Greensboro Daily Photo

Grand Girls

These grand girls of music reside inside the music building at UNCG. The sculpture spans 3 stories from the base, to a globe to the girl on the bell of the horn. We didn't see a description of the artwork or an artist's plaque. If you know about it, please share. It looks as if the woman is playing to a little copy of herself. Perhaps this represents the reflective process of thinking about your playing, how you sound, look, and what you think of your playing. Other than voices in the head, music in the ears, what better way than to see yourself lifting your your arms, pursing your lips, blowing air through the mouthpiece and making music!!!

If we had one wish it would be for someone to clean the cobwebs off of this work of art-- oh, and remove the nickel from the bell of the instrument. Nature brought us the cobwebs but student humor brought us the nickel for your effort!

In the ABC Wednesday meme world, this week's letter is "G" and "G" is for Girls!!!!! 

 

School of Music at UNCG

Yesterday's footbridge walking to the north edge of UNCG's campus leads to the School of Music Building. Like those southern churches that extend for a city block, the music building starts at McIver Street and extends westward on Market Street-- a loooonnnng way. It is comprised of red brick, cement, and glass, combining hard angles and acoustically-accommodating round edges. Here we see one tiny piece of the building. Even more glorious than the outside is all of the wonderful music being created inside. Each theater, practice room, and classroom is an oasis of sound. On any given day, instruments of all kinds, music of every genre, and musicians at all proficiency levels can be seen and heard herein. Personally, we could use a good dose of POLKA & Oberek music.

If Ruby Tuesday considers Brick Red as red, we're onboard with the passionately red crowd today!
 

At Grove & Portland, The Beat Goes On

This music venue is located at the corner of Grove and Portland in the Glenwood neighborhood. Glenwood is making a real effort towards gentrification. As you can see, the building is beautifully painted with a snazzy banner of musical notes and instruments framing a plywood window and a bedsheet-curtain. This neighborhood is starting to spark to life on the weekends. Optimistically, wikimapia says about Glenwood, "A historic and very diverse lower-middle class to middle class neighbourhood in the southwest corner of Greensboro. It has seen some tough times in the years, but through local community efforts, the neighbourhood is to be expecting a revitalization. This will be like Greensboro's downtown."  Wikimapia, we sure hope you are right! If you follow that site, you can see a google map of the actual neighborhood-- very 21st century!

Sanctuary of West Market Street United Methodist Church

Happy Sacred Sunday! Recently, we published an exterior view of the West Market Street United Methodist Church in downtown Greensboro. Several commenters thought the exterior of the building looked German. 

Today, we take you inside to see sanctuary. The beautiful Dobson-Rosales organ sounds even better than it looks-- and it looks stunning!  The stained glass windows are said to be Tiffany. The rounded pews wrap around the sanctuary and soften the look of the interior. In person, the rounded shape and minimal hard edges is even more apparent. Truly, the building is a feast for the eyes and the soul outside as well as inside. In future weeks we will share examples of the artwork. Fortunately, this downtown church continues to thrive. Hopefully it will be here for another century, or two, or three...

If you are visiting the blog today for the Sacred Sunday post and want to see our earlier posts in this category, please click here for eight months of Sundays!

UNCG Sapphires: Singing A'Cappella, at Night, in the Rain

The August 2009 theme for the 1,000 City Daily Photo sites around the globe is: NIGHT. Greensboro's contribution is this photo of the Sapphires, an all-female a'cappella singing group from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). We took the photo AT NIGHT in the pouring rain at Greensboro's 2008 Summer Solstice event. We want to feature this very talented group and encourage you to enjoy their music. Their always-fine music varies depending on the strengths of the current members. For example, in the above photo, the singer holding the water bottle makes amazing, percussive sounds with her mouth. This You Tube video is a good example of the percussive sound of the Sapphires. Also, the song, "Numb," an MP3 file on the Sapphires' My Space account will leave you convinced that they are using instruments.

The Sapphires formed in 2000, after two members of the Spartones, UNCG's male a'cappella group, decided that UNCG needed a female group. Ironic that the male group formed first since UNCG has only been accepting male students since 1968. At any rate, we are thrilled to have both groups in Greensboro.  Let's hope CDP's August 2009 Theme Day gives the Sapphires a little international recognition!

Click here to view thumbnails for all participants

Music in the Air: Eastern Music Festival & MUSEP Concerts on Sunday

 

Summer is the perfect time for playing music outdoors in Greensboro and there are many opportunities to enjoy music for FREE! The above photo was taken on Sunday, July 12, 2009 on the Guilford College Campus. The Eastern Music Festival Student Orchestra gave a concert that through the free MUSEP series. The center of the photo features the guest conductor for that concert, Chelsea Tipton, who is originally from Greensboro.

