DAY

Bike downtown with my friend Crissy--free tickets to the San Francisco Youth Symphony. As good as the main one, frankly. It's the music I'm not wild about.

This Midnight Hour (Anna Clyne, 2015) is meant to evoke Parisian nightlife. Nope! Forgettable.

A century back to Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Petit Suite de Concert, Op.77 (1911). Four competent dances; a French prettiness, never breaking into real passion. When I think of others composing around then--Django Reinhardt, Igor Stravinsky, Bessie Smith, George Gershwin--SCT seems safe & dull. Is he on the program just for being black but writing white music? So white it's bleached.

At the break I walk around and gawk at the classical crowd. Well, because it's the Youth Symphony and friends and family turned out, it's less overwhelmingly fossilized than your average symphony crowd. And yet out a thousand, just four look good. A nation out of shape...

Lights dim. Back in. The main act: Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique (1830-32). Hmm. He uses the full tonal smorgasbord a big orchestra offers, but the first three movements lack a single interesting theme. Okay, the March to the Scaffold (4) is powerful, and the Witches' Sabbath (5) has good bits. But the conductor talked as if Berlioz rivaled Beethoven. Sorry, no.

But that's just me. Chrissy heard totally different music--focused on that huge tonal palette, and the individual players' performances. I'm all about the composition--themes, chord movement, structure. These pieces shimmered, but down deep? Limp.

DREAM

Making carrot-leek stew, I ponder the classical music canon. But I get distracted by a feline-fluid wonder: our tiger-striped tabby cat         Stretches for ballet.         Arabesque. Plié. Meanwhile, our rumpled Persian snoozes on the floor. Lazybones! Neglects her barre-- how will she get better?         Wait--she's not a cat at all!         Just a fuzzy sweater.

• Distracted: at the symphony, girls in that (younger than the usual arthritic) audience distracted me from the music. Or... was the music so blah that I'd rather cruise than focus?
• Feline ballet: a TV ad for a local ballet had catlike dancers.
• Cat dances: Peter Beagle's novella A Dance for Emilia. The cat can't talk to prove it has a reincarnated human soul, so it dances.
• Cat's not slacking, she's a sweater: composers are who they are, not who I wish. Beethovens and Pavlovas are rare. Most are limp--mere sweaters. Comfortable. That's craft, not art.
• ACTION: Do your barre. Put in your time. Write tunes with muscles. Grow a spine.

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