Monthly Archives: November 2008

My Dad

After listening to several Bryn Terfel videos on You tube yesterday I got the “family DVD” in the mail. When i started listening to it, I thought, “My dad is the best!” Thank you, Rach, for putting together the stuff he left behind. I felt like I had gotten him back when I could see his face before illness took it and  hear his wonderful, wonderful voice.

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His Holy name.

Bless the Lord , O my soul, and forget not all His benefits!”

Happy Thanksgiving to whomever reads this!

Let’s hear it for the Men!

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If you asked me who my favorite singer is, “Bryn Terfel” would fly straight out of my mouth. I always think that Dad’s voice had the same quality. It’s the Brit in him. The Welsh take it away for singing, the English fior melody, the Irish for motion or making you want to dance and the Scots for the poetry. What more can you ask for? I gave Dad a Bryn Terfel CD several years ago and I remember lisyening to it with him and chewing it over while Mom kept walking through the living room repeating. “Everyone’s going to bed!” We let it go over our heads like water over a duck’s back and I am so glad because it had been a long time since I had been able to have a conversation like that with Dad and it was last one.

When people say they like this singer or that singer, I am sorry, but my standards for men are Bryn Terfel and Luciano Pavarotti. I am sorry I am so hard on all the others because there are lot of wonderful singers out there that aren’t this caliber! Myself included! One time I taped a man singing ‘Old Man River’ off the radio. He was a black college professor of voice. Dad listened to it and said, “He hasn’t got any expression!” And from the sofa where he was laid up with his broken ankle, he just took off with that song! He was right. He wouldn’t be able to fault BT for no expression! I am sorry the video music is slightly off with the words. I am going to go check out the video he does with Andrea Bocelli. If LP were younger, he would be the better match. They are both vivid. I call it ‘presence’. What I mean is that they could be anywhere in the room and it would fell like it was right in your ear. But I am sure that Andrea does a nice job.

Bryn Terfewl make me positively swoony.

Listening in

One of my favorite things to do is to go to Barnes and Noble and listen to CDs on the headphones. I am in another world. It is my own little concert hall. Wel,, move over B&N, here comes YouTube! I seem a little stuck on women’s voices. As I listened to this I thought, with a little practice and some coaching, my sisters and I could do this. maybe not the whole big splash, but maybe the quality of music. A really good coach can reach down and pull things out you didn’t realize were there and tell you about your nasty habits. Mrs. Brimmer taught me to record myself. I thought it was like standing in front of a mirror naked! Then she’d say, “The tape never lies!” hmmmmm….. dare we dream?

Monday Morning Music

Sometime I would like to know the ancestry of this music and how it relates to other music. I am sure it is ancient and I am sure it has traveled around the world some. I am not sure in what directions. last night I felt this zippy. And Ifelt zippy when I crawled out of bedl bu then I had to take Joel to work and run an errand and driving in the sun makes me sleepy. So here it is, not 10:00 and I want to take a nap. Maybe I’ll listen to this video again.

Checking

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I am seeing if I can change my font and size. If you are looking for music, the Monday morning music is planned, so you will have to check in then, See ya!

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Learning new things

Widgets! That’s what they’re called! Now my archives are back up! I also leraned that youcan click a corner of the video and there will be several related videos down below. So if you want to see more of Sweet Honey, yes! You can! If you want to see how many takes of papagena you can endure, they are there, sweet honey!

It’s a rainy day and I can’t go out to play

I should have played yesterday. Instead, I made applesauce. I really wasn’t in the mood, but I GOT IT DONE! I should probably say what I have been playing. The first one is from an opera called ‘Lakme’ by Delibes. It is the ‘Flower Duet’. The second one is ‘Papagena’ from ‘The Magic Flute’. don’t you love the French captions while they are singing in German!! The last one is ‘Sweet Honey in the Rock.” Stay tuned for more ‘Adventures in Music”. Melinda has discovered Youtube!

Every now and then I get an email slamming a particular talk show host and I am going to use my space here to respond to it. Usually these are few and far between. I used to think that talk shows were for people who never took Latin, that is to say, there was no rhyme or reason. Definitely not reason. People came on to air out whatever they had in their heads, but not to put anything they hadn’t thought of themselves in them, i.e. listening to another party with a different perspective. When Luisa was a junior in HS, we started watching ‘Oprah’ when we were sick. When she was a senior, we watched when we got home from school. alas, now I watch alone. I am not going to claim anything concerning her spiritual state, but just say what I like about her. Now I got her in her 50′s. Maybe she did things differently when she was in her 30′s. I like the way she treats people, even when they have done something really stupid, or when they have suffered much. I like her willingness to take on difficult subjects and say what’s going on all over the place, including our own homes and neighborhoods. She often qualifies having those particular guests on her show as representatives of what’s going on in the world. I loved it when she and her friend traveled from California to NYC in a car and filmed it extemporaneously for all of us to see! I like what she does with her money, and she often includes the giving of others with her own gift, so she is not getting all the credit herself. I learn about other people like Mohammed Yunus and Elie Wiesel. A couple Fridays ago she called Il Divo and asked if they would come sing Amazing Grace on her show that day. They were at an airport, but they changed their tickets to Chicago and came and sang! One of my favorite quotes is her telling about when she was a child there were hardly any trees in the neighborhood and she vowed when she grew up, she was going to have trees. She said every morning she looks out and sees 2,000 trees in her yard and she thinks about the grace of God.  If I don’t want to watch shows about the ‘gods and goddesses’, I am at perfect liberty to skip it, and I usually do.

Pax vobiscum