A new composer to me! And thus, hopefully, to you.
One of my favorite eras of “national” classical music is the English music of the 20th century, starting with Holst and Vaughan Williams and continuing on to Britten, William Walton, and others. To that roster I now add Ruth Gipps. (Provisionally, thus far. I’ve only listened to two pieces of hers, after YouTube Music suggested a new album of her work the other day.)
Gipps lived 1921 to 1999, and she had a full musical life in her years: she founded two orchestras, composed fairly prolifically, and taught extensively. Her impact on British musical culture was such that she was appointed an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for her work. And yet, her own compositions are mostly unknown. Perhaps this is because her style is Romantic and tonal in nature, and one cannot rule out simple sexism. Whatever the reason, Gipps’s work is only now starting to see some reappraisal, partly because of conductor Rumon Gamba’s ongoing series of recordings of her work.
This piece, the Coronation Procession, dates from 1953, several months before the official coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. It’s a fine work in a genre that has produced some stunning classics like the Elgar Pomp and Circumstance marches. Katherine Cooper of Presto Music writes:
It’s a little gem of a piece, relatively light on pomp and circumstance until the final stretch but brimming with colour, energy and excitement as Gipps evokes cavalry, fanfares and the poised elegance of the young queen with almost cinematic vividness. In lieu of the broad string themes which sit at the heart of similar works by Elgar and Walton, Gipps gives us a minor-key melody for her own instrument, the cor anglais (which features prominently in several works on the album) before the music swells to a suitably majestic climax as the Procession enters the Abbey.
If you read my 2024 wrap-up post–which if you didn’t, why not, and hey, it’s right here, go read it and come back!–you noted that I decided to defer any photography in that post in favor of a separate one, because otherwise the original post would have become way too long. Well, it’s time, folks!
First, here are my favorite self-portraits of 2024. In a way, they do all look kinda similar, I must admit….
Charles Burchfield Nature and Art Center
Orchard Park Railroad Station
Chestnut Ridge Park
Overalls look cool from the back, too!
My “Renaissance Faire” fit for 2024!
Now, more general photos. But first, how did 2024 go for me, photographically? I think it went very, very well. I can only remember one or two outings that didn’t go terribly well, and that’s because the light on each venture was…disappointing. That’s to be expected, honestly, and I’m still trying to figure out my approach here. Some photographers won’t even venture out if the light isn’t great, while I am definitely more tilted currently toward “Meh, go out anyway, maybe you get an image or two you can do something with, and even failing that, being out is its own reward.” Honestly it’s not the light that tends to dissuade me from going out, it’s the weather. I can’t really be out shooting a lot if there’s precipitation (Miranda, my Lumix FZ1000ii, has no weather-sealing), and if it’s extremely cold or very windy, it just isn’t pleasant.
I’ve most definitely become more skilled with the technical aspects of photography, which was the whole goal all along when I bought Miranda in the first place. I’m learning more and more about composition and exposure, and just what all those dials and buttons on the camera actually do. And the upshot of that is learning to make better photographs, now that I’m finally to the point of having a solid foundation of the techniques involved. For a while, any really good photos I got were more a matter of luck than anything else, but now I’m starting to be able to visualize and compose my shots before I ever aim the camera.
Another couple years, and I think I’ll be able to start getting really good at this!
(I think I will write a longer-form exploration of my year in photography on the Substack.)
Anyway, here’s a short selection of my favorite photos from 2024. I went through all of my photos from last year and picked out a whole bunch of favorites which I gathered into this Flickr album, for a total of 50-some shots. (Maybe 49 or 50, and then add in the self-pics above.) I’m not reproducing all of those photos here, because who wants to scroll through 50 photos, but these are representative. And at bottom is my favorite shot of the entire year. All of these were edited either with Snapseed (for photos taken on my phone) or Lightroom (for photos taken on Miranda…I also started shooting RAW in 2024).
Here we go! I’m going to group these by photography genre.
Nature/Landscape/Wildlife
I’m not sure what I’d call myself when it comes to these three related, but distinct, genres. I think “Nature” is probably the best descriptive term to what I do, because, well, I shoot anything and everything that captures my eye. I’m just as likely to seek out and shoot a spectacular vista as I am to capture a small waterfall on a stream in the woods that’s not even big enough to have a name on the map. As far as wildlife goes, I like shooting it–but I don’t have anywhere near the right equipment to really get into making wildlife photos, and I also don’t have anywhere near the knowledge the good wildlife photographers need. All of my best wildlife shots to date are birds, and they’re almost exclusively of birds taken near local waterways where there’s lots of people and walking paths and boats. Why is that? Because the birds who hang out in such places generally aren’t terrified of humans and are easier to predict and photograph.
