(no subject)

So I'm playing in this volunteer "baroque" orchestra, part of the First Family of Alternative Classical Music in the Valley Productions (father conducts, mother sings, 8-year-old son composes, plays the violin, is hyperactively precocious). The orchestra is mostly local music teachers, plus a few retired symphony players. Very retired, I might add. I may have a grand-daughterly crush on the principal violist, who is probably about 90 and a bit hard of hearing, and who always contests dynamic instructions, and then plays loud all the time anyway. He's also adorable.

Anyway, the awkward thing is that we're playing a Haydn aria (this one) and our singer (the conductor's wife, naturally) isn't quite up to it. She sounds good in some places, but a lot of the passage work is not terrible clean, and the high sustained notes have that "soprano imitating a cat" sound. I shouldn't snark, but...

In other news, from this interview with Meghan Whalen Turner (PAGE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR CONSPIRACY OF KINGS) is this interesting quote about influential books:

It's a toss-up between Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones, which a friend gave me when I was 16 (he thought he was loaning it to me, but I never gave it back) and The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, which I read as a freshman in college. Without Diana, I might not have been published. Without Thucydides, I don't know what I'd be writing.

I always have assumed Herodotus, mostly because of the obvious plot borrowing, but also because of the importance of oracles and religious ceremonies, and the inset stories. It may be because I have so much trouble getting my mind around Thucydides as a whole that I feel like this information has to change how I am seeing these books. But I am probably overthinking.