I was born in Maryland and spent my first thirty years living there, first in the Appalachian Mountains, then on the Eastern Shore, and later in suburban Washington. After a year in South Carolina, I moved to Georgia in 1977. I soon met another park ranger who worked in Florida. She was a wonderful woman who became my best friend. then my wife, and soon the mother of our three children. I spent over eleven years working in the historic city of Savannah, Georgia, and on the moss-draped sea islands nearby before moving to Atlanta.. In 2007, I retired from the National Park Service and a career dedicated to preserving and interpreting resources and themes in the cultural and natural history of the United States. It was a most rewarding experience. Today, I enjoy living in the rolling hills and woods of the Appalachian Piedmont east of Atlanta.
The American composer, Philip Glass, turns 75 today. For a long time his work has been described as minimalist, but it seems anything but "minimal." Listening to Glass is often more an experience where one can get "into" the music as a participant rather than merely observe. Even at its simplest, his work has complexities in tone, harmony, tempo and orchestration. For one thing, Glass counts. He plays by the numbers, practicing his musical arithmetic adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and even solving some algebraic formulas here and there. In the end, music to Glass seems like mathematics. Perhaps that's as it should be - he studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago. Fortunately for our culture, popular as well as haute, he became an extraordinary, prolific composer and a significant international influence in the music world.
Here are three selections from his vast and still growing output. The first comes from his Academy Award nominated original score for the film, The Hours(2002)
Next is "Knee 5", the concluding "scene" from his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, composed in 1975. Readers will find the lyric here. After the first listen, you may want to repeat the piece with lyrics at hand. An Einstein revival overseen by Glass began an international tour on January 20, 2012 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
We conclude with Glass's work for Koyaanisqatsi (1982), one of the most remarkable experimental documentary films of our time. The film, the first in Godfrey Reggio's Qatsi Trilogy, has entered cult status. This segment reminds OTR of the visual images in Blade Runner and Tron, convincing him that we're already living "the future."
OTR imagines by now that many readers will view the appreciation of Philip Glass as an acquired taste. He does after all take his listeners to the edges of creativity. OTR agrees and hopes readers will persevere. The reward is there - just takes a bit of time to discover it. He also hopes that readers who are unfamiliar with the Qatsi Trilogy and Reggio's other work in film will enjoy exploring them.
Delius belongs to no school, follows no tradition and is like no other composer in the form, content, or style of his music.
Frederick Delius was born on this day in Yorkshire, England, in 1862 - yes, today is the sesquicentennial of his birth. At 24, he lived the classic story of breaking away from the family business to pursue a love for the arts, in this case, music. The break was interesting for it took him first to Solano Grove and an orange plantation on the banks of the St. Johns River south of Jacksonville, Florida. Later, he would teach music in Virginia before returning to Europe for formal education in Germany. He took the sounds of American culture with him. In 1888, he settled in Paris, later married the painter, Jelka Rosen, and devoted his life to composition.
In the last sixteen years of his life he was tortured by the pain of a slow death from syphilis contracted during his early years in Paris. In the four years before his death in 1934, he was blind and essentially paralyzed from the neck down. He composed and completed some of his most significant work during this period, all of it reaching paper through the notations of his loyal amanuensis, Eric Fenby.
In 1968, Ken Russell directed a biography of Frederick Delius for the BBC. OTR saw the program by chance in its U.S. premier during the summer of the following year. He was in full cultural rebellion by that time having renounced the West, but the unique lyric quality of this English composer's music was like a magnet. There was no escape from the compelling soundscapes with such rich, complex imagery and depth.
OTR would outgrow his bitterness over the lost decade (1964-74) of the Johnson-Nixon years, but he never outgrew his fondness for the music of Delius. Today, he's pleased to report a wave of renewed international interest in that music in the last twenty
years. In fact, the Delius recording catalog has never been larger in
spite of the music being some of the most difficult to realize in
performance. Here is a fine Telegraph article by the cellist, Julian Lloyd Webber, about Delius and the current revival.
This post opened with Song of Summer, written in 1930 when Delius was blind and paralyzed.To conclude, here are two excerpts from earlier compositions. The first is from the Florida Suite, written when he was twenty years old. Music historians agree that this piece represents the first use of black American folk idioms in classical form by a European composer. He also composed the first black opera, Koanga. George Gershwin is most often erroneously credited with this accomplishment, but his opera, Porgy and Bess, premiered fifty years later. The second selection, Sonata in One Movement for Cello and Piano, was composed in 1916 at the height of his career.