You’ll also notice throughout, in many of my genres, that “People walking away from me” is a common thread. I suspect this is all part-and-parcel of my fascination with street photography and my slow progress at it…but more on that below.
Chestnut Ridge
Chestnut Ridge. This waterfall is very small; the total drop is probably all of three or four feet.
Pure luck! I barely registered that a bird was flying over, so I aimed Miranda and hit the shutter. I didn’t realize it was an eagle until I got home and reviewed that day’s shots on my computer.
A strong contender for my favorite shot of the year. I learned some stuff in making this one. I may discuss it in a video!
It’s amazing to me that I owned Miranda for about 15 months before I ever ventured up to Niagara Falls with her.
Golden hour at the Outer Harbor. I took a lot of good bird-in-flight shots that evening.
Streetscapes/Infrastructure
My favorite genre may well be what’s called “Street Photography”, though I’m still not entirely sure what qualifies as street photography and what does not. Does street photography require people to be present? Does it have to be an urban setting? Is it all candid, or can it sometimes be posed or at least prompted? I’m honestly not sure. I love photographing people doing interesting things, but I also love photographing buildings and architecture and roads and also infrastructure; the way things are made tends to fascinate me. So, all of this falls under that general view. My personal preferred term is Streetscapes, because it echoes Landscapes and because I think it generally sounds a bit more inclusive than Street photography.
Umbrella mobile at the Botanical Gardens.
Woman with phone, Highland Park, Rochester, NY. Taken during the Lilac Festival. She was sitting here talking into her phone. I don’t have any idea if she was on a call or recording a Tiktok or what. I like photographing people doing things. Doesn’t matter if I know what they’re doing.
Person walking along the Outer Harbor. I like the giant grain elevator as backdrop. Also, this photo was my first test-case for Lightroom’s “Remove objects” tool. Originally there were two big, ugly garbage cans marring the shot. Not there aren’t!
Acrobatics at the Sterling Renaissance Festival
Below a power-line tower, looking straight up.
Buffalo Metro Rail train arriving at the station. This is inspired by Kenneth Hines Jr., a favorite photographer and content creator online. He loves subways and public transport and trains and he always takes wonderful photos of trains in motion (or not).
The Giacomo, Niagara Falls, NY
Underside of the observation platform, Niagara Falls State Park, NY
Candid, through foliage. I’ve been practicing my framing skills.
Grain elevator at golden hour. I’m telling you, folks, Buffalo has some of the best sunsets anywhere.
Finally, you gotta get the dogs, because…dogs.
(Dogs are also great practice for wildlife action photography, especially for working with shutter speed and using burst-mode!)
Big stretch!
And here, finally, is my favorite photo of the year. I thought it would be harder to choose, but for some reason, this one just registers with me. I love that I was able to capture this…even if I may have done something slightly, um, less-than-legal to do it.
What happened was this: I spent a Sunday morning shooting at the Buffalo Outer Harbor, but then when I was done, I decided to venture into the city just to see if I could find any inspiration. So I turned onto NY 5 heading east, which in this case takes you up and over the Buffalo Skyway, a big concrete bridge that crosses the Buffalo River and the ship canal area before descending again into downtown. (There’s been a lot of debate in recent years about whether or not the Skyway should be demolished, since it theoretically hurts waterfront development to have this big bridge towering over everything. I personally think that of all the problems facing Buffalo that one is really far down the list, and anyway, I like the drive over the bridge.)
The light that day wasn’t terrific, but I had a nice clear view of downtown looming ahead of me…and a glance at the rear-view mirror revealed that there was literally nobody behind me for at least half a mile. And also, I had not turned off Miranda, so the plan was simple: slow to a crawl on the skyway, grab Miranda and snap a photo of Downtown Buffalo, and then resume acting, well, normal.
It went off perfectly. A bit of processing in Lightroom later, and voila:
Downtown Buffalo, NY, as seen from the apex of the Buffalo Skyway.
Yes, it was a really good year for me and my camera. Here’s hoping for even better returns in 2025!
