Three Beautiful Things 02-02-2026: It's a CD Set!, Big News in the World of Wordle, I Created a Fun and Tasty Soup

 1. Upon closer inspection today, I discovered that the discs I bought from Better World Books were not DVDs. They are CDs. Ha! Now I can listen to the lectures about understanding music by either clicking on my audible app or putting a cd into my Blu-ray player. I guess I'll keep the CDs around in case audible buys the farm one day. 

2. I decided quite a while ago when playing Wordle not to use words that had already been solutions. Every morning, I created a tab that opened up a website featuring a list of all past Wordle answers. I vetted all my guesses using this list. 

Today, word came across the ticker tape of the World Wide Web that, starting today, Wordle will start reusing past solutions to be solutions again. I assume recycled solutions will pop up irregularly. 

No problem. I'll enjoy playing this version of Wordle just as much as when the game didn't repeat answers. 

I just need to always keep in mind that sloving on the sixth guess is a win and continue in my mission not to judge myself if I don't solve the puzzle quickly and need as many six tries. 

3. I had leftover chicken soup in the fridge that had no chicken pieces. Last night, I didn't have enough filling for six peppers, so I stuffed the sixth pepper with some of the surplus basmati rice I cooked. 

I decided to make a soup combining the chicken soup, leftover rice I put in a container last night, and the steamed red pepper, sliced, that was filled with plain rice. I put the pepper's rice in the soup, too. 

I seasoned the soup with liquid aminos.

It worked and made me think I might invent a soup using the one stuffed pepper I still have, one stuffed with the lamb mixture I made for family dinner last night. 

Three Beautiful Things 02-01-2025: Fixing Lamb Stuffed Bell Peppers, A Delicious Family Dinner, Gonzaga Symphony on Thursday

1. Last Sunday, Christy's plan (hope?) was to serve shepherd's pie at family dinner. Its featured meat is lamb. When she found ground lamb at one of the stores, she concluded it was too expensive and so she bought ground beef and we had cottage pie. 

Debbie bought a pound of ground lamb several months ago and I have repeatedly seen it in our freezer. Had I known Christy could have used it last week, I would have donated it to the family dinner fund (ha ha -- there isn't such a thing). 

Instead, I decided as tonight's host that I would make something with the lamb and decided Mediterranean stuffed bell peppers would be good. 

I thawed out the frozen lamb.

I chopped a white onion and minced four garlic cloves and cooked them for about five minutes. 

I added the lamb and cooked the aromatics and the lamb together until the lamb browned. 

I finished cooking a pot of basmati rice and soon I added ground cloves, cinnamon, and cumin along with two chopped tomatoes and tomato paste and golden raisins and toasted almond slivers to the lamb, onion, and garlic mixture. 

After the lamb cooked for about five more minutes, enhanced by the above ingredients, I added the rice to the stuffing. 

I cut the tops off the peppers and pulled out the seed and other stuff inside and then stuffed the peppers with the meat, aromatics, tomatoes, and other ingredients.

I placed the stuffed peppers in the bottom of the Dutch oven, poured water in the bottom, and put it in the oven, lid on, for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees. 

2. Christy brought a delicious Carpaccio for an appetizer and Carol made a Greek salad to go with the stuffed peppers. Our focus was Mediterranean and we succeeded through our shared effort to produce a very good meal. 

After tweeking our family schedule for the next couple of months a bit, we enjoyed talking about books and learned news about some people around the Silver Valley. I couldn't stop myself from saying a few things about last night's concert. Paul talked about plans for the fall production at the theater (I don't know if the fall play is public knowledge so, for now, I'll hold it in confidence). 

I hadn't made stuffed peppers before and was happy my idea to make them in a Mediterranean style worked out. I wanted classical music to play during our time together, but I didn't want to have on surging symphonies or blazing concert. 

Instead, I put on a playlist of Mozart's piano sonatas, and this music provided a tranquil and virtuosic backdrop for our time together this evening. 

3. At 10:00 this morning, Leonard Oakland hosted his two hour classical music program. At some point, he announced that the Gonzaga Symphony will be playing at the university on Thursday evening. The program will feature violinist Gil Shaham, unknown to me until Leonard's announcement about the concert, and now I know he his highly regarded and is a Grammy award winner. 

