2006-04-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

Memorial for Robert

I've just returned home from the memorial service for my friend Robert Samels at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater. It was bittersweet, with moments of humor but also a weighty, inescapable sadness that our ways have parted irrevocably. I was honored to be able to meet his parents and tell them how much I loved and respected their son. They were exceedingly gracious and took time to speak with anyone and everyone who came up to them. I can only imagine the emotional strain they must be under.

There were a number of pictures of Robert, from childhood through graduate school, and even as a child, he had an intensity in his gaze that showed he knew what he wanted and he was going for it. They also put Robert's score for Pilatus out on a table for his friends to look through. I went through it page by page, reading the lines, remembering the feeling of certain phrases, hearing the sound of the singers voices, especially of Chris Carducci as Pilate and Nathan Baer as Barrabas and feeling incredibly alive, and indescribably sad. Certain lines jumped out at me as I read, particularly Pilates line at the end "but will they remember me?" to which Barrabas responded scornfully "No they won't remember you."

I was talking with an elderly friend of mine who I ran into as I was walking home from the reception and he asked me "will the music school ever recover from this?" I am confident that it will-- but it will always bear the marks of April 20th, 2006.

2006-04-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

After taking a long break from my previous blog, I decided that I should probably move along and find a new field to stomp around in. So here I am.

say what?