Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Yesterday (Sunday, November 3) my husband Charles and I went to a free concert in downtown San Diego at an open-air location on 13th and Broadway featuring the Voices of Our City Choir. Originally called the San Diego Homeless Choir, Voices of Our City Choir was founded in 2017 and is an independent nonprofit corporation headed by Steph Johnson, a tough, energetic woman who MC’d yesterday’s show. Voices of Our City Choir seeks to recruit homeless people as a way of helping them out of homelessness. Its Web site, https://www.voicesofourcity.org , describes its mission as follows: “Voices of Our City Choir began out on the street: communing and connecting around music. Six years later, dignity remains the entry into, and experience within, our Choir. In 2022, we expanded our services and introduced new offerings. Voices’s outreach team built relationships with neighbors living outdoors, extending per...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved Yesterday afternoon (Saturday, November 2) I went to a live concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral featuring Jacqueline FitzGibbon on oboe and both alto and soprano recorders and Michael Gorman on piano. The program consisted of 15 “miniature” pieces by a wide range of composers, including Béla Bartók, Henry Cowell, Leos Janáček, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Darius Milhaud, Maurice Ravel, Ennio Morricone, Ernesto Júlio de Nazareth, and Astor Piazzola. There were also pieces by lesser-known names like James Oswald (1710-1769), Madeleine Dring (1923-1977), Alan Richardson (1904-1978), and the one still-living composer represented, Sofiane Pamart (b. 1990). Sofiane Pamart is a young man living in France, and he’s perhaps best known for his dramatic appearance in the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics, in which he was on a barge floating down the Seine River playing a...