Eileen went a little nuts this morning and scheduled our furnace to be replaced next week.

They will also install AC and a humidity control unit.

I told her we were probably guaranteeing cool weather for the rest of the summer. We could use the AC and humidity control right night as it is hot and humid in Holland.

She is at the dentist right now. But when she gets back she is planning to shop for tickets to fly to California. She is my energizer bunny.

My daughter Sarah sent me some cool pics for Father’s day.

This is me worming my way into Lucy’s heart with the guitar.

Same thing here, but it looks like she’s more interested in the camera.

Here Lucy is exploring moving me up and down on my Mom’s old electric chair. She loves buttons and moving me around!

 

 

The interwebs can be a beautiful thing. I “follow” some Italian organists who post  concerts on Facebook. Yesterday I was looking at a program called “Organ Visions”

There was no performer, date, time, or place in the post. I suspect Marco Lo Muscio was the performer. The Ligeti caught my eye. I recently purchased “Musica Ricercata.” It is written for piano.  I pulled out my copy and took it along when I went back to church to spend some time with Buxtehude and Bach. After a couple hours, I began to get tired, but thought it would be interesting to look at the two pieces by Ligeti.

First of all, No. 7 is not titled, but I like the title the performer put in the program because it is descriptive and would probably be helpful to the listener.

I like this piece a lot and it does sit nicely on the organ manuals. I’m not sure how I would learn to do two speeds at once but I was able to fake it enough to think that it was cool and would make a good organ piece.

This is the other piece the organist played. It also works. I played the loud sections with my Great reed and it sounded very cool.

Not sure which portion of the Bernard Hermann movie Soundtrack the organist played but here’s a lovely taste.

While I’m at it, I searched for the piece on Scarborough Fair. I’m listening to the above video as I write. I love the way this dude programs although the last piece is kind of long. He and I are living in the same century anyway. So far I’m enjoying the above video. Warning it’s over 20 minutes long. (P.S. After listening to the whole video I think there are some outstanding variations in the last couple of minutes of this piece. They are probably what I would program. The piece is a bit of a monolith otherwise, in my opinion)

I was listening to Haydn this morning and thinking about the course I took on him. I checked in my library and my notes were not on the shelf. Dam. That means they are filed away somewhere. It was a great course taught by Ethan Haimo at Notre Dame.

In 1995 he published  Haydn’s Symphonic Forms: Essays in Compositional Logic (Oxford Monographs on Music). This is exactly what his course was about. I remember being tempted to purchase it but it was expensive. Fuck the duck. This morning I ordered a used copy for around 70 bucks. It will make some great vacation reading and his insights into Haydn were amazing.