Music is a cry of the soul. It is addressed and should appeal instantly to the soul of the listener. It is a revelation, a thing to be reverenced.
Frederick Delius
Photo: Portrait of Frederick Delius by his wife, Jelka Rosen.
Opening quote: The New York Times, 1929
Acknowledgments:
The Delius Society Before the Champions: Frederick Delius' Florida Suite for Orchestra, Mary E.
Greene., M.A. Thesis, University of Miami, 2011
Radio Swiss Classic, Frederick Delius
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Frederick Delius
This 1975 film stars Robert Redford and was directed by George Roy Hill. Both worked together on several films including two of Hollywood's best, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). Flying sequences were under the guidance of the irrepressible stunt pilot, Frank Tallman.
The story follows the fictional Pepper from his days as an unhappy World War I flight instructor through a career as a barnstormer and Hollywood stunt pilot. Many pilots from that war actually lived the story line. In fact, Tallman lived a very similar life, only his began in World war II and had a much happier ending.
If OTR's readers have a fascination with barnstorming, stunt flying, and antique airplanes, The Great Waldo Pepper is tailor-made for them. There's a fine score by Henry Mancini as well.
Earlier in this week of birthday commemorations, we introduced Django Reinhardt as one of the co-founder of the 1930s hot jazz group, Quintette de Hot Club du France. Today happens to mark the birthday (1908) of the other founder, the jazz violinist, Stephane Grappelli. We introduced both artists in a video appearing in Monday's post. Readers who missed it should take the time to view it as Grappelli appears in several interviews. Like his friend, Grappelli was a self taught musician who developed a unique playing style, and made a big influence in the world of music. Fortunately, much of that influence was direct as he outlived Reinhardt by nearly fifty years and performed with perfection almost to the end of his life on December 1, 1997.
He loved people almost as much as he loved music and brought his jovial, upbeat personality and style to audiences young and old, large and small.
Here he is playing in Warsaw in 1991 - he's 83:
And here he is in a conversation with George Gershwin:
Finally, with the Hot Club in Paris in 1938:
It's interesting to note that Grappelli was almost forgotten in the U.S. until he began touring in the 1970s when he was well into his 60s. One would think that a jazz virtuoso would be well known in the country that birthed the genre. How thankful we should be that he was "rediscovered" here and lived to entertain us for another twenty years.
He knew that the subject of his musical obsession, Johnny Mercer, often used the imagery of trains in his lyrics. He knew that Mercer at a very young age often slipped away from his home on Gwinnett Street to listen to music in the black neighborhoods of Savannah. Tonight he learned of a remarkable connection in black music, trains, and Mercer.
By pure chance - or was it luck - OTR discovered a wonderful four part
series on the American musical invention known as boogie woogie. Here is Part I:
Wonderful connections. Enjoy, enjoy. Bet you tapped your feet. Beware: Part 4 will leave you jumpin', maybe dancin'.
Several of OTR's favorite people in the world of music have birthdays in the next week. Our first is Django Reinhardt, born on this day in 1910.
Andres Segovia, Wes Montgomery, B.B. King, and Jimi Hendix. All masters at the guitar. And then there is Django Reinhardt. He was a poor Belgian gypsy who as a young man played the guitar. When a trailer fire left him with a severely injured hand, he developed a new fingering style to compensate. It was a unique sound. In the early '30s he met the violinist, Stephane Grappelli, an equally free spirit in the early days of jazz. They would go on to form the "Quintette du Hot Club de France" and make music - and music history for the next twenty years.
Reinhardt died in 1953 at the age of 43, but his impact has lived on for decades. Even today, almost every celebrity guitarist in the world of popular music, jazz, blues and rock and roll would acknowledge Reinhardt as an influence in their music.
Here is a excellent documentary segment describing Reinhardt's early life, his meeting Grappelli, and the formation and history of the Hot Club.
And for an encore, here's five minutes of mostly Django at his very best.
OTR's love for the natural world has its origins in the trees outside his nursery window, in the shooting star he saw through that same window, and in the sycamore forest, fields and stony creek in his childhood paradise in Burlington, West Virginia. Now at the other end of his earthly life, OTR still reveres the cultural and natural world around him, nurtured by a career steeped in the study of the American experience. In the early days, he peeled that experience in much the same way one would peel an onion for the day's salad. One day, he stood with his best friend at the summit of Capulin Volcano in central New Mexico. They were washed in a glorious sunset filled with distant horizons, a full pallet of color and crepuscular rays that made it a holy event. At once he began a discourse on volcanic landscapes and regional geography interspersed with comments on physics and meteorological phenomena. He didn't get far. After no more than thirty seconds, his friend told him to "shut up" and simply take in the sensation, take it all in.
