Tag Archives: music

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Exposure

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Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
– Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
– Helen Keller

“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.” – Igor Stravinsky

I find that photographic terms morph in my mind to concepts. Being exposed and captured in the Raw is a very vulnerable state. But in the kind hands of an Artist, that’s how beauty can be shared.

Thank you, Sofia, for opening up the possibilities, for inviting the dark as well as the bright, for acknowledging that neither is “right”.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Street Art

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“Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.”
― Raymond Salvatore Harmon

My daughter’s partner is working on establishing himself as a club music producer under the label Houseium. He asked me and my sister to do a photo shoot for his promotional material, so we went into Eugene, OR to find some colorful street art as a backdrop for his portraits.

I have become one of Houseium’s top fans on Facebook. I am really impressed by Jake’s ambition to learn to apply new technical skills, new dance skills, and new musical skills to his art. I have a BA in Voice Performance. I studied Classical music and performed my senior recital in four languages, interpreting four different period styles of music from the Baroque era to the 20th Century. Jake is just beginning to learn to read music. But he knows what he likes and what sounds good to him. I have to admit that I don’t listen to his genre of music much or his music in particular. Unless he’s putting on a dance party for the family! Then I dance seamlessly through his array of a couple of hours of music and enjoy every minute!

Thanks to Patti for hosting this week’s challenge and choosing a subject that is new to me and very fun!

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Harmony

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“There is no true greatness in art or science without a sense of harmony.”

Albert Einstein

Greatness is a pretty tough challenge. Harmony is a tough challenge as well. Technically, emotionally, socially, it is not easy to make music. I have a B.A. in Music/Vocal Performance, and almost two years ago, I took up the violin. Professionals make it look almost easy. I had no idea how difficult it is until I tried to produce some kind of pleasing sound whilst scraping a horsehair bow over a metal wire. The idea is rather ludicrous…as were my first attempts. Why do would-be musicians even bother? 

This evening, my eldest daughter is performing Mahler’s 8th Symphony with the Madison Symphony Chorus…and a host of other musicians. After all, it’s the “Symphony of a Thousand”. Tomorrow, I am performing Mozart’s Solemn Vespers and Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna in a basilica known as Holy Hill.

It’s impossible to imagine the number of hours that go into producing a concert, from composition to performance. Similarly, from learning to speak to writing poetry, what motivates humans to communicate? Why bother to go further than grunting out urgent pain or danger?

There is something sublime, something divine in experiencing the mystery of being alive in a moment. Music is LIFE in a moment. Photography is LIFE in a moment. It is breath-taking, poignant, exhilarating to be able to show someone that LIFE and feel that they resonate with that experience. That is harmony — experiencing the resonance of LIFE with another being. 

As a Lens-Artist, I hope to show you something that touches a chord. Thank you, Tina, for the invitation to be part of this challenge and share the art I’ve practiced. 

Weekly Photo Challenge: I’d Rather Be…honest

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How do I finish this sentence? “I’d rather be….” It presents a bit of a conflict.

If I can think of other things I’d rather be doing, then I’m not engaging with the present moment and the thing that I’m doing right now. I’d like to be a person that practices the discipline of positive presence, but honestly, I do a lot of wishful thinking.

That said…here’s what I would enjoy doing, any time!

#1 – Hanging out with my adult children. They are all tremendously stimulating individuals, and I’m very attached to them…and they all live at least 70 miles away from me. So occasions to be together are always a treat. Occasions when all five of us are together are extra special!

#2 – Camping. “Can I play outside? Please?” 

#3 – Making music, dancing to music, listening to music

So my complete fantasy would be singing around a campfire with all my kids. Hasn’t happened yet, but maybe some day….
Yeah, that would be a real Kumbaya moment. Peace out!

I’d Rather Be…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Harmony

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“The combination of simultaneous musical notes…having a pleasing effect.”

“The quality of forming a pleasing or consistent whole.”

I have a B. A. in Music/Vocal performance.  Harmony is something that means many things to me.  It evokes memories of listening to my late husband’s barbershop quartet rehearsing in the living room, listening to my children sing tight vocal jazz arrangements with their friends, and performing with church choirs week in and week out.  

Harmony is rich and pleasing and ethereal.  How do you photograph that feeling? You might think of going directly to musical instruments.  Something like this:

Then again, that does not quite capture the mood.  Perhaps it looks more like this:

Newlyweds

1989b

Yes, I think that’s better!

