American classical music written prior to, say, Gershwin tends to not be terribly familiar to audiences, as much of what was written prior to that time was deeply indebted to European musical traditions; it took time for truly American musical idioms to emerge (such as jazz) and be incorporated into classical music. But one of the finer American 19th century composers was Edward MacDowell, whose music is still heard today. Here’s a solo piano piece of his, the “Scotch Poem”. I actually played this piece as a high school senior.
The lyric tune in the middle is lovely, but it’s also a bit clicheed, right down to the “Scotch snap” (a rhythmic device that is common to Scottish folk music). But still, an entertaining piece of music from an era of American classical music that tends to be underexplored.
This was the song The Wife and I chose for our first dance at our wedding reception, fifteen years ago today.
The weather that day was crappy — cold, rainy, and windy; days before, the Buffalo News had run a story indicating that the average temperatures to that point that May were on par with an average November’s. Oh, and I was hung over. Yeah, I hate to admit it, but I had indulged too much wine the night before. Oh well. There were parts of the ceremony where I really was thinking, “Wow, I wish I had a water bottle up here right now.”
We had our reception at a tiny Community Hall way up in the hills above Allegany, NY, in a community referred to by the locals as “Chipmunk”, even though that’s not any kind of official designation. Don’t look for Chipmunk on any map; you won’t find it. It’s a very rural road, with a cluster of houses and its own community center. But that was part of its charm. The food was catered by the people who ran our favorite local restaurant down there; they still run that restaurant, actually, but as we don’t live in that town anymore, we haven’t been there in many moons.
It turned out that our church organist, who would eventually play for our wedding, was a guy who came into the Pizza Hut where I worked at the time regularly with his family. It’s always weird when someone you know from one aspect of your life enters another aspect of it. Our pastor was the father of two guys I went to high school with and had known eight years prior. Again, funny how life circles back on itself.
For dinner, we had chicken. Which is fine. I like chicken. Having to stop every third bite to kiss the new Wife after some putz started the ‘tapping the wineglass with their fork’ thing got a bit old, I must admit. I don’t recall much else from the meal. The cake was good; we got it from a local supermarket. I like when local supermarkets do wedding cakes. No, we didn’t do that annoying cake-smashing thing. It may be surprising to hear that from a committed fan of the pie in the face, but I’ve never liked the wedding cake smashing thing. (We were married seven years before I’d finally get my first pie from her. Why so long? That’s a long story….)
The thing that made The Wife happiest, I think, was the cans and stuff tied to the back of my car. She loved the sound of that stuff rattling behind us, and I think she was disappointed when it all broke off fairly quickly. We spent our first night together at a local bed-and-breakfast…or maybe it was a hotel of some sort. Called the Century Manor, it’s a restaurant with a few rooms upstairs, in a very old building. When we went to take our respective showers, we had trouble figuring out the plumbing. There were pipes with handles going everywhere in that shower. By some trial and error I got water flowing. I have no idea how.
My new sister-in-law caught the bouquet, and my uncle Jerry caught the garter. After I had to throw it twice, because the first time, all the guys just stood there, hands in pockets, letting it fall to the ground. Heckuva job, guys.
There was no ‘family drama’ at my wedding…none whatsoever. There is some dysfunction in our extended clan (or rather, there was; most of those parties have now gone into the good night), but none of them attended, and thus our wedding was just what a wedding should be: a party out in the boonies with a bunch of smiling people, good food and beer inside, a bonfire outside, a DJ who did a pretty good job on the music, and two young people starting their lives together.
What has come since has been up and down; longtime readers and friends know that. We’ve been tested in ways that nobody should be tested, and yet, some people are. Did we pass the test? I’m not sure what ‘passing’ even means, in this metaphor, but I have this: we’re still together and I see zero chance of that changing. We both have regrets…but then, who doesn’t?
I wouldn’t trade a minute of these fifteen years for…well, that’s not entirely true. There are a few minutes we’ve had that I wouldn’t object to trading away for something better. But if I had to face those moments…I’m glad I faced them with her. Because I’m not sure I would have got through them otherwise. And the good moments? Well, those ones are pretty sweet.
Oh, and the day after our wedding? Mid-sixties and sunny. Bite me, weather gods!
Here’s a jaunty march that I got to perform one year at the Bristol Hills Music Camp. Marches don’t always have to be bombastic things; this one is more charming than anything else. It’s the March of the Belgian Paratroopers by Pierre Leemans.
