Archive for the 'Music' Category
October 17, 2009 @ 7:56 pm | Filed under: Art, Connections, Games, Music, Poetry
Another week full of drafts and snippets, words squeezing into the teasing interstices of busy days. Most of what I jotted down had to do with the subjects that got their hooks into us: a chronicle of paths wandered, links explored.
(detail)
During our Balboa Park day last week, Jane strolled through the Timken Museum of Art. One piece she found particularly compelling was Benjamin West’s Fidelia and Speranza, painted in 1771. West was a friend of Benjamin Franklin (his portrait of Franklin’s famous moment with the key and the kite is a hoot). Jane was struck by the image of the girl (Fidelia) holding a chalice with a serpent looking out from it. A little digging informed us that the sisters are figures from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: Faith and Hope, who reside in the House of Holiness to which Una (Truth) guides the Red Cross Knight.
XII
Thus as they gan of sundry things devise,
Loe two most goodly virgins came in place,
Ylinked arme in arme in lovely wise,
With countenance demure, and modest grace,
They numbred even steps and equall pace:
Of which the eldest, that Fidelia hight,
Like sunny beames threw from her christall face,
That could have dazd the rash beholders sight,
And round about her head did shine like heavens light.
XIII
She was araied all in lilly white,
And in her right hand bore a cup of gold,
With wine and water fild up to the hight,
In which a Serpent did himselfe enfold,
That horrour made to all that did behold;
But she no whit did chaunge her constant mood:
And in her other hand she fast did hold
A booke, that was both signd and seald with blood:
Wherin darke things were writ, hard to be understood.
XIV
Her younger sister, that Speranza hight,
Was clad in blew, that her beseemed well;
Not all so chearefull seemed she of sight,
As was her sister; whether dread did dwell,
Or anguish in her hart, is hard to tell:
Upon her arme a silver anchor lay,
Whereon she leaned ever, as befell:
And ever up to heaven, as she did pray,
Her stedfast eyes were bent, ne swarved other way.
Well, that led to a lot of Spenser-related digging. We can’t undertake to read much of Faerie Queene right now; we dove into The Odyssey this month and I think one epic poem at a time is enough!
The week’s other big research project (for various children) had to do with Tamagotchis—the craze has resurfaced here, after a year of dead batteries. Growth charts, game strategies, daily logs: it’s like living in a research lab. One of the sites that turned up on our search was this critical analysis of Tamagotchi use, which I found quite interesting, especially this bit:
I was reminded of Professor Ken Goldberg’s Tele-garden, a web-based project where users can plant and water seeds in a small garden through the use of a remote robotic system. In a presentation on the project, Professor Goldberg mentioned a shift from the Paleolithic Hunter/Gatherer state of the World Wide Web (brief forays into the world of technology for the purpose of apprehending some piece of information) and the Neolithic Husbandry model supported by the project (where users must devote sustained interest and effort to foster growth).
The Tamagotchi is indicative of a similar shift in video game modeling. The majority of video games (especially popular video games) hinge on a model of conquest and succession – temporally limited tasks with set goals attainable through skill and reflexes. Key examples range from Pac Man and Galaxians to Super Mario Brothers and Mortal Kombat. Player/users identify with the “main character” of a simple narrative – “destroy or be destroyed”. Having completed a set amount of destruction, the player/user rests for a moment before taking on a progressively difficult level.
Notable exceptions exist. The most popular of these is the Maxis line of Sim- products, including SimCity, SimCity 2000, SimEarth, SimAnt, and others. Here we see the stirrings of the “Neolithic shift”. The user is responsible for the growth and maintenance of a town (or world, or ant colony, or whatever) and the ultimate goal is to simply “flourish”.
What do you think? Do you prefer Hunter/Gatherer internet experiences, or Neolithic Husbandry?
Speaking of hunting, I fell into a research project of my own last night, as you know if you’re my friend on Facebook or Twitter (which seems to be a synthesis of the hunter/gatherer and husbandry models, if you ask me). For fifteen years I have wondered which version of the Te Deum was the one referred to by Sheldon Vanauken in A Severe Mercy. Vanauken writes:
St. Ebbe’s sang the Te Deum to a setting that made a triumphant proclamation of the line: “Thou art the King of Glory, O-O-O-O-O Christ!”—the O’s ascending to the mighty ‘Christ!’
