Arrival

Finally in Bremen! Now that I'm here, I'll be keeping some sort of account of my time here with this blog. After about 22 hours of total travel time, I arrived here on Tuesday around 2:30. I was picked up from the airport here by our program's coordinator and taken to my student apartment. After a little grocery shopping and rummaging in the program's storage room for furnishings for my room, I unpacked and settled in. It's been hovering just above freezing during the day, and well below at night, keeping the city an icy, slushy and muddy mess. The snow's been so bad in North Germany this winter that the country's running out of salt to salt the roads! They're having to import from Tunisia, or somewhere. Yesterday I met the other exchange students here with the Dickinson program - all very nice. One of them I know from high school when we were both exchange students in Germany! It was fun to see her again. The exciting upcoming event is our trip to Vienna for a week - starting next Tuesday! Just us nine exchange students, the program coordinator and the program's sponsor professor are going - the perfect size for a tour group. I think it'll give us all a change to properly get to know Vienna. After our meeting yesterday, we did a little shopping downtown and then headed back to the apartments. A little later, I came back into town to meet my friend and organ teacher for the semester, Christoph Grohmann, in the church where he teaches. We had coffee and cake and chatted about repertoire and possible churches where I might be able to practice. Today I did a little more shopping on my own, then went to a concert that was recommended to me by Christoph in St. Petri cathedral - Bremen's architectural centerpiece. The choir of the Music Conservatory (where I'll be taking a class or two and to which Christoph belongs as faculty) gave the concert, which was entitled, "Der Mensch lebt und bestehet nur eine kleine Zeit," (Man lives and exists only a short time) a fitting theme for the mood during these dreary winter months! The choir sang three motets from Brahms, op. 110, a piece called "Timor et tremor" from "Four motets for a time of penitence" by Poulenc, a piece called "The Lightfield" by the contemporary Swedish composer Karin Rehnquist, and a motet by Max Reger, the name of which was the source of the program's title. Then, cathedral organist Tobias Gravenhorst played a wonderful piece by Reger called Trauersode, or Ode of Sorrow/Grief, which ends beautifully with a peaceful, drawn-out statement of some chorale - I'll have to look it up. The cathedral has five organs, the largest of which was used for the concert - an organ by the German Romantic builder Sauer. It was amazing to hear Reger on a perfectly-suited instrument in such a wonderful acoustic, which I would estimate is about 4-5 seconds. It's always a wonderful shock to the senses to hear music live in a cathedral acoustic. The concert ended with a stunning piece by Mahler, transcribed for choir by Clytus Gottwald, called Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, which I think means "I have become lost to the world," and a piece by another contemporary Scandinavian composer Bengt Hambreus for choir and organ called Motetum Archangeli Michaelis. Afterwards, I took some pictures, but I'll have to take more in daylight and when the weather's better.

Altogether, I'm enjoying myself very much, and getting properly settled in before we take off for Vienna!