Tomorrow's free, outdoor MUSEP concert (July 26th) will again be held at Guilford College, starting at 6pm. It is also part of the Eastern Music Festival featuring The New Familiars. Allow plenty of time to park, walk, and set up your own picnic space to enjoy while watching the concert! If you follow our link to The New Familiars'  my-space page, you will see that Sunday's FUN, GREAT, acoustic concert will be fringe-like and informal! 

Greensboro is celebrating our 30th year of free, outdoor music concerts in the summer. If you have a chance, follow the links to read more about opportunities to enjoy music this summer; it isn't too late. Of course, for those in the position to lend financial support to these well attended events, donations are greatly appreciated and can be arranged through the EMF and MUSEP websites!

Feliz Cinco de Mayo

Happy "Cinco de Mayo." This photo was taken on Saturday at the  Artbeat Festival in our beautiful City Center Park in downtown Greensboro. The four dancers are dressed in festive costumes from Jalisco, Mexico. These women make dancing look easy; however, in reality, the dresses are extremely heavy and the women get quite a workout swishing the skirts and moving around on stage. 

Typical of events where Artbeat and the Greensboro Public Library are involved, this event attracted people of all ages and from many cultures. The Artbeat Greensboro Festival will continue until May 10th, so if you haven't attended an event yet, it is not too late. Also, if you are in the mood to celebrate Cinco de Mayo today, turn your radio dial to 94.5 FM, La Preciosa, and enjoy the "musica inolvidable en vivo." If you look to the left of the photo above, you can see the tent belonging to "La Preciosa." The announcers were balanced bilinguals and took great care to accommodate their English and Spanish listeners.

If you go out today to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, please dine in one of the 127 restaurants participating in the "Serving Greensboro Together" fundraiser for Urban Ministries. Ten percent of the sale will be donated to Urban Ministry.  Arriba!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day: Got GREEN?

Scottie dogs aren't Irish (maybe Scots-Irish!), but this fellow looks so cute sporting glittery, green shamrocks. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Our holiday vignette shows you how one Greensboro family goes all out decorating for St. Patrick's Day-- even if they aren't Irish! If you are up for celebrating the green, M'Coul's on 110 W. McGee St. has quite an St. Patrick's Day line-up and at least the first six events sound wonderful AND family friendly! 

Johnny Burris with his Bagpipes 8am to noon

Jason Pierce 12:30- 2pm

Dakota Joe and Scott Manring 2:30- 4pm

Walsh Kelley Irish Dancers 4:30- 7pm

Molly McGinn 5:30- 7:30pm

Limerick Contest 8pm-9pm

DJ 9pm-1am

Here is a modified Ogden Nash limerick to put you in the festive spirit:

A jolly young fellow from Yuma

Told an elephant joke to a puma;

Now his skeleton lies

Beneath Greensboro* skies-

The puma had no sense of huma.

*(hot western)

               

Brown Building on the UNCG Campus

Known as the Brown Building since 1960, the Music Building opened in 1925 on the campus of the University of North Carolina Greensboro. It served as the School of Music's home until 1999, when a new Music Building was dedicated on McIver Street. Recently, we found a post card with the above view of the original music building in the 1950's. The post card was written to a family in Daytona Beach, Florida, by a man named Bill. When the post card was written, UNCG was known as the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina, and only females attended, hence the use of the word "fems" below.

On January 26th (today's date) 1958, Bill wrote,

Hey--

Every day I go by this building it reminds me of my younger days before they made the practice rooms sound proof-- you could hear the fems trying to reach high C on our front porch on a warm spring night, boy the years do fly-- see you soon, Bill

What an opening sentence for a novel!  Bill, unless you make yourself known to us, we claim that line!

By the way, we tried our best to replicate the view found on the post card while photographing the building. After all, we aren't called Greensboro Daily Post Card!! Surprisingly, the building's façade hasn't changed! See a 1927 version of the Brown Building here.

Here are four relevant books...

                                      

Breaking Up Christmas

As the Christmas season comes to a close, the above old-time dancers just may be dancing to the fiddle tune, "Breaking Up Christmas."  Breaking Up Christmas parties are held in Greensboro; however, they are believed to have originated in nearby Surry County.   In the days before electricity and multi-media entertainment, people would gather in each others' homes, push back the furniture and dance to fiddle and banjo tunes. These parties remain especially popular in the time between Christmas and the Epiphany (today, January 6th). Guilford County is home to many fabulous old-time musicians and dancers, many of whom are, well, breaking up Christmas. 

If your New Year's resolution was to exercise more, put on your dancing shoes and head on over to the Vintage Theater in Winston-Salem TONIGHT to hear two fine Greensboro old-time musicians, Rich Hartness and Tolly Tollefson, with Kenny Greer calling (7:30 dance lessons, 8- 10 pm dancing; $7).