Jack's Blog:
November 29th '09
Private Concert:
Last night at Xipal was another "musical moment". When the band out on the corner (at another restaurant) started up about 8 o'clock, they cranked it up and drove us off the patio, where we had a few guests sitting. We retreated to the library where the din was down to the level of a distant radio, followed in a few minutes by our guests, who had come in to hear us play, after all.The library is part of the Casa Rosada Hotel's old original house (in the 18th century the "Natural Hospital of the Immaculate Conception", and in the 20th the residence of painter Diego Rivera's daughter) and has a fireplace, some overstuffed chairs and a sofa, a long-defunct harmonium, and bookshelves which appear to have been restocked at some recent date with used books bought by the crate from the book sale at San Miguel's Biblioteca Publica. You can see the entrance to the library in our Wedding March Video, which was shot in the seldom-used private dining room that you have to pass through to get there.
So we set up in front of the fireplace and played for another two hours for a small group of hotel guests who hailed variously from the USA, Spain, Mexico and Venezuela. They didn't seem in a hurry to leave beyond checking with the kitchen to see if they could be served a late-late dinner. The gentleman from Venezuela asked for Antonio Lauro, so I pulled a few Venezuelan Waltzes out of the memory banks (every guitar player knows these, but they are not part of our working duet repertory.)
In the quiet of the Casa Rosada library we are able to play with the true voice of the guitar, which can be the most intimate of instruments. So often in our lives as commercial musicians we have played, amplified or not, over the noise of traffic, drunken patrons, and kitchen clamor, beating out rumba flamenco tunes or whatever, and so we are grateful at this time of our lives to be able, now and then, to experience giving private concerts under circumstances where the guitar's most beautiful whisper can be heard.
Later on, the gentleman from Venezuela, who knew San Miguel from his university days in the 70's, shared that he had lived for the last 17 years in Caracas, which nowadays rivals Baghdad as one of the most violent cities in the world. Finding himself once again in San Miguel de Allende, sitting in an elegant 18th-century library listening to classical guitar music over a few drinks with congenial friends (and in the company of a beautiful woman, we observed) was a dreamlike experience of peace for him, he said.
November 22nd '09
Xipal Review:
In San Miguel de Allende, unlike when we played in the States years ago, it is not usually customary for restaurants to feed their musicians. Last night some friends came into Xipal to hear us play and bought us dinner afterwards, and now we can give a genuinely informed report on the food. (Yes, we had had lunch there once before.)Restaurant musicians (such as ourselves) have a curious relationship to the restaurants in which we play: the restaurant would like us to draw in clients, and we must do our best, but then the restaurant must provide quality food and service, too; if the food and service are very good, then maybe they don't really need any music, and if the food and service aren't so hot, then we damage our own credibility when we try to bring in listeners. Sometimes this relationship is in a reasonable balance, other times not. At Xipal, the food and service are up to standards that we can recommend, thank goodness. There have been times in the past where we had this dilemma. This year we are at Xipal and Bugambilia, both excellent in their respective ways.
Xipal is on the end of the spectrum generally toward the higher prices and smaller quantities, but not at the extreme end and not bad for San Miguel. Entrees range from $150 to $250 (that's pesos), and are small enough that you will likely want soup, salad and dessert. To put this in perspective, consider a place like Hecho in Mexico, where the entrees are large and cost under $150 (pesos), and at the extreme other end the Fonda de Doña Raquel, where a huge plate of rice, beans and chiles rellenos costs $30 pesos. Naturally we don't play at Doña Raquel's.
Dinner started off with small cups of a delicate squash soup with a curious mild curry-like flavor. This was an example of the oddly South Asian-like flavors that appear at Xipal, which we understand to be derived from traditional Oaxacan cuisine. (We haven't been to Oaxaca yet.) Next up were chips and salsa (both tortilla chips and chicharones); three unique salsas provided more delicate flavors with just a litte hint of chile (far less chile than the familiar scorchers that we are used to.) I had the "Pico de Gallo" salad, which in most places would be a chunky salsa; Xipal's version had largish cubes of avocado, frozen (!! was that intentional?) mango, tomato, greens and red onion. Like everything else, it was colorful and attractive; also delicious in an unexpected way.
