A musical Mothers' Day...with good food

Current playlist: Surrounding sound of a quiet late night
Current mood: blessed, contented, not extremely hyper, feeling good to be alive

What happened on Mothers' Day:-
- Recorded a video for my mom
- Had a chocolate fondue + curry party with my buddies
- Watched "Malaysian Voices" contemporary concert
- Feeling good to have such a great mom and I started to realize a lot of good things

I had the best Mothers' Day celebration ever.

On Saturday I recorded this video dedicating to my dearest mommy. I speak in Cantonese and the songs are mandarin songs of my mom's favorite Taiwanese singer Richie Ren. Just a note: I'm not a good piano/keyboard player.

Then, I celebrated this special day with good friends and music, to me it's the best way, for now, to celebrate my mom's awesomeness because she has been teaching me a lot in socializing and supporting my musical aspiration.

Fondue party with my best friends in Toronto. GOOD FOOD!!

I watched this concert at The Music Gallery close to Osgoode station.

Introduction before the concert started. From left: CHOW Jun Yi, CHONG Kee Yong, Robert Aitken

The Music Gallery is apparently a church, but it is the home for creative music in Toronto too.

Basically the concert was featuring Malaysian composers of contemporary music. Honestly I didn't hear much about this genre in Malaysia before I came to Toronto in 2008, and I was quite surprised that there was a concert in Toronto featuring these works. I almost jumped when I saw the listing in WholeNote magazine.

Thank goodness there was a Contemporary Music Fest in Malaysia in 2009 and Kee Yong has been working hard to push the festival bi-annually/annually. Good music, regardless the genre, should be encouraged and shared everywhere.

I have a thing with contemporary music. I wanted to study that in York but eventually I affectionately fall in love with jazz. Thanks to the flexibility and interdisciplinary system in York, I took a contemporary piano and improvisation class with Professor Casey Sokol and tutor Steve Koven; the course is changing my life. It is in present continuos tense because the course will NEVER end even if I stop taking it formally. It's about the spirit and I always keep in touch with great teachers.

I also have a thing with dissonance. I like Satie, embrace Webern, appreciate Schoenberg, and admire Cage. Dissonant contemporary music might not sound pleasant but to me there are many different types of dissonance, which I can even sub-categorize them into pleasant dissonance and unpleasant dissonance, and also relatively-pleasant dissonance. The "judgment" of consonance is very subjective, as we know 3rds and 6ths were even considered dissonant in medieval time. To me, minor 2nd can sound very pleasant too; it depends on the context and instrumentation, and not forgetting - the listener's current mood.

Detailed thoughts about the concert will be up in the next post, hopefully. I found this post will be terribly lengthy if I put everything together.

By the way, tomorrow is Girls Night Out jam session in Chalkers Pub, hosted by Lisa Particelli. I'm loving her more and more. I'm coming again! Let's have some live jazz and cocktails ;DD