Without context
Bad Joke Friday
Something for Thursday
Tone Poem Tuesday
Antonin Dvorak wrote this work, The Noon Witch, after his return to Europe from the United States. It is a musical telling of a horrible story:
A mother warns her son that if he does not behave she will summon the Noon Witch to take him away. He does not behave, and the witch arrives at the stroke of noon. The witch, described as a horrible creature, demands the child. The mother, terrified that the witch has actually come, grabs her son, and the witch begins chasing them. Finally the mother faints, grasping her child. Later that day, the father arrives home, and finds his wife passed out with the dead body of their son in her arms. The mother had accidentally smothered their son while protecting him from the witch. The story ends with the father’s lament over the terrible event.
Yikes!
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Symphony Saturday
The American composers of the Romantic era are an interesting bunch, because they exist in a kind of musical purgatory. Their music is not heard much, mainly because it’s all pretty firmly ensconced in the European symphonic tradition, and thus isn’t terribly interesting in any nationalistic sense. But a lot of their music is still quite good, and the trouble with musical purgatory — especially as time passes — is that it captures works that might not rank with the greatest masterpieces, but which also don’t deserve the sad obscurity that awaits most works of art.
This symphony popped up as a recommendation for me on YouTube a while back. I had never heard of John Knowles Paine before that moment, and I listened to his Symphony No. 1 on a whim and found it quite pleasing, muscular and dramatic and at times very lyrical. The knock on the American music of the time — that it is too essentially European — is in evidence here, quite strongly. There is nothing about this symphony that sounds the least bit uniquely “American”, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad, just that the American voice had not developed yet into its own sound. That would not happen until the early 20th century, when jazz finally came along. Instead, the work should be heard as a fine piece in the Brahmsian tradition (Paine was almost an exact contemporary of Brahms).
Here is John Knowles Paine’s Symphony No. 1 in C-minor.
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Bad Joke Friday
Something for Thursday
When things collapse….
This past weekend was…an adventure.
The groundwork started the previous weekend, when a large puddle formed at the corner of our street and the street that leads to it. It had rained a bit that weekend, so I didn’t think anything of the puddle, except it persisted all week, through dry days. Never shrinking. Just…there.
Turns out it was a water main break.
I got home from work Friday afternoon to no running water as the crews were starting the repair right then. I don’t know what made them choose Friday night, but I’m guessing that something happened which forced their hand. So no water that night, which wasn’t a huge imposition (we keep water bottles filled and have jugs of water on hand at all times), except that I couldn’t shower. I shower after work, not before, because the nature of my job doesn’t always leave me particularly clean. Plus, showering after the job helps me make the mental switch from Day Job Me to Writer and Homebody Me.
But Friday? No water until 10:00pm, so no shower. No big deal, really; I figured I’d just shower Saturday morning, after The Wife showered and went to work and I got the dee-oh-gee’s walked. Fine.
Except The Wife leaves and calls me from the road, two minutes later. The water main is now broken again, and impressively so: it’s making a little geyser and flooding the street in ankle-deep water.
Ayup.
A cop is already there. Within minutes a Water Authority guy is also there, and within the hour the water is back off and the crews are working. This time there are even more big machines and big trucks involved, and the water doesn’t get turned back on until between 5:30 and 6:00. Again, not a gigantic deal, except that I was now two days removed from my most recent shower, which led me to conclude that I should not attend the work party that had been scheduled for that afternoon.
That sucked. But, the water was back.
Onward to Sunday. Hiking at Hunter’s Creek Park with Dee-oh-gee 1.0. Pretty autumn day, nice colors, warm weather if a bit windy.
But later on that day? A wind and thunderstorm barreled through, knocking out power to Casa Jaquandor (among a LOT of others).
For seven hours.
Yuck.
The worst part of this was that our power company’s website is supposed to post updates as to status of outages, with estimated restoration times, but they never posted any such information. Every street was listed as “assessing”, which they say means that they haven’t even figured out what work needs done.
This went on and on and on. At least I got some writing done by candlelight…
…but still, not fun. Especially when we discovered that our back-up sump pumps, which had been working fine, were now overwhelmed and our basement was starting to flood.
Luckily that’s when the power came back on and the main sump pump engaged and cleared the rest of the water pretty quickly.
Everybody lived and nothing was lost, but the entire weekend was, for the most part, one headache after another.
At least it’s over.
Harumph.