the other day Callum was completing a writing assignment in his notebook – as part of his schooling we often give him a set of words to write about, and he’ll write a story about the words, or describe them, or something similar. At any rate, on this day he was writing, and started to hum to himself, and ended up composing a little song. He wrote the song from his head on his writing paper – not by using the actual notes (A, B, C#, D, E, F# etc), but by indicating how many fingers to put down on each string of the violin – so A1 is the first finger down on the A string, A2 is the first two fingers, etc. You can see the song he wrote in this picture.

when I got home from work Callum got out his violin and played the song he’d composed for me. It wasn’t the Magic Flute, of course, but I must admit I was pretty impressed, mostly at the fact that he had the gumption to go ahead and think up a song and write it down. When he asked Yvonne if it was okay that he included that as a part of his writing assignment, she said “of course!” – and I agree, I wholeheartedly encourage this sort of experimentation. I think it is a great sign – and if he keeps it up, his skills and creativity in this area will certainly improve.

one of the pieces played yesterday afternoon was the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, with the Charleston Symphony’s Concertmaster, Yuriy Bekker, on lead violin. This guy put on a heck of a performance, with such amazing speed and grace with his violin (a 19th century French instrument by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume) that any sort of sound I could make come from such an instrument would sound like chickens scratching on a tin fence in comparison. Pretty daunting!

at any rate, it was a great experience to be the only guy in the audience to hear such a masterful piece of work, and not something I’ll soon forget.

overall, it was a good show; it has been ages since I have been to a techno concert and it was nice to get to experience that scene again. What surprised me upon arrival in the main hall was seeing Rob Hall DJing… without using any turntables. I realize that CDJ units and DJing software packages are quite popular these days, but I didn’t expect to see such a thing in use by one of the more popular DJs; usually the top DJs have a very strong vinyl bias. Rob Hall had a Powerbook open and did most of his work on that, though he also had a mixing deck beside the computer. I believe he was using Ableton Live to do the mixing, ’cause that’s what I would use. The mixes were seamless, of course, but then again Ableton all but does the mixing for you, so that is probably to be expected.

LFO were also good. It was fun to hear some of their hits from the early rave scene, it really took me back. Surprisingly there were no whistles or glow sticks to be seen in the whole place, though there was one guy dressed up like in sunglasses and a shiny radiation suit not unlike the ones worn by those guys from Altern-8. Every now and then people would hoist him up on their shoulders and he would pump up the crowd.

one fun experience was climbing up to the balcony overlooking the dance floor. Looking down you could see a sea of people dancing around to the beat. Many of them were standing stock still amidst their jiving buddies and tapping text messages into their cell phones. Looking out over the crowd you could see plenty of them, little lights winking at you from amidst the gyrating crowd. It reminded me of the days people used to hold up cigarette lighters during rock ballads.