I'll be there Thursday as long as nothing comes up to prevent me from going. 

I'm especially stoked that Gil Shaham will be featured as the soloist for Brahm's Violin Concerto in D Major. The rest of the program looks great: Mozart, Mussorgsky, and Saint-Saens. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-31-2026: Soulful Soups and Spirits, Jess Walter on the Music of Language, A Concert of Contrasts

1. When I need to drive into downtown Spokane, I have a much easier and enjoyable time if I arrive while it's still light. I had a ticket to tonight's scintillating Spokane Symphony concert and I arrived in the vicinity of the Fox Theater well in advance of the concert -- in daylight. 

I easily found parking on Jefferson near the Railroad Alley and, as I expected, in order to pay for my parking, I needed to use my phone, follow online instructions, and type in credit card information. 

The late afternoon light helped me succeed. 

My spot was just a couple of blocks from the theater and just a block from Soulful Soups and Spirits where I would eat a light dinner. 

The last time I visited S. 111 Madison, I was with Patrick and Meagan and we enjoyed drinking cider together at what was then the One Tree Cider tasting room -- now relocated to its production warehouse just east of Division/Ruby at 125 E. Ermina. 

I very much enjoyed the bowl of tomato basil soup accompanied by a house salad I ordered. Unfortunately, I arrived between when Soulful Soup ran out of bread and when their next batch would be coming out of the oven and be cooled off enough to slice. 

No problem. 

I'll try their bread next time and I'll treat myself to a different soup and, over time, try as many of their soups as I can. 

2. Even though I went to the lecture on Thursday for this concert, I wanted to hear whatever the conductor had to say in his pre-concert lecture tonight. 

Spokane writer Jess Walter was going to be narrating the guide to the orchestra as the concert's finale and he and Conductor James Rowe had a fun and insightful conversation about the similarities between music and language, whether spoken or written. 

I've spent a bit of time on this blog writing some of my thoughts about the musical nature of language and the terrific comments Jess Walter made helped reassure me that my comments were at least in the ballpark! 

3. In his Great Course lectures, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, Professor Robert Greenberg frequently returns to the point that many, if not most, classical composers structure their work around contrasts, whether contrasts in tempo, feeling, key signature, instrumentation, or other elements of a musical piece. 

I thought tonight's program featured very enjoyable contrasts between the different compositions. 

William Walton's opening piece featured a full orchestra playing lush and full-throated reimaginings of melodies originally composed by J. S. Bach.

The Fox Theater then started to feel like a church or a cathedral as the Spokane Chorale sang the Thomas Tallis piece that became the foundation for two small orchestras, one in the balcony, as they played Ralph Vaughan Williams' deeply emotional and spiritual reworking of Tallis' melody into his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Without a break, the smaller orchestra moved right into Paul Hindemith's mournful Trauermusik, a composition Hindemith wrote in six hours the day after the death of King George V for the BBC Orchestra to play the next day to express the grief of the nation. The Spokane Chorale then immediately deepened the sense of us being in a house of worship by singing Bach's "Vor deinen Thron tret' ich hiermit" or "I humbly come to your throne,/O God! and humbly beg you:/Do not turn your gracious face away/from me the poor sinner."

When the chorale ended its performance, the house lights went out and I felt like I was in a Compline service. The hall was absolutely silent and we all entered into a meditative, even prayerful, state and after a bit it became appropriate to applaud this moving series of soulful compositions. 

Then another contrast took shape as the second half of the program was much lighter.

It opened with Grace Williams' Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes and the concert came to a fun and a stirring end as the orchestra played Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to Orchestra and we heard Jess Walter reading his reworking of the original narration, making it a Pacific Northwest guide. It was great fun as each section of the orchestra came to represent a different part of the northwest. 

If you'd like to hear this concert, it will be replayed on KSFC-FM radio next Saturday, Feb. 7 at noon. You can stream KSFC by going to spokanepublicradio.org and clicking on the All Streams box and picking SPR Classical. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-30-2026: Preparing for Family Dinner, Cool Old Man Status (Maybe), A Simple Chicken Soup

1. I am hosting family dinner on Sunday and going to hear the Spokane Symphony on Saturday, so just to get a little bit ahead of myself, I started cleaning the house and doing laundry today. I am very slow at this, but I vacuumed the living room and used the little green machine thing to spot clean some spots on the rug. 

