Today, a concerto: specifically, a trumpet concerto. This one was written by the great film composer John Williams, who has somehow over his incredibly busy years of scoring many films and maintaining a hectic conducting schedule managed to find time to compose concert works as well. The man is amazing. He just is!
This concerto is a strikingly dramatic work in a modernistic vein, and as is often the case with Williams’s concert works, the piece doesn’t have the ear-catching melodies that are almost always present in his film scores. This is not a criticism. In his concert music, Williams tends to let melody be more of an emergent thing than an obvious one; there is usually an improvisatory air to his concert music, which may spring from his days as a jazz pianist and a session musician before he fully transitioned to the life of a composer.
Williams’s Trumpet Concerto was written in 1996 for The Cleveland Orchestra and its principal trumpet, Michael Sachs. The work was premiered by Sachs and The Cleveland Orchestra on September 26, 1996, under the direction of then-Music Director Christoph von Dohnanyi. The debut of this significant addition to the trumpet repertoire garnered praise from the local press, with Donald Rosenberg of the Cleveland Plain Dealer noting the concerto’s “dignified personality, soloistic variety and orchestral color.”
Here is the Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra by John Williams. No Haydn concerto this, with a calm classical intro! The soloist is the first thing you hear, in starkly dramatic fashion.
Remembering this day those who lost their lives fighting in wars under the American flag. I make no attempt this day to adjudicate the justness of any of those wars; there are other days for that.
Every year on this date I listen to this song. It’s been done by many artists, so here it is by the Dropkick Murphys. This song is one of the best artistic meditations on the awful futility of war that I know, because those last words are so absolutely true: “It all happened again, and again, and again….” I don’t find a great deal of solace or even solemnity in Memorial Day, just a sadness that we keep coming back to this and that there will never, ever, be a Memorial Day when we can say, “Interesting, there are no new names to remember this time around.”
I’m also reminded of Lee Blessing’s play A Walk in the Woods, which dramatizes an event in the 1980s when two arms negotiators, one American and one Soviet, got frustrated with the lack of progress and wandered off to put together their own proposal, which was soundly rejected by both sides for being too realistic, I suppose. In that play, Blessing puts these words in the mouth of his Soviet negotiator:
“If mankind hated war, there would be millions of us, and only two soldiers.”
I fnd it hard to disagree with that sentiment.
Here are the Dropkick Murphys.
oh how do you do, young willy mcbride do you mind if i sit here down by your graveside and rest for a while in the warm summer sun i’ve been walking all day, and im nearly done and i see by your gravestone you were only nineteen when you joined the great fallen in 1916 well i hope you died quick and i hope you died clean oh willy mcbride, was is it slow and obscene
did they beat the drums slowly did the play the fife lowly did they sound the death march as they lowered you down did the band play the last post and chorus did the pipes play the flowers of the forest
and did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind in some loyal heart is your memory enshrined and though you died back in 1916 to that loyal heart you’re forever nineteen or are you a stranger without even a name forever enshrined behind some old glass pane in an old photograph torn, tattered, and stained and faded to yellow in a brown leather frame
did they beat the drums slowly did the play the fife lowly did they sound the death march as they lowered you down did the band play the last post and chorus did the pipes play the flowers of the forest
the sun shining down on these green fields of france the warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance the trenches have vanished long under the plow no gas, no barbed wire, no guns firing down but here in this graveyard that’s still no mans land the countless white crosses in mute witness stand till’ man’s blind indifference to his fellow man and a whole generation were butchered and damned
did they beat the drums slowly did the play the fife lowly did they sound the death march as they lowered you down did the band play the last post and chorus did the pipes play the flowers of the forest
and i can’t help but wonder oh willy mcbride do all those who lie here know why they died did you really believe them when they told you the cause did you really believe that this war would end wars well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame the killing and dying it was all done in vain oh willy mcbride it all happened again and again, and again, and again, and again
did they beat the drums slowly did the play the fife lowly did they sound the death march as they lowered you down did the band play the last post and chorus did the pipes play the flowers of the forest
I first heard this song when I first watched The Big Lebowski a number of years ago. I remember looking the song up and being surprised to learn that it was a Kenny Rogers song. It was recorded first by Jerry Lee Lewis, but later Rogers and his band the First Edition recorded it, in 1967. It’s barely recognizable as Kenny Rogers, actually: I’ve listened to this song a lot and I’ve found no hint of the guy who would later become a solo country act and sing about “The Gambler” and “Lucille”. It’s amazing how things can change, isn’t it?
