At 11 AM today, we stood at the bus stop with all our luggage in tow. The bus arrived—

—and didn’t stop.

Somehow, it missed all fourteen of us.

We managed to procure the services of a shuttle and after that get inside. (Think fourteen people plus luggage in something roughly as big as those smaller buses like the Magic School Bus.) Originally I was next to the door before suitcases were piled up all the way to the ceiling obscuring it. Snug as a bug in a rug, as Andy Hardy would say. We had to hold onto the suitcases, especially at every turn. Besides the Mahler concert, that was the highlight of my day. We made the train with a few minutes to spare.

Later tonight a few of us saw Mahler’s sixth symphony played by the London Philharmonic. During the first half they played a viola concerto by James MacMillan in its world premiere. The piece was cool but a little too busy for my liking… it didn’t really seem organized. Like a true dilettante I thought this piece was the Mahler and that the concert was over. (This might not have happened if I had not quit music school.) In my defense, it’s been a pretty long day.

Clearly I know too little about Mahler to make such an error, but what I have heard of his over the years wasn’t really my bag. Maybe I was dumber in youth. Tonight I really liked a lot of it, some parts more than others… the second movement in particular. I should have been listening more actively so I could provide more intelligent thoughts and musical analysis here, but instead I got off the Tube at la-la land. Of course seeing the London Philharmonic perform is an experience I’ll never forget. I believe it’s the best orchestra I’ve ever heard live. In fact, I just realized that I have a lot of recordings by the London Philharmonic in iTunes, and it’s something about which I really don’t think very often… mostly it’s the composers and the pieces I remember, and then I forget completely about the linking agent between the composer and the the audience—the performer. So much nowadays is about being able to hear pieces on our own time and terms, and performances aren’t important to people anymore because they seem inconvenient. This is a topic with which I’m fairly familiar as we discussed it in my First Year Seminar. Now I see that I haven’t been applying the knowledge as well as I should.