How it went at Arts Around the Block

This was the event I told you about last week.

Me

My playing went well.

The background noise level when I was playing outside was not intrusive. I was playing country dance tunes on the G alto recorder, and it was carrying well enough that although there wasn't much foot traffic where I was, people who were hearing it from a block or two away came to investigate and stayed to listen for a while. I never had a large, visible audience, but a woman who was manning one of the booths came up specially to tell me how much they were enjoying it.

When I moved into the chapel to play the Ortiz, I was able to take over the audience for my sister's harpsichord set. She's been doing concerts in Fall River for several decades, and has built up a small but loyal following. So there were a dozen or so people in the small chapel with some of the best acoustics for recorder playing I know of.

I'd been working on making the Ortiz variations on Douce Memoire and O felici occhi mei sound easy and convincing. I made lots of progress; I probably didn't completely succede, but the audience did seem to enjoy it. One good thing about that audience was that it liked singing; Judy had given them Greensleeves and Drink to me only with thine eyes to sing, and they'd sounded really good. They weren't quite as good on Douce Memoire, which most of them had probably never heard before, but they were making the attempt.

Everybody else

The big success was Peter and the Wolf. There were about 40 people, including a lot of children, in the audience. The musicians for the solo parts were quite good, and the electric piano filled in for the rest of the orchestra.

The basic problem with the rest of the programming is that there isn't enough audience for three classical music venues. And aside from my recorder playing, the other acts scheduled for outside weren't loud enough to draw in from where the foot traffic was. And the music down the hill did get louder as the afternoon progressed, so the last outside event (a recorder group) was partially drowned out, even for the performers themselves. (Recorder groups need to hear each other.)

Arts Around the Block is a relatively new institution, with some growing pains that are still in evidence, but there seemed to be enough success for enough participants that one believes they will continue and improve.