Sam is Five! and Christmas Concert

Today is Sam Shaffer's fifth birthday. He's already looking ahead and tells me that next year he'll be six and then seven and eight and nine.... They do grow up all too soon. We talked on the phone today, but I'm looking forward to seeing him Thursday and having a chance to wish him a happy birthday in person.

Tonight we attended the McAllen Town Band's Christmas concert at the Trinity Worship Center. We picked up Steve and Jan and Hardy (Judy is nursing a sore throat and decided to stay home and rest). Steve gave us great directions to find the church, which is tucked in behind a motel and next to the Exotica Club. Jan says that it's apropos that venues for sin and redemption are located so close together!

The Trinity Worship Center offers online video of its services, and it's clear that the church was designed with recording in mind: it's got great acoustics and stage lighting. The band are all volunteers, but dedicated and talented to a professional level.

The concert was very enjoyable, with the usual Christmas classics, but also some different offerings. One we especially liked was Minor Alterations (Christmas Through the Looking Glass) by David Lovrien. Here are the author's comments on the music:

The piece I wrote last year for the Dallas Wind Symphony‘s Christmas concert is selling like hotcakes for the upcoming holiday season. It is easily the #1 best-seller from the Lovebird Music catalog this year. I was informed this morning that the United States Navy Band will be performing it on Dec. 5th. Have you heard it yet? If not, have a listen.

The idea started with an arrangement of “Pat-a-pan” that I did in 2006 as a demo of the capabilities of the Garritan Personal Orchestra sample library. Pat-a-pan is such a cool minor-key tune, almost Slavic sounding, and I wanted to slip some other Christmas-themed material into it, so I decided to transpose “Up On The Housetop” to minor. It worked out great and the arrangement was completed…

Several months later, as the DWS Christmas concert approached I came back to the same idea and started to expand on it. Grace and I were driving to my daughter’s orchestra concert when idea started coming quickly and I started giggling. She wanted to know what it was all about and I hummed some “warped” variations to her. She loved the idea. The layers and the “jokes within jokes” came together very quickly; taking tunes like “Here Comes Santa Claus” and transposing them to minor… oh wait, Danny Elfman did it just like that in “Nightmare Before Christmas,” didn’t he? OK, I’ll have to do better. Let’s make it a waltz… yes, that works. In fact it sounds a little like… ooh! Let’s use the accompaniment pattern from Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2! Gosh, do you think people will get that? Hmm, better drop a couple bars of the melody on the end to make sure…

Then I had to assemble them all into a form. How about arranging them in tempo order from slow to fast, like a Jewish Hora? That way it builds energy from start to finish. Drop the waltz variations in the middle and it works great. It seems to hit the right balance between “sounds nothing like the original” and “oh, I know what tune that was.” And it’s a nice change of pace for Christmas concerts where things can get sickeningly sweet, like too much candy on Christmas morning.

Of course we had to have some of the sweet stuff too, including a sing-a-long at the end.


We decided not to dance today because time is getting short before my trip. We went shopping and did some errands instead. We had to stop at the post office to see if we could get them to find our mail. It was "confirmed" delivered on Saturday, but we haven't gotten it. Fortunately there is a tracking number. The person we spoke with said he would give our carrier a note and ask her to look for it (possibly in another nearby mailbox???).