We went… a friend… hang on. There was this concert. My wife mentioned it to a friend of ours, who discovers the coolest music etc. She said the dulcimer player was good, she had seen him perform once where she also saw the Vienna Vegetable Ensemble. The concert was in a small town out in the country. We drove out. The countryside was beautiful, like a moonscape if the moon were covered with rolling hills and plowed fields, and had a big full moon hanging over it. The place wasn’t so big, small stage, eight or ten tables. Despite that, and what you would expect to be the attraction of an electric dulcimer/accordeon duo, with vocals, sort of ethereal, the place was nearly empty. That is, when we got there we were the entire audience. Then more people came, and more, and more, until there were at least ten people in the audience, not counting the guy moving levers up and down on the mixer.

It was really good. I had no idea dulcimer and accordeon could sound so modern and like that.

After the concert we went outside and talked to the singer for a while. She was surprised to meet someone in a small town in the Austrian countryside who spoke fluent Japanese. By “we” I mean “my wife.” I stood in the background and smiled and nodded and wished I’d worn a warmer coat.

The singer was a Japanese woman, FYI.

That was a few weeks ago. Last Saturday we were at another concert. This one was in another small town, but the audience was quite large and knowledgeable. Interestingly for us, by “us” I mean my wife and me, the musicians were too good. They were classical musicians – their regular job is playing with the V1enna Ph1lh4rmonic. This was… the music at this concert was Schrammelmusik, which it would be oversimplifying to describe as the urban folk music played while drinking wine in Vienna, but I can’t do any better. And we agreed, although they were really, very good, that the music could have used a little more dirt, wasn’t imperfect enough. Lacked the seeds of its own destruction.