As I’m sure most people did, we enjoyed a quiet and socially-distanced Thanksgiving this year. But since Thanksgiving is always quiet and socially-distanced for us, it really wasn’t a big deal. Thanksgiving is always a small event for us, in terms of numbers of people; it sure isn’t small in terms of food!
Anyway, even though I had no intention of attempting any shopping, I also took Black Friday off as I always do these days; Thanksgiving Weekend has become over the years one of my favorite weekends of the year. It was pretty nice actually this year as well, even with COVID trying to ruin everything.
Here’s some photographic evidence of what transpired this weekend:
Fifteen years seems like a lot, and sometimes it feels like a lot.
Other times it feels like yesterday.
We miss you, Quinn, and we wonder what kind of life you might be living now. How much fighting would you have done? Where would you be? You should be sixteen, not forever frozen in my heart and mind at fifteen months and two days.
According to somebody, November 27 is “National Pie in the Face Day”. The last few days I’ve been posting some of my favorite photos of myself in a pied-face state, with nifty quotes attached, to social media because let’s face it, if ever we lived in a time where humor of any kind was desperately needed, even if it’s an old staple like the pie in the face, it’s now. So here are a few selections!
And finally, here is an amusing item from an artist who creates surreal images mixing elements of classic art with real life. Given the apparent state of affairs as I write this, especially in the United States, it’s hard not to think that God, if They are out there, is in precisely this kind of mood with regard to humanity:
Indeed.
Stay safe, everybody, and at least try to keep laughing. It’s really all we can do in the face of disastrous times, until they end!
Hey, folks! I’m doing this on Twitter and Instagram, and since this blog is the granddaddy of all my “social media” ventures, I should do it here, too. I am in the cover-design phase of The Savior Worlds, Book Four of The Song of Forgotten Stars, which means it’s time to update the author photo on the back cover! I’ve pre-selected these four images, and if a consensus forms around which one is best, I’ll go with it. (If it roughly breaks even then I will pick.) What should be my author photo? Let me know!
This has been a truly ghastly year, and even the weather today as I write this is metaphorically on point: it’s drizzly and rainy and the screen on my library window is filled with raindrops so I can’t really even see outside very well.
I won’t write my usual long list of things I’m thankful for, but suffice it to say that even in a year like this, it’s still quite a long list, when I really put some thought into it.
Stay safe, folks. Please don’t take unnecessary trips and please oh please oh please, keep your masks on. It looks like we might very well get through this all right, but if this pandemic is a baseball game, we’re only in the bottom of the fifth. Let’s play the whole nine innings, folks.
If you’re wondering what I’ve been up to in terms of writing of late, here’s what! I’m doing some revision work on Stardancer, The Wisdomfold Path, and Amongst the Stars as part of a relaunch effort, at the same time that I’m getting The Savior Worlds ready for release. Yay! New stuff!
What’s new in the first three books? I’m adding a “Dramatis Personae” to each book, and each volume after Stardancer will have a brief “Our Story Thus Far” summation of the story to that point. I’m also redoing the interiors with some new fonts, and I’m redoing the covers. Watch this space (or the Official Site) for more info as it comes along!
First off, I think it’s high time I admitted that this series has morphed away from an exclusive focus on tone poems toward a general focus on whatever piece of classical music I’m grooving on at any point in time, so that’s what it’s going to be, even if I continue to call it “Tone Poem Tuesday” for reasons of alliterative nature (and the fact that I don’t really feel like launching a new posting series with new title). OK? OK!
So, naturally, let’s turn our attention to a piano concerto.
Florence Price, a Black composer who lived from 1887 to 1953, has appeared a number of times in this space over the last several months, and when 2020 is over, I wonder if her music might not be the finest musical discovery I make this year. Every work of hers I hear is vibrant and full of drama and color, and this concerto is no exception. It is lush and romantic in its orchestration, but distinctly Black in its musical language and its thematic material.
