12.14.2023 – thirty three one third

thirty three one third
long playing, unlimited
wasn’t long enough

With a movie on his life coming out, Leonard Bernstein has been much in the news of late and it got to me thinking about recordings of his work as a Director of an orchestra.

Looking through files available to me, I found the complete 9 Beethoven symphonies.

I downloaded the files and was adding them to my iphone when I noticed something odd.

The 9th symphony was in five sections.

The 4th movement was in 2 parts.

I listened to the files and tried to puzzle out why one section of the 4th movement was the first 8 minutes and the 2nd part was 19 minutes long and why there were 2 sections to start with.

I checked the notes that downloaded with the files and they said the CD that the files came originally from was produced back in 2004.

This CD is available still today on Amazon.

I was about to put the notes away when I noticed in small small print the line, LIVE PERFORMANCE and the year, 1980.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I said.

This set of recordings were originally offered as records.

LP records.

Long Playing records that turned at constant speed of 33 1/3 revolutions per minute.

Those old records could hold about 22 minutes of music.

The 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony is about 26 minutes long.

Somewhere, someone had to choose a point to break that 4th movement into two parts.

My first thought was to wonder why someone didn’t bother to take the time to couple the two electronic files together into one file for the CD.

How lazy could you get that someone just took the digital masters of the vinyl recordings and lumped them together on this CD with an unfortunate skip 7 minutes into the 4th movement.

It really got to bug me when I thought of the mostly apocryphal story that when Sony created CD’s, the President of Sony, a one time classical music conductor, demanded that a CD had to be long enough so that Beethoven’s 9th Symphony could be played on a single CD which is why a when a CD came out it had 88 minutes of music.

Then another thought came to me.

No one argues that Mr. Bernstein and the music he created or had a part in creating is all incredibly wonderful.

While we have the recordings, we have the recordings via the technology of the era.

Records limited to 22 minutes.

When RCA Victor standardized the 33 1/3 record (and the first record, sold in 1931, was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski) they only lasted 15 minutes.

The LP that made 23 minutes of sound available was ground breaking technology in 1948.

23 Minutes of recorded music.

Unlimited in many aspects.

But the long playing album wasn’t long enough.

Not until that 88 minute CD came out was there room enough for Mr. Beethoven and his 9th.

There are some technological advances that ARE cultural ones I guess.

Technology comes into the music picture often today with advances in recording, mastering, editing and even instruments themselves.

Listening to these audio files from 1980, what I noticed the most was the changes in microphones and what can be picked up an reproduced.

The whole concept of sounds and sound and recording and then stepping ahead to digitally reproducing the sounds gets me to the edge where, like sausage, I no longer want to know.

Just let me listen.

Somehow, regardless, the recordings or maybe the music itself still picks up personality.

Mr. Bernstein was famous for his energy as he directed.

Mr. Beethoven was famous for the energy as he composed.

The musicians, unless they were dead or something, picked up on both sources of energy and produce sounds filled with energy.

Beethoven has been dead for almost 200 years (2027)

Mr. Bernstein has been dead for over 30 years.

Loud and clear today.

12.13.2023 – words muddled effect

words muddled effect
on my mind seldom caused
any afterthoughts

Adapted from, “There was no doubt that I had a fondness for books — especially old ones. But my reading was desultory and unassimilative. Words made a muddled effect on my mind while I was busy among them, and they seldom caused any afterthoughts. I esteemed my books mostly for their outsides. I admired old leather bindings, and my fancy was tickled by the thought of firelight flickering on dim gilt, autumn-coloured backs—rows and rows of them, and myself in an arm-chair musing on the pleasant names of Addison and Steele, Gibbon and Goldsmith. And what wonderful bargains were to be discovered in the catalogues of second-hand booksellers at Birmingham!”

In Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (The Memoirs of George Sherston #1) by Siegfried Sassoon, Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1928.

For me, words make a muddled effect on my mind while I am busy among them, and they often cause afterthoughts.

