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 It’s not Tuesday. Sorry about that. But let’s give a listen to something our boy Jean Sibelius wrote in 1908: a tone poem called Night Ride and Sunrise. It’s quite an evocative piece, starting with a brief fanfare figure in the brass before settling into a rhythm that suggest hoofbeats along a dark road, the “Night Ride” of our title. It seems as if we’re going to be in for a long stretch without a melody, until one arises in the upper woodwinds, playing above the rhythmic pulse; this melody yearns and stretches and yet somehow manages to stay almostDown the rabbit hole….

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Here is my annual reposting of some things that pertain to Memorial Day. This particular year’s iteration of this day gives me pause to consider my sense that many of the things for which the men and women we honor today fought and died may be slowly, or quickly, passing into memory. I hope not…. First, a remembrance of a soldier I never knew. Fifteen years ago I wrote the following on Memorial Day, and I wanted to revisit it. It’s about the Vietnam Veteran whose name I remember, despite the fact that I had no relation to him andDown the rabbit hole….

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 Sorry to be so late with this! Crazy week here at Casa Jaquandor (nothing bad, just busy). Anyway, here’s something cool: the “official video” for Elton John’s classic song “Tiny Dancer”. The song dates from the 1970s, well before the notion of music videos, so this is a newer development: a short film that tracks several people through their daily lives in Los Angeles. One of my favorite uses of “Tiny Dancer” comes in the Cameron Crowe film Almost Famous, in which an underage teenage kid is using journalist credentials to tour with a rock band called Stillwater. The bandDown the rabbit hole….

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 Greek-born composer Nikolas Labrinakos has come to my attention recently. After growing up in Greece, he went to London to study music composition, eventually getting a Ph.D. from the University of Surrey. He is an active composer of both film music and concert music, and what I’ve heard of his is fascinating and atmospheric, displaying a gift for shimmering, evocative string writing. The present work, The Last of England, is a pastoral work in the tradition of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, and Gerald Finzi. The piece is inspired by the seascape of England’s southern shore, with itsDown the rabbit hole….

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 It’s almost June, so it’s just about time to retire the flannel shirts until maybe late September, but more likely, some time in October. When I was a kid, in third or fourth grade, my father decided that I needed to wear flannel shirts. At the time I did not understand this. I quite hated collared shirts as a kid, for whatever reason, so I took a rather instantaneous dislike to the flannel shirts that ended up in my closet. As I recall, they were new and stiff and scratchy, and all of that was on top of my already-establishDown the rabbit hole….

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 Here’s some recent reading I’ve done! I don’t have pictures of the covers, unfortunately. (Several of them I forgot to snapshot before I whisked them back to the library.) ::  Maybe you didn’t know that you needed a graphic novel about the Bronte sisters, their brother, and the imaginative life they lived in their youth, but you do need that graphic novel, and thankfully for you, it exists! It’s called Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontes, by Isabel Greenberg. Apparently in their younger years, the Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) and their brother Branwell passed the timeDown the rabbit hole….

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 French composer Emmanual Chabrier isn’t much known these days, but he is represented in the standard repertoire by his intoxicating dance Espana. That work is one of the most compulsively joyful in its bright orchestrations, sparkling melodies, and effervescent rhythms in the entire classical music canon. This piece, from one of Chabrier’s less-performed operas (and none of his operas are often staged), is cut from the same cloth as Espana, being a five-minute burst of energetic dance. From what I’ve read, Chabrier is a curious composer in that his work has never really cracked through into the mainstream of classicalDown the rabbit hole….