 You know, we are going to be doing some filming today, so if anybody doesn't want to somehow be possibly caught in the film, feel free to, you know, sit to the sides or a little bit back, but for the most part, you just have the recorder group in the shop, so don't worry. Stay where you are. Just wanted to let you know before we get started. We'll start in about one minute. So carry on. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. My name is Angela Scott, and I am a library assistant here at Alamedo's Neighborhood Library. On behalf of our librarian, Miss Cindy, and all the staff here at Alamedo's, I'd like to welcome you to the first program of our library's newly-fledged musical performance series. Today, we are proud to feature a special musical program of traditional European and American holiday music and carols on the recorder, presented by members of the recorder, music class, and Cal State Long Beach's OSHA Life Long Learning Institute, otherwise known as ALI. This is one of a series of musical programs, which will be presented periodically throughout the year here in Alamedo's, in addition to a series of local history and natural history lectures. So please keep an eye on our LBPL calendar and website as we finalize details for upcoming programs, and we hope you'll join us for more of these special performances and lectures. Now, we do have a number of reminders for events occurring in January, all we have in here if you'd like to raise your attention. Our next LBPL will be on Saturday, January 12 at 2 p.m. here in the community room. If you have any questions about posts or reading, or the LBPL, please inquire at the reference desk downstairs for more information. In January, preschool story times for creative five-year-olds will resume again on Thursdays, starting on Thursday, January 3rd, from 7.30 a.m. to 12 p.m. Finally, today, right here in Alamedo's library, LBPL is kicking off a brand-new tech initiative to make programs, like today's first annual holiday concert here in Alameda's, accessible via live streaming and archive recordings on the Internet. Not only is Alameda's library patrons, but also to any LBPL patron and public and large. This new pilot program is being implemented by the library system's automated services team. We are very pleased and grateful to welcome and give thanks to ASB staff member, TechWiz John Fee, the man behind the camera, who is helping us spearhead this effort on our behalf today. He is here to supervise and demo test our first ever efforts to live stream our library's programs over LBPL's YouTube channel. Just to repeat, anyone has concerns about possibly being recorded in this live stream video, which will be archived and accessible for watching later on the library's YouTube channel, please feel free to sit anywhere behind this point. Okay, otherwise, please continue to stay in your seats. If you have any questions, otherwise, about any programs I've mentioned today, or other events coming up in the new year, please inquire with library staff to see our monthly calendar feature downstairs at the front entrance hall and keep an eye on our website for more details. Getting back to our musical performance for today, it is our pleasure to welcome and introduce our featured musical guests for a corner music class on the Osher Life World Learning Institute also known as Holly at Cal State Long Beach, taught by Mrs. Meryl Pendleton. Now, Meryl has been teaching the recorder class at Holly for about 16 years, as well as leading a playmaking class, but unfortunately Meryl is out of stick today with a bad cognitive ability to make it here. But one of her dedicated musicians, Jim Belloli, is here scanning it for her today and keeping you meeting the group. The all-unicorner music class is generously providing this program to us and we will charge as a pre-educational gift to our Alamedo's library community, and they're also performing as a result of this library, which we just did this week, and El Dorado Library branches next week. So thank you very much for joining us today, and for taking advantage of this wonderful opportunity to thank our performers for their very gracious support of our Alamedo and Oluquia members community. At the end of today's program, please check out books and media on the topics of holiday songs and carols, recorder sheet music, music history, all available for checkout downstairs, and please stay after Meryl to join us for some refreshments provided I find the library in the back. