OK, it’s the 26th, which means I’m out of scheduled posts. I want to post something but I’m still too jetlagged, two days after arriving home, to really come up with something coherent (the reason why will be a post of its own), so here’s what I’m going to post: a randomly selected concerto.
I will be using random.org to roll a die. The results will determine our concerto for today.
Roll One: A violin or a piano concerto? Odd numbers: violin; even numbers: piano.
The roll: 2
A piano concerto it is!
Roll Two: A major-key or a minor-key concerto? Odd numbers: major, even numbers: minor.
The roll: 5
A minor-key piano concerto it is!
OK, now the meat of it: what composer shall we hear? I’m going to pick twelve composers who have all written minor-key piano concertos, using this Wikipedia page as my source. Then I will switch from random.org to Google’s dice roller gadget (just search “dice roller” and it comes right up) to roll a d12 to determine our composer. OK? OK!
Here are our composers (this could get awkward if it turns out I can’t find the resulting concerto on YouTube, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it):
Beethoven
Amy Beach
MacDowell
Rachmaninoff
Chopin
Glazunov
Balakirev
Dvorak
Tchaikovsky
Schumann
Brahms
Saint-Saens
Some of these composers wrote more than one minor-key concerto…but first, let’s roll!
[clicks]
And…Glazunov!
OK, let’s see what we can find on YouTube…and, here it is. Enjoy the Concerto No. 1 in F minor for piano and orchestra, by Alexander Glazunov!
I have never heard this piece before, and in fact, as I write this I still haven’t, because I’m going to proceed with publishing this before I’ve even listened to the work at hand. That’s how I roll, y’all. I’ll give this a listen soon, but for now, I gotta go make more coffee.
It’s Christmas! May the day bring light and joy to you, whoever you are, wherever you are!
(I personally tend to associate Handel’s Messiah more with Easter than Christmas, but I’ve noticed the great oratorio making more of a Christmas presence in recent years. This particular performance is rather idiosyncratic, recorded in 1959 and conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. Musical purists would likely cringe at this now, were it to be offered as something new, because the work was re-orchestrated by Eugene Goosens, a friend of Beecham’s, who wanted to record a spectacular version of Handel’s work touched up for the modern symphony orchestra in the still-new “Hi-Fi” age. The result–a Messiah for gigantic forces, with percussion that Handel would never have actually employed–is absolutely contrary to the standards of fidelity to composers’ intent and constraints of the time period that we enjoy today, but even so, the Beecham Messiah is somehow a classic all on its own, by virtue of its excesses instead of in spite of them. Anyway, there it is.)
And finally, here’s one of my favorite Christmas hymns, performed in 2012 by the talented folks at my college’s main rival!
Oh, sorry…that has nothing at all to do with Christmas, does it? Sorry!
Another grab-bag post:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P14jxKY3Gy8
I went to college with this guy! Jim McDonough was obviously talented “way back when”, but he’s really made good on his talent and made a great musical life for himself. Here’s an entire special he did for Iowa Public Teevee:
And now, if you’re a believer, it’s that last cold night before something amazing dawned.
Let’s see what’s in the Christmas music (and whatnot) grab-bag today, shall we?
I just happened to be watching this when they did it on the air, sometime in the 90s. It lodged in my brain forever. I love this:
An entire album here. I’m slowly warming to the classical guitar. (Not that I was exactly “cold” to the classical guitar before, so maybe that’s not the way to put it…it just wasn’t ever a major part of my listening.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsu9GUU4tvQ
Another full album because I couldn’t pick a single song off here:
There’s no theme here…just songs and music and maybe something that’s not music at all. This will be the way of it for the balance of the season.
EDIT: One video has been removed because the uploader removed it. I’m guessing they didn’t like their video being embedded…and as I’ve no idea what it was at this point (I wrote and scheduled this post more than a week before it published), I’m not going to try and replicate it or find another source.
Only two days remain in our Hawaiian adventure. This morning we woke up for the first time to cloudy skies. Since gray skies tend to be the norm for Buffalo in winter–a season that I find beautiful in many ways, in ways that incorporate the gray skies, even though I have to admit that the gray gets to be too much at times–this almost feels like Hawaii is trying to prepare us for our return home.
Nice try, Paradise, but I’m not ready. Nine full days here will turn out to be many things, almost all of them wonderful, but they will not be ‘enough’.
OK, I hope this works…I’ve never tried embedding a playlist on WordPress before! If it does work, here is the score to the film The Nativity Story, with music my Mychael Danna. I have not seen the film, but the score is wonderful in its ethereal meditative beauty, and as you listen through it you’ll hear a number of Christmas songs and carols quoted throughout.
To justify the Jimmy Buffet reference, here’s the cheeseburger I had the other night.
Thanks, Maui Brewing Company! To paraphrase Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, “Mmmm! This WAS a tasty burger!”
And here I am, writing.
It turns out that Hawaii is not a cure for RBF, sadly….
Both of these things happened in Paradise.
Some writers are insistent about doing their work in their preferred environments–their home offices or libraries–but I’ve always been able to write just about anywhere I can plunk down with my computer for a while. I actually like having a bit of hubbub around me, and when I write at home I don’t like it to be too quiet: I’ll almost always have music going, and nowadays there is the wonderful world of soundscape videos on YouTube where you can actually pick some ambient sound to play in the background while you do stuff.
