This week for the ongoing Song Challenge we have A song that makes me happy. Here’s one of my all-time go-to songs for getting out of a bad mood, “Dreams” by Van Halen!
Something for Thursday
Tone Poem Tuesday
A toast to Edgar A
Today is Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday.
It’s pure coincidence, of course, but a happy one nonetheless, that today I also managed to get the ebook of The Chilling Killing Wind finally available. Poe’s poem Annabel Lee is central to this book’s story, after all. Poe has been one of my favorite poets ever since high school. There’s just no getting over him.
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Something for Thursday
So this week in our ongoing Music Challenge brings us to Entry Seven: A song to drive to. There’s a lot of great driving music out there, but I always find that the James Bond movies provide a virtual encyclopedia of music that you can play while driving. Even moreso if you’re someplace where you’re able to drive fast.
Here’s one of the series’s two purely instrumental themes, and one of my absolute favorite movie themes of all time. And, I might add, incredibly fun to blast while driving. It’s the theme from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Here’s something interesting, not for how good it is but rather how good it isn’t. This concert overture, creatively titled by its composer “Concert Overture #1,” is a student work that makes for a nice and pleasant listen, but that’s about it. There’s no hint at all here of greatness to come from the composer, none of deeper musical thought at work. If this piece represented the height of its composer’s powers, that composer would be a forgotten name today.
However, this particular composer turned out to be a bit of a late-bloomer, and by the time his true abilities actually did manifest themselves, this composer ended up not only being one of the immortal greats of music, but the dominant force of Western artistic life in the second half of the 19th century. Not bad for a late-blooming Richard Wagner, eh?
Here’s Wagner’s Concert Overture No. 1. It’s a pleasant-enough work with some Beethovenian influence, and not a hint of Rheingold or Tristan und Isolde to be found.
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Meanwhile…
The Watch
So on Christmas Eve we were all gathered in my parents’ living room, opening gifts. I went to open one particular box and I heard my sister say to my mother, “Oh look, he’s opening it.” So I knew that there was something of note therein.
What it was, was a pocket watch.
I took it out and admired it. It’s clearly an antique, and I was already fascinated by it. I own one other antique pocket watch, and two that aren’t antiques that I got from a “steampunk” dealer at a local con. This one is bigger than the antique watch I already own, and it’s a hefty one too. I could tell that at some point it was lovingly restored. I figured that my sister, who has an eye for such things and does a lot of antiquing, had spotted it in some emporium or curio shoppe someplace…or that maybe my mother spotted it somewhere.
Little did I know that it belonged to my grandfather.
My father’s father was a bricklayer by trade, and he fought in World War I. Apparently he joined the war effort as a way of getting out of his tiny town in the hills of Southwestern Pennsylvania, where his only option for the future would have been to work in the coal mines. I know very little about him save those things, and that he dealt with a broken window in their house by not replacing the window but by building a fireplace. I never knew him. He died in 1949, when my father was only ten, twenty-two years before I was to come along. (I never knew my maternal grandfather, either, and both of my grandmothers died the winter of 1986-87, so I am to this day bewildered by people who live into their adulthood and beyond with multiple grandparents alive.)
I have no idea how Grandpa Sedinger (what would I have called him?) met Grammy (that’s what we called my father’s mother; my mother’s mother was Gramma) or how they courted or when they married. I have no idea how they came to live in a brick house in Pittsburgh, or much of anything else. Nor did I know, until the moment I took it out of the box, that he had owned a pocket watch by the Hamilton Watch Company. But as soon as I learned of the watch’s heritage, I couldn’t help staring at it just a few moments longer. An old thing, that watch, and it spent however many years in the pocket of a man I never knew but whose influence I must have felt daily.
I don’t carry that watch with me–it’s too much of a treasure, really. (A bit of an irony, that, given that a common feature of many of the pairs of overalls I own is a pocket just for pocket watches and a slot for the chain and fob.) It hangs on my desk, ticking away the hours, a comforting presence as I write. My mother picked up a neat stand for it on one of her trips to Europe (Florence, Italy, this time), and there it rests. Funny thing, time–a device used to measure it marks it in more ways than just its comforting ticking.
Nice to meet you, Grandpa.
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Something for Thursday
Tone Poem Tuesday
Last night we finally watched this year’s New Years From Vienna concert, a new year tradition of mine that dates back to high school when I discovered this wonderful annual program on PBS. We used to watch it on New Years Night, but now we wait a day or two until it becomes available for streaming on the PBS website and then watch it in the comfort of our own bed, usually with an open bottle of something sparkling. (This year it was hard cider, but sparkling is a must.)
Vienna’s New Years concert always features the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performing works by the Strauss family, with occasional pieces by other contemporary composers of light music. The telecast always features brief looks at Viennese history and art and architecture, and each year at least two or three of the performed works accompany a performance by dancers from the Vienna Ballet. If you’ve never seen it, I can’t recommend it highly enough: it’s always a bit of music effervescence to bring in the New Year.
This piece, the overture to Johann Strauss’s operetta The Gypsy Baron, opened this year’s program. Now, this performance is actually from the 1992 concert, hence the more dated appearance. Today’s VPO is noticeably younger and also less male than the VPO of yore, but this music still runs through the blood of Vienna. Here, from 1992, is The Gypsy Baron overture. (Note, also, conductor Carlos Kleiber’s somewhat wild range of movement!)