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the Alamedo's library is very pleased to present and welcome the recorder music class from Cal State Long Beach, Osher Life World Learning Institute. Thank you Angela, we're very pleased to be here. We have a program about half an hour worth of music. We'll pause about five or six minutes into it and we'll tell you a little bit about what it is that we're playing here. Our program includes pieces from pretty much all over Europe, England, Flanders, Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, and the Americans. So you can think of it as a world tour, or you can think of it as a chronological telling of the Christmas story, which will end up to Hanukkah and ending up with modern songs. So please feel free to sing along with anything that you hear that you recognize, or clap, or dance, or anything you'd like to do. Feel free to participate. And when we get to the more modern stuff, we can pass on instruments and require you to participate. So we'll start us pretty much as if we're a caroling group walking down the street and gathering people as we go. It's something that all the kids in the Long Beach area are people who have been third graders. Well, it's a really nice instrument to start with because it's easy to make a noise with. For example, well, it's basically just like a tin flute or a whistle that your teachers use to get you in order. So if you can find the place to blow into and a place in your face to stick it, then you can make a noise like this. Or if you play it extra loud, it can mess up a little. Anybody want to try it and see if they can make a noise? So just blow in here softly and see what it sounds like. So the nice thing about learning to play the recorder is that it's a good start for learning the other musical instruments. You can start making music right away just by blowing on it and covering different holes with your fingers. It's not like a trumpet where you have to go here. Exactly. Or like a flute where you have to blow across it and then get just the right angle or else it doesn't come out as a note. Or a violin where you have to figure out how to hold the bow and exactly where to put it on the strings and where to put your fingers and unless you get all those right, it can sound pretty awful until you get good. For the recorder, you can start learning to get good as soon as you can start playing. So we have different kinds of recorders here. We have four different kinds. The one that carries the melody most of the time is the soprano recorder, which looks like that. And you notice that some of us have wooden recorders and some have plastic. And plastic sounds pretty much just as good as wood except for really good players, they can make a mellower sound with the wooden. On my level, it doesn't make any difference. So basically, soprano carries the tune nowadays back in the time when Bach and Handel and Mozart were writing for the flute, which was this instrument, the recorder. They use the alto recorder as the solo instrument, also called the treble recorder. And we have alto instruments with one of you. What about you? Sorry. But Jim, you better do it. The fingering can get a little bit tricky, especially when you're playing sharps and flats and so on. And usually we get it right, which is important. The next one down is tenor. It's bigger. It's bigger than the others. And the tenor and the alto are very nice for filling in the chords as the instruments play together. And finally, in our group, we have the bass recorder. The bass takes more wind to play than the others, but it's still relatively easy to play. And we have a bass recorder player ready to get started over here. Now, there are different sizes of recorders. Besides the four that we have here, the next one up from the soprano is called a soprano. And it's about this long and it's kind of squeaky. It's like a piccolo in a band. And there's another one that's even smaller than that. It's called a dark line flute line. And in German, that means a very small little flute. Going down from the bass, we get a great bass, which is longer. We gave her to play a recorder on a great bass. Below that is a contra bass. And below that is a subcontra bass. And that is a huge instrument. There's a lady named Don Viano out, breaking in the Netherlands who makes those. And she's made three of them. And they stand about as tall as this fan up here. It's more than twice her height. And from the top of it, it has a tube that comes all the way down and she plays it like this. And it's very impressive and sounds nice too. It's fairly easy to make a recorder. It's just like a whistle. There's a hole here on the end and it blows the air past to read here. And on YouTube, you can find an explanation of how to make a recorder out of a carrot. A professional recorder player took a nice big carrot and drove a hole in it and then did a bunch of funny stuff to get this shape up here. And after about two hours, which they cut down to about 15 minutes on the YouTube, they ended up with a carrot recorder, which the lady who was interviewing him played. Exactly right. She asked him, how long does your recorder last? And he said, well, if you put it in the refrigerator in plastic with a little water, your recorder should be good for about five days. If you put it in the freezer, it will get frozen and then your lips will freeze when you try to play it. Okay, so we'll roll out a gun and play this piece that they were starting and we'll be playing it this around. One, two, three. On the read up here. And if you don't clear it off the read, then it gives kind of a fuzzy, furry sound. So when we go, or we accidentally cover it out of the way and go, and that's because we're clearing the moisture off of our read.