That was more than forty years ago. At that moment his days of looking at his world, and particularly himself, began to change. He no longer looked at the bits and pieces. It was as if a long childhood, both personal and academic, had come to an end. Although he could still peel the onion when needed, he began to examine wholeness and its aesthetic. It was beautiful then and beautiful now.
Today OTR would define himself as a pragmatic environmentalist. He sees the need to preserve the world - the American experience - through a lens molded and polished in realism. Unfortunately, environmentalism as a national movement has drifted away from many of the broader American principles that created a love for nature and the culture that sustained it.
Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds has posted a link addressing some interesting and unsettling realities about the environmental preservation movement. OTR has lived, both comfortably and uncomfortably, with these realities for some time. What he finds so interesting is the same observations made by American economist Thorstein Veblen almost a century ago in his discussion of the environmental zeitgeist as something he termed "industrial exemption."
OTR hopes his readers enjoy expanding their mind engines on this narrow topic. He also hopes they can better see the world in their onions as well as chop them for a delicious salad.
Photo: Capulin Volcano Sunset by Mike Schoonover, 2010
This week's film is Steven Spielberg's 1941, a comedy released in 1979 and based on the fear of a Japanese attack on California following Pearl Harbor. The film was a financial success for its backers and well received by critics. Unfortunately, it was overshadowed by Spielberg's enormous blockbusters, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that appeared in 1975 and 1977. Though viewed as a lesser success, 1941 has entered cult film status due to its casting, homage to film history, Oscar-winning special effects, and comedy genius of John Belushi.
Here's a teaser:
And the official trailer:
Fasten your seat belts and make sure you have plenty of Coke on hand.
It's election season and OTR thinks it's about time for a history lesson from the popular culture archives. While we're listening to the candidates and mulling over the state of the union - the address is coming up shortly - we need to be reminded of the social and political realities driving the nation. The American writer and cartoonist, Al Capp, defined these realities quite well in his satirical syndicated strip, Li'l Abner. It ran from 1934 to 1977 and enriched the culture on several fronts.
In 1959, Paramount Pictures released film musical based on the strip and a 1956 stage production. It was a moderately successful film in its day and, after fifty years, an even more significant object lesson in American politics. With music by Gene De Paul and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, the stage version of Li'l Abner remains a popular production for high schools as well as local and regional theater groups. OTR thinks it should be required viewing for voters, first, to get them smiling, and second, to instruct them in the principles of political reality. Here is your first lesson:
Gilbert and Sullivan came to same conclusion in England by 1880.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'
OTR is pleased to know that virtually every high school graduate in the U.S. has encountered the poem, The Raven. It brought Edgar Allan Poe instant fame in 1845 and ensured him a secure place in American literature. Poe's appeal to readers, especially young ones, rests in his dark and stormy subjects, his fantastic plots, and rich, descriptive writing. There is a timelessness about his work as well that, in part, accounts for his appeal to contemporary readers. His influence has lived on the the works of Dostoyevsky. Baudelaire, Lovecraft, Eliot, Sayers, Nobokov, Bradbury and many others.
Poe was born in Boston on this day in 1809. He spent his lifetime living
and working between the coastal cities of Boston and Charleston. Death
found him in Baltimore in 1849 wrapped in the mystery and tragedy that surrounded him during much of his life.
Today there is another mystery surrounding Poe. Since 1949, a toaster has appeared at his grave in Baltimore's Westminster Burial Ground in the early hours of his birthday. The toaster leaves three roses and a half full bottle of cognac. The Poe Toaster's identity is unknown. Last year, he or she did not appear. Will the toaster return? By the time most of us are awake reading our online newspapers, checking email, Facebook or favorite blogs, the world will have an answer or a deepening mystery. Either way, Poe's legacy will live on in classrooms, in private libraries, on glowing Kindles or anywhere readers enjoy imagination at its best.
On this night in 1938, Benny Goodman and his band, along with select members of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands, performed a concert at Carnegie Hall. No jazz bandleader had ever performed there. The concert was a sensation, reaffirming Goodman as the "King of Swing," and jazz as serious American music. In the eyes of many music critics and historians, this concert remains the single most important event in popular music history in the United States. Superlatives aside, the concert was a study in swing music history and jazz improvisation. After several curtain calls at the end of the concert, Goodman announced to the screaming fans that an encore would follow. Sing, Sing, Sing was the last song in that set. It already was a popular piece for the band, but this performance lifted it to holy status in the swing jazz genre. Featured players: Gene Kruppa on drums, Babe Russin on saxaphone, Harry James on trumpet, Goodman on clarinet, and Jess Stacy in a masterpiece of improvisation on piano.