2.I realized today that now I'm one of those old men I used to talk to in bars when I was a young man. I'd leave the bar, whether alone or with others, and comment, saying something like, "That old guy was pretty cool." 

Ed and I met at The Lounge around 4 this afternoon and had some back and forth with a man and a woman who usually come into The Lounge later in the evening when the clientele is younger -- well, younger than Ed and me. 

Ed made them laugh and things were fun between us. The guy said to the woman that they'd have to come in more often around 3 or 4 o'clock and I wondered if maybe they stepped outside and said something like, "Those old guys were pretty cool."

3. All I had to do when I got home to make a delicious dinner that was light and warmed me was heat vegetable and sesame oil in the Dutch oven, toss in chopped celery and carrots, a half a white onion in rings, and about four chicken breast tenders. Later I added sliced mushroom and when these items had cooked up I added three potatoes sliced, some broccoli, corn kernels, and a quart of chicken broth.  

I salted and peppered the soup, cooked everything until tender, avoiding mushiness, and ladled myself two bowls of this soup and added Braggs liquid ammino to each bowl. 

Simple and satisfying.  

Three Beautiful Things 01-29-2026: Debbie Called, I Loved a Lecture in Spokane, My Better World Books Order Surprised Me --Blissfully

1. Not long after I returned home this afternoon from Spokane, Debbie called. She and Adrienne's family have weathered the heavy snow and frigid temperatures in Valley Cottage, NY well. School was only closed one day this week. Debbie witnessed snow plows working the street they live on regularly. They didn't lose their power. This was all good news. 

Last week, Patrick had flown on business to Portland from Cincinnati and his flight out of Portland last Friday was delayed because of the snow and ice in Cincinnati. Debbie wasn't sure exactly when he arrived back in Cincinnati, but he's home now. 

Meagan sent out two pictures from their Cincinnati apartment. The main water line to their apartment building broke this morning and, in one picture, Patrick is melting snow so they can flush their toilet.  They can look down on the Ohio River from their apartment, and the other picture is of sheets of ice floating down the mighty Ohio. 

2. I guess it's obvious that I enjoy public lectures.

After all, I'm spending a couple or three hours a day listening to a series of forty-eight lectures on classical music. 

At noon today, for the second time this month, I drove to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and attended the Spokane Symphony's music director and conductor's lecture on the concert the Symphony will play this weekend. 

As with James Lowe's lecture I attended a couple of weeks ago, I loved his presentation today. 

This weekend's program is called Stolen Melodies and features how composers like Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton, Paul Hindemith, and Grace Williams reworked pieces written by earlier composers and transformed them into works of their own. 

The concert will close with Spokane writer Jess Walters giving his own take on the narration to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. 

By playing recorded excerpts from these works and commenting on them and by going on a couple of enjoyable digressions, the first dealing with modern musicians playing centuries old works on period instruments and the second on Welsh language, James Lowe prepared us splendidly for the program coming up this weekend. 

3. Just as I was getting ready to leave this morning for Spokane, two packages arrived from Better World Books. 

Gibbs rarely pees in the house, but for some reason he did so last week just one time and dampened the book I bought at Booktraders, so I ordered a replacement. 

I made another order and didn't quite understand what I ordered but was pumped to discover what I paid for. 

This lecture series about classical music I'm listening to has a coursebook to accompany it.

I thought this coursebook was in six volumes since what I ordered was in six parts. 

But, no, the coursebook is a single volume. 

The other five parts are DVDs of the lectures! 

Just for the record, taken together, before sales tax and a minimal shipping cost, the book and DVD cost $8.20. 

And they are in pristine shape. I think they are brand new. 

Now I have the lectures to listen to on audible, the lectures outlined and highlighted in the coursebook, and I have them on a bunch of DVDs to watch on our television when I want to. 

