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So tonight I saw Evelyn Glennie at Oxy. It was incredible. Traffic sucked on the way there, as usual, but XM has this magic effect of making traffic stress disappear. You almost want there to be traffic, so you can listen for a few more minutes.

Anyway, she played Michi, which is certainly one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. She performed it mostly the same as the recording she did, except that on almost all the melodic stuff in the right hand she was kind of doing a one-handed single-stroke roll. She basically made every note a double stop with mallets 3+4, but then controlled the rebound so each mallet hit four times instead of once, which gave the melody this fractured, frantic effect. It was amazing. At one point she was playing harmony with mallets 1-3 and doing the quadruple-bounce crap with mallet 4, completely independent of mallet 3. Ridiculous. I was just shaking my head in resignation through most of it. And she was doing that for, say, 15 minutes. Who needs reverb when you can do it yourself, eh?

The song is about loneliness, depression, and frustration. I guess that’s one of the reasons I like it so much. I find that performing it is ultimately uplifting, and I think it is for her too. When she came to the bridge of her improvisation after the main original section, where the really fast stuff breaks into the big, fat harmony, it was beautiful. I got chills, for about 30 seconds straight, which was weird. I kept thinking, what is it about a stupid V-I progression that’s so pleasurable to a human, and makes your CNS malfunction to the point that your spine tingles and you choke back tears?

That’s what I was doing, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but essentially the entire USC percussion department was sitting behind me, and they all noticed that I was losing it. I arrived just as the lights went down, so I didn’t see them until after Michi. I was kind of embarrassed during the intermission, heh.

Anyway, it was great. This month I’m seeing Jimmy Eat World, Broken Social Scene, Death Cab, and LTJ. Pretty cool. #