My mom and I meet for coffee and breakfast every Friday morning. Often, she will pick me up and I will ride with her to our local Panera. Last Friday, as we were driving, she had the radio on...tuned to Sirius XM's Symphony Hall Channel 76. She had it turned up because The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana was playing. She told me a wonderful story about how she and my dad, while they were teenagers, would go to a record store on the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, and they would play music in the listening booths, and he would tell her about the piece playing. She has a vivid memory of the time in 1956 that they listened to The Moldau with him explaining what was happening musically to bring the piece to life as they listened to it. I could see this in my mind. My dad loved music so much, and he loved sharing it and talking about it. My mom said he opened this musical door for her, and to this day, she has a great love, appreciation, and understanding of not only classical music, but all forms.
I still listen to vinyl. And it has been making a big comeback in this digital world of ours. I am too young to remember the listening booths that many record stores had that allowed you to hear a record before you took it home. Of course, now you get a sample of a download before you buy it. But the listening booths did the same trick back in the day.
The Moldau, which is from a collection of symphonic pieces by Smetana called Ma Vlast, was composed in 1874. The Moldau is a river, also known in Czechoslovakia as Vltava. Smetana creates a musical description of this river from it's birth as a tiny brook, steadily growing in power and size to it's majestic enormity. This piece is so easy and fun to listen to. The melody is infectious and widely known though concert performances, recordings and TV/Commercial/Film use.
Musical doors await. Someone may open it for you. All you have to do is walk through.
My last post was about my friend Webb Chiles and his amazing accomplishment of sailing around the world...for the 6th time. During his many passages, he listens to a lot of music. Here is a video he shared on YouTube from the final leg of the journey from Panama to San Diego. On this occasion, he is playing the soundtrack from Out of Africa by John Barry. I made the comment that this music was intended to capture the majestic landscape of Africa, but it does the same capturing the majesty of the ocean.
I saw a great commercial this week. Volvo is selling a new car and using the the music of Mozart to do so...the Queen of the Night Aria from The Magic Flute, first performed in 1791. Enjoy.
Erik Satie is one of my favorite composers. I have shared some of his music in previous entries of this journal. I know that he was an eccentric dude, but I did not know that he wrote a Mass...the Messe des Pauvres 1893-1895. He actually invented his own religion called the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. Satie served as the High Priest. This Mass is scored for 2 voices and Organ. It was not published during his lifetime. Fellow composer Darius Milhaud unearthed it and brought it to the public a year after Satie died (1926). It is absolutely weird. But it is equally fascinating...and I have probably listened to it ten times in the last month.
My friend Webb Chiles just completed his sixth circumnavigation of the planet earth. Yes, he has sailed around the world six times. This sixth voyage was completed on April 29, 2019. He sailed 30,000 miles all by himself on a Moore 24...a 24 foot sailboat. He started in San Diego in 2014 and finished there last week. Webb is 77 years old and blind in one eye. He has read more books, listened to more music, traveled more miles, and lived more life than many of us combined in all of our lives. He is a special person in so many ways, and I feel lucky to call him a friend. I don't know much about sailing, but Webb knows a lot about classical music, and thus our friendship is rooted in that shared passion. Webb listens to a lot of music at home and out at sea. Much of it is classical, though, like me, he has a wide appreciation of many types of music. Bach is his favorite composer. He says of Bach, "he's the man." I can't disagree with that. On the last leg of this sixth journey, he also listened to The Creation Oratorio by Haydn. I revisited this piece again this week thanks to his mention of it in his passage log. As I listened to it, I thought about what it must be like all alone on a small boat in the vast ocean. The thought overwhelms me, just as the thought of this tiny planet we live on "spinning in infinity" (thanks Paul Simon) in the vastness of space.
Congratulations Webb. You are truly an amazing man.