I entered a whole new world of ignorance is bliss today. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-28-2026: I Have Spokane Symphony Plans, Closing Gaps, Laughing at Mittens and Tabitha and the NYC Alley Cats

 1. The Spokane Symphony's program this weekend includes a composition I wrote about a while back. It's one of the pieces that always moves me to stop whatever I'm doing and stare, soul-struck into the the great beyond. It's Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis". I first heard it in January of 1996. I was with a woman with whom I would be a classical music traveler for just over a year and both of us were visibly moved when the Eugene Mozart Players closed that concert with this Vaughan Williams masterpiece. 

It holds musical, spiritual, and nostalgic value for me. 

Not only will the Spokane Symphony play Williams' stirring fantasia, they will also play the tune Thomas Tallis composed, the theme Williams borrowed from to create his own piece. 

I planned to go to The Fox on Sunday and attend the matinee performance.

I accidentally bought a ticket, however, for the Saturday night concert.

My plan was to avoid driving back to Kellogg in the late evening, but I'm going brace myself, enjoy the concert, and make the drive I had hoped to avoid. 

(By the way, on Thursday, January 29th, I'll drive to Spokane in the morning and attend the lecture about this concert being given at the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture at noon.)

2. It hit me hard today, as I listened to Prof. Greenberg lecture on two musical forms, the symphony and the concerto, that I really haven't focused much of my listening to classical music on either Franz Haydn or Wolfgang Mozart. In the last handful of lectures I've listened to, Greenberg has rhapsodized about both of these giants of the Classical Period and has worked to explain the unique genius of both artists. 

I am on the verge of ecstasy that I decided to listen to the 48 lectures of this Great Course. I'm just over halfway through the course and am especially stoked that my inexplicable neglect of Haydn and Mozart is becoming a thing of the past. 

3. I am grateful for Artificial Intelligence making it possible for their creators to bring Tabitha and Mitten's adventures to life at Tabby Topics and for making it possible for me to keep up with the ongoing storylines over at NYC Alley Cats. 

I watch them on Facebook. 

They make me laugh -- and when they pop up, so do the cat podcasters. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-27-2026: Listening with Memory and High School Algebra, Walking for a Little Cash, An Example: Music Expressing for Me What My Words Cannot

1. Teaching English composition required me to do my best to teach students how to read attentively and critically. Much of the writing I assigned grew out of books and essays I assigned the students to read. 

I tried to encourage the students to read with memory, to do their best to keep in mind what they had read in the book or essay under study and how the writer moved us to whatever place we were at in later stages of the book. 

Now I am finding that the more I can listen to a symphony or sonata or any other form of music with memory, the more I can appreciate patterns, departures and returns, contrasts, tempo changes, changes in mood, and other aspects of the piece. 

I find this very difficult. 

I tend to listen to music with a strong focus on what's happening in the moment I'm in while listening.

As a result, as I listen to Professor Greenberg tell me to remember a passage of music from the opening of the composition we are currently studying, it's not there for me. 

I don't remember it, even if I heard it just a few minutes ago. 

I'm trying to listen to music similar to how I read. I am trying to be involved in the moment while at the same time listening with memory, remembering what has come before. 

Listening to these lectures has also reminded me of my experience taking algebra my first two years in high school. 

When I watched my teachers work out algebra problems on the blackboard, it all made sense to me, but I could never do it well on my own. 

Likewise, when Professor Goldberg plays a piece of music and calls out when one feature of the composition's form ends and another feature begins, it makes perfect sense to me. But on my own, as I listen to classical music on the radio or on Spotify, I cannot make those determinations. 

I'm hoping in time and with more experience I will be able to do this. 

I hope listening with some analytical ability to great music won't be another algebra experience for me! 

2. The weather turned a bit warmer today. I'd bought a five dollar scratch off lottery ticket at Yoke's the other day. I scratched away and won fifteen dollars. 

Nice weather. A few bucks to go pick up. I took my first outdoor walk in months today up to the Gondolier to redeem my ticket.

I needed that walk. 

It felt good and I look forward to the possibility that it will help me sleep better tonight. 

3. I wrote a few days ago that instrumental (and probably choral) music often expresses how I see, think, and feel about things better than my own words can. 

