If you practice with your hands you must practice all day. Practice with your mind and you can accomplish the same amount in minutes. - Nathan Milstein
2005, December 29
Elephant Seals at Christmas
Elephant seals on the beach near San Simeon at Christmas.
My daughter and son-in-law took their 14 month old daughter to the beach at San Simeon on Christmas to see the Elephant seals. But she was frightened of the them, they were so close and so large. I think she showed good sense.
2005, December 12
From Heaven Above - A Christmas Hymn
From Heaven Above to Earth I Come (Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her)
The words of the hymn were written by Martin Luther, for his five year old son. The hymn has 15 verses.
Luther originally used the melody of a tavern song "Ich komm aus fremden Landen her" for his words, but later the tune was "ejected" from the hymnbooks because of the tavern associations. The anonymous melody currently in use was chosen by Johann Walther in 1551.
The original melody Luther chose.
The current melody Walther chose.
Some people claim that there is a reference to this melody in BWV 127.1, but to my mind it is a stretch. "In the very first 5 measures, Bach establishes Christ’s descent with an untexted musical reference to the famous Christmas chorale by Luther “Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her” [“From heaven on high, that’s where I come from.”] by having the highest-sounding instruments (recorders, in this instance) representing the heights of heaven begin in the very first measure with a vague attempt (the first interval drop is ‘tonal’ rather than ‘real’ – it is a full-step/tone down rather than just a half-step/tone down in the original melody."
Comment from: Schweitzer: Believing, as he said, that "the devil does not need all the good tunes for himself", Luther formed his Christmas hymn "Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her" out of the melody of the riddle-song "Ich komm aus fremden Landen her" - in which the singer propounds a riddle and takes her garland from the maiden who cannot solve it [8]. Afterwards, however, he had to let the devil have the melody back again, for even after its conversion it haunted every dancing-place and every tavern. In 1551 Walther ejected it from the hymn-book, replacing it by the tune to which Luther's Christmas hymn is sung to this day [9].
[9] Böhme was the first to conjecture that the ground of the ejectment
of the first melody was its profane power of resistance See Zelle p.
49. The new melody - the one now current - (Bach V, No. 49 and pp. 92
ff.) is found in a Leipzig hymn-book as early as 1539.
Here is an article discussing the Chorale, its development and its use in the Lutheran litergy.
| The music: | BWV 248.9 | A four part chorale with orchestral interludes between phrases. | |
| BWV 248.17 | A four part chorale. | ||
| BWV 248.23 | A four part chorale with orchestral interludes between phrases. | ||
| BWV 606 | An organ chorale. | ||
| BWV 700 | An organ chorale. | ||
| BWV 701 | An organ chorale. | ||
| BWV 738 | An organ chorale. | ||
| The Vom Himmel hoch Variations: | BWV 769.1 | ||
| BWV 769.2 | |||
| BWV 769.3 | |||
| BWV 769.4 | |||
| BWV 769.5 |
MP3 files of these chorales are available. If you want one, leave me a note in a comment with your email address and I will send it. Unfortunately, the files are too large to put them on my ftp server for general distribution.
Some names under which this chorale is known:
Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her
From Heaven Above to Earth I Come
Translations from the Emmanuel Music website:
2005, December 03
Excerpts from Ellis Peters
Winter sets in near Shrewsbury, from Ellis Peters, 1913-1995
Excerpts from Virgin in the Ice
They went out together into the cold and dark of the garden, and felt on their faces the first flakes of the first snow of the season. The air was full of a drifting unease, but the fall was light and fitful here. Further south it set in heavily, borne on a north-westerly wind, dry, fine snow that turned the night into a white, whirling mist, shrouding outlines, burying paths, blown into smooth, breaking waves only to be lifted and hurled again into new shapes. Valleys filled to a treacherous level, hillsides were scoured clean. Wise men stayed within their houses, clapped to shutter and door, and stopped the chinks between the boards, where thin white fingers reached through. The first snow and the first hard frost.
All those four days since the first snow the weather had followed a fixed pattern, with brief sunshine around noon, gathering cloud thereafter, fresh snow falling late in the evening and well into the night, and always iron frost. Around Shrewsbury the snowfalls had been light and powdery, the pattern of white flakes and black soil constantly changing as the wind blew. But as Cadfael rode south the fields grew whiter, the ditches filled. The branches of trees sagged heavily towards the ground under their load, and by mid-afternoon the leaden sky was sagging no less heavily earthwards, in swags of blue-black cloud.