(Every year now, social media around the 716 lights up on the anniversary of the Bills-Oilers wildcard playoff game in January 1993, almost always simply called “The Comeback Game”. I wrote these thoughts a couple years ago when that record comeback was finally exceeded. I’ve been thinking a lot, more recently, about the degree to which numbers have taken over sport discourse in this country, and some of these thoughts might be pertinent to the current “race” for the NFL MVP award.)
From The West Wing, Season Three, “Stirred”:
VICE-PRESIDENT HOYNES: I heard you had Caps tickets.
SAM: Yes, sir.
HOYNES: How was the game?
SAM: Not very good.
HOYNES: Have you ever seen a good hockey game?
SAM: No.
HOYNES: Me neither. I love sports, I just can’t get next to hockey. See, I think Americans like to savor situations: One down, bottom of the ninth, one run game, first and third, left handed batter, right hand reliever, infield at double play depth, here’s the pitch. But scoring in hockey seems to come out of nowhere! The play-by-play guy is always shocked. “LePeiter passes to Huckenchuck who skates past the blue line. Huckenchuck, of course, was traded from Winnipeg for a case of Labatts after sitting out last season with–Oh my God, he scores!”
A warning for those who don’t care about football: Football blathering ahead!
In the Wild-Card weekend following the 1992 NFL season, the Buffalo Bills famously fell behind by 32 points, 35-3, to the Houston Oilers before coming back to eventually win the game in overtime, 41-38. The comeback was the greatest in NFL history…until just a few weeks ago, when the Minnesota Vikings fell behind 33-0 to the Indianapolis Colts before coming back to win, 39-36. So the Vikings now hold the record for the greatest NFL comeback of all time.
But…do they?
Well, obviously in one very key sense, yes, they do. The numbers don’t lie: a 33-point deficit is greater than a 32-point deficit. And much of the “debate” that followed as to whether this was really the greatest comeback of all time centered on Buffalo fans who just don’t want what’s probably their franchise’s greatest singular on-field accomplishment erased. That’s the problem with records like that: every record can be erased, or pushed to second place, eventually. Championships are forever, but records are transitory, and a record that stands for 30 years before being pushed to second place is still the second-place record. So yeah, I get it.
But…that’s a pretty starkly numerical way of looking at things, isn’t it?
You can’t escape numbers in sports. Numbers are bound up in sports. They are inescapable…probably because numbers are inescapable in life, but really, numbers are sometimes everything in sports. Tom Brady’s 7 Super Bowl rings, Nolan Ryan’s 7 no-hitters. Ted Williams, last guy to hit .400. The idea then shapes out that numbers, more than anything else, tell us everything about what happens on the field. I remember quoting Fox Mulder from The X-Files a while back, talking about how he can look up a fifty-year-old box score in a yellowing newspaper and know exactly what happened on the field that day, all because of the numbers captured in that box score.
But…can he?
I mean, he can, to a certain degree. But the numbers don’t tell everything.
You can’t look at a box score and tell how blue the sky was that day, or what it smelled like in the park because maybe the breeze was coming from the lake or the industrial park the other way (in Buffalo, with the cereal plants downtown, it often smells of Cheerios). A box score won’t tell you how scuffed up the first baseman’s jersey is after several close plays, or how the catcher is still trying to work off the gimpy ankle from that play at the plate last Tuesday night. The box score won’t tell you the crowd’s mood: Are they giddy and jubilant, or are they kind of grumblingly negative because the team’s having a rough season and they’re sarcastically cheering the guy hitting .197 who just managed to leg out a weak grounder safely to first?
The box score won’t tell you if the players are attacking an early season game with vigor, or if they are visibly just playing out the last few weeks of the schedule, mired in fifth place and just wanting nothing more than to go home and rest for about a month. The box score will tell you that a particular player homered in the sixth, but it won’t tell you that he was on a hot streak and he came up against a tiring pitcher who probably should have already been pulled and who had of late been surrendering homers to right-handed hitters at a surprising rate for a guy who, up to a few weeks before, had been almost unhittable.
Numbers are great and important and useful…but they are also a flattening force, a force that tends to flatten out story. A baseball player who collects more than 3000 career hits is almost guaranteed a spot in the Hall of Fame…but is that all that player does? All I really know about Robin Yount is that he hat 3000 hits in his career. That’s numbers: for me they reduce a Hall of Fame player to a guy who had roughly 150 hits a year over his 20-year career.
But, what if I ask a person who has been a Milwaukee Brewers fan their whole life, “Hey! Tell me about Robin Yount?” Then, I’m not going to hear about 3000 hits. Then, I’m going to hear stories.