 

Harmony

Music: A Soul Experience

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This piece is featured in this month’s issue of The BeZine.  To go to the interactive table of contents, click HERE.

Addressing this topic is a tricky proposition for me. How do I write about “Music” after a lifetime of being in its company, serious collegiate study, professional and semi-professional music-making and now coming to an ever-changing place of informal interaction with it? It is as daunting as writing about “Being Female”.

My partner Steve, who has a more organic relationship to music than I, often asks me, “What is music? Is this Music?” My definitions are vague. John Cage hears music in the sound of traffic. Why not? Steve stands by a babbling brook or a wide lake shore, closes his eyes and begins to wave and conduct the irregular but compelling rhythms. Music is an experience. It is felt and lived, by humans, most certainly, and perhaps by oceans, birds and the cosmic spheres. We can pick it apart, measure it scientifically, codify and teach it and all but kill it while still trying to communicate something beyond all those characteristics. I taught Voice lessons for a few years, giving rudimentary information on practical aspects of sound production and score-reading, but when it came time for a student to prepare for performance, I said something like, “Feel your confidence; trust your instrument; let go and SING!”

P1100993 - Copy

The music of the soul, singing, is not without dukkha, the intrinsic suffering of human life. Aside from Art or Artifice, singing is a conduit for emotion as vulnerable and raw as any primal utterance. Those who have guessed this often try to manipulate it or manufacture it for their own uses. Or they try to lose their egos and get as close to being on the edge as they can. Who are the great “emotive” singers you can name? Judy Garland is our favorite. Her story and her relationship with her music is a painful one, but we love to hear her inimitable voice and styling. I used to play my Wizard of Oz record over and over again and try to sound just like her…before I was 10. Before I knew much about suffering at all. She was all of 16 on the recording. She kept singing that song throughout her career. She knew exactly how to wring all the pathos of her life from that melody by the time she died. She did it repeatedly, convincingly each time.

Just two days ago, I read a passage about Singing that struck me with an entirely new impact. It is from Frederick Douglass’ own autobiography about his life as an African-American slave. It will haunt me now whenever I hear Spirituals or make up my own bluesy tunes in passing. This is written in Chapter II, a memory from before he was 10 years old:

“The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow-slaves, were peculiarly enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. …The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. … To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery… If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul,—and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.” I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.”

Song pouring forth like tears for the relief of an aching heart. Music is a channel for all the emotion that lives within us, be it deep sorrow, longing, suffering, yearning, passion, joy or triumph. Have you never brought an embryonic ache to maturity by playing the right music? Have you not fed a wild impulse by stomping out an insistent rhythm and letting your voice, your body move along with it? Music is my companion, my teacher, my soul mate. It accompanies me as I discover myself, like my breath, my heartbeat. It is biological and intellectual, a genius of Life like an inalienable right. I could not endure existence without it; I can not imagine Freedom without it.

Jim at Carnegie Hall

My late husband was a singer, a gifted tenor. When he died, 300 people came to his memorial service to sing their good-byes – solos, congregational hymns and choir pieces. They sang as the living and imagined that there must be Music after death. They could not bear it to be otherwise. Though Death is entirely unknown and a very different (and luckier, as Walt Whitman would say) experience, I would not be surprised if there was music in it. Perhaps it is the very essence of all experience, conscious or not.

© 2015, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

80 Years in Eight Days — Day Number Three: Ten Musical Memories

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Today is Day 3 of my mother’s Birthday Project.  (Happy St. Stephen’s Day as well.  “Come on over; we’ll celebrate getting stoned”…one of my mother’s quips.)  On the docket are 10 musical memories.  My mother began her formal music training at the age of 5 when she started piano lessons.  To this day, she plays and sings for the residents of her senior community quite regularly.  Mom at POP 001

Her musicianship far exceeds mine, even though I have a B.A. in Music/Voice Performance.  She has an M.A. in Church Music.  She can improvise at the piano in various keys as well as play the organ: pedal keyboard and two manuals at once.  I am “keyboard proficient” and can play the pump organ at the museum…meaning, essentially, I can read piano music and ride a bicycle at the same time.  NOT the same skill set.  My favorite arrangement is her at the piano bench and me singing alongside. 

photo credit DKK

photo credit DKK

So here are 10 more musical snapshots of my mother:

1) She is a young girl, her mother calls out proudly, “Anne Louise, play Clair de lune.”  She rolls her eyes.  Not again!  Consequently, I don’t think I’ve ever heard her play it. 