For an entree I had the Huachinango - the Mexican word for all-purpose whitefish - which was perfectly cooked in yet another matrix of delicious and unfamiliar spices, not hot, and tantalizingly flavorful, but looking rather lonely in the middle of a huge white plate with little swirls of fru-fru sauce decorating the surrounding expanse. I shouldn't make fun of it, and it was delicious, but it provides an example of the disappearing entree: how much should it cost to receive nothing at all on a big white plate, then?
Still, with soup, salad and entrees we were comfortably fed and not uncomfortably stuffed (contrast rolling home from Doña Raquel's for a compulsory siesta) and we still had room for dessert: Frances and I both ordered the chocolate tamal. Yet another delicious, surprising, odd combination of unfamiliar spices, the tamal was a species of chocolate mousse wrapped in a corn husk, almost too sweet but accompanied by a not-quite-sweet sherbet made of something completely mysterious (again with tantalizing and unidentifiable spices - I will have to ask) which offset the sweetness of the mousse.
Our waiter (who is our bud and coworker) started looking uncomfortable around midnight, and we realized that we had been eating and talking for three hours after we were through playing. Our friends are polyglot guitar players and world travelers, and we found lots to talk about. A bottle of wine or three had gone by, too...
By the way, Xipal is on Cuna de Allende street (it means "Allende's Cradle") directly behind the Parroquia, next door to the better-known La Capilla. Go in the front door of the Casa Rosada Hotel, march past the front desk and up the stairs to find the restaurant and the bar. Reservations: (415) 154-5410.
November 8th '09
The newest addition to our library is Alfred Mann's Theory and Practice: The Great Composers as Teachers and Students. We were fortunate to find a beautiful hardbound copy used on Amazon for about ten bucks USD. If you are "into" counterpoint, you know Mann as the translator into both German and English of J. J. Fux's Gradus Ad Parnassum, the seminal 18th century textbook on modal counterpoint. In this more recent book (1987) Mann discusses Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert as students and as teachers, always focusing on how they taught (and learned) counterpoint, specifically.The book is long on musical examples and short on text; you can read the text in an afternoon and then spend the next couple of years (I haven't done this part yet) working through the exercises in composition that Handel created for Princess Anne, and those that Haydn assigned to Beethoven, and picking apart the many incidental examples throughout the book. Then you can check your work against Beethoven's, whose species counterpoint exercises are reproduced in full with commentary.
On the trivia quiz, did you know that Beethoven and Schubert both studied with Salieri? Beethoven from 1798-1801, Schubert sometime after 1808, when he became a choirboy in the Imperial Chapel where Salieri directed the music. Salieri's strong point was not counterpoint, but Italian vocal practice. Schubert struggled with counterpoint right up until his early death, and Beethoven had several other teachers.
For students of composition, and more specifically of classical counterpoint, the book is full of enlightening minutia. There is also a larger issue that Mann addresses briefly, which has to do with the way that contrapuntal theory more or less became gradually irrelevant to composers, beginning in the early 19th century and continuing to the present day, culminating most egregiously in a 19th century recommendation that Bach's "48" NOT be used as models for student fugues (go figure).
November 7th '09
From among the never-ending projects that we continue to dream up, the idea of blogging spaces for me and Frances recently made it into the light of day. So here it is, Saturday afternoon 3 hours before we start playing, and here's the first post! Now I have to go practice... Do we really want to spend any more time on the computer than we already do? Time will tell if it's just another way to goof off instead of being "productive".Anyway, we'll be at Xipal tonight at 7, come on by.