Life is not a rehearsal
Guitar great Tommy Emmanuel reminds us that we need to get on with life!
All posts filed under: Acoustic Music
Only two kinds of music
Today is bittersweet, as our Andrew prepares to leave tonight for London and his graduate studies at conservatory. Over the past month, we’ve been savoring both his presence and his music. When we were in California in August, we had the chance to attend the final concert in San Francisco’s 2018 American Bach Soloists’ Summer Bach Festival, the stirring Mass in B Minor. Andrew joined three other musicians for the Benedictus. This tenor aria comes near the end of the mass, and Andrew’s beautiful singing was supported by just a flute, cello, and double bass. Then just this past weekend, Andrew had a call to sing the state funeral for U.S. Senator John McCain at the Washington National Cathedral. He had turned in his badge and music at the cathedral, where he most recently was one of the tenors in the men’s choir. But his replacement had not arrived from out-of-town so Andrew had the chance to sing his third state funeral (Reagan and Ford, while a boy chorister, were the others) to go along …
Be present when serendipity strikes
You’ll never know that one of your guitar heroes is sitting in the seat next to you if you don’t take your head out of your phone or computer.
Think slow
Our 15-year-old nephew — a budding musician — was in town this past weekend, so I took him to the House of Musical Traditions in Takoma Park. There he could see every type of musical instrument known to humankind (plus some) and, frankly, it gave me an excuse to play a few good guitars. Not that I don’t have good guitars at home. Later in the day my nephew had a chance to see and play my two prized Running Dog guitars made by luthier Rick Davis. Davis was profiled in Tim Brookes’ 2005 book Guitar: An American Life, where the author seeks to replace a badly damaged first guitar with a hand-crafted one “for the second half of my life.” He writes that as he nears 50 years of age, he finds an itch that can only be scratched with a new guitar. And as Brookes notes, “Guitar makers even have a word for these baby-boomers-who-always-wanted-to-be-great-guitarists-and-now-have-the-money-to-indulge-those-dreams: dentists.” “Much later, after the guitar is finished, Rick will refer to ‘the eternal and infinite capacity of …
Lenten litany
At yesterday’s service on the First Sunday in Lent at the Washington National Cathedral, Andrew — a tenor in the men’s choir — was the soloist for the Lenten Litany. This particular version of the litany was arranged by Canon Michael McCarthy, the Director of Music at the National Cathedral. It is a moving seven minutes of music, to help bring the faithful into an observance of the holy season of Lent. The solo begins around the 13 minute mark. With blessings for whatever practice you bring to the season. More to come… DJB Image: Central Tower of the Washington National Cathedral
Practicing
Over the holidays I returned to a book I first read some ten years ago. Glenn Kurtz’s Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music is, in its simplest form, a memoir of a young child prodigy on the classical guitar who attends the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music and then quits playing in his early 20s when he realizes he won’t be the next Segovia. Fifteen years and a career change later, Kurtz returns to the guitar and finds, in the process, a richer love for music. But like all good memoirs, Practicing is so much more than a simple life’s story. Kurtz has been practicing since he was eight years old, but it isn’t until he returns after his hiatus that he begins to understand all the richness of the various aspects of preparing for performance, or life. “Practicing is training; practicing is meditation and therapy. But before any of these, practicing is a story you tell yourself, a bildungsroman, a tale of education and self-realization. For the fingers as for the mind, practicing …
Here comes that rainbow again
Kris Kristofferson knew that there are kindnesses and civility all around us, if we’ll look for them.
Observations from Home: The Silver Spring Day Off Edition
If you don’t read anything else in this post, go to the bottom and watch the last video. Morgan James is beautiful and has a wonderful voice, but you won’t be able to take your eyes off the Tambourine Man. He’ll bring you up, no matter how down you are. And you’ll thank me for it. Now, on to the rest of the post. I seldom take a weekday off where I’m at home in Silver Spring. Yet after working about 20 weekends in a row (perhaps I exaggerate), I decided to take today off and make it a three-day weekend. It was interesting to be around downtown Silver Spring and see the following: Bikes are sprouting up everywhere one looks. First it was the Capital Bikeshare stations that arrived in downtown. But in the last month, we’ve been inundated with the new dockless bikes, and today was the first time I walked around town and had the sense that they are EVERYWHERE! (At least if you walk around the condo/apartment heavy downtown.) They look …
Two unexpected books for these times
It wasn’t until I was well into the second of two books I’ve devoured in the past few weeks that the timeliness of these very different works dawned on me. Nothing in either the biography or novel – both released in 2016 – would have suggested that they were important books for our time, much less that there would be common threads. And as a bonus, both are terrific reads. Timothy Egan has produced a page-turning biography that captures the incredible saga of Thomas Francis Meagher (pronounced Mar), one of the most famous Irish Americans of all time. Egan – one of my favorite writers (see the “Writers I Enjoy” list on the side of my blog page) – has previously written highly readable and well-researched histories on the Dust Bowl (The Worst Hard Time) and the founding of the U.S. Forest Service (The Big Burn). In The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero, Egan bring Francis Meagher’s time and story to life. Meagher was born to comfort in Ireland, but …
The preferred Pre-Inaugural concert
Earlier this evening, I joined a full house at Strathmore Music Hall as we made our choice for a different pre-inaugural concert from that on the national mall. Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt are two of the best songwriters and (especially in Lovett’s case) song interpreters in the Americana field. The beautiful sound and setting at Strathmore was perfect for their two-and-one-half hour acoustic set on Thursday evening. They played their hits. They played unrecorded new songs. They bantered. They played songs by other songwriters. And they did it with such ease and obvious affection for each other that the time flew by. Hiatt’s voice is getting older and doesn’t hit the notes like he once did. But that really didn’t matter in this setting. Here’s a video of a tune they played tonight, Lovett’s “She’s Not Lady.” Enjoy! More to come… DJB Image: My ticket in the nose bleed section at Strathmore
MORE TO COME... 