"Like Streams in the Desert"

Here's a boldness break of a rather different sort than the laughing Buddha on the train earlier this week. (A boldness break is a brief time-out that re-juices imagination and creative courage.)

"Like Streams in the Desert" is an orchestral piece composed in honor of the 50th anniversary of Israel by my friend-from-first-grade Meira Warshauer. She and I got to be buddies out at the swings at recess. In second grade when she won the drawing to take home the room-size Santa Claus mural the class had pasted together, she gave it to me; her family did Hannukah and not Christmas.

When I saw in my email the note about her work on video on Youtube, it was holidays all over again, 9:54 seconds worth of her music while the camera soars over water-in-the-desert images from artist Shoshanna Brombacher, who in this work reminds me simultaneously of Chagall, Van Gogh, and Georgia O'Keefe. (Wow, that sentence covers a lot of territory. Oh, the pleasures of editorless blogging!)

Meira's music is performed here by Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra on a video developed by Michael Bregman. The CD of her Torah-inspired music is available from Albany Records, this piece commissioned and premiered by Neal Gittleman and the Dayton Philharmonic.

For the musically literate, here's a review: "spiritually ecstatic, beautifully felt... representation of [the] mystical creative process." If you're in the mood for a stream in a desert, go listen and watch for a few minutes. It's profoundly refreshing.

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