The first paragraph below, in red, is the second of three parts about my childhood beginnings in music. It can stand alone, but if you want to read Part One, click HERE. Or, you can skip down past the red type below to go right to my regular diary.

Part Two (of three): When I was about nine, one of my older sisters had an upright piano in our living room for her piano lessons. All I can now remember is her playing my favorite of her pieces, Schubert’s Marche Militaire. To my parents’ credit, they also played vinyl records of classical music at home throughout my childhood. My special request was always Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. They also had a set of translucent, red records in a boxed set of chamber music by Beethoven, which I enjoyed while lying on the floor and looking at the world through rose-colored record glasses. When no one was around, I went to the piano and secretly picked out the tunes of popular songs I liked. But for some reason I really wanted to write them down using those little golf clubs called notes. I think I wanted to preserve them and somehow secretly own them myself in some tangible form. I found a little guide in the front of one of my sister’s beginner piano books that showed which piano keys correspond to which notes on the staff. I didn’t know how to notate rhythm yet, but I was able to draw an imperfect five-line staff on a piece of blank paper with my plastic school ruler and copy a crude treble clef. Then, by trial and error, I pecked around on the piano keys to find and write out the pitches (but not the rhythm) for two of my favorite tunes, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever by the Beatles. Then I put those pieces of paper on the piano and practiced playing those melodies from them, then hid my scores secretly away in my room. To be concluded next time in part three.

For architecture and organ nerds: Since I last wrote, Crystal and I had occasion to be in the sleepy little town of Augusta, Georgia on a Sunday and came across a very beautiful and historic church, Most Holy Trinity, the oldest surviving Catholic church building in the state of Georgia! It also has one of the largest, most famous, historic tracker pipe organs in the south. Like the church itself, this organ dates from the mid 19^th century and was beautifully restored. That morning, I think the organist employed all of the organ’s 1,520 pipes! My hair was blowing in the breeze from them! The sound was gorgeous and real. Many, perhaps most, Americans have only heard a fake electric organ sound coming through hidden loudspeakers from church organs displaying fake pipes, for looks. Hearing authentic, richly acoustic sound such as this, from real air actually blowing through real pipes, was to my ears like seeing real flowers compared to seeing artificial plastic ones.

For music composition nerds: I have made a start on a new (third) symphony. It’s hard to describe this experience, because it feels different from starting many other kinds of projects. It could sound like you are beginning any other craft project, methodically, like painting a house. In this case, though, you must first focus on your own interior life and on what’s in your soul, and then let that generate music from somewhere inside you. The notes must then mysteriously find their way outward, as if the paint on the house were oozing paint like sap out of the pores of the wood, from within. Then I hear the music involuntarily, from wherever it has come, and write it down. For me, this begins to happen after spending what I call “pre-composing” time listening to inspiring music (this time, Brahms symphonies, with the scores) and mentally improvising in contemplation of a kind of role-playing in the mood I want to strike. The latter is not a matter of acting a role that is not really true to oneself, though, but rather of tapping into something genuinely hidden within oneself.

For music theory nerds:  I have started this movement (whichever it ends up being) in a serious tone with the string section and a horn on darkly voiced chords. After my second symphony and then composing nearly an hour of ballet music for large orchestra, I feel my musical language evolving ever so slightly. I have often used chromatic mediant relations and modes, which I will continue to do, but in this work I am hearing (as described above) a bit more traditional gravitas from a touch more functional chromaticism, as if Sibelius or Vaughan Williams had been more influenced by their predecessor Brahms. I told a friend that maybe I’m evolving historically backwards, like a musical Benjamin Button. However, don’t worry, I won’t end up writing Baroque music!

For computer nerds: My computer has been constantly overheating and shutting down! The fan inside works but could just not keep up. For a while I was putting cold packs from the freezer on top to cool it down! After some research on CPU drainage, I have switched my browser from Opera to Vivaldi (which behaves much better in the task manager). I also downloaded and ran the free virus software Malwarebytes, and it discovered 172 Trojans that my paid McAfee had completely missed. Another trick I learned to save CPU overload is to open the “Event Viewer” from the search window, then under “Windows Logs” press the button to “clear log.” The logs slow everything down when they get too full. And finally, I dumped most of my big files onto a new external 2 TB hard drive to lighten the memory load on the hard drive. So the pie chart in C: properties now shows my hard drive only half full instead of 90% full. So far, so good. It’s running faster and smoother and not shutting down.

For cooking nerds: Last week I spatch-cocked a whole 5 lb. chicken on my Weber kettle grill, using indirect coal heat and smoking chips at 350F degrees for one hour. Spatchcock is where you cut out the backbone, flip it over, and flatten the whole bird out, butterflied. I rubbed both sides and under the breast skin with oil and Mike Church’s fantastic B & B Rub. Halfway through, I slathered on a thin layer of barbecue sauce, and I kept my remote thermometer in the breast till it came up to 265 degrees, and the bird came out perfectly and really juicy. You can see the thermometer probe at the top right of the right photo, which is attached to a cord.

For book nerds: Since last time, on a whim, I went to our home’s children’s bookshelf. We have quite a collection acquired from the fact that Crystal has a masters in education and took children’s lit courses, my mom was a children’s book illustrator and owned a lot of other books that she gave me, and during one year out of school I worked as the buyer for the big children’s book department of a bookstore and bought a lot of them. This time I picked out and read the original 1926 edition of Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, with its original, delicate line drawings. I found it more endearing than anything I’ve read since reading James Herriot’s All Creatures books last year. For the first time, I thought about the context of when Winnie was written in England. Between the two world wars, England was suffering economically, and that year of 1926 saw the great coal workers’ strike that so greatly debilitated the country. The book’s stuffed animal characters, perhaps in an escapist way, are naively charming, thoughtful to each other, wholly innocent, and good. I think that’s why the book feels just as uplifting and refreshing to the soul in today’s stressful climate as it must have been in 1926. If you’ve only seen the Disney movie, I recommend the original book. It’s full of wisdom and is much more “for children of all ages” than the animated film.

Well, sorry if you are not any kind of nerd! Not much here for your this time! 😊