm to oneself or others. I didn't mention to Davis at the time that by that standard most of President Bush's platform could be considered hate speech.

I originally met Morgan at Spoleto in May, then I met her again here in Ohio, and was beginning to wonder why I kept meeting people named Morgan until I realized she was the same person. She sort of has this way of metamorphosizing into a different person without warning. Or maybe I'm just really dumb. No matter which person she happens to be, she seems to always remind me how wonderful it is to make music - at our dress rehearsal, she announced that she was planning on picking out someone nice in the audience, and pouring her heart out in a personal statement to just that person. I asked, what happens if they leave halfway through? I guess next to Morgan, I'm a jaded cynic.

Bassist blogger San Bei Ji added to the flurry of Hummel-blogging at his excellent website.