Contents:
Forget The Hourglass
Winter Question Answers
Spring Question
The Ball Game, a story, part 1
Live your life and forget your age.
Jean Paul
*****************
I just turned 72. That means I lived 36 years twice. I like that idea. It also means I lived to be 24 three times. I like that even better.
"Old rockin' chair's got me, my cane by my side" wrote Hoagy Carmichael.
"You're too old for that" says someone else. "Act your age" says another.
Ask President George Bush if he was too old to go sky diving. Ask John Glenn if he was to old to go into orbit again. A few years ago I understudied Douglas Campbell in a large and difficult role. He was 83. I never played it. He played every performance. Who gave George Burns permission to live to 100? Who told Irving Berlin to sign out at 101?
"They try to tell us we're too young
Too young to really be in love"
(Nat King Cole)
I know a young man whose girl friend is 15 years older than he is. She has no problem with it, neither does he. A person has to be at least 35 years old to be President of the United States. But Lafayette entered the American Revolutionary War as a Major General at the age of 19. The first human cannonball was a 14 year old girl called Zazel. Mozart was playing his own music on the harpsichord in public at the age of 5,
Life is about living, not about counting ages.
I can't do some of the things old folks do any more. I'm not as old as I used to be.
DB - The Vagabond
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WINTER QUESTION ANSWERS
What was the most significant event of 2010?
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BP Oil Spill
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my answer: The Chilean miners were rescued.
A you tube video depicting the incident:
http://youtu.be/XGecqHnN2gQ
entitled:
Chile Miners Rescue Video: Joy as capsule raises trapped men to surface
--------------------------------------------
I remember the big oil spill
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The most significant event of 2010 for me was penning my third book (which sadly I'm still in revision with). (Hugs)Indigo
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2010, most significant event... I would say the Haiti earthquake, followed closely by the BP Oil Spill and November elections.
----------------------------------------
The most significant event of 2010 for me, was the dawning of Jan. 1, 2011.
-------------------------------------------
Most significant event of 2010? My actually getting on a plane at John McNamara airport with a destination for Omaha...
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So many significant events happened last year, but my vote for the most significant is going to FIFA World Cup South Africa. The whole world focuses its eyes on soccer supremacy. Borders, barriers, language, culture, politics, religion wealth, age ------ all disappear in the name of sport. No game in the world has as much significance as soccer, or football if you prefer. Just for a few weeks every four years, people put aside their differences and focus on the game. It always amazes me that sport has a way of uniting the world far better than any politicians.
--------------------------------------
Most significant events of 2010: Globally, I think it was the Haitian earthquake and the world's response to it, and for the U.S., Wikileaks.
----------------------------------------------------
I think, after this country woke from a decade of international belligerence, and began to feel the future again, that was the year we realized how much we'd been hobbled and how far we had to go. 1st step on a long road.
----------------------------------------------
Thank you all.
DB
***************************************
SPRING QUESTION
NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.
Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?
dbdacoba@aol.com
I eagerly await your answer.
DB
******************
The Ball Game,
a story in 7 parts
Part 1
The first time Jimmy Login saw his father was at a stick ball game on a Brooklyn street. His father died when Jimmy was only 3. Jimmy doesn't remember him and only knows him from a photograph his mother has of a handsome, smiling man with glasses His mother said Jimmy's father was a physicist who was working on a top secret project when he died.
Billy Ferguson threw the ball with great force and it hit the step with a loud wallop. Jimmy held the stick firmly ready to hit the ball if he could. At that moment he heard a man's voice call his name: "Jimmy." He looked up and just for a flash saw his father's smiling face, just like in the picture. Then he saw the ball coming toward him gradually and gracefully, like a bubble on the wind, as if the whole game was suddenly in slow motion.
When it drifted right in front of him he swung hard and hit the ball squarely on. It flew up fast, bounced off the side of the building, went tumbling down the street and rolled under a parked car.
"Wow" someone said.
That was the first time Jimmy saw his father. But not the last.
(Part 2 tomorrow.)
**********************
Showing posts with label Mozart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mozart. Show all posts
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
Go Wolfgang
Everything has its own food, and music is the food of the spirit.
Nasrabadi
********************
In the former, primitive, pre transistor, pre CD days the only way to get music, if you didn't make your own, was either on a cumbersome record player with vulnerable analogue disks or through a radio with tubes. But anyone who was hungry for the songs of the day had a portable AM radio which they carried next to their ear. There were plenty of yelling top 40 DJs supplying the air with all the latest hits.
If, like myself, you were a classical music lover, the opportunities were very slim. It was a hunting game. There was the station in New York where I was growing up, but it went off the air at midnight. Switch over to another Music Till Dawn station and then another one for the Saturday afternoon opera broadcast from the Met which happened only for part of the year. It was a stuggle.