St. Ebbe’s is the Anglican church in Oxford the Vanaukens attended around 1950. Between YouTube and ChoralWiki, I have investigated, well, scores of scores (ba dum bum), looking for that particular setting of the Te Deum. A commenter at the MusicaSacra forum suggested it might be Benjamin Britten’s Festival Te Deum: that’s the only score I’ve found that has ascending O-O-Os, so perhaps he is right.
Here it is on YouTube, performed at the University of Utah. I must say I’m partial to the setting in C major by Charles Villiers Stanford. The Elgar, too, is lovely and stirring.
But most lovely and stirring of all is this piece a Twitter responder reminded me of: not the Te Deum, but rather the Non Nobis. I remember how I was moved to tears by this music (and this scene) when I saw Branagh’s Henry V several years back. I meant to buy the soundtrack (score by Patrick Doyle) but forgot all about it. How is that possible? This—this is unforgettable.
February 27, 2009 @ 5:58 pm | Filed under: Music
January 21, 2009 @ 2:15 pm | Filed under: Music
We’re in the mood for a bit o’ Bach. Taking a nod from Ambleside, we listened to his Magnificat in D this morning—to the first movement, that is. Somewhere around the second aria, Rilla decided her mission in life was to plant both feet flat on Beanie’s face. For some reason, Beanie found it difficult to listen to music that way. Rookie.
Anyway, I’m rounding up my links for easy access during, let’s say, Rilla’s naptime. If you’ve got any great Bach links, books, CDs, etc, you’d like to share, please fire away. 
Magnificat in D on YouTube (Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) (One of many, many recordings there.)
Wikipedia page on Bach’s Magnificat
Wikipedia page on the Magnificat itself. (Includes Greek, Latin, and several English translations.)
Mr. Bach Comes to Call
Have any of you read this book: Sebastian Bach, the Boy from Thuringia? Do we desperately need to read it? Because I’m trying this crazy, crazy thing where I (gulp) don’t buy any more books for a while. ::::shudder:::: Sorry, I felt faint for a minute there. Good thing I’m sitting down, anchored by a great big lump of snoozing baby.
(Deep breath) Okay then. Moving on. Beanie has just begun reading Genevieve Foster’s George Washington’s World
Here, for good measure, is the Douay-Rheims translation of the Magnificat, Mary’s great outpouring of joy from the Gospel of Luke:
- My soul doth magnify the Lord.
- And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
- Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
- Because he that is mighty, hath done great things to me; and holy is his name.
- And his mercy is from generation unto generations, to them that fear him.
- He hath shewed might in his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.
- He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble.
- He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
- He hath received Israel his servant, being mindful of his mercy:
- As he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his seed for ever.
Bach, Magnificat, Magnificat in D
December 3, 2008 @ 8:13 am | Filed under: Books, Family, Music
I have over 200 incomplete posts in my drafts folder. Yikes. And that’s just here, at the Wordpress site, where I’ve been for less than a year. Lord knows how many drafts are sitting over at Typepad. I dare not look.
In an effort to clear this cache out a bit, here’s a look at some things I was going to write about but didn’t get around to finishing.
***
Swell Stocking-Stuffer for Your Music-Loving Hubby
Or for any lover of contemporary music, really. Doesn’t have to be your husband. Your sister, your teenager. It’s just that Scott’s the music buff in my life, so I relate all things musical to him.
And also, these are his books I’m recommending. Not his as in he wrote them. His as in he keeps leaving them all over the house. Some are from the library and some he picked up with the one measly Amazon gift certificate I shared with him after spending all the rest on crafty books for my own self. Um, I mean on inspiring and creatively enriching resources for my darling children. Yeah, that’s the ticket (she says, hastily shoving her hot-off-the-presses copy of Stitched in Time behind her back).
Anyway, these music books. They’re a series of little bitty paperback books called 33 1/3. As in: thirty-three and a third. Like, you know, those round black things they used to scratch music out of back in olden times. Each volume is a kind of extended essay on a single record album. I think. I mean, it’s not like I’ve actually read any of them. But I listened ever so intently when Scott raved about the awesomeness of the concept. One book: one album: one deep exploration of musical themes and lyrical themes and the life-affirming statements of painful, screeching guitar solos and all that stuff people like Scott think about when they do this thing that is so unfathomable to me where they just sit and listen to music. I don’t do that. Music is for singing, or for cleaning to, or for entertaining children in the car, or for getting teary-eyed over when it’s your daughter practicing on the piano she got from the Make-a-Wish Foundation
Obviously, I wandered from the point. The point was: Scott loves this series of books and I thought someone on your Christmas list might, too.
