Editorial - And the music goes round and round ...

Add to that performances at the Pine Mountain Jamboree and the Hoe-Down, the interesting and talented club bands and groups listed in Lively Entertainment who appear all over town, music in Basin Park and even the impeccable acoustic artists who play out at the Farmers' Market -- and you couldn't even throw a stone in Eureka Springs without hearing a tune to your liking.

The icing on April's multitalented, multilayered musical cake, however, had to be the CICA Music Festival's fundraiser performances of the St. Petersburg String Quartet and Claire Luan Wells last weekend. One young musician's father described the Sunday concert in the auditorium as "communing with the gods on top of the clouds." Another audience member said she would have fallen off her chair in tears of rapture during the performance at the Crescent Hotel on Saturday "if the noise from the kitchen hadn't kept me grounded."

Unfortunately, not everyone got to enjoy all they might have liked to during April because so many things were booked simultaneously. During the St. Petersburg's performances, for instance, there were three or four other music-related events happening at the same times on Saturday and Sunday.

We can fix this. People shouldn't have to struggle between loyalties to friends or children appearing in yearly concerts and a one-time chance to hear an amazing performance by a group most people normally have to pay a week of a reporter's salary to see. All were worthy and all should have had an equal chance to have an audience.

Perhaps a solution to this might be to clear music event dates through an organization like the Mayor's Council on the Arts, or to create a Music Performance Registry similar to the Artists' Registry. Not only would this help with publicity for the events, but they could be booked on non-conflicting dates.

Apparently, having an event listed for months in the Citizen doesn't help people plan their dates as much as we would like to think it does, either. But we do have two organizations that keep year-long online calendars updated with events -- the Chamber of Commerce and the City Advertising and Promotion Commision. When planning local events, a quick check of these two calendars might make the difference betweeen getting a good crowd or only a few stragglers.

If anyone wondered if the St. Petersburg Quartet was disappointed that the auditorium wasn't completely full; perhaps, but they never showed it. They gave one hundred percent of their prodigious talent to the performance just as they would have for a packed house in the Concertgebouw.

First violinist, Alla Aronovskaya, who founded the Quartet with cellist Leonid Shukaev, understands completely. Because their group just established their own music academy, held in different parts of the country each summer, they know what it is to get a project like the CICA Summer Music Festival up and running, and that a lot of education needs to happen on the local level.

In June the Quartet will return to teach at the CICA Music Festival, and there will be another chance to hear them in concert. Meanwhile, before we get letters pointing out that the CICA festival and Opera in the Ozarks will overlap for a few days (given what we've just said about checking dates), just remember each is event is weeks long and there will be plenty of opportunity to do both!

We Eureka Springers don't like to miss anything.

C. D. White