Erratum (Fulton's Landing, Brooklyn) and Minneapolis conference

After failing to hold Brooklyn Heights, Washington's army rowed away from this beach on the Brooklyn side of the East River at sundown on 29 August 1776 under cover of fog and moved up Manhattan to Harlem Heights.

Howe later tried to encircle him by landing troops in Westchester county to the north, but Washington got up to White Plains (where Percy Grainger later lived, by the way) where there was a battle, and then into New Jersey.

Went to Minneapolis last week for the League of American Orchestras' conference. Interesting place, Minneapolis. It's probably more my size of city, but I wonder about the emptiness in the downtown streets. Is it a hangover from the many days of snow? Probably the most striking feature are the skyways that connect the city buildings. Without street corners to orient me in this aerial path through city buildings, I ended up back at the Hilton ballroom (site of the conference) with no idea how I got there. It's better, of course, than getting lost. The day I arrived, it was 101F. It was probably nostalgic for the populations of Ethiopians and Somalians (and Hmong) who now live there, but a bit of a shock given it's not what we normally think of as Minnesotan weather.

Highlights of the conference included the concert with the Minnesota Orchestra's performance under Vanska of Sibelius' Second Symphony. You could almost imagine this music being in the bones of Minnesota's Scandinavian descendants and for the first time I understood that description you often find of Sibelius' many perspectives; that it's like sunlight falling in different ways through thick forest. I do wonder about Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto though. The first movement still sounds like written-out extemporization, which it was (Beethoven hadn't written down the piano part by the time of the first performance), and I have always found it slightly odd that people play it as if it were set in stone. Why not treat the orchestral part as a paradigm, and play with this part a bit? But would that be acceptable? The catch word at the conference was 'innovation' but is everything up for grabs?

Last night we went to a night of African-American monodramas at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn, subjects like Harriet Tubman, texts by people like Langston Hughes, and beautiful singers. Full-blown song is what got the audience most going. (I am really starting to wonder about atonality's artful evasion of cadence, its refusal to set foot on an 'earth'; it often sounds to me like not getting to the point. It may be enjoyable to perform, intellectually fun to keep off the tonic, but somehow failing to give listeners emotional payoff.)

We pinch ourselves to think that we travel so far to go to things here. Inwood to High Street, Brooklyn would be 13 miles.Yet we jump on trains that come every five minutes, think nothing of travelling this distance to see a show, but in Sydney terms it's Sydney to Parramatta and we wouldn't just blithely jump on a train to do this in Sydney. The way regular trains eat up such distances here is a sign of the energy of the city, I think.