Year of Wonder, the book of daily classical music pieces Christy gave me for Christmas/my birthday featured a composition on January 15 that illustrates what I mean.

Its title is "Quartet for the End of Time", written by French composer Olivier Messiaen, and the book's author, Clemency Burton-Hill, has us listen to its fifth movement entitled, "Praise be to the eternity of Jesus."

When France fell to Germany in 1940, the thirty-one year old Messiaen, serving as a medical auxillary, not a combatant, was captured and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A in Germany. 

He befriended a clarinet player as well as a cellist and a violinist. 

With the help of a sympathetic prison guard, he acquired manuscript paper and pencils and wrote the "Quartet for the End of Time" for piano, clarinet, cello, and violin. 

The prison had a terribly out of tune piano and the musicians secured a clarinet, cello, and violin, unkempt and third hand. 

The musicians performed "Quartet for the End of Time" in freezing conditions on compromised instruments to an audience of prisoners and guards. 

Here's how Burton-Hill described the performance in her January 15th essay on "Quartet for the End of Time":

Playing battered, makeshift and out-of-tune instruments, the musicians premiered the work on the evening of 15 January 1941, outdoors. There was rain falling and snow on the ground. Reports vary on how many fellow prisoners of war were in the audience that evening but it seems somewhere between 150 and 400 French, German, Polish, and Czech men from all strata of society huddled together in their threadbare uniforms, on which was stitched 'K.G.' or 'Kriegsgefangene', meaning prisoner of war. One audience member later recalled, 'We were all brothers.'

 I don't have adequate words to express what I think and feel about the forceful capture of persons, separating them from family members, displacing them to prisons (or camps) (or detention centers), and subjecting them to misery, whether we are talking about what happened in the 1940s or is happening in 2025-26. 

This fifth movement expresses my thoughts and feelings far better than any words I possess. 

If you'd like to listen to it, go here.  

If you'd like to listen to the entire composition, go here. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-26-2026: Tubing and Jethro Tull and J. S. Bach, Dance Music Written for Listening Not Dancing, A Brothy Potato Soup

1. Both years I went to North Idaho College, my experience with the world of music increased substantially thanks to John Soini, especially when we were trailer mates our sophomore year. 

Now, before going to college, I'd had one experience with Jethro Tull my senior year at Kellogg High School. I might have this upcoming story wrong, but I'll write what I remember fifty-four years later. 

Cara invited me to join her and a bunch of other people to go tubing on a hill somewhere in the Cataldo area. 

It was a blast and afterward the party moved (as I remember) to Mary McReynold's house in Kellogg for hot chocolate.  I'm thinking Mary (or one of her siblings) must have had a copy of Jethro Tull's masterful LP, Aqualung. 

Mary (or someone) played it that night. I loved what I heard on that album, but I didn't do anything about it. 

Jethro Tull resided on the fringes of my music listening. 

Then, about seven or eight months later, John Soini introduced me to Jethro Tull's powerful double LP, Living in the Past and it transported me into a whole new world of music enjoyment, as did repeated listenings of Aqualung and Thick as a Brick. 

This Jethro Tull awakening came back to me today as I spent a few hours listening to more of the lectures contained in the Great Course I'm "taking" entitled How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. 

So what does this Great Course have to do with Jethro Tull and, more specifically, Living in the Past?

One track on Living in the Past was "Bouree", a J. S. Bach composition that Ian Anderson (the front man for Jethro Tull) played on his flute. 

It immediately wonderstruck me, but until now, thanks to these lectures, I hadn't realized or thought about some things that are now very important to me. 

The most recent lectures I've listened to have focused on the role of dance music forms in helping shape the compositions of music written in the Baroque period all the way to the present. 

Now I know that these composers took the basic forms, tempos, and rhythms of these dances (like the bouree) and transformed them into more complex pieces, not to accompany actual dancing, but to enhance their compositions and for our listening pleasure. 

2. So, starting fifty-four years ago when I first heard Ian Anderson play Bach's "Bouree", I didn't think of it as having grown out of music originally written to accompany the dance called the bouree. 