2) I am a young girl, a wee little kindergartener.  Mom tucks me into the bottom bunk bed at night and sings, “Now the day is over/ night is drawing nigh/ shadows of the evening/ steal across the sky.  Jesus gives the weary/calm and sweet repose/ with his tend’rest blessings/ may thine eyelids close.”  She kisses my forehead.  “Ni’ – night, d’good girl!”  All is well.  I hear her voice complete in my memory.  Every note. 

3) Mom is studying at Concordia Teacher’s College.  She needs to do some organ practice, and I’m not in school.  Perhaps I’m sick?  So she takes me with her.  The organ is enormous.  The room is large and institutional.  I sit beside her and watch.  I am fascinated by the pedal keyboard.  Mom lets me crawl around on it, picking out tunes.  I play “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater” on the black keys, like I do on the piano.  It booms out all over the room.  This is great!!

4) I am about seven years old.  I am the youngest member of our church choir which consists of my parents, my 3 older sisters, and a few others.  I sit in the front row of the loft with the sopranos, leaning out to see the candles in the Christmas Eve procession.  I am singing Midnight Mass with the adult choir, and I am going to stay awake through the whole service!  How exciting to be allowed to sing out like an angel from up here instead of being stuck in the basement in the church nursery!  Anthem’s over.  That sure was fun!  There’s a pile of coats in the corner of the pew….my, I’m feeling sleepy.  I’ll just rest a bit before the next hymn…oh! What?  We’re going home now?  Did I miss the recessional?  Drat!

5) I am about eleven years old.  I’ve been taking piano lessons for 3 years.  I practice before school every morning, while Mom washes the breakfast dishes in the kitchen.  I am out in the living room, struggling away with a new piece.  I hear Mom calling out from behind the swinging kitchen door, “It’s F-sharp, Priscilla!  Look at your key signature.”  I look.  She’s right.  How did she know that from the other room?!  I am trying to play a piano reduction of Dance of the Hours by Amilcare Ponchielli.  I can’t get the stresses right to make the piece dance.  It comes out stiff.  I’m playing what’s written on the page, aren’t I?  Mom comes in, “Think of it this way…try singing in your head… cot-tage cheee-eese, cot-tage cheee-eese…” Suddenly, it clicks!  Oh, this is that piece from Fantasia with the hippos in tutus!!  I’ve got it now!  But cottage cheese?  What made her think of that?!

6) My mother and my piano teacher, Mrs. Lerner from around the corner, are in a community choir called The Village Accents.  They are giving a little concert at the Women’s Club in that Frank Lloyd Wright building in River Forest.  The family must be in attendance.  There they are, this bevvy of ladies in skirts made of green and blue polka dots on white fabric.  Their shirts, and the piano, are chartreuse.  Oh, Lord.  This is embarrassing! (Can you guess I’m in Junior High?  And it’s 1975?)

7) I am in High School.  I am dating a guy whose mother was a concert pianist.  He sings in the community college choir and has a great voice.  My mother highly approves.  She invites him over for dinner.  Afterwards, she sits at the piano and pulls out some sheet music:  Jerome Kern’s “All The Things You Are”.  I’ve never heard it before, but it’s a great fit – the style, the sentiment, the voice.  I am in romantic heaven.  Months later, he invites me to one of his Jazz Choir concerts.  “I have a surprise for you,” he says and puts a piece of paper in my hands.  On the program, I see he has a solo.  Yes, you can guess the song.  He tells me he’s dedicating it to me.  Yes, that was Jim, my husband for 24 years, until his death. 

8) So I go off to college to study, um, music.  I’m 400 miles away from home.  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my mother and Jim have been singing in church together and have formed, along with some other church music colleagues, a group called Renascense (or some archaic spelling pronounced ren-NAY-sense).  I’ve done an entire blog post on this memory in the past, titled “Christmas 1982” and you can read it here.