***
The next draft was begun in mid-November. I’m not sure why I didn’t post it, or what else I might have been going to say.
What We’re Up To These Days
Let’s see. You already know we’re reading zillions of picture books for the Cybils. I think I’m up to 76 books read so far, with another five in my TBR pile and several more waiting for me at the library. Saturday is Scott’s library-run day (honestly, I don’t even try any more, not with the action-packed Wonderboy/Rilla combo), so I’ll most likely curl up for another reading marathon tomorrow afternoon.
I tried to cut back on out-of-the-house activities this fall, but bit by bit the schedule filled up again. We’ve got a pretty good rhythm going, though. Jane is taking ballet, Jane and Beanie are in a children’s choir that practices once a week, and Jane, Beanie, and Rose are all in a very nice little drawing class they begged and begged to squeeze in, and I’m glad I succumbed to their cajoling. Our sewing/laundry room walls are filling up with some truly gorgeous art in chalk pastels. I hope I’ll be up to maintaining the art class dropoff/pickup schedule after the baby comes in January, but it does leave me with an awkwardly sized window of time to fill with my little ones. Sometimes I do a grocery run during the window, but if I don’t get the coveted fire-truck cart that seats two children, I’m sunk. This week I took a less productive but infinitely more pleasant approach and simply buckled them into the Awesome! New! Double! Stroller!! (thank you, Mr. Wonderful, you know who you are) and went for a, you guessed it, stroll. Did a little window shopping on a quiet street full of craft stores and antique shops. Bought each of us a teeny tiny bag of teeny tiny sandwich cookies. It was lovely. And when I picked up the girls they were full of chatter and excitement because two of them are about to graduate from chalks to watercolors, and one of them (Beanie, let’s brag on the seven-year-old) had just completed a picture which was chosen to go in the ‘gallery,’ aka the studio window that fronts a busy street. Miss Bean was positively glowing. When her grandparents come for a visit next week, they will have to drive by and admire the display.
Wonderboy has speech therapy twice a week and PT twice a month. PT is a bit of a hike (up a busy highway to the Children’s Hospital) but it coincides with choir, and the other moms have been wonderful about keeping an eye on the girls for me (mainly Rilla) while the boy and I slip out for his session. This was supposed to be a three-month burst of PT to help him past a growth spurt (bone grows faster than muscle, so whenever he hits a spurt, his already short and tight muscles get even shorter and tighter), but the therapist would like to extend it for a while. She’s doing some pretty intensive deep-tissue massage and stretching with him. We’re giving it another few weeks before we make the call.
So all of that, plus my OB appts (which, gulp, just hit the every-two-weeks mark this week, which means we are really very close to the end of this pregnancy, which is sort of mindboggling because it feels like it’s only been a few months so far), makes for a pretty busy schedule. Much busier than in our mellower Virginia days. But then, my girls are getting big. Their interests are tumbling out of our home, which is right and proper.
***
Oh, look, the next draft isn’t really a draft—it’s just an unpublished baby ticker. I think I’ve stuck it at the bottom of a few other posts.
Wow, I REALLY need to find that box of baby clothes I know I saved when we moved from Virginia.
***
One of the drafts is called “Peace Comes Dropping Slow.” That’s all there is, just the title. I vaguely remember meaning to describe some particularly chaotic and noisy scene that had just taken place, making a mockery of the Yeats quote at the top of this blog. Of course, every single day provides, oh, dozens of such moments. “Peace” as applied to this house refers more to a state of mind than any kind of sensory description, you understand.
***
Whoops, the 7:00 bird just cooed. The “big noisy peace” (as Sandra Dodd calls it) will commence any minute now. Actually I can’t believe it hasn’t begun already—kids are sleeping late this morning. But I should go. I didn’t make it very far through the big pile o’ drafts, did I?
