It was the summer solstice yesterday, so it was time for the Garden of Memory walk-through concert at the Chapel of the Chimes mausoleum in Oakland. I used to attend these annually, but I hadn't been in six years, counting pandemic years when they didn't have them, conflicting engagements and a reluctance to risk the virus accounting for the rest. But this year I decided to take it, especially when I learned they were limiting attendance (no at-the-door tickets, for instance), and it was indeed rather less perishingly crowded than before. But despite an official request for masks, only about 10% of the attendees were wearing them.
Many of my favorite performers weren't there this year, which meant I couldn't settle down and spend the whole four-hour event listening to Amy X Neuburg or Laura Inserra. Instead, I wandered around. I came in through the upper back entrance (the building is on a hill) and found one group I did know, the Orchestra Nostalgico, in their usual position on the porch, playing Nino Rota in their drier-than-a-big-band way. Wandering inside, I was distracted from a guy playing a lonely saxophone by the sound drifting up from the floor below through the big aperture. It was the slow wordless keening of a female voice accompanied by electronics: haunting and arresting. When I went down and found her, according to the performance map she was Majel Connery, but the music was quite unlike anything you'll find on YouTube with that name, so I dunno.
Elsewhere I heard a very quiet quartet of two violins, electric guitar, and steel drum; two women playing hushed Irish folk tunes on harp and dulcimer; a woman playing wandering modernism on a set of clarinets and saxophones, including a contrabass: I didn't know you could play pizzicato on a saxophone, but apparently you can; a number of performers of the "play a note, take a long pause, play another note" school; and a recital of new music for harpsichord. All these, you'll note, were quiet, though I did find one guy who loaded up his new-age electronics to heavy-metal volume level; fortunately he was in the closed-off Middle Chapel.
They didn't give out performance maps on site this year, though there were some posted on walls here and there; the only way to get one to carry around was by having printed it out from the website in advance, which I did because I'd read the e-mail to ticket-holders saying so. But a lot of attendees didn't have one, though that did not fully explain the number of attendees wandering around lost. Twice when I got in the elevator, I was joined by somebody who was trying to get to the very floor that they were already on.
Though I drove up at 2 PM, the Nimitz freeway was stop-and-go traffic all the way: I fear it's become like the 405 in LA. So I got off it as soon as possible and came in by 580. There's only street parking in the vicinity, but I found the last available space on the street by the back entrance an hour before starting time, and sat in the car eating my late lunch or early dinner. When I got down to the main entrance later on, I found three food trucks - none to my taste - and a bunch of plastic picnic tables outside, an advance on amenities of past years.
Hoping there was no covid, I had a good time.
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