Igor Stravinsky is not a composer i know terribly well, and honestly, that bothers me a bit. More than a bit, really. Stravinsky is considered to be the major bridge composer between the Romantic era and the Modern one. His art has its roots in the 19th century, but most of his work is fully conceived in the 20th, but it’s not generally as hard to crack, in my experience, as is the work of other Modernists like, say, Schoenberg, Berg, and later avant garde voices like Cage. Stravinsky worked in recognizable forms, for the most part, and his ballet music–perhaps his most famous and familiar works–represent some of the most starkly dramatic work for stage dance ever written. The Rite of Spring actually provoked a riot at its premiere, so there’s that.
Written for a ballet that was in turn based on Russian mythology and legend, The Firebird is one of Stravinsky’s most enduringly popular works. It comes fairly early in his career, and thus he was only just starting his life-long evolution into full-on Modernism. (Born in 1882, Stravinsky died roughly five months before I was born in 1971!) The Firebird tells its story with startlingly evocative orchestral writing, and it is by turns exotic and suggestive, weaving a spell with sonic imagery that borders on the purely impressionistic. While I don’t know Stravinsky well as a whole, The Firebird has endured in the repertoire for a reason.
Also popular is one of the three shorter orchestral suites Stravinsky culled from the pages of the entire ballet. This suite, the middle of the three, was put together by Stravinsky in 1919, and despite his later insistence that the score was riddled with errors, it it the 1919 suite that has endured of the three suites he created from the entire ballet. I do recommend the entire ballet; it’s only about 45 minutes long, which does make me wonder why Stravinsky felt the need for abridgements at all.
Some of the moodier music in The Firebird would later serve as partial inspiration for composer Cliff Eidelman, when he was tapped to score Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
There are times when people are using a particular implement to do a task, but they think they need to be helping it along. Lots of times we reject the idea that there’s a passive element in what we’re trying to accomplish. When I first used an angle grinder, the guy I was working with had to admonish me several times: “Don’t press on it! That thing’s whirling around at however many thousand RPMs, and you know it’s working because you can see all those sparks! Let the tool do the work!”
Huh.
I’ve heard similar sentiments from Gordon Ramsay, many times over the years as I’ve watched him on this or that cooking show, most of them competition shows featuring cooks who aren’t as experienced. They’re trying to cook this thing or that dish and they get a key component into the pan and then they start futzing with it. Moving it around. Flipping it a lot. Poking it. Prodding it. And Ramsay just says, “Use a hot pan, keep the pan hot, and let the pan do the work.”
Which brings to me to a beloved topic of mine that I haven’t written about much in a while: the ever-amazing, eternally-wonderful pie in the face.
Let the pie do the work, folks!
What on Earth am I talking about now?!
Well, here’s a video. This has been on YouTube for years, and every once in a while the YT algorithm serves it up to me. A woman lost a bet with someone on the Red Sox, and her fate for losing is to get a pie in her face. The pie is a big beautiful thing…but…well, here it is:
So, just from the image that defaults as the video’s cover, you’re probably already thinking that this is a fantastic pieing! Look at all that cream and crust splattering onto her shoulders and neckline. Surely her face is going to be delightfully plastered with a thick layer of whipped cream and (I think) chocolate pudding and chunks of crust. That would be a fair expectation, until you actually watch this guy’s delivery and see his error:
He doesn’t let the pie do the work!
All he has to do is plant the pie in her face, hold it there for a second or two, maybe give it a single partial twist, and then…step away. That’s it! Trust me, folks, a thick cream pie is a sticky affair. For at least the first few seconds, most of that whipped-creamy goodness is going to adhere to the victim’s face. If you need to, you can pull the tin off their face, if it sticks there and you didn’t pull it away when you delivered the pie, thus revealing her in all her pie-faced glory. At least, that’s what this guy should have done.
But…no.
He decides he’s going to help the pie, so he spends like fifteen whole seconds rubbing the tin around her face and, I don’t know, grinding the pie in there or something. I don’t know what he thinks he was accomplishing, but when he finally pulls the tin away, what has happened?
He has literally used the pie to wipe itself off her face!
Yup, by the time he’s done, her face isn’t delightfully covered with whipped cream and custard; instead her face is mainly slimy with some crust chunks on it. It’s terrible. Just terrible.
When you hit someone in the face with a pie, the second the pie’s forward momentum into their face is stopped, so is your job. Your work is done. Step back, admire, laugh, cheer, whatever. Let the pie do the work.
For some other helpful pointers, here’s a bit of instructional help from the old TBS Dinner and a Movie show. Remember that? When they’d show a movie but interspersed throughout was a comedy cooking show based on the movie of the evening? I have no idea what movie might have prompted them to include this, but this is all sage advice. Note that Paul Gilmartin, the male half of this duo (the other is Annabelle Gurwitch, on whom I may have nursed a small crush back in the day), actually says as much: “You don’t gotta knock me into the next kitchen. Just put it on there and let it do its work!”
Yeah, all of that. Let the pie do its work, people. (Unless you’re using a meringue pie, because for this purpose those are useless. Meringue will not stick to the face.)