My problem is remembering what I read and where.

Desultory?

No sir.

Unassimilative?

Nope.

Fondness?

Guilty!

12.12.2023 – more wonderful than

more wonderful than
way sun floats toward horizon?
relaxed, easy …

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

The Sun by Mary Oliver

I can sit and watch the sun all day long as the show never changes but is never the same.

Sometimes it isn’t the fun I get in walking the beach on my lunch hour as much as it is that I have to go back to work.

I do have to go back but I did get to walk on the beach.

How DO you work the definition of fair and being fair and what is fair, into this thought?

12.11.2023 – lovers of money

lovers of money,
boastful, proud, have nothing to
do with such people

In my Bible today I read this admonition in 2 Timothy, Chapter 3 1-5.

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.

People will be lovers of themselves,

lovers of money,

boastful,

proud,

abusive,

disobedient to their parents,

ungrateful,

unholy,

without love,

unforgiving,

slanderous,

without self-control,

brutal,

not lovers of the good,

treacherous,

rash,

conceited,

lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God — having a form of godliness but denying its power.

Have nothing to do with such people.

That pretty much seems to take care of Congress.

Our elected officials.

Most anyone in the current news cycle, for that matter.

Puts me in mind of the type of people, and there didn’t seem to be any in the recorded history, who would have tried to steal the 1st Class dining room silver … on the Titanic.

As for those elected folks, we voted them in there.

How did Obi Wan put it?

“Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?”

Come on everybody, time to grasp at straws and go attack the Death Star.

12.10.2023 – no delete buttons,

no delete buttons,
no cut-and-paste, just the click
clack of history

Fun but unsatisfying is what I thought after reading, You Can Buy Hemingway’s Typewriter. But Would You Use It? by David Waldstein in the New York Times.

Unsatisfying because Mr. Waldstein did not tell the story on how this feller, Steve Soboroff, tracked down all the typewriters of famous people that he now plans to offer at auction.

Fun because it was fun to think about owning such a machine.

This past summer I was able to sit at a desk with one of James Thurber’s typewriters.

Maybe a musician sitting at a piano used by Stevie Wonder would feel something.

Mr. Leonard Bernstein is on film describing what it was like to direct an orchestra and standing what had to be standing somewhere near the spot Ludwig Beethoven stood when his 9th Symphony was debuted.

Something about a typewriter.

I haven’t owned one in years but I have a bunch.

The last one I got was a gift that had a small computer screen and could store up to three lines of text.

You could set it to type each letter or to wait and type out each line.

I never caught the rhythm of the line by line.

A funny thing, but the last typewriter I ever bought was vintage manual Royal typewriter I got at the Salvation Army.

The machine worked fine, but finding typewriter ribbon was a problem.

The place where I worked had just thrown out all there old adding machines, along with boxes of adding machine ribbon and with a little winding, these ribbons could be retro-fitted onto my typewriter.

Friends and neighbors let me tell you that when the time comes to move cross country, a 20lb manual typewriter quickly makes it on the list of things you don’t need to bring.

Mr. Waldstein writes, The machine has no delete buttons, no cut-and-paste. Just the click-clack of history.

Sitting at the Thurber machine, I imagined his fingers on the keys and a story coming out, letter by letter, return by return.

I could hear the click-clack and the bell and the grrrrrrrr of the carriage and the thump when the the next line came into place.

John Steinbeck said, “Sometimes just the pure luxury of long beautiful pencils charges me with energy and invention.”

There is much to be said for those pencils.

I cannot remember the source of line, but someone pointed out that the American Space Programs spent millions developing a pen that could insure the flow of ink and write in zero gravity while the Soviet Union sent their astronauts into space … with pencils.

I use a comuter.

I hear the rattle of my keyboard.

That qwerty keyboard that connects my typing with the old machines.

But I back space.

I delete.

I highlight and copy and paste.

I print multiple copies.

And …

I miss that old Royal typewriter.

no delete buttons,
no cut-and-paste, just the click
clack of history