Play

I managed to squeeze quite a lot of music in today as well. This morning I went to the morning service in church, not something I do very often. It varies among parishes but many want to use local artists for some extra music during service. Today, two of my friends were playing music for violin and piano. They are both refugees from Azerbaijan and are highly educated musicians from their country both playing with well known orchestras of high rank but after their escape to Sweden they are, after many years of learning Swedish and finding their way into society, teaching children at beginners level in the voluntary music school. Not that it's unimportant in any means but it doesn't meet their musical standards or knowledge. This is often the case among immigrants as a whole, it's difficult to find a job at all and rare to find one within their own field of knowledge. We have Architects and university professors working as cleaners and taxi drivers, I'm sure the situation is similar everywhere.

I take every opportunity to listen to them playing. They are married to each other and play very well together. They have a vast repertoar but today they played mostly Swedish romantic summer music from the classical repertoar. It was wonderful to hear them play, I forgot to take pictures.

Right after the service I was invited for lunch at another friend of mine, who wanted to discuss if I could help her make a few recordings of some songs she made. She's become grandmother a week ago and has composed a song for her granddaughter. While talking, I found that she has quite a lot of music that would be great to record, now that she's a recent pensioner, she has more time to play. She wanted me to accompany her on guitar on a couple of songs, which we tested successfully, her eyesight has been a problem for many years and she has gradually turned completely blind, which makes it even more important to keep playing to remember her songs. Her repertoar has been classical and traditional folk-music. That will be a small project during the autumn i expect and it will be fun to do.