9) Finally, I am a junior in college.  I have just been inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa society.  My grandmother purchased the gold PhiBet key as a gift to me, and I went to the awards banquet, alone.  I’m told a bit later that I should come to the annual Senior Awards Ceremony in May, even though I’m not really a senior.  Well, maybe I am.  I have enough credits to be.  I figure it’s related to the Phi Beta Kappa thing and tell my mother about it over the phone.  “Just a bit of news, Mom.  I know you have a 9-year-old at home to take care of, but there’s going to be this other ceremony…”   That sunny morning in Southern California, I am seated in Balch Hall with the choir and all the senior women of Scripps, glowing with promise.  It’s a beautifully festive day.  I scan the crowd…and there’s my mother!  What?!  She came all the way down here for this little ceremony?  The awards are given out.  The next one sounds interesting: The Gladys Pattison Music award, given to “the most deserving student in the field of music for the purpose of enriching her music library”.  Drum roll, please….yes!  It’s me!  I am surprised; I beam.  Afterwards, I find my mother.  She hands me a little gift.  It’s a music box, wrapped in keyboard paper.  I turn the handle and hear the opening notes of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.  Professor Lamkin, the choir master, joins us and suggests that we all go out to lunch…off campus.  What a treat!  I stare in amazement at Mom, who is not the spontaneous type.  “How did you just up and take off to be here?” I ask.  “Oh, honey.  I’ve been planning this for weeks.”  Oh.  Well, that explains it.

10) And in closing, every medley eventually ends up with “My Buddy”.  This is mom’s signature when she’s been at the piano a while.  No matter what key she’s in, no matter where she’s been dabbling, she always figures out how to incorporate this theme.  “Miss your voice, the touch of your hand, just long to know that you understand, my Buddy….my Buddy,  your Buddy misses you.”  I miss you, Mom.  Thanks for all the music!  I look forward to much more in the New Year!

mom and piano

 

Around the World in 24 Hours

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Milwaukee can be a rather uninspiring place in the dead of winter. Not that the light, feathery, cotton candy snow that piled up overnight wasn’t beautiful. As we walked to the breakfast cafe to meet Steve’s mother, we came up with an alphabetical list of adjectives for this particular day’s precipitation. I don’t want to complain about the temperature hovering around zero degrees Fahrenheit, although it is a favorite local custom. There are much better ways to engage the imagination, and I live in a house which reminds me of this every day.

 Scholar & Poet Books is the name of our other roommate. The drafty, old duplex we share rises over 4 levels: basement, first floor, second floor, and attic. She occupies every level and every staircase. She completely fills “my” closet while some of my clothes have languished in suitcases under the bed for 3 years. I am learning to appreciate her presence instead of begrudging her seeming dominance. In fact, I think I am coming around to choosing her company.

Scholar and Poet I

 After Sunday breakfast with Mom, we returned to her, eager to taste her bounty. Samplings for the day included Irish, French, Argentine, Tibetan and Yiddish. She expands our consciousness, delights our senses and supports our livelihood and our dreams. Her body is an amalgam of tens of thousands of books and CDs with a few hundred other artifacts thrown in. She is library, concert hall and museum. She is introvert heaven.

 We started by reading aloud a poem by W. B. Yeats, “A Prayer for My Daughter”, the howling North Atlantic wind of the Irish verses being matched by the Wisconsin bluster that rattled our windows. After delving a bit into Yeats’ biography, Steve then began his daily business of listing our friend’s appendages for sale while I went downstairs to do the dishes and make bread. After lunch, while the loaves baked, we began to discuss our plans to travel to Tibet. Internet research prompted a search through our stacks to find more information on that side of the planet. Steve came down with 6 books of varying relevance. When the bread was safely out of the oven, we went upstairs to watch a DVD, Manon of the Spring, having watched Jean de Florette just weeks before. This emotional tale of French village life transported us visually and linguistically to another world in a simpler century. I tried, unsuccessfully, to pick out the movie’s musical theme on my harmonica before returning to the kitchen to make dinner.

 When we’d finished our meal and our wine, we retired to the bedroom to peruse the wall of jewel cases. We settled on a CD of Argentinian folk songs and dances by Suni Paz. In contrast to the Irish ballads we lit upon at first, these undulating rhythms drew us deeper into the sultry passions beneath our awakened senses…

 Fueled by a solid Monday morning breakfast, we dove into the business of packaging our sales, accompanied by Moishe Oysher singing Yiddish, bluesy, vaudeville, Hollywood-like tunes. I have no idea what they were about, but his passages of improvised “scatting” made me think of Tevye stomping and shaking around in his barn, pouring out his desires to be a rich man. One of the books we packaged was sent to a Jewish community center in New York; it was a children’s book called Klutzy Boy. It made me laugh.

