To arms, to arms.

Round about this time of year I begin to feel like a musical Paul Revere. Instead of riding from town to town shouting, “The redcoats are coming! The redcoats are coming!” I begin posting from social media to social media, “The Mainly Mozart is coming! The Mainly Mozart is coming!”

I should probably point out that The Mainly Mozart Festival is the good guy. Although I suppose there were some who thought the redcoats were the good guys—bloody loyalists, I should be careful here since the Mainly Mozart music director, Michael Francis, is British.

Whatever the case, “The Mainly Mozart Festival is coming!” Yes indeed.

Saturday, June 10, is the first of the festival orchestra concerts and is the centerpiece of what the festival is calling Genius Weekend. It starts on Friday, June 9, with a Music and the Mind event and concludes with a concert in Balboa Park on Sunday, June 11.

Of all the concerts I’ve been to, the Mainly Mozart has forced me to grow the most as a writer.

The performances are at such a level that I feel like an idiot when I try to write about them and somehow that has compelled me to exceed my own literary limitations. Have I been able to capture the energy of the festival with my feeble attempts?

It’s not even close.

Not. EVEN. Close.

Yet we are onto something here. Being forced to express something about a concert in a coherent fashion has made me listen to concerts with a less passive ear. Could this be a way for all of us to increase our concert experience?

If audiences went to a concert with an ear inclined toward expressing their experience to others—well—I think that could be rich vein.

All I can say for sure is that I’m looking forward to what the Mainly Mozart’ers are going to teach me this time.

Listen to my propaganda podcast.