Recordings of the concert have remained in print as best sellers since 1950 when masters were found in Goodman's home. What more can be said?
Some folks fly in aircraft. Some fly in spacecraft. Others fly in suits with wings. Jeb Corliss is a Californian and a professional flyer who owns one of those suits. On September 25, 2011, he flew through a hole in Tianmen Mountain in Hunan Province, China. All in a days work.
Here is a video of that flight. The reporter adds little to the story, but the flight is certainly dramatic as is the remarkable landscape of one of China's most popular national parks.
OTR wonders what this guy does for recreation.
Photo: Jeb Corliss, from "Jump. Fly. Land.", Air and Space Magazine, November 2010
H/T to my friend, Virginia
If anyone wondered why people could enjoy orbiting Earth this video will put their questions to rest. It will leave dreamers thinking how they can reserve a spot on the International Space Station. Here is your Discovery Channel link to this astonishing time lapse journey on the ISS taken on Expedition 28 and 29 between May and November 2011.
Fasten your seat belts and be sure to watch in high definition. If you need an itinerary, refer to the list below the video link.
Florence Lowe "Pancho" Barnes (1901-1975) is an American legend with a near half century connection to aviation history. She began her career as a barnstormer and became an advocate for stunt pilots in Hollywood. By 1940, she built a fly-in dude ranch in the California desert that would become known as the Happy Bottom Riding Club, the off duty home to the finest fliers and space pioneers at Edwards Air Force Base.
In 2009, Amanda Pope and Nick Spark, two of Hollywood's best documentary filmmakers, released their interpretation of this most entertaining story. The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club was screened nation-wide on PBS, internationally, and at several film festivals. It is an award-winning production - including an Emmy - and has become a favorite among aviation enthusiasts. OTR guarantees his readers that they will enjoy what amounts to a whirlwind adventure film about one of the nation's most colorful personalities.
Here is a brief Edwards Air Force Base production about Barnes and the planes, people, and place she loved.
Who among us does not want a better world? That's the easy question. Things become more complicated when the community tries to decide how to achieve that good life. For some, the decision rests on controlling the "evils" around us. The control takes many forms. OTR is especially fond of H.L. Mencken's assessment of the Puritan effort at achieving a religious utopia. He described it as a society based on "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, was happy." Well, one man's trash is another man's pleasure. That brings us to a review of Christopher Snowden's new book, The Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800. Here's a link to the review via Instapundit. It has been updated to include a post about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's new crusade against liquor stores in New York City.
Bloomberg's effort gives us an opportunity to recommend Prohibition, the superb new (2011) three-part documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. This production has all the magic we've come to expect from the Burns organization and some surprises most of us never heard in history class - if there ever was a history class.
Mencken (r) celebrates the end of Prohibition
This post would not be complete without a vision of OTR's moral crusade utopia. Now that he's on the other side of 65 years, only two vices drive him to disgust. First is the the use of tobacco in public. It is the equivalent of experiencing copious cubic feet of flatulence at your favorite restaurant. The passer doesn't mind because he enjoys smelling his own essence. And second is the mobile subwoofer, a device almost always preferred by narcissists who have no taste in music. Whenever he encounters the mobile subwoofer, OTR wishes to summon the "Graboids" and "Shai-Hulud" to terminate the operator. Such extreme prejudice, on the other hand, is a poor moral choice for such vices. OTR should be content to let nature take its course, summoning the gas passer to an early demise and the "boom-boom" narcissist to quick and early deafness.
Vermin Supreme is running on the Democrat ticket for President in today's New Hampshire primary. He's been there before, and OTR thinks he's been around long before that if any of his readers recall the perennial presidential candidate, Pat Paulsen, from the days of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a 1960s television landmark. Who cares about Mr. Supreme's political affiliation when you can have this much fun celebrating the fact that ANY native-born American can rise to the highest office in the land.
And for those who don't know Pat Paulsen or need a refresher, here is the candidate and his observations on others running in the tumultuous election of 1968. It's interesting what runs through the mind at the mention of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace, and the others considering how history has unfolded.
Powerline's Scott Johnson reminds us that Joan Baez turns 71 tomorrow (Monday). His post likely reflects the feelings of many aging boomers: she's had the voice of an angel for over fifty years and a career diminished by political controversy. Through it all, OTR still loves the voice, the control, the diction, and the repertoire.
