June and August meetings are directed by chapter members here at SFRS. Any member is welcome to try their hand at it, we would love to have you bring your favorite selections to conduct. Contact Greta to volunteer!
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| Our Conductor for May: Malachai Komanoff Bandy |
Our in-person meetings continue to be suspended due to personal distancing mandate during the CoViD-19 pandemic (see our News & Events page). After a full YEAR of quarantine (and longer keeping our "social distance") we are itching to play music in person! Our host venue, Christ Church Lutheran, has begun holding limited services in person and welcome us back as soon as we feel safe to do so, but we are still "playing it safe" and will continue to hold virtual meetings through August via the Zoom Conferencing platform. Since June, players from other chapters have been invited to join our meetings, and in September we joined forces with the Sacramento Recorder Society to present excellent online meetings. We've have had an attendance of between 35 and 50 recorder enthusiasts in attendance, resulting in an SFRS record 48 paid memberships. We are SO grateful for the support and enthusiasm shown by so many outside of our local area.
Our meeting on Wednesday, May 19 at 7:30 PM Pacific time will be conducted by Malachai Bandy, who wowed many recorder players at the 2019 SFEMS Recorder Workshop with his playing skill, affable style, and deep knowledge of his topics. He is eager to meet us online and present some of his favorite repertoire that we will feed our musical souls. We are thrilled to once again join forces with the SRS to present this excellent program with a conductor we don't normally have available to us in the Bay Area or the Sacramento Delta Area.
To participate, send an email to Greta and be placed on our invitation list.
NOTE: Be sure to keep your Zoom account up to date (now at version 5.6.4) for the best online musical experience. Click HERE for a PDF sheet of tips to help you with settings for the best results for playing of and listening to recorders on Zoom. Most of these tips - all of the ones pertinent to our needs - are still applicable to the latest Zoom version
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| Multi-instrumentalist Malachai Bandy will conduct our May chapter meeting |
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A native of Los Angeles, MALACHAI KOMANOFF BANDY has amassed a professional performance record on some twenty instruments spanning over 800 years of music history. He graduated cum laude with Distinction in Research and Creative Work from Rice University's Shepherd School of Music with double bass and music history degrees. In recent years, Malachai has performed as a violist da gamba, violonist, and renaissance double-reed player with various ensembles in the U.S. and Europe, including The Orpheon Consort, Ars Lyrica Houston, Voices of Music, Queens Baroque, Tesserae, and Ciaramella. He is also a featured soloist in Bear McCreary’s scores to the films 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016, playing yaylı tanbur), Welcome Home (2018, playing viol), the Emmy-winning title theme for the STARZ television series DaVinci's Demons (2013, playing viol), and the video game God of War (2018, playing nyckelharpa).
After completing a Wagoner Fellowship-funded course of viola da gamba and organological study with José Vázquez in Austria, Spain, and Switzerland, Malachai received a Presser Graduate Award (2016) to create the first comprehensive aural catalog of the Orpheon Foundation’s fifty historical violas da gamba (Duino, Italy). He is currently a PhD candidate and Oakley Fellow in Historical Musicology at the USC Thornton School of Music, in 2020 and 2021 taught courses as Visiting Lecturer at both Pomona College and Scripps College, and was the 2019 recipient of both the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music's Irene Alm Memorial Prize and the AMS Pacific Southwest Chapter's Ingolf Dahl Award in Musicology. Malachai’s scholarly interests include topics pertaining to occult philosophy, number symbolism, and Rosicrucianism in the North-German Baroque, as well as viola da gamba technique, repertoire, instrument design, and iconography.
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Although we really miss playing together in person, most of us are almost getting used to attending online music playing events. As we near the last quarter of our season, we've enjoyed experiencing each conductor's unique approach to the art of online presentation.
We look forward to next season when we hope to play together again in person and have another brilliant slate of professional musicians direct us. Meanwhile, we will do our very best to stay well and keep up our enthusiasm for playing our beloved recorders while staying well ... and getting vaccinated as soon as possible!
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| Pied Piper illustration - the top of an old model Mollenhauer recorder box |
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