But it was a struggle that was worth it. As more and more people were discovering the classical arena of music, musical education was improving in the schools and the United States was beginning to produce great musicians of its own, not having to rely completely on the gifted artists of Europe.
I like to compare classical musicians to Grand Prix drivers. Those people can drive anything, from a tractor on up, in any kind of traffic. In a recent interview a member of the New York Philharmonic said the orchestra was so good it could play any kind of music set before it. Unfortunately there is still some prejudice against "serious" music, even from some "popular" musicians. But the prejudice doesn't usually go the other way. Real musicians can not only play any kind of music, they can also appreciate it, even simple music. Shostakovich, the great Russian composer of symphonies and string quartets, also wrote some children's songs.
Some people have their favorites, the bombast of the 1812 Overture, the grand Hallelujah Chorus, Beethoven's Fifth and so on, but they don't venture into music they don't know. And when most people think of music they think of songs, lyrics, words. In pure music there are no words, or rather, there are words and ideas expressed in a language people aren't familiar with and don't learn.
That was my big discovery as a child with my radio hugged to my ear. I heard the language of music and have been a music lover ever since. If you want to know where the truth is it's in all the music of Bach, the late Beethoven string quartets and the Mozart piano concertos.
Now here is something you must do before the year is out and the sooner the better. Even if you don't like classical music, even if you hate it, you must listen to Alfred Brendel perform the Mozart Piano Concerto number 23 in A major K. 488. Buy, borrow or steal it (no don't steal it). Don't do anything else but listen. Concentrate, hear every note and let it talk to you. Listen to it twice through, at least. Don't intellectualize about it, Climb its ladders and swim in its streams. Hear the gentle rain, hear the warm sun. It is a grand, loving, work of genius and pure spirituality. It sings, dances, weeps, laughs, swirls and jumps with joy. It is life affirming, world changing, a gift from heaven to an as yet undeserving human race. Hear it, enjoy it. That's an order.
DB - The Vagabond
****************************
WINTER QUESTION
(This is not a contest)
What was the most significant event that happened in 2010?
dbdacoba@aol.com
Only 1 response so far
I await your answer.
DB
******************************
Nasrabadi
********************
In the former, primitive, pre transistor, pre CD days the only way to get music, if you didn't make your own, was either on a cumbersome record player with vulnerable analogue disks or through a radio with tubes. But anyone who was hungry for the songs of the day had a portable AM radio which they carried next to their ear. There were plenty of yelling top 40 DJs supplying the air with all the latest hits.
If, like myself, you were a classical music lover, the opportunities were very slim. It was a hunting game. There was the station in New York where I was growing up, but it went off the air at midnight. Switch over to another Music Till Dawn station and then another one for the Saturday afternoon opera broadcast from the Met which happened only for part of the year. It was a stuggle.
But it was a struggle that was worth it. As more and more people were discovering the classical arena of music, musical education was improving in the schools and the United States was beginning to produce great musicians of its own, not having to rely completely on the gifted artists of Europe.
I like to compare classical musicians to Grand Prix drivers. Those people can drive anything, from a tractor on up, in any kind of traffic. In a recent interview a member of the New York Philharmonic said the orchestra was so good it could play any kind of music set before it. Unfortunately there is still some prejudice against "serious" music, even from some "popular" musicians. But the prejudice doesn't usually go the other way. Real musicians can not only play any kind of music, they can also appreciate it, even simple music. Shostakovich, the great Russian composer of symphonies and string quartets, also wrote some children's songs.
Some people have their favorites, the bombast of the 1812 Overture, the grand Hallelujah Chorus, Beethoven's Fifth and so on, but they don't venture into music they don't know. And when most people think of music they think of songs, lyrics, words. In pure music there are no words, or rather, there are words and ideas expressed in a language people aren't familiar with and don't learn.
That was my big discovery as a child with my radio hugged to my ear. I heard the language of music and have been a music lover ever since. If you want to know where the truth is it's in all the music of Bach, the late Beethoven string quartets and the Mozart piano concertos.
Now here is something you must do before the year is out and the sooner the better. Even if you don't like classical music, even if you hate it, you must listen to Alfred Brendel perform the Mozart Piano Concerto number 23 in A major K. 488. Buy, borrow or steal it (no don't steal it). Don't do anything else but listen. Concentrate, hear every note and let it talk to you. Listen to it twice through, at least. Don't intellectualize about it, Climb its ladders and swim in its streams. Hear the gentle rain, hear the warm sun. It is a grand, loving, work of genius and pure spirituality. It sings, dances, weeps, laughs, swirls and jumps with joy. It is life affirming, world changing, a gift from heaven to an as yet undeserving human race. Hear it, enjoy it. That's an order.
DB - The Vagabond
****************************
WINTER QUESTION
(This is not a contest)
What was the most significant event that happened in 2010?
dbdacoba@aol.com
Only 1 response so far
I await your answer.
DB
******************************
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