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.
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