The work is in a single movement that nevertheless has three distinct sections within: the big first “movement”, the slow second movement, and a spritely third. We open with a solo trumpet sounding the first notes of what will be the first section’s main theme, a tune that is redolent of a spiritual, and that theme does in fact dominate a movement that is as big and bold in its statements as any great Romantic concerto. Then, in the slow movement, there is another gorgeous melody with a strong folk-like character (its pentatonic nature makes it even sound less moored in a specific time and place), before the final dance-like allegretto begins. It sounds like ragtime to me, but on reading a bit, apparently the finale is based on the juba, a specific dance from the plantations that predated ragtime.
Price’s concerto is one of the most delightful things I’ve heard all year, and I’ve heard a lot of delightful music this year. There is sweep and energy and emotion and lyricism and, in the end, a compellingly rhythmic dance that leaves the toe tapping, if I may invoke a rather tired cliche.
And it does all this in roughly eighteen minutes. Florence Price does something wonderfully economical here.
The work was performed in the early 1930s, with Price herself as the soloist, but unfortunately it appears to have utterly disappeared since then, until apparently in 2012 a composer named Trevor Weston was commissioned to recreate the work based on orchestral parts. Price’s own autograph score is long lost. Once again I am struck by how tenuous our grip truly is on the artistic work of our forebears.
Here is the Concerto in One Movement by Florence Price. Please give it a listen! And really, give it at least two. It deserves it.
A quite lovely article appears in The Buffalo News by Jeff Miers, describing his struggle with the degree to which the COVID pandemic has disrupted his lifestyle. It’s not just his leisure that’s affected; it is literally his entire life. Miers writes about music and the arts for the News, and with a beat like that, he’s required to be out in the city almost all the time, interacting with music and art and musicians and artists. This has been his life for decades, and now, all of a sudden, he’s been forced to…stay at home.
The Wife and I often comment that it’s strange how this particular pandemic has basically forced so many other people into our lifestyles: we don’t go out a lot at all, and when we do it’s mainly to eat someplace, so getting takeout is just fine with us. My trips out by myself tend to be solo trips to the library, or jaunts to a local park to walk The Dee-oh-gee in solitude. We simply don’t find ourselves often in situations that involve lots of people are in social situations. But our lifestyle isn’t the only lifestyle, and Mr. Miers (who is, by the way, quite a fine writer whose work I usually enjoy) had felt the pinch very keenly:
After months of telling myself that I was far too fortunate to demand such a luxury, I finally admitted that I needed some help, that the ways in which I warded off depression and anxiety in the past – all of them involving music – were no longer enough. I began seeing a mental health therapist, virtually. She immediately pointed out that, in addition to the difficult situation with my parents, I was also quite likely in a state of shock resulting from a core feature of my existence – the live music experience, which has occupied my time an average of five nights a week for 30 years – being ripped away. Allowing myself to admit this, and to mourn it, in a sense, has helped me greatly.
In the course of his article he notes how he discovered that his son’s girlfriend is actually the granddaughter of a noted jazz musician named Roosevelt Wardell. I found an album of Wardell’s on YouTube, and though I am no expert on jazz by any means, I greatly enjoyed it! This record is quite a compelling listen. You never know which direction art will take in reaching us. Some guy asks a girl out, introduces her to his parents; Dad turns out to be a local writer who mentions her grandfather in a newspaper article, and now I’m listening to a jazz record.
Fifty-seven years since President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I’m surprised to note that I’ve never written a long piece about Oliver Stone’s film JFK, and it’s been so long since I last saw it that I don’t want to try to write one now; maybe next year, after a rewatch. For now, here’s my review of Stephen King’s amazing novel 11/22/63, and here is John Williams conducting a suite of his music for Stone’s film.
I wonder what kind of America would have emerged from the 1960s had Kennedy not been murdered.
The Moon put on a show at the very end of last month. Here’s a bit of how it looked from my backyard.
That last is of the Moon and Mars, visible as the bright light off to the right. (The green is just a photographic accident…or maybe the mythical “Green Flash”, meaning that some sailor has returned from Davy Jones’s Locker to the world of the living…but more likely the first thing.)