Excerpt from The Confession of Brother Haluin
…December came in with heavy skies and dark, brief days that sagged upon the rooftrees and lay like oppressive hands upon the heart. In the scriptorium there was barely light enough at noon to form the letters, and the colors could not be used with any certainty, since the unrelenting and untimely dusk sapped all their brightness.
The weather-wise had predicted heavy snows, and in midmonth they came, not with blizzard winds, but in a blinding, silent fall that continued for several days and nights, smoothing out every undulation, blanching all color out of the world, burying the sheep in the hills and the hovels in the valleys, smothering all sound, climbing every wall, turning roofs into ranges of white, impassable mountains, and the very air between earth and sky into an opaque, drifting whirlpool of flakes large as lilies. When the fall finally ceased, and the heavy swags of cloud lifted, the Foregate lay half buried, so nearly smoothed out into one white level that there were scarcely any shadows except where the tall buildings of the abbey soared out of the pure pallor, and the eerie, reflected light made day even of night, where only a week before the ominous gloom had made night of day.
2005, November 26
Headache - Shel Silverstein (1930-1999)
What might a headache become?
Having a tree growing up out of me
Is often a worrisome thing.
I'm twisty and thorny and branchy and bare
But wait till you see me in Spring.
Headache, a poem from A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein
WebSites:
Biography
Kid's Site
Banned Hamlet
Memorial
2005, November 13
A Living Process
Emily Onderdonk, violist, teacher.
I have been very fortunate.
I have found a teacher of viola and violin who works with all aspects of learning the violin, mental and physical, and she offers support when family distractions make progress slow.
But in the end, aren't these divisions between physical, mental and emotional arbitrary and artificial? We are single beings and bring all of ourselves to each lesson and practice time.
I look forward to each lesson; her patience, energy and enthusiasm have become a vital part of my life.
2005, November 04
Patterns in Architecture
A language for towns, buildings and construction.
If you look around in the northern part of the East San Francisco Bay at the housing that was built by developers in the forties and fifties, as well as most of what is being built today, you would think that no one has ever given any thought to planning, livability, or simple attractiveness. This is not so.
A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, et al, was published in 1977 and is now in its 26th printing. It is the second of a series of three books; the first is A Timeless Way of Building, and the third is The Oregon Experiment
The book, A Pattern Language is carefully organized and addresses the architecture of rooms, offices, waiting rooms, small houses, large buildings, villages, towns, cities within the social context of how people live their lives.
Though it presents a theory of architecture and construction, the book reads like a series of meditations on human life, a social architecture. You can start at the beginning and read through, or start anywhere and read as much as you want.
These ideas are available to architects and developers. Why are they ignored?
Christopher Alexander's Website
Discussion of work by C. Alexander
2005, November 02
Chinese Worry Balls
A tip from a pianist friend - for finger strength and dexterity
Rotate these balls in both hands. They massage important accupressure points and strengthen the muscles of the fingers, palm, wrist and forearm. All important for violinists, pianists and students.
2005, October 14
BWV 1.6 Organ Trio
BWV 1.6 corrections and a wonderful organ trio arrangement.
Hermann Scheuber, a gentleman in Switzerland who is retired and an organ student, downloaded the midi file for BWV 1.6 and made an arrangement for the organ.
He omitted the alto, the tenor and the first horn part so that he was left with an organ trio made up of the soprano chorale in the right hand, the second horn part as an obligato in the left hand, and the bass in the pedal.
Here is a QuickTime file of the resulting trio.
When three parts were omitted, I was able to hear the second horn part more clearly and realized there was a mistake in the file that went back through the years to the original file and ran through the midi, the QuickTime and the PDF files.
So because of Hermann's work I have been able to post all new corrected files for this chorale. It is wonderful how people are using the files; I always appreciate the feedback I get.
- Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh' darein
- BWV 1.6 midi
- BWV 1.6 QuickTime
- BWV 1.6 PDF
- BWV 1.6 Organ Trio QuickTime
- BWV 1.6 Organ Trio PDF
(Wie schön leuchtet der morgenstern)
