I took the Commuter Rail in because busing. I had to take the bus back home but it wasn't that bad because it was at night and it was also only between North Quincy and Braintree.
I got a bowl at Cava.
The people behind me were asking each other “would you rather” questions, like would you rather give up dip or sauce and they collectively came to the conclusion that hummus is not a sauce but tzatziki is. One of them asked if they’d rather have hands for feet and all I can say is that having feet for hands would suck and one of them said that he’d bei doing a handstand all the time if he had hands for feet and one said that if she flipped the table over does the leg become an arm and I think that even if your feet are hands, the anatomy of your leg would remain the same. They all agree that there's nothing wrong with being gay but even if there was, it would still beat having feet for hands.
I bought the book A Cautious Traevller's Guide to the Wastelands at Beacon Hill Books.
As you can no doubt tell by the title, these works are all based around the concept of home, as nebulous as it may be. Before it was a movie about dogs, it was a song by Paul Simon.
Franz Schubert, Auf dem Strom (On the River) for soprano, French horn & piano, D. 943, Op. 119
This was written to commemorate the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death. Well, the date of a concert of his music coincided with that day, so he wrote this. There are quotes
He was hailed as the next Beethoven, but on november 19 of that year, he died. So much for that. He knew his health was going to shit by then. It was either syphilis or mercury poisoning that did him in. Or maybe he just died with those conditions. He wrote a lot lot lot of music in that brief time. Most of them leider, along with an unfinished symphony, a bunch of finished symphonies, and the world’s only sonata for arpeggione and piano (at least, until someone else decided they’d also do one). The Harvard radio station did a Schubert-a-thon one year and it got kind of tedious after a while. Maybe Debussy or Mahler or Ravel or even Britten would have been a better choice.
Stacy Garrop, Postcards from Wyoming for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano & percussion
High Plains Prairie: Mostly the marimba playing the overtones of the piano. Some gong.
Call of the Wild: is a dies irae in which the violin and cello evoke the buzzing of insects. A lot of drumming.
The Solitude of Stars: is sparse notes played on the piano and the flute, which was lower in register and bent like the handle of umbrella and played to sound like a Native American end-blown flute. They’d call it “tâhpeno” in the Tsėhésenėstsestȯtse language but that doesn’t matter. Despite the capital being Cheyenne, they mostly speak soni' ta̲i̲kwappe or Hinónoʼeitíít there.
at the end they all audibly exhale.
The crotales are the things you scrape with a bow. During the intermission, I walked in on Matt explaining them to someone else and asekd the same exact thing. And then Matt explained them to someone else.
Charles Ives, The Housatonic at Stockbridge and other songs for soprano & piano
There were eight songs: Berceuse, A Night Song, There is a Lane, In The Alley, The Side Show, the Housatonic at Stockbridge, nn Street, They are There. All picked for a sense of home.
i don’t think anyone expected Deborah to waltz on stage playing the fife for They Are There. The lyrics call out totalitarians for starting wars that everyday people fight and die in and so I thought this had to do with Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, but the collection was published in 1922 and therefore it’s calling out Kaiser Wilhelm II, Nicholas II, and Franz Joseph I.
Ernest John Moeran, Fantasy Quartet for oboe & strings (1946)
He can assure you that his head is flesh, bone, brain, and that crude metal plate he got in France. He fared better than Ernest Farrar.
Anyway, the wound caused instability, mood disorders, and alcoholism and he lost the ability to compose for a while. The fantasy quartet was composed near the end of his life, as recollections of his childhood home, integrating Norfolk folk songs.
Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quintet in C Major, Op. 29, “Storm”
It starts out with classicism and then becomes the titular storm of early Romanticism. Also, there was a bit of a tempest in a teapot regarding the publication rights. The publisher Artaria had the right to seek damages but didn’t because they didn’t want to piss of Beethoven too much.
There were artworks. All of them are by David Lloyd Brown and most of them don’t have titles but they’re all part of a Primordial Soup series. They’re all inspired by paisley, Persian carpets, William Morris, climate change, and how the fins of sarcopterygii became the legs of amphibians.
( Clickity )A passenger had hair of radioactive green, yellow-gold, and violet.
Madison and friends were discussing the relative merits of the seats on the new train (they’re cleaner) vs the seats on the old trains (they’re cushioned)
burning question: how does one stretch out 74 minutes of music into over 2 hours? Okay, I said 74 but maybe it was more like 85, since the website only mentioned one song by Ives and there were seven others but some were short and some were really short.
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