The last few days I have been preparing for my month-long sojourn in Europe which begins on Saturday, and in fact, I started packing and re-packing my suitcase about a week ago. I’m trying to take as little as possible, bearing in mind that I’ll be away from home and a washing machine for 30 days. In trips past, I have really struggled with my too many suitcases / carryons / purse, etc. and there have been two distinct times in recent memory when I’ve tumbled down escalators, face first, because I was trying to carry too much! Yikes!

Some time ago I realized that I will be visiting five countries in this month, with five different currencies! The first two weeks I’ll be on a GoAhead Tour called “Highlights of Eastern Europe.” I will use the Hungarian forint in Hungary, the euro in Austria, the Czech koruna in the Czech Republic and the Polish zlotny in Poland. While in Eastern Europe, I look forward to seeing the Matthias Church in Budapest, site of Hapsburg coronations; Schönbrunn Palace and Hofburg Palace in Vienna, the nearby town of Eisenstadt where Josef Haydn worked; a river cruise down the Danube; castles and cathedrals of Prague; Wawel Cathedral in medieval Krakow; and the city where Frederic Chopin lived, Warsaw. There will even be a chilling visit to Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp and the resting place for 1.5 million people. Of course, this list is only the tip of the iceberg in the number of churches, cathedrals and museums I plan on visiting!

Then I will fly to England (where I’ll be using the British pound) to spend four days in London with former Lutheran Church of Honolulu Executive Assistant Joan Ishibashi. One of the days we’ll travel together to Cambridge to see former LCH parishioners Ann Lillya and Ian McFarland. 

I’ll once again enjoy being at the Three Choirs Festival, this year taking place in Worcester, England from July 22-29. You may remember from my posts last summer, that the cathedral choirs of Hereford, Gloucester, and Worcester having been holding a week-long festival of “the world’s finest choral music” for over 150 years. I enjoyed it so much last summer that I wanted to take it in again.

This year, however, I look forward to meeting former LCH choir director Joseph Hansen at the Festival. We actually had planned to meet last summer before Joe became ill and had to cancel. Luckily this year his strength has recovered sufficiently to attend.

On Tuesday night a bunch of us who had performed in the Purcell concert reunited at Orvis Auditorium to attend a unique and utterly fascinating concert which featured early music, storytelling and a video show to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. The performers called themselves “Galileo’s Daughters” and included Sarah Pillow, soprano; Mary Anne Ballard, viola da gamba; Dava Sobel, storyteller; Marc Wagnon, video artist; and Daniel Swenberg, lute and theorbo, whom we had played with last Sunday in the Purcell performance.

The music was by a lot of familiar early music composers: Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676), Giovanni Kapsberger (1580-1651), Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), Jacques Arcadelt (1507-1608), Giulio Caccini (1551-1618), Girolami Frescobaldi (1583-1643), Claudio Monteverdi (1576-1643), and Henry Purcell (1659-1695).

I had no idea about the close relationship between music and astronomy; for example, did you know that Galileo was born into a family of musicians? And that each of the planets in our solar system can be designated with a pitch on the musical scale? For further reading, check out “Music of the Spheres,” also known as Musica universalis. In the video, one of the utterly compelling images was that of a flight of birds, with a musical staff imposed in the sky.

Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter is the story of the life and trials of Galileo as seen through the eyes of his cloistered, illegitimate daughter. Read the New York Times review here.