Musical experience
Yesterday I got in my car to go to my office. I went at a random time, but I think it ended up being exactly at 10:30. A preacher I don’t like was on the Christian station; NPR was playing the offbeat music that they play in the morning. So I turned it to another public radio station in the Chattanooga area that doesn’t carry a lot of the typical NPR programming because the station is affiliated with a religious institution.
What a serendipitous choice—I caught the exact beginning of Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring. Through the opening, I teared up; then I wanted to dance, then I wanted to sing praise to God that it is a gift to be simple and a gift to be free. I had to get out of my car at the very end, but since I have a recording somewhere I can find it and play it to my heart’s content.
I resolved to 1. Thank God for the human creative spirit that can make that kind of music and 2. To play it to my humanities students and 3. Learn more about the piece.
Did the media go crazy when Aaron Copeland died in 1990? Did Michael Jackson ever create anything as moving and important as Copeland’s work?
I still think we are living in the Twilight Zone in the aftermath of Jackson’s death. How anyone can bring in a racial component and present him as a civil rights icon is beyond me.
I have one other memory of Copeland. In the 80s I was watching a program on PBS about the rehearsals and performance of a Copeland work, the one on Lincoln, by Bernstein. Copeland himself was going to read the narration. Bernstein was telling Copeland how he wanted Copeland to read the lines—Copeland’s own work! And Copeland, though an old man and clearly a little perturbed, acquiesced to the conductor and did it his way. There is a spiritual lesson in there somewhere. We might think we are writing the scripts of our own lives, but there is another conductor ultimately responsible for the outcome of the performance.
By the way, the last sentence on the previous post means that people in the military of necessity become very close, so I don't see how two people working that closely side-by-side would not eventually reveal information about sexual preference. It wasn't meant to say that homosexuals are always obvious from some outer behavior or look, a la Bruno or Rosie O'Donnell. I've always wondered why gay people tolerate those type of images and portrayals.
What a serendipitous choice—I caught the exact beginning of Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring. Through the opening, I teared up; then I wanted to dance, then I wanted to sing praise to God that it is a gift to be simple and a gift to be free. I had to get out of my car at the very end, but since I have a recording somewhere I can find it and play it to my heart’s content.
I resolved to 1. Thank God for the human creative spirit that can make that kind of music and 2. To play it to my humanities students and 3. Learn more about the piece.
Did the media go crazy when Aaron Copeland died in 1990? Did Michael Jackson ever create anything as moving and important as Copeland’s work?
I still think we are living in the Twilight Zone in the aftermath of Jackson’s death. How anyone can bring in a racial component and present him as a civil rights icon is beyond me.
I have one other memory of Copeland. In the 80s I was watching a program on PBS about the rehearsals and performance of a Copeland work, the one on Lincoln, by Bernstein. Copeland himself was going to read the narration. Bernstein was telling Copeland how he wanted Copeland to read the lines—Copeland’s own work! And Copeland, though an old man and clearly a little perturbed, acquiesced to the conductor and did it his way. There is a spiritual lesson in there somewhere. We might think we are writing the scripts of our own lives, but there is another conductor ultimately responsible for the outcome of the performance.
By the way, the last sentence on the previous post means that people in the military of necessity become very close, so I don't see how two people working that closely side-by-side would not eventually reveal information about sexual preference. It wasn't meant to say that homosexuals are always obvious from some outer behavior or look, a la Bruno or Rosie O'Donnell. I've always wondered why gay people tolerate those type of images and portrayals.
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