Sunday Stealing is all about your bed! By the way, did you know that there’s a low-budget horror movie from 1977 that’s become a cult classic, and its title is Death Bed: The Bed That Eats? It’s about a bed that has been possessed by a demon and thus it literally eats people who sleep on it. So that’s fun! (You can watch it on YouTube, if you insist.)
Anyway, onto the questions, about bed stuff (it’s all G-rated, folks):
1. Let’s say your alarm wakes you up with music. What would be the worst song to hear first thing in the morning?
Honestly, I’m not sure. Sometimes the song has been something quiet and peaceful, which doesn’t really help. And I wouldn’t want to wake up to Toby Keith, for example…but there’s zero chance of that.
We did used to have the clock radio set to WNED, the local classical station, and WNED used to run the BBC’s news update at the top of every hour. So there were a few times we were awakened, if the alarm was set for 6am or some such thing, to a British person calmly reading news copy like “Authorities are still working to collect the bodies.”
2. How many pillows do you sleep with?
I use two while sleeping, and sometimes my head goes under the top one. I use a third, smaller pillow to prop my head for reading, but when I put the book side, off goes that pillow.
3. What size mattress do you sleep on?
Queen at home. When we’re staying in a hotel we try to get a King.
4. Do you always sleep on the same side of the bed?
Generally, yes…as you’re in the bed, I’m usually on the right side. We recently spent a weekend in Toronto and we had to flip, though, because the hotel room’s AC unit was blowing directly on The Wife, and she didn’t like that.
5. Do you make your bed every day?
I wouldn’t say we “make” the bed, but we do tidy it up a bit.
6. Do you keep water on your bedside table?
Yes, though I rarely actually drink out of it.
7. How often do you change your sheets?
Weekly? Biweekly? Honestly, I’m not sure.
8. What’s under your bed?
Stuff, dust, and cats.
9. Do you sleep in total darkness or do you like to have a light on?
I need light, but not much. A light in the hallway is fine, or the soft light from the humidifier. Total darkness freaks me out. I hate not being able to see anything. When we’re in hotels, I’ll leave enough of a gap between the thicker curtains to allow some light in, maybe just an inch-wide gap of light, during the night and in the morning.
10. What do you remember about your childhood bedroom?
Which one? We moved a lot…but when we settled in WNY, I had the upper part of a bunk bed, which gave me extra room down below. That was fun.
One memory from my youth that I’ve been kicking around is the day after my first date with this one girl in college. We had kinda-sorta met the previous weekend, and then I asked her out on an official date. We went to see Edward Scissorhands. (This was February 1991.) I didn’t know this girl at all well and I wasn’t terribly sure if the date went really well or just nicely enough, but it went well enough that I was hoping there would be another. Luckily, a mutual friend had already sought her out and picked her brain so she (the mutual friend, that is) could assure me that yes, this girl did in fact want another date. Securing a second date was, at that time, quite the accomplishment for me.
Six years and a few months later, we got married. Specifically, on this very date in 1997. Which means that today we are celebrating our 28th wedding anniversary. What are we doing? Errands! Going to the Farmers Market and maybe another produce market and returning some books to the library and dropping by our favorite bakery and then picking up a prescription or two, and then coming home to do laundry and walk dogs and later on we’ll have cheese for dinner and drink some adult beverages while watching a movie. Romantic? Yeah, absolutely. You kind of get to a point where everything’s romance, it’s all just at a low simmer, that’s all. (Except for times when it’s not!)
Twenty-eight years, wow. Oh, I think she just got up. I have to go make her morning coffee.
Drinks before tacos, Kensington Market, Toronto, April 2025Niagara Falls (Canadian side), April 2025Rochester Lilac Festival, Rochester, NY, May, 2025
2025: The Fallen
Remembering this day those who lost their lives fighting in wars under the American flag. I make no attempt this day to adjudicate the justness of any of those wars; there are other days for that.
(image credit)
Every year on this date I listen to this song. It’s been done by many artists, so here it is by the Dropkick Murphys. This song is one of the best artistic meditations on the awful futility of war that I know, because those last words are so absolutely true: “It all happened again, and again, and again….” I don’t find a great deal of solace or even solemnity in Memorial Day, just a sadness that we keep coming back to this and that there will never, ever, be a Memorial Day when we can say, “Interesting, there are no new names to remember this time around.”
I’m also reminded of Lee Blessing’s play A Walk in the Woods, which dramatizes an event in the 1980s when two arms negotiators, one American and one Soviet, got frustrated with the lack of progress and wandered off to put together their own proposal, which was soundly rejected by both sides for being too realistic, I suppose. In that play, Blessing puts these words in the mouth of his Soviet negotiator:
I fnd it hard to disagree with that sentiment.
Here are the Dropkick Murphys.