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A Theft of Sundays

This week’s Sunday Stealing quiz is pretty straight-forward stuff about “adulting”. (And honestly? I have to conclude that at 55 I’m still not that good at adulting, so maybe it’s just not gonna happen.) 

The Grown Up Meme 

1. Do you have a college degree?

Yes! B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Music, Wartburg College, 1993!

2. What was the amount of your last electric bill?

Hell if I know. The Wife pays the utilities. (I pay food and other stuff.)

3. Do you have life insurance?

I have a small-ish policy. I don’t actually know that life insurance makes a terribly great investment.

4. Do you check your cholesterol on (at least) an annual basis?

Twice a year, currently; my doctor loves bloodwork, and currently I’m seeing her twice a year. (It’s good, actually! My cholesterol numbers are consistently terrific.

5. Have you ever attended a high school reunion?

No. Facebook and social media pretty much eliminate that need for me, and at this point, we’re past the 30-year mark.

6. Do you have a will or estate plan?

No. Maybe I should….

7. Do you remember when MTV played music videos?

Oh yes! Fun times, those. We lived outside the part of town that had cable for several years, though, so I only got to see MTV when I went to a friend’s house. I didn’t really get the idea at first, but I quickly figured it out! (BTW, one of the first videos I ever saw, Bette Midler’s cover of “Beast of Burden” by the Stones, ends with Bette and Mick Jagger getting pied in the face!)

8. Is there a bottle of wine in your refrigerator?

Technically, yes, as I have a bottle of vermouth in there that I use for Manhattans. Other than that, no. I’ll only put wine in the fridge if we’re planning to drink it that night.

9. Have you been divorced? 

No, and I never will be, either. It’s not an option. Period. I don’t think we ever got close even when we were struggling the hardest.

10. When you were 16, did you play music on vinyl, cassette, or CDs? 

Mostly cassette and some vinyl. This was 1987-88. I didn’t have my first CD player until Christmas of my senior year, when I was 17. (Christmas 1988, that is.) Vinyl was tough because we only had one record player in the house, so what I did for a few years was buy recordings on vinyl (heavily classical at this point) and use the good player to record them onto high-quality cassettes.

And now that this quiz is done, I’m off to throw some empty cans at the kids on my lawn!

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Tuesday Tones (Saturday edition)

Oof, that was a week. Just busy as shit, and The Wife got sick. (She’s on the mend, we’ll all be fine, last night I loaded her up with Hot and Sour Soup and her favorite Curry Chicken and she even had some of my Pad Thai.) The week was obnoxious enough that I didn’t even have the mental wherewithal to stick a Suppe overture on here! And on the couple of times in the week I did think about posting, some news event just pissed the living hell out of me. Right now, I think Vivek Ramaswamy might well be the single most vile human being currently drawing breath, and that is a hell of a competition to be winning. But enough of that, here’s what I would have posted on Tuesday as a conclusion of sorts to my brief look at “autumnal” music.

Now, strictly speaking, only one quarter of this is actually “autumnal”, because it comprises all four seasons. Thus it is titled, appropriately enough, The Four Seasons. Yes, I’m actually featuring Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons here, even though it’s a work to which I have never much warmed, though I have started coming around in recent years. (I started coming around on Vivaldi himself years before that!) This particular version, though, isn’t Vivaldi entirely. This is actually Recomposed: The Four Seasons by German composer Max Richter, which is inspired by Antonion Vivaldi.

This is not an arrangement of Vivaldi; it’s a new composition entirely, taking Vivaldi’s melodies and looping them and phasing them and doing new things with them. Apparently Richter has discarded fully three-quarters of Vivaldi’s original material for this work. How does it contrast with the original? I am admittedly not qualified to say; I simply do not know the original well enough to judge that. I do find this “Recomposed” experience a fascinating and appealing listen. I used to be bothered by the frequently repetitive nature of some Baroque and even earlier music, but now I find something meditative in that old compositional style, before symphonic-style thematic development had taken root.

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Something for Thursday

Some weeks I know what I want to feature here. Other weeks, not so much, so I do other things, like what I did today: On my way home from work I did not listen to a podcast, but rather played WNED Classical (which isn’t actually called that anymore, now it’s BTPM Classical, which stands for Buffalo Toronto Public Media) to see if they featured something I’d want to put here. And the first thing I heard was a contender, let me tell you!

But the second think I heard was the keeper. I’m not nearly familiar enough with Rodgers and Hart, apparently; I had never heard this song before I heard this rendition, by Dawn Upshaw, on my way home. I need to listen to more of this kind of thing. A lot more.

