Went to a strange musical experience this past Thursday night. Couldn't get there til 7p, and thought I had to hurry through to see everything, and missed so much by doing that. Now that I've experienced it without having known what I was getting into, I want to go back again next year. Next year I know I can dress in black, and take my cat Boo, and I'll have a much better idea of the many performances there are for me to discover, and I'll let the music wash over me in the strange atmosphere and let the experience happen to me more fully. I will sit and enjoy the people watching. I will better know the history of the building I'm entering. I will give some moments of meditation and respect to the many lives represented there. I will have better experienced having gotten away to the mystical world of this event.

New Music Bay Area and Chapel of the Chimes present Garden of Memory 2007: a Columbarium Walk-Through Event at Chapel of the Chimes, a labyrinthine Julia Morgan-designed columbarium and mausoleum replete with gardens, fountains, and stained-glass skylights. col•um•bar•i•um also col•um•bar•y n. , pl. -i•a also -ies . A vault with niches for urns containing ashes of the dead. mausoleum n. , pl. -leums or -lea . A large stately tomb or a building housing such a tomb or several tombs. Slideshow tour of Chapel of the Chimes

"It all began with a search for a public bathroom. The impetus for the quest was journalistic, not biological. In 1996, Sarah Cahill -- pianist, radio host, critic, impresario and musical jill-of-all-trades -- was traipsing through Oakland looking for material for a feature article she was preparing on 'Best Bathrooms of the East Bay' when she ran across the Chapel of the Chimes, the Julia Morgan columbarium on Piedmont Avenue. Surely, Cahill thought, an ornate building like this must have a great bathroom lurking inside it. What she found was far more interesting. 'I walked in and the place was like an enchanted fairyland,' Cahill recalls. 'There were indoor gardens with skylights, like something out of 'Where the Wild Things Are.' There was one room that was taken over by a giant banana palm, and another with a cage with two lovebirds. There were fountains and staircases going off in all directions." From somewhere in the distant recesses of the interior came the sound of an organ. But the more Cahill tried to locate it, the farther away it seemed to get. 'It was a very sensual experience to search for music while you're being visually stimulated, plus I loved that feeling of getting lost. And that's when I thought, 'What if you turned one way, and there was a string quartet, and then you walked awhile and turned a corner and there was a clarinet?' " 'Garden of Memory,' the annual new-music event that grew out of that flash of inspiration, marks its 10th anniversary on Thursday amid a welter of sound ranging from the stentorian to the practically subliminal... San Francisco Chronical 2007 "We wandered happily through the wonder cabinet of rooms, stumbling upon treasures around every corner. In this nook, Jason Victor Serinus, "the Pavorotti of Pucker," whistled a poignant melody with a recorded accompaniment. Around the corner, the Crank Ensemble made happy, surprisingly funky sounds with electrified hand-cranked instruments and an upright contraption played with a feather. (All this under the Byers family's remains.) "Listen, listen, listen" sang the all-women's Threshold Choir, a group that sings frequently in hospice rooms to less cheery audiences. Other little chapels featured a squawking trombone, an eerie seance scene, a noodley electric guitar jam, and a MAX-controlled chime and cymbal piece... Attendees at this event were a really mixed bag. It seemed that all the
families in Piedmont turned out for the event with their kids, but I also saw
plenty of burners, dreadlocked hippies and at least 200 women who looked just
like my therapist. " SF Gate Culture Blog

They all have one thing in common: They're there to have fun. These are musicians at play, having a good time being goofy, spontaneous, experimental, even silly with their music.

By popular demand, Mills College music professor Maggi Payne will be back with her singing orchid, which is hooked up to an electric switch that causes the flower to make musical sounds when people touch it.

And if singing orchids aren't to your taste, how about singing seaweed? That's what you'll find in the Court of Reflection, where Krystina Bobrowski will be playing her "Kelp Ensemble."

Professional whistler Jason Serinus will be in the Mediation Chapel, whistling works by Bach, Mozart, Verdi, Brahms, Schubert and Debussy.

Nearby, the Nature Sounds Society will perform the "Dawn Chorus" -- recordings of birds, frogs and insects greeting the day.

And the Crank Ensemble will play handmade instruments operated by -- you guessed it -- hand cranks.

ContraCosta Times

This is my video of my limited experience this year, with performers' samples of music from their webs.