Johnson links to a video of Baez singing Love is Just a Four-Letter Word with Earl Scruggs and his son on banjo and guitar. It's a treasure to see and hear, but the production values suffer, so here is the song taken from her 1968 album, Any Day Now: Songs of Bob Dylan.
And here she is singing forty years later at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2007. The song, Diamonds and Rust, recalls the emotions of her two-year relationship with Bob Dylan during the mid-1960s. Still the voice on an angel.
Pop culture. For decades, it's been washing across the U.S. like waves on a beach. Writing in Vanity Fair this month, Kurt Anderson says that, strange as it may seem, the cultural surf stopped around 1990 because we got fixated on the past. Emily Esfahani Smith responds with a resounding "No." She says those waves are still there, but we don't study the past anymore, so what looks like stagnation is really an attempt to "reconnect" with a rich heritage.
Instapundit's Ed Driscoll has a brief observation on this issue as well as links to the above mentioned articles and the phenomenon of our "present-tense culture." Makes for some interesting reading for pop culture junkies everywhere. Be sure to read the comments following the Anderson and Smith articles.
Illustration: Untitled from Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn). 1967, Any Warhol. MOMA
For those interested in seeing the most noteworthy of the ClimateGate2 memos, Watts Up With That has posted the homework done by Tom Nelson. Some astounding reading here that should put to rest any idea that "global warming" is "settled science." For those who understand, there's damn little settled science - hypothesis and law - out there when it comes to climate change. Come to think of it, there isn't much "settled science" anywhere if you believe in the scientific method as a means of investigation and explanation.
Illustration: Horn Island, Walter Inglis Anderson, ca 1960
H/T to Instapundit
Jodi Cantor is a reporter for The New York Times. That said we could expect nothing about the current occupants of the White House except tea and sympathy. OTR has no objection to that presentation. Whatever normal life a family had dissipates rapidly upon entering the White House grounds for four or possibly eight years of living in the national fishbowl. It would be difficult enough to adjust with years of prior political experience. Imagine the family of an up-and-coming senator suddenly finding themselves in that residence. Imagine them being the first family of color. Imagine a First Lady whose credentials rival those of her spouse. In a phrase, "it ain't going to be easy." This Huffington Post article seems to have the most detail on the subject.
There is but one popular American carol for the celebration of Epiphany. It was written by the Episcopal clergyman, John Henry Hopkins, Jr., and appeared in print in 1863 in a collection of his sacred music. Here is a superb performance of that carol, We Three Kings, by the Robert Shaw Chorale:
This post marks the end of our daily music series for the Christmas holiday season. OTR hopes his readers have enjoyed listening to it as much as he enjoyed the research and preparation.
Twelfth-night (The King Drinks), David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690)
This is the twelfth and final day of Christmas 2011. In the Western tradition, it is time for general merriment, song, dance, and feasting, and plays that turn the world upside down. At Twelfth Night celebrations, it is time for the Lord of Misrule to turn those "above the salt" into peasants, and peasants into kings, to enjoy the mummer's plays, to let the feasting and wassailing carry on to midnight. As the clock strikes that hour the party ends, and Epiphany, the commemoration of the three kings's visit to the manger begins.
This year Trinity Wall Street, an Episcopal church in lower Manhattan, has sponsored a Twelfth Night concert series. Here are two selections by Claudio Monteverdi from that series:
And if readers want to see Twelfth Night partiers in action, here is some old-fashioned wassailing and good fun from Maplehurst, West Sussex, UK:
As we approach the end of Christmas in the Western tradition, Orthodox Christians prepare to celebrate their holy day on January 7. Today's music comes from the Eastern tradition. It is the Song of the Magi, performed a cappella by one of those magnificent Russian male choirs.
Released in 1927, the film, Wings, was the first to receive an Academy Award as "Best Picture." William Wellman directed this classic. As an honored flyer in World War I, he received massive support from the U.S. Army Air Corps in making the film, including more than 200 aircraft. Here is a clip showing the scale of the production:
Here is Christmas Eve, a symphonic poem written by the British composer, Arnold Bax (1883-1953). Bax was an impressionist composer inspired especially by the landscapes and cultures of Ireland, Scotland, and Russia.
British composer John Rutter wrote this peaceful carol in 1984. He is deeply appreciated in the U.S. and Britain for his many choral and other compositions, for his work as a conductor and arranger. and as the founder of The Cambridge Singers.