I think we would all benefit greatly from an increase in the jauntiness of our daily lives!
They were chunky, clunky ships. They looked cool at first, since they looked like something that should fly, instead of the capsules and LEMs that had looked like distended tin cans or crumpled bits of tin foil. They looked, at first, like what you might think of when you thought “spaceship”.
But over time, they looked clunkier and clunkier. Their fragility became scarier and scarier, and two of them carried their crews to their deaths. An inevitability, that — we do not collectively flaunt danger without danger eventually exacting a price — but still, two of them ended their final flights in flame. They became something of a joke over time, a literal holdover of 1970s technology into the 1980s, then the 1990s, then the 2000s. Newer ships were promised; pretty pictures of potential newer ships were trotted out every so often. Presidents would show up, pay lip service to our destiny up there, and then go home. And yet, these clunky spaceships kept flying, until someone finally decided that they would fly no more.
And yet, there are no new ships. There will be again, someday…but not for a while. One day, someone will decide to take a slightly smaller step, but a much more giant leap. But for now, we look up and think, “We’ve gone far enough.” Really…what kind of human thought is that?
These ships are done, and none take their place. This saddens me greatly. I was no great lover of these ships, which were utilitarian and got the job done for longer than they should have. But they did a job, and now their voyages are done. I just wish it didn’t feel like the voyages were ending.
Godspeed, Columbia and Challenger; Godspeed, Enterprise (the one that never flew), Discovery, Endeavor, and Atlantis. Here is a selection of Bill Conti’s music from The Right Stuff.
Russian Romanticism in music appeals to me on nearly every elemental level of my being, so it’s always seemed odd to me that I tend to have a hit-or-miss reaction to the music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. There is some of his music that just leaves me kind of cold (the 1812 Overture); there’s other music of his that appeals to me on a basic level but leaves me wanting something with more substance (the Piano Concerto #1). And then…there is the music where he hits, and in these cases, the music has a startlingly deep emotional impact on me. The Nutcracker falls into this category, among others, but by far, my favorite work of Tchaikovsky’s is his Symphony #5.
Like many Russian symphonies, this one is cyclical, with melodies from the first movement returning for a glorious flowering in the final movement after appearing in insistent, almost unwelcome, form in the second and third. Lyricism triumphs throughout, but what always engages me in long Russian symphonies like this isn’t even so much the raw lyricism as the logic that is applied to it, a sense that the final triumph, long delayed, reaches a point in that fourth movement where you can just feel it pushing its way through.
Here is the entire Symphony No. 5 by Tchaikovsky, in a wonderful performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Once again I am struck by how Bernstein was so my kind of conductor. I hate it when conductors don’t look like the music they are conducting is making them feel anything; Bernstein shows that the music is making him feel everything.
I read a news story yesterday that put me in the mood for this (and now I’ll need to watch the movie one of these days): the launch scene from Apollo 13.
This is one of the most masterful sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie. It’s very kinetic, but every shot seems to lead into the next, and the utter thrill of such an event as launching a Saturn V rocket on a mission to the moon is perfectly juxtaposed with the calm, professional precision with which all these people do their jobs. This particular video omits one tiny detail: we start with Flight Controller Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) asking the individual departments to check in. But immediately prior to that, which we don’t see here, Kranz takes a calm sip of coffee from his coffee cup. That’s it…but it’s in the way Ed Harris plays it, as a guy at total command of his resources who basically says, “OK, one more sip of my coffee, and then, let’s launch this rocket ship.”
The news story I mention above? Apparently an expedition financed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has located the engines of Apollo 11, the mission that took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon, sitting at the bottom of the sea. Bezos hopes to raise all or part of the engines back to the surface, which would be an amazing feat. I don’t know what shape they’d be in, but what an amazing artifact of our own technological past to recover!
Although…I’d be lying if I wasn’t a bit saddened that we’re excited to fine the used pieces of our old spaceships, when at the same time we don’t seem all that interested in building new ones.
Well, I missed this feature last week, and I’m late this week, but here we go. I just want to pay a small tribute to Robert B. Sherman, who passed away last week. Sherman was one half of the Sherman Brothers, a music-and-songwriting duo that was responsible for many of the extremely catchy songs in Disney (and other) films in the 1960s. Here are some of them.