Consequently, I wouldn't have thought of what I've learned in the last few days: Bach's "Bouree" couldn't be danced to. It's too complicated as are the minuets, rondos, gigues, and other forms of dances that constitute entire movements composed by Bach, Mozart, Hadyn, Beethoven, and many others within sonatas, symphonies, concerti, and other larger forms of composition. 

Now I get it. 

I'm learning more about the compositional structure of the minuet, the rondo, and other forms and so my ability to anticipate what will be coming in a piece of music is improving as is my feeling of satisfaction when the music meets those expectations. 

It's reminding me very much of the deep pleasure I experienced over forty years ago in graduate school when I studied sonnets, Shakespeare's and others, more deeply and began to understand how the different sonnet forms enabled the poets to create both emotional and intellectual impacts through meter, rhyme schemes, and overall structure of the poem.

I'm doing just what I wanted to do when I retired. I'm reading, listening, watching, learning, exploring not as a part of a job, not for a salary, but for my own enjoyment and maybe even growth and for anyone else's enjoyment who might like reading what I write in this blog. 

3. In the first several months or so of my recovery from the kidney transplant, I had to be careful about eating too much potassium, careful about eating potatoes, tomatoes, avocados, and other foods rich in potassium. 

Gradually, after about a year, I began to experiment with eating more of these foods and the potassium levels in my blood stayed in range. 

So, today, when I felt a yearning for some kind of potato soup, I didn't hesitate to work on making one. 

In a Dutch oven, I fried bacon and after about five minutes added celery and onion and, a little later, sliced mushrooms to the bacon. 

When these ingredients had cooked about as much as I wanted them to, I added sliced russet potatoes and chopped carrots along with a quart of water. I brought this soup to a boil, turned down the heat, added salt, pepper, and Bragg liquid amino and soon everything cooked through, but didn't get mushy. 

This soup satisfied my desire for potato soup, a brothy one, not a creamy one. 

As much as I thoroughly enjoy a dairy-based potato soup, I wanted a lighter soup tonight. 

I'm pretty stoked that I have more of this soup to enjoy tomorrow. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-25-2026: Leonard Oakland's Morning Classical Radio Show, Music More Than My Words Right Now, Smashing Family Dinner

 1. I wrote myself a note last night to be sure to tune into KSFC at Spokane Public Radio at 10 a.m. to listen to Leonard Oakland's Morning Classical program. His decision to read William Carlos Williams' mighty poem "By the road to the contagious hospital" worked perfectly for me, not only with its promise that the winter season will not last forever, but maybe it also hints that our winters of human discontent won't last forever either, giving me some hope that the brutal beginning of 2026 won't be everlasting. 

Leonard played several wonderful pieces during his two hour show. I was particularly happy to be introduced to Dvorak's String Quintet in E Flat. I love Dvorak's compositions and was uplifted by the effect of adding a second viola to the traditional string quartet and the music he wrote for this ensemble to play. 

2. It's the weirdest thing. 

From the time Christy gave me the book Year of Wonder, I had it by my side, next to the chair I sit in in the living room. While it was next to me, I was opening the book daily, reading the piece Clemency Burton-Hill wrote for that day, and going to Spotify and listening to the musical piece she wrote about. Her book has a prose and classical music offering for each day of the year. 

Well, I moved the book just ten feet away as a way of decluttering the living room before I hosted family dinner two weeks ago. 

From that point forward, because the book wasn't where I was used to having it, I failed for two weeks to read and listen to the daily entries. 

Today, after Leonard Oakland's show, I finally woke up to the fact that this book, while not being next to me, was very close by and I spent the afternoon getting caught up.

I've read a lot of words over the course of this brutal January. I've listened to quite a few as well. 

I realized today that if I were to express what's going on inside of me, the music I listened to lays it out much better than my words can. 

I need to go back, listen some more, pay more attention to how the music affects me, and then I'll think about posting some examples of the music that so pointedly reflects my inward life. 

3. We had a dynamite family dinner tonight at Christy's. Christy made a cottage pie (a shepherd's pie is made with lamb, a cottage pie with ground beef) and to compliment this main dish, Paul brought pickled appetizers, Carol brought corn as a vegetable side dish, I contributed fruity cole slaw, and Christy contributed dinner rolls. We had a brownie with ice cream for dessert. 

