Random Monday: Liberace’s Horn, Christie’s Rock Star Status, Atlanta’s Principals, and Moses’ Horn

John Graas

• Liberace’s horn player
  An old post unearthed at the Indiana Public Media site features John Gras, a West Coast horn player active in the 1940′s and 50′s. He made an album titled “Jazz Studio 3″ — a search online found nothing more about this.

• From hairy chest to sexy beast
  In a Random Monday two weeks ago, I posted a video of the morning news crew commenting on Phoenix Symphony Orchestra Music Director Michael Christie’s hairy chest. Last week, the web site Daily Beast dubbed him as one of  “Young Rock Stars of the Conducting World.”

  This brings to mind a similar puff piece by Playboy last year, “The Sexiest Babes of Classical Music” which inspired “Sexy Musicians; Rock Me Amadeus!”

  This time around Horndog’s Photoshop skills were dutifully restrained from creating wild imagery of hairy, sexy rock-star conductors.

  It’s just too easy…

• On the flip side…
  This looks very intriguing and forward-thinking.

  Michael Christie, Music Director and Conductor of the Phoenix Symphony, will participate in a Civil Disobedience seminar entitled “Concerts in the Age of Interactivity.” Working with hip hop artists Fabel and Phonte, ASU Professors Gary Hill and Richard Mook, and advanced ASU graduate students, Maestro Christie will participate in the development of new institutionalized concert formats that facilitate audience participation and engagement. A report on the group’s findings will be released in Spring of 2010.

• Atlanta principals interviewed
  From one of the online horn discussion groups, two radio interviews from 2006 were found of Atlanta Symphony Orchestra principals Brice Andrus and Christopher Rex.

• Chuck Todd, journalist and horn geek
  Through the New York magazine web site, it has been learned that American political talking head Chuck Todd went to college on a horn scholarship.

• Like father, like son
  At the Democrat and Chronicle site, father and son illustrate the centuries-old tradition of the shofar, a ram’s horn instrument used in Jewish ceremonies since the time of Moses. The father in the story, Ilan Adar, studied horn at Indiana University and for a while was a musician in the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

• This week from Horndog
  The final entry of the “Mozart Horn Concertos” series, some Photoshop tricks and treats, and why the browser Internet Explorer 6 needs to go away forever.