1. I spent a lot of the day doing more good work to make the PC I have started using again more suitable to the activities I enjoy.
2. I needed to shop for a few things at Yoke's and decided to drive the Sube over. I hadn't revved it up for a while and, to my dismay, when I turned the key, the battery was dead.
AAA came a while later and charged the battery.
I drove around for about a half an hour to strengthen the charge.
I'll take the Sube to the shop Monday morning and have the battery checked out.
I'm also going to use the Subaru more frequently, like daily, and keep it active.
3. For about forty minutes this morning, I used the Spotify app to play about forty minutes of Chuck Mangione songs.
I didn't expect Chuck Mangione to transport me to Beall Concert Hall at the University of Oregon, but that's exactly what happened.
It was a Sunday in early January of 1996. Another lover of classical music and I had arranged to go to a Mozart Players concert together.
Both of us were deeply moved, dumbstruck in fact, by the orchestra's performance of Ralph Vaughn Williams' deeply emotional composition, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
I love classical music. In fact, lately I haven't been listening to the Sirius/XM Grateful Dead Channel during my drives to CdA and Spokane and back again, but have switched to the classical channel called Symphony Hall.
Why would listening to Chuck Mangione take me back twenty-nine years to a matinee concert at Beall Hall? And why, in turn, did my mind also suddenly flash on repeatedly listening to Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings?
(Let me digress: In the spring term of 1997, I was particularly fond of my Wednesday night Shakespeare class and I invited them to my house for a party on the evening I was supposed to give them a final exam. Most of the students were older, typical not only for a community college class, but also for night classes. It was a memorable night for two reasons: first, the Bulls and Jazz played Game 5 of the NBA Finals that night (June 11, 1997) and a handful of guys and I went into the room where I watched tv and lo and behold what unfolded before us was the epic Michael Jordan flu game, in which Jordan exerted a strength of will and determination unlike anything those guys and I had ever seen before -- except, as it turned out, in characters in some of the plays we'd studied that term!
The second memorable occurrence that night happened after many of my students had left, but a handful remained. We were all feeling a mellow euphoria from the beers we'd been enjoying, and somehow, I had the bright idea to play Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings for those gathered.
The sublime beauty of Barber's composition silenced the room. As the Adagio built, we all stared into the great beyond, transported beyond the confines of my humble living room and we experienced a spiritual union together. The Adagio for Strings ended. The music had brought one student out of her chair and with her hands moving upward, she guided the orchestra to the piece's climax and, once reached, she collapsed, spent, back into her chair.
Michael Jordan and Samuel Barber.
What an evening.
What a party.)
Back to my question: Why did Chuck Mangione move my mind to Beall Hall and that June 11th party at my house twenty-eight years ago?
It was the building.
So many of Chuck Mangione's songs gradually build from something quiet, often a single instrument at the start of the song, and rise slowly to joy, even triumph, and I have to believe that he helped shape my love for this kind of momentum in pieces of music.
Slow emotional building shapes both Vaughn Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and I am positive that my love of this gradual rising was shaped by my obsession with Chuck Mangione's albums in the late 1970s.
Should I say it?
Probably not, but I will anyway.
This trip I've been on with Chuck Mangione and his influence on me and the memories his music inspires.
It feels so good!
😊
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