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.
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