August 4, 2008 @ 5:20 am | Filed under: Connections, Music, Unschooling
Originally posted March 28, 2005
Yesterday my kids pulled out a CD we used to listen to all the time: the soundtrack to Snoopy: The Musical
So when Jane was five or six and I, for no particular reason, found myself humming one of the dear old Snoopy songs, I hunted around online and found a recording. Ah, the bliss of Google! My tiny girls loved the album, as I knew they would. A singing dog! A boy named Linus! A squeaky-voiced Sally belting out tongue-twisters!
Later, as the girls grew, they connected to Snoopy on different terms. One of our favorite songs on the album, “Clouds,” is like a theme song for homeschoolers. Charlie Brown and the gang are lying around looking at the sky, and someone asks Charlie Brown what he sees in the clouds.
“I see a—” he begins, but Sally cuts him off to sing that she sees: “A mermaid riding on a unicorn.” Peppermint Patty sees “an angel blowing on a big long horn.” Linus, ever my favorite, is a visionary. “I see Goliath, half a mile tall, waving at me….what do you see?”
Poor Charlie Brown. How can he get an answer in edgewise? Lucy sees a team of fifty milk-white horses; Patty sees a dinosaur; Linus sees Prometheus, waving; Snoopy, grandiose as always, sees the Civil War. The entire Civil War.
You could spend a year rabbit-trailing your way through this song. The Peanuts kids know their history, I’ll give ‘em that. (Although they seem to hit a bit of a roadblock when it comes to a certain American poet/storyteller, as evinced by their poor classroom performance in the hilarous song “Edgar Allen Poe,” elsewhere on the album.) When these kids gaze at the clouds, they see Caesar crossing the Rubicon, the Fall of Rome, and even all twelve apostles, waving at Linus.
Linus: “The Pyramid of Khufu!”
Sally: “You too?”
All but Charlie Brown: “Seven Wonders of the World…”
For our family, this is a song of reciprocal delights. Some of these cloud-tableaux are historical events the girls already knew about, and the idea of Snoopy beholding an entire war sculpted in cumulus is irresistibly funny. Some events are things my kids first encountered in the song. When, years later, we read about the Rubicon in A Child’s History of the World
So I was happy to hear the Peanuts gang belting away once more yesterday afternoon. It has been a couple of years since last they regaled us with their splendid visions. The girls have encountered more of the world, more of the past, and so they have more to connect with in the lyrics of Charlie Brown’s imaginative friends.
As for Charles, alas. The gang, having at long last exhausted the gamut of grand happenings to see in the heavens, demand of Charlie, “Well, what do you see?”
Says Charlie, glumly (and you probably remember the punchline from the Sunday funnies when you were a kid): “I was going to say a horsie and a ducky, but I changed my mind.”
(Cue hysterical laughter from little girls. Every. Single. Time.)
October 4, 2007 @ 7:46 pm | Filed under: Music
Sashwee had a question for Mr. Stossel after yesterday’s post.
Would Mr. Stossel, I wonder, be willing to recommend some starter music for a baby? Stimulating but not too stimulating if you know what I mean?
Sashwee, I tried to reach him but he can be hard to pin down for questioning. (I guess he prefers to be on the left side of the question mark.)
September 9, 2007 @ 6:01 pm | Filed under: Music
…of Mama Squirrel. Look what’s playing in the Treehouse: a music study on pianist Glenn Gould, with emphasis on his Bach performances.
I showed the post to Scott and asked if he thought we should tag along, so to speak.
"Oh, absolutely!" he replied without missing a beat. (A beat, get it? I’m so very musical.) Scott’s the classical (and other kinds of) music buff of the family, and I usually look to him for suggestions on what pieces of music to play (over and over and over—that’s the sum total of our "music appreciation" method) for the children.
(No, wait, I guess there’s more to it than just listening to the music—we also listen hungrily to the interesting stories Scott tells about the composers and performers. All those evenings when I’m nose-deep in educational philosophy? He’s reading musicians’ biographies.)
"I’m kind of psyched to see some of those Gould performances myself," he added, still scanning Mama Squirrel’s list.
He says Gould is interesting to listen to, because he often hummed along—not in tune!—as he played. I’m intrigued. And also eager to hear all that Bach. I love Bach. Listening to Bach is like what St. Francis said about singing: It’s praying—twice.
