Tuesday September 19, 2023; 6:11 AM EDT
- A fundraiser. A large hall, round tables, centerpieces, dinnerware exactingly set at each place. Elegant black name card on a little spike: Ken Smith / Salmon, at my place on a table for eight in the far front corner. A quick glance revealed that I would be watching people head into the rest rooms all evening, passing through the doorless entry, pausing to look left or right, seeing which path was their path, then heading in. #
- Not as obvious was that the empty chairs just behind me formed the performance area for the string quartet. When their time in the program arrived, the four musicians filed in. I turned my chair180 degrees and I was looking over the left arm of the cellist at his iPad music software, which he operated with a foot pedal, turning pages in a blink from time to time. Nobody had a better seat, nobody else could have reached over and touched one of the musicians. I bet people at the far end of the hall could barely hear them.#
- When the waves of dots on the screen grew blacker, more tightly spaced, the cellist moved more intensely and the sound that came from this nearest instrument grew similarly intense. I could see when his part in the music would grow agitated or mellow, even before it happened. A person wouldn't quite have been able to "read" the music from where I was sitting well enough to play it, but I could read the broad patterns of the sheet music, possibly for the first time in my life. Not sure, but it looked like the Stomp bluetooth foot pedal that turned the page also had settings for scrolling, turning pages, going back a page, and, I think, moving to the next document. Cool brand name.#