Joe's Odyssey

I went back and read what I wrote about my 2020 NJCL performance and found the following:

"The NJCL Convention next July 2021 is scheduled to be in San Diego and I hope by then we'll be able to travel and be in rooms together listening to music. But I wouldn't be surprised if we can't yet."

So... I guess I "shouldn't be surprised" that my 2021 NJCL performance was done from my living room, again, over Zoom. 

After the overwhelming experience of my journey to Alaska to perform Homer in Homer, it was almost…

I’ve tried about fifteen different ways to write about my journey to Alaska to perform the Odyssey in Homer. No words seem to capture how emotional it was to be back on the road after sixteen months of Zoom performances, no conceit comes close to conveying the overwhelming beauty and intensity I experienced over the course of the four plus days I wandered the long Alaskan daylight from Anchorage to Homer and back. 

The performance is documented HERE as part of a radio broadcast. I used the occasion to do…

I can't remember the last time I practiced my Odyssey.

Sure, I'll run pieces of it to warm up or after a time off from performing it.

But actual practice? It's been probably a decade since I sat down and worked on it in a conventional way.  Maybe after I didn't play it for over three years and came back to record and start performing it again in 2010.

That doesn't mean I'm not actively trying to get better at it: I know the piece so well, it's so in my blood and is such a part of me that my improvement…

I've been doing my Odyssey for a long, long, long time. 

Over 19 years to be exact, which means longer than some of my college audience members have been alive. 

(Big sigh)

This is mostly a good thing. 

No, it's entirely a good thing. To have created a piece of music and a show that has remained relevant and in-demand (or as in-demand as a folk opera based on Homeric epic can be) for almost two decades, a piece at which I'm still improving, that I still enjoy performing... what more can you ask for as a…

My take on the Odyssey tends to come across as more sympathetic to the protagonist than most modern audiences feel (or want to feel) about him. 

So much so that listeners sometimes get agitated at having to consider Odysseus as anything other than a lying murderous unfaithful sociopathic monster.

I didn't feel this sort of audience animosity during the post-show discussion with students at UIC, but the professor did ask me to expound a bit on any dissonances between my Odysseus and Homer's.

As often happens…