My students wrote essays growing out of listening to Glenn Gould's 1982 recording of J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. They are reading their essays aloud to the class. I deeply enjoyed the copious variety of their memories and associations and experiences.
1. J. remembered how as a girl in Kansas she never could quite get good as a piano player but felt the most alive when out with her horse and dog and entering into the dreams of her solitude.
2. C. remembered how she tripped over a hurdle in a track meet her junior year in high school and broke her arm and finished the race.
3. The Goldberg Variations pulled deep sobs out of S. as she gave herself over to Variation 15 and the memories of her mother, who died when S. was in kindergarten. It was a gorgeously cathartic paper.
1 comment:
Gorgeously cathartic. . .I would never have thought of juxtaposing these two adjectives because together they sound oxymoronic.
(I was thinking "voluptuous purging").
However, when I looked them up, they can be a succint way of describing a beautifully written paper that purifies the soul.
It's good to think outside the box.
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