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Tuesday Tones

Continuing a look at autumnal music, we have today a symphony by a 19th century composer whose work was highly regarded in his day but who is mostly forgotten now. Swiss composer Joachim Raff lived for 60 years, 1822 to 1882, and he was very prolific and popular during his lifetime. Since then? Not nearly so much. I have heard, well, exactly one piece by Raff, to my knowledge, and it’s the symphony here. It’s a warm, genial work, certainly not hard to listen to. Is there anything about it that’s particularly autumnal? Well…not in my ears, honestly. Raff doesn’t seem to have had the gift of melody, either. I have to be honest that very little of this piece lingers in my ear or mind after hearing it. Is it bad? Absolutely not. But can I hear why Raff did not endure in the standard repertoire? Absolutely yes.

But give this a listen! It’s…nice.

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Sunday Stealing, Monday edition

This week’s quiz has no theme, so I’m not even going to post it on Sunday! So there!

1. What was the last gift you received?

The Daughter gave me a birthday present: a 12-inch record that had been etched out with Star Wars designs. It’s really cool! I need to figure out how to display it and then I’ll get pictures.

2. Who did you last hang out with?

Just about all my hanging out nowadays is with The Wife, and I’m fine with that! She’s a ton of fun to hang out with and she gets me and I get her and it’s just that she’s who I want to hang out with. It’s a good thing when you want to hang out with the person you married.

3. Do you often lose the remote?

No! And that’s kind of surprising, considering how tiny it is.  Is the age of the Giant Clunky Remote With Eight Hundred Buttons receding into memory?

4. When did you last check Facebook?

As I write this on Sunday morning, an hour or two ago. Facebook is becoming my least-used social media platform, to be honest: Not only is it showing me less and less content by people I follow, it’s also showing me more and more content by people I don’t know at all. And if that isn’t bad enough, if there’s a right-wing MAGA chud out there, whether they’re an actual noted person or just some Joe Schmo, Facebook’s algorithm will show it to me, no matter how many times I tell it that I’m not interested because MAGA sucks. I know that liberal and left-wing content exists, but I see very, very little of it. You can’t tell me that Facebook isn’t putting a thumb on the scale.

5. Are there scented candles in the room you’re in?

Not at present, just a couple unscented ones. We are heading into candle season, though.

6. Next time you leave the house, where will you be going?

Just to walk doggos. I don’t plan on going anywhere today.

7. Do you know anyone named Steven or Stephen or Steve or Stevie?

Yes! I have a coworker named Steve. Good dude. He won’t see this.

8. Which do you prefer: macaroni salad or potato salad?

Potato, especially mustard potato salad. I do like macaroni salad, but my family generally doesn’t, so I don’t get it often.

9. Do you have an ice maker in your refrigerator door?

No. For years I wasn’t really a fan of these, but the fridge we had in our suite in Hawaii five years ago had one, and you could change the consistency of the ice depending on what you wanted. That was a cool feature.

10. When you woke up this morning, did you get up straightaway or lounge a bit?

On weekends I’ll kind of doze in and out, and when Hobbes starts making noise, then I’ll get up and deal with his needs. This morning, Hobbes never made a sound! I got up after his normal waking hour (to my chagrin, he’s an early riser, so I don’t get to sleep in much on weekends) to check, and lo, he was fine, just hadn’t made noise yet. Weird dog!

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“Sometimes I just sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits”

The post title is from a poster that hung on the wall of the Band Room when I was in high school. I think the animal pictured was a monkey or an orangutan or something of the ape variety…I could look it up, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that yesterday we were at Letchworth State Park and this happened:

Unedited JPG.

Now, that’s a kind of big deal because greyhounds generally don’t sit a lot! It has to do with the way they’re built. Their gangly legs and huge chests and tight hips don’t work well for the standard “dog sit”, so generally they won’t do this much. They can, but left to their own, they usually won’t.

So naturally, Hobbes, who for a pretty weird breed of dog is unusually weird, chose to randomly uncork a perfect dog sit during a lull in the day’s activity. I suspect he found this easy because the ground was a little sloped there, but still, there’s just something about a greyhound doing a sit that looks weird.

Unedited JPG.

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Something for Thursday

Composer George Fenton has died. He was a prolific film composer, and he was one of those guys whose work is good and yet whose work I have never really explored deeply except for seeing quite a few of the movies he scored. That’s more on me than a statement on him; listening to his work is never a bad time. This is from his score to Dangerous Beauty, a movie from the 1990s that I have somehow forgotten about even though it’s really good.

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Tuesday Tones

More autumn music today. My old friend Robert would have loved this one…and actually, I’m sure he did. Gerald Finzi was one of his favorite composers, and Finzi did not have a large output, by any means. He was more prolific as a choral and vocal composer, but he did produce a small amount of orchestral music and after he died at only 55 years of age (ooof, that’s my age, you notice these things more as you get older, I’ve discovered) he left behind a number of unfinished works that a good friend of his, composer Howard Ferguson, edited and orchestrated. This is one of those: an intended movement for a chamber symphony that now lives on as The Fall of the Leaf. 

Finzi’s music is deeply akin to Vaughn Williams and the other “pastoral” British music of the first half of the twentieth century.

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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