About three years ago, when my then-future-wife was just moving to Akron in preparation for graduate studies, her grandmother said that some distant relatives happened to live in northeast Ohio. Over the course of the next two years, she—and subsequently we—became great friends with these “cousins” (actually a much more complicated relationship, but this is how we refer to it for simplicity).
Last night we had the pleasure of visiting with them and taking in a concert at the Copley Bandstand. It was a fun night of big band music, courtesy of Swing Machine. Great memories of playing second tenor in a big band came rushing back to my mind as I listened to charts such as Basie’s “April in Paris.”
“Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots … you stop.”
… and this passage, Col 1:9-14, as Exhibit B:
“For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”
My recent activities have included a great deal of research in the area of psychology in terms of the concept of creativity. Here is a term that has been lost due to modern usage. For example,
The word “creativity” in popular culture has, at best, an ambiguous definition
No one, not even any psychologist, knows exactly what happens in our minds when we are creative
Furthermore, some people just seem to be more creative than others, just because of who they are
I don’t know exactly how we got here, but this is where we are.
One of the primary difference between a score by Bach and another by Boulez is in the details.
At what tempo do you play any piece by Bach? A “correct” answer could be “the same tempo as everyone else.” Granted, this is not an absolute. As performance-practice research becomes available, players modify their tempos to reflect the most current research. Aye, this is the bane of historically informed performance.
At what tempo do you play any piece by Boulez? This one’s easy. The correct answer is printed right on the score. Period.