Christy's cottage pie was superb and the other foods she assigned us to bring worked harmoniously with the pie. 

We talked about all kind of thing tonight: Carol and Paul's recent visit to Moscow, the Seahawks going to the Super Bowl, the Zags, 70s rhythm and blues music -- which inspired us to watch a video of the Manhattans performing "Kiss and Say Goodbye" -- and other topics.  

It was a great evening, good for our spirits as well as our appetites. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-24-2026: A Correction, "Concert of the Week", Cole Slaw for Family Dinner

 1. A correction from my blog post yesterday: A suite is a collection of instrumental movements, but I stated a suite is a collection of dances. Often, maybe even usually they are. But not always. A suite might extract its component parts from ballet (e.g. The Nutcracker Suite), operas, or original compositions. 

You can see my way of learning. I have a long history of learning as I get things not quite right and correct myself. 

2. I was very grateful today for Spokane Public Radio. Every Saturday at noon, the station features a program entitled, "Concert of the Week". Each week one can hear a performance recently given locally or not too far away. 

I'd been looking forward to today's presentation for the last several days. I went a lecture a week ago Thursday looking at the program the Spokane Symphony played last weekend. I didn't go to the Symphony's performance, but it was on Spokane Public Radio today. 

It was thrilling. 

Bernstein's Symphonic Dances, a suite of songs from West Side Story, touched upon a wide range of emotions, ranging from energetic jubilation to tragic grief. 

I had never heard anything quite like Paul Creston's Fantasy for Trombone and thoroughly enjoyed its energy, drive, various rhythms, and the space it gave the trombone soloist, the Spokane Symphony's principle trombonist, John Church to showcase his virtuosity and play trombone passages that introduced me to whole new ways of hearing what could be played on a trombone. 

Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances occupied the entirety of the second half of the program. I loved its hugeness, its variety of directions, and, as with Bernstein, its evocation of a variety of emotions ranging from disillusionment to nostalgia to expressions of spirituality. 

I want to increase my familiarity with this Rachmaninoff composition. I want to listen to it more, read more about it. It was more than I could absorb today, listening to it for the first time.

3. For tomorrow night's family dinner, Christy assigned me to make cole slaw. I made it this afternoon in the hope that it will benefit from sitting overnight in the fridge, giving its variety of flavors a chance to mature. I usually prefer cabbage salad or cole slaw with a vinegar dressing, but I decided to veer away from my usual pattern and made a creamy cole slaw. 

I have my fingers crossed that Christy, Carol, and Paul will enjoy it tomorrow evening. 

Three Beautiful Things 01-23-2026: The Suite, Bach's Cello Suites, Yakkin' at The Lounge

 1. By listening to the lectures that comprise the music course I downloaded into my audible library I'm learning a ton about music forms: the concerto, oratorio, fugue, cantata, and more, with many more to come. I've listened to twenty of these forty-five minute lectures and still have twenty-eight to go. 

Right now, I'm in the midst of learning about dance music from, let's say, the 18th century. It's what's known as the Classical period of classical music and unlike the previous period, the Baroque, Classical composers like Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven and others put much more emphasis on recognizable and memorable melodies in their compositions, whatever form their music took. 

During this period in Europe, dancing was very popular and composers had several dance forms to work with and integrated these dances into the larger structure of their compositions. 

One of these larger forms is the suite. Spokane Symphony music director James Lowe talked about the suite in the lecture of his I attended about nine days ago. I learned that the suite is a compilation of different dances, each different dance a movement within the suite. 

So, for example, this past weekend, the Spokane Symphony performed Leonard Bernstein's "Symphonic Dances from West Side Story". It's a suite made up of the several dances in Bernstein's musical and features the different sounds and rhythms of the cultures portrayed in this musical. 

2. So, now let me move back in time from the 20th to the early 18th century, from Leonard Bernstein to J. S. Bach. 

I last visited London forty years ago. 

It was my third trip there and I had learned that I enjoyed going to classical music concerts as well as theatrical plays that I didn't know much about. 

I enjoyed being out of my element and being surprised. 

One evening I attended a performance of Bach's Cello Suites. 

I'd never listened to them before. 

I was out of my depth that evening, but the music made a very positive impression on me. 