(Scott just looked over my shoulder and told me—wait, say it again, honey, I’m taking dictation—that when Gould played Bach he didn’t use the sustain pedal, so it sounded very dry and crisp, like the harpsichord. And also! Rumor has it that his mother introduced him to the composers in chronological order, so he became intimately acquainted first with the Baroque, and then the Classical, and then the Romantic, and then the Modern composers, as opposed to the scattershot method most of us in this century are used to where we probably heard Mozart before Bach, or Tchaikovsky before—oh shoot, that’s as far as I can remember, and Scott just left for Mass. Ah well. You get his drift. See what I mean? Fascinating!)
So there’s that plan. Gould and Bach. :::rubs hands together briskly::: Gosh, thanks, Mama Squirrel!
(Another terrific resource for classical music studies is Helen over at Castle of the Immaculate. We rode the wave of her Elgar study last year. Oh! I still get goosebumps at the thought of that cello concerto played by Jacqueline du Pre!)
January 23, 2007 @ 1:30 pm | Filed under: Music
This morning, after drilling Rose on musical notes for quite a while (her piano teacher asked her to bone up a bit), I went hunting for some games online that would help with note recognition. Here’s what I have found so far:
Pedaplus.com—Has a simple but good note recognition game. Choose treble or bass clef, and beginner or advanced. You try to read and click on the names of as many notes as possible in the time frame. Rose played for about twenty minutes and drastically improved her score.
There is also an ear-training game in which a short series of notes is played and you click on the piano keys for the appropriate intervals. Pretty cool.
The site also has other musical games and quizzes.
HappyNote.com has several games to download, but (alas) none for my Mac—yet.
Music Notes has lots of quizzes on music history, as well as an ear-training game.
In the Novel Games "Musical Notes" game, notes on the treble clef scroll across the screen, and you must click the correct piano key to make them disappear. A variation on the old shoot-the-ducks arcade game. Doesn’t seem to cover more than the basic treble clef notes, though (or maybe I just didn’t play it long enough).
I am really bummed that there is no Mac version of this free Tetris-style note recognition game. If you try it, let me know how it is.
I’d love to hear of other good note-fluency games you’ve discovered!
January 8, 2007 @ 6:30 am | Filed under: Music
Castle of the Immaculate is sharing some good stuff on Elgar. I looooove the Elgar cello concerto. We’ll be jumping right on this bandwagon, with gratitude for the links and information. Always nice when another mom does my homework for me. Thanks, Helen.
Another wonderful music resource: Ambleside’s composer study page.
Charlotte Mason on music appreciation:
With Musical Appreciation the case is different; and we cannot do better than quote from an address made by Mrs. Howard Glover at the Ambleside Conference of the Parents’ Union, 1922:––
"Musical Appreciation––which is so much before the eye at the present moment––originated in the P.N.E.U. about twenty-five years ago. At that time I was playing to my little child much of the best music in which I was interested, and Miss Mason happened to hear of what I was doing. She realised that music might give great joy and interest to the life of all, and she felt that just as children in the P.U.S. were given the greatest literature and art, so they should have the greatest music as well. She asked me to write an article In the Review on the result of my observations, and to make a programme of music each term which might be played to the children. From that day to this, at the beginning of every term a programme has appeared; thus began a movement which was to spread far and wide.
"Musical Appreciation, of course, has nothing to do with playing the piano. It used to be thought that ‘learning music’ must mean this, and it was supposed that children who had no talent for playing were unmusical and would not like concerts. But Musical Appreciation had no more to do with playing an instrument than acting had to do with an appreciation of Shakespeare, or painting with enjoyment of pictures. I think that all children should take Musical Appreciation and not only the musical ones, for it has been proved that only three per cent of children are what is called ‘tone-deaf’; and if they are taken at an early age it is astonishing how children who appear to be without ear, develop it and are able to enjoy listening to music with understanding."
(Vol 6 pg 218)
Melissa Wiley on music appreciation (LOL): Easiest thing in the world. Pick a piece of music and play it often. Tell your kids what it’s called, and drop in some interesting biographical information over dinner or while doing dishes. Pick out some good rousing housecleaning music (Beethoven and Tschaikovsky work for me; so does Aretha Franklin) and some lively breakfast music. Mellow and soothing is perhaps better for dinnertime. But really, just loving the music yourself and playing it often, naming it, discussing the composer and the instruments: it’s easy and pleasant to encourage a taste for fine music. In our house, that ranges from Celtic tunes to the Beatles, Shostakovich (Daddy’s favorite) to Springsteen.