Of course, for ambient writing noise you can’t really beat the cries of sea birds, the lapping of the waves, and the voices of happy people on Hawaiian holiday.
I didn’t bring my laptop on this vacation because I just didn’t want to be that encumbered, which means a forced two-week break from drafting Forgotten Stars V: Spacecapades (not the actual title). I draft the new novels in Scrivener, and the laptop is the only device I have that can run Scrivener (until they come up with an Android version, that is), so for now, that book is out. I suppose I could write new material for that book in Google Docs and import it after the fact, but the formatting would be all screwed up and I don’t have the book in Google Docs to begin with. Plus, it’s my experience that at the lengths of book I tend to write, Google Docs tends to bog down.
So, what am I working on? I’m making a pass through an older manuscript that I haven’t looked at in a while: the supernatural thriller about a haunted kayaking expedition, that I had once dubbed Deliverance, eh? (Deliverance being an obvious reference to a canoe trip gone bad, and the eh? because the story takes place in Canada.) As part of my “Release a book every year” plan for as long as I can manage to pull that level of production off, this one’s set to be my 2022 release.
This book is definitely on the short side, for me: it tips the scales at roughly 85,000 words. Even so I can tell that this length makes Google Docs a bit sluggish. But the good part is that I don’t need my laptop for this! Using Google Docs for shorter work is a big reason why, last time I was in the market for a new tablet, I bought one with a Bluetooth keyboard:
Obligatory “pie in the face” wallpaper!It is a challenge scaling one’s position to a smaller keyboard, and at times I miss the keypad, and I have to remind myself that mouse functionality isn’t there. As always, overalls are the best uniform for writing.
(Those are older pics, by the way.)
I’m enjoying using this tablet a great deal! It’s a Samsung Galaxy Tab A, which I bought about a year and a half ago. Samsung devices do have their quirks, but I like the ecosystem and the easy connectivity of devices, and I love the cameras on their phones, so a Samsung fan I remain. (In fact, my next laptop will likely be a Samsung too! This after what will likely have been fifteen years as a Dell user.) Typing with the Blluetooth keyboard is a breeze, and blogging-on-the-go is very easy. I do have the WordPress app installed, but I prefer to use the actual site in my browser; a while back WordPress updated to a new content-management system that uses something called “blocks”, and I find it generally confusing to use so I’ve got a plug-in installed on the main WordPress site that lets me use the old interface. I can use the app, and I do on occasion, but I prefer this way of doing things.
Oddly, when I was still on Byzantium’s Shores, I had to use the Blogger site in the browser too, as opposed to the Blogger app, for a completely different reason: for whatever rationale the engineers chose, the Blogger app will only render in portrait mode, which makes blogging on the app while using the keyboard (and therefore landscape orientation) nearly impossible. This is likely under the assumption that the Blogger app would be used more on phones than tablets, but even so! Bluetooth keyboards are not that uncommon a tool, and and design choice that makes use more difficult is a bad choice indeed. I believe there are workarounds–maybe third-party apps that force reorientation–but I don’t want or need more stuff cluttering up my gizmos just so I can do the work I want to do. Of course, it’s not even an issue anymore since I’ve left Blogger behind, but still!
I know that the tech gods really want to get to a point where full-sized laptops are a thing of the past, but I wonder if they’re not slowly giving up on that dream and are instead blurring the line more and more between old-school laptop and tablet, with touchscreens that fold all the way around and the like. I’ll probably get to experience that myself with my next laptop (which will likely come sometime next year), but for now I don’t mind having multiple devices for different tasks. This tablet suits me nicely for smaller needs, and also for travel. And who knows? Now that I’m being bitten by the travel bug….
And as always, one doesn’t even need a nifty electronic device to get some work done! I may not be directly drafting Forgotten Stars V while on this trip, but I am getting some plotting done the old-fashioned way:
Pen and paper will never die!
Oh, and the actual title of Deliverance, eh? is–tentatively–The Jaws of Cerberus. The more you know!
And now, I wrap this up because as I write this I have to catch a bus to make a boat ride. It’s a tough life, I tell you!
I’m not saying this is my ideal writing set-up, but it is, as the kids say, “In the conversation”.
As I write this, I am scrambling to get all of these posts written and scheduled before we take flight; as you read this, we are traveling and (hopefully) having a great time in our tropical destination. So, that’s my way of saying that we’re now at the part of the program where this feature will mostly be repeats of old favorites of mine, and commentary will be…less.
That said, here is the original version of one of my favorite Christmas albums: The Many Moods of Christmas, with Robert Shaw conducting the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra and the Robert Shaw Chorale. When I say this is the original version of a favorite album, I am referring to the fact that Shaw and his chorale recorded this music twice: first with this album in the 1960s, and then later again, with the Atlanta Symphony, in the 1980s. This later recording is the one I own on CD someplace, but this is the original.
Victor Hely-Hutchison was a British composer whose music was well-known in his day but who is almost completely forgotten now, except for one piece: a collection of four chorale preludes, each based on a Christmas carol, that he titled A Carol Symphony. It’s one of the delightful listens to which I return each year.
And here it is!
Share This Post
ForgottenStars.net
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