About twelve years later, Rita Hennessey and I, as part of our team-taught course in Philosophy and English Composition agreed to include in our course a series of six films entitled, Inspired by Bach. 

Each film featured Yo-Yo Ma playing one of the six suites that make up the Cello Suites. 

Each film also focused on how the film's suite could be enjoyed in relation to another art form. The films focused, in order, on nature and garden design, architecture, dance, film making, Japanese Kabuki dance, and ice skating. 

These films and Yo-Yo Ma's discussions with each of the six directors significantly expanded my enjoyment of the Cello Suites. 

But a key element of the Cello Suites hadn't yet sunk in. 

It hadn't sunk in a few years later when Debbie and I went to St. Mary's Episcopal Church to a performance of the Cello Suites by a University of Oregon professor. 

So what was missing? 

What do I know now that I didn't know then?

I didn't realize that each suite consisted of six movements, a prelude and then five dances. I wasn't paying attention to how Bach composed a different prelude for each suite and then presented different music for each of the repeated dances. 

Here are the names of the six movements of each of the six Cello Suites:

1. Prelude

2. Allemande

3. Courante

4. Sarabande

5. A mixture of dances

6. Gigue

The Great Course lectures are teaching me the specifics about each of these dances as musical forms. 

I know that as I learn more about these musical forms and as I listen to these Cello Suites more often, my appreciation and enjoyment of them will expand.

And, who knows, maybe I'll discover that a cellist from somewhere will give a concert somewhere not too far away and I'll be able to hear Bach's Cello Suites performed again. 

3. If you read through all of that and are still with met, I thank you. 

My day wasn't all suites and minuets and musical textures. 

Ed and I met up at The Lounge this afternoon. Before Ed got there, I yakked with Harley and Candy for a while about the Elks Taco Feed and the pleasures of the Elks sponsored hoop shoot that is about to move from the local to the district level. 

As a way of being able to laugh about his treatment for prostate cancer, Ed likes to make jokes about the hormone pills he takes, the hot flashes he experiences, especially at night, and likes to act like the therapy has made him want facials and other luxuries usually associated with women. 

He gets a lot of mileage out of these jokes and I think they've helped him maintain a positive attitude throughout his treatment and I'd like to think his positive outlook has helped his treatments be so successful. He's come through all of this doing very well. 

Ed regaled us with a few of those jokes at The Lounge this afternoon! 

Three Beautiful Things 01-22-2026: Medicare Annual Wellness Exam, Apple Fritter and Lemon Almond Scone, Spokane Symphony and Sha Na Na

 1. Today was my annual Medicare exam, which means I saw my primary care person for the first time since January of 2025.  I think the fact that I have seen Dr. Bieber and the different pros at the transplant clinic so many times over the last year helped this exam go quickly and smoothly. I had plenty of data on hand measuring how I've been doing and could report on it and, as a bonus, I crushed the memory test and the clock drawing exercise. 

2. I enjoy treating myself to a pastry or two and a latte after I've had any kind of medical examination or test and today I indulged in an apple fritter and a lemon almond scone at Beach Bum Bakery and brought them home to enjoy with a homemade latte. 

Wow!

3. There is no way that I can write out what I learned today listening to a few more lectures, each 45 minutes long, about how to enjoy and understand great music, but suffice it to say I will listen to Baroque music, especially J. S. Bach, with a keener ear and I'm getting a far better understanding of the Classical Era of concert music than I've ever had before. 

I don't know if others who love music have strong preferences regarding different eras of music, but I don't. These lectures are helping me better understand why I have been almost instinctively moved by classical music of all eras, an experience that began in the fall of 1972 at NIC when I secured inexpensive student tickets from our choir director, Rick Frost, from time to time and went to Spokane to hear the Spokane Symphony. 

During that fall of 1972 I heard the symphony live at the Fox Theater and I also heard Sha Na Na at the Coliseum one nights and Santana another and so began my epicurean love of nearly all music. 

What I've really enjoyed about getting older is that some uninformed prejudices against some kinds of music have melted away and I really enjoy music now that I disdained, with unearned smugness, when I was younger. 

Like disco. 

Let that sink in!