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Center Garden Club Musical Program

 

 

Center Garden Club’s March meeting program featured Mrs. Janette Wittmann and her voice and piano students from Joaquin who delighted the Club and its guests with a musical tribute to  nature. Mrs. Wittmann designed the program to remind the audience of how nature has influenced the development of music since time began.  Music has been our vehicle to express our thoughts  and feelings through sound.  Throughout history, composers have used the muse Nature for inspiration. Among the categories included in Mrs. Wittmann’s exploration of nature’s influence on our music were space, seasons, water, birds, mountains, hills and valleys, prairies and meadows, trees, garden critters, flowers, air and wind.  For each of the natural categories, examples of orchestral, movie music, spiritual, opera, children’s songs, songs of yesteryear, choral, madrigals and rounds, Christmas, ballet, cowboy, college songs, patriotic, metaphysical, folk songs, sacred, pop and other genre were performed or cited.  

 

Student performers and their Nature selections included :  Madalyn Bryant, “The Puffin” (vocal) and “The Butterfly”(vocal and piano); Kinsey Bryant, “Icicles” (piano);  Emma Lewis, “Trees” ( a reading) and “The Birch Tree” (vocal); and Anna Claire Lewis, “Over the Rainbow” and “Little April Showers” (both vocal).  The Bryant sisters are the daughters of Tracy and Jonathan Bryant.  The Lewis sisters are the daughters of Brandi and J.C. Lewis.

 

In the final segment of the program, Mrs. Wittmann also introduced several unusual instruments:  the ‘Sea Organ” in Zadar, Croatia and the Jean Sibelius Monument of six hundred pipes in Helsinki, Finland.  Mrs. Wittmann had visited both of the unusual instruments.  She also introduced the  beautiful manual  Stalactite Organ located in the Virginia’s Luray Caverns which Center’s own Ann Harmon had once played.  Mrs. Wittmann also cited the annual ice music festival held in Geilo, Norway where instruments are carved from ice and then played.  In conclusion she encouraged everyone to view these musical wonders on YouTube.

 

Through this most informative, inspirational, and moving program, produced and narrated by Mrs. Wittmann and performed by her piano and voice students from Joaquin and her, the audience became vastly more aware of how the marriage of nature and music is therapeutic and inspirational, expressing beauty and showing us as Louis Armstrong used to sing:  “What a Wonderful World”! 

 

Following the program, the Club served lunch to the performers, their parents, and other guests in the Fellowship Hall of the First Baptist Church.

 

 

 

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