Sport isn’t just numbers, it’s also stories. I think that’s why we follow sport so adamantly as a species–well, partly, anyway. I don’t want to discount numbers, after all. But numbers aren’t the whole story.
This suggests to me that there’s another kind of greatness at play here, when we talk about “Greatest Comebacks”: situational greatness, we can call it. Or storytelling greatness? The New England Patriots trailed the Atlanta Falcons 28-3 a few years back in the Super Bowl–and they came back to win it. That’s a 25-point comeback, still a full touchdown “less” than the Bills’ against the Oilers…but 25 points down in the Super Bowl? You have to give that some special consideration, I think, because comebacks just don’t happen in the Super Bowl. The previous record for biggest comeback in a Super Bowl had only been 10 points. That means something.
And it also means something that the Bills’ comeback against the Oilers was a playoff game, at home, after a season that had been a bit of a struggle, when the Bills were banged up and missing several starters (including their quarterback and running back), and had been beaten soundly just the week before by that very same Oilers team. The Vikings’ comeback? A regular season game, at home, relatively healthy, against one the worst teams in the NFL that built its lead on a pile of field goals. The box score will tell you the Vikings overcame the biggest numerical point deficit in an NFL game to date. The box score won’t tell you the other stuff, and the other stuff is what we talk about when we sit over a beer and discuss old sports memories.
So. Is the Vikings comeback the greatest in history? Numerically, yes. Absolutely. Thirty-three points is more than thirty-two points.
But I doubt as many people will still be talking about that game thirty years from now as are still talking about that game in January 1993 when a backup quarterback erased a 32-point deficit in a playoff game.
(Credit for West Wing quote. Disclaimer: I do not endorse the fictional Vice President’s opinion of hockey.)
“Self Portrait”, Ann Clark. Tufted wool, cotton, and silk.
Across the street from the Buffalo AKG Museum stands the Burchfield Penney Art Center. This is a museum dedicated to the works of Charles Burchfield and the WNY art community in general. We finally visited this lovely museum for the first time several weeks ago.
This feature was hibernating through December, what with the Daily Dose of Christmas, but we’re back now! We’ll start with observing the bicentennial of German composer Anton Bruckner, who was born in 1824.
So yeah, we missed it. Oops.
I like Bruckner, but I’ve never fully entered his sound world beyond listening to his symphonies here and there. Bruckner wrote massive symphonies, some of which exceed an hour of length, and his sound is such that it often sounds as if he really intended to write for the organ rather than the orchestra. In fact, his writing for organ (he was a professional organist himself for a time) influenced his approach to orchestration, to the point that each of his symphonies is written for almost an identical complement of orchestra musicians, and none call for vocal input in any way.
Bruckner was a deeply spiritual man who wrote a good deal of sacred music in addition to the symphonies that make up the most famous part of his output. His general sound has been described as “Cathedral-like”, and though he was a deep admirer of Richard Wagner, there really isn’t much direct influence to be found. However, hearing Wagner provided Bruckner the inspiration he needed to work much more seriously at his own composing, after which his own work flowered. Bruckner enjoyed little success as a composer during his life, but his stature climbed greatly after his passing.
Today, Bruckner can be a “take him or leave him” kind of composer. For some, his works are simply too long-winded, with too little inspiration to sustain them, for enjoyable listening. I personally find his symphonies highly enjoyable, but it takes a special mood. Anton Bruckner, alas, is not for me in terms of every day listening.
Hardly all of his work is towering organ-like symphonies, though. He wrote a great deal of sacred vocal music, and that’s what I’m featuring today. This is a motet called “Locus Iste”, which Bruckner wrote for the dedication of a new cathedral in Linz, Austria. Listening to this, it’s not hard at all to hear the line connecting Bruckner to earlier sacred music masters like Bach, and even farther beyond. The motet is, after all, one of the oldest forms in Western music.
A poem by JRR Tolkien. This appears in The Fellowship of the Ring, recited by Bilbo just after he has given Frodo his old sword and his old shirt of mithril. Remember that when Bilbo left The Shire, early in the book, it was in hopes of venturing far and wide again, perhaps as far as Laketown and the Lonely Mountain again, places he had visited in his earlier adventures. But once he was past the influence of the One Ring, all of his accumulated years caught up with him and he lived out most of his old age as a guest in Rivendell.
This poem speaks to me a little more each time I encounter it, and I consider this any time anyone questions JRRT’s skill as a writer.