 The anthem of my Alma Mater, Scripps College, starts: “Strong in the strength of all, venturing together, searching, exploring the life of the mind…” In the midst of a Milwaukee winter, this is the antidote to cabin fever. I’m grateful to be shacking up with Scholar & Poet Books.

(author’s note: to browse our inventory listed on A.B.E. Books, click HERE. To visit our eBay Store, click HERE.)

© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

Advent Day #15 – Music

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The sun is rising in the east, lighting the low clouds with a brilliant pink-orange glow and silhouetting a raven in the large oak next door.  We awake this Sunday morning in a gloriously celebratory mood.  This is the only day in the week that Steve doesn’t wake at O dark 30 to get out the door to work.  He goes to his 7-foot stacks of CDs (did I tell you he collects and sells CDs as well as books?) and selects a favorite.  The timpani boom out the announcement of Christmas. Boom-bo-bo-bo-bo-boom Boom!  Bach’s Christmas Cantata is a great, rousing morning piece.  Now we are at the Grand Canyon, listening to the bird flutes and the donkey hee-haws of Grofe (accent on the ‘e’).  Music is a truly wonderful gift that we enjoy every day.

I’ve Got Music

How to unwrap this truly spectacular gift?  It pulsates and glows and pulls you in, as your heart resonates and your soul throbs.  Music received and believed regenerates like faith.  I cannot think that it is merely a human construct, yet I cannot prove the music of the heavenly spheres.  Is it invented?  Is it natural?  Is it free?  Perhaps it is everything.

All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!  ~Thomas Carlyle

Without music life would be a mistake.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.  ~Ludwig van Beethoven

My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.  ~Edward Elgar

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.  ~Victor Hugo

Is there a culture on earth without music?  Rhythm: sound and silence are as basic as biology.  Heartbeat, breath.  Melody is anything with a voice.  Do animals make music?  Do plants?  Does the earth itself sing?  Sound waves flood space.  Is that music?

Does music have an important part in your life, in your living?

Steve has a mental invention: “the sound pack”.  He imagines carrying around a device that would provide a soundtrack to your life as you live it, matching music to your moods and experiences.  It differs from an iPod in that it is all original music.  Of course, he hasn’t actually built a prototype. I have never gotten into the habit of wearing ear buds and listening to music constantly.  My arachnoid cyst would probably explode if I did.  It’s more comfortable for me to take my music in without other distractions, especially as the white noise in my head increases.  Imagine that you lived 200 years ago, before recorded sound.  What place would music have in your life then?

I sing to myself when I drive, making up lines and verses as I go along, like the Spirituals of the south, especially if I’m anxious.  Driving up to Steve’s house from Illinois, I’d get off the Interstate at Swan Blvd and hum, “Here I am on a street like a long-necked bird…”, the murmur of a bluesy minor key calming my nerves.  I would sing to my little brother on the drive home from the beach when he was a boy.  He’d be asleep by the time we reached the driveway, damp head on my shoulder.   I loved singing to him.  When he was an infant, I would reach into his crib and lift his sleeping body so that I could take him to the rocking chair and sing him back to sleep again.

Of course, I sang to my own children.  And they sang back.  Harmony is an amazing satisfaction.  I am looking forward to my kids visiting me on Christmas Eve.  I’m hoping we can take a stroll around the neighborhood and trot out some of our favorite carols….and maybe some Beetles.   Have you ever heard people singing in the streets?  Do you look up in delight?  Wonder why they seem so happy?  I do.

One morning, I awoke to the sound of my sweetheart singing beneath my window.  “Michelle, ma belle, Sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble….”  Instead of the melody, though, it was the baritone part of a barbershop arrangement.  Didn’t matter.  It was in French and warmed by a May breeze.  I opened my window and drank it in.

I have not experienced oneness with an instrument except my own voice.  I am truly impoverished by that fact, I think.  I did buy a harmonica this year with high hopes, but I am just too impatient.   My mother-in-law was a concert pianist.  My mother is an accomplished accompanist as well.  I wish that I had been more disciplined and practiced the piano more.  I wish that I had spent more time with the guitar, too.  I suppose having a good voice tempts you to be lazy in that way.  If Jascha Heifetz could sing, would he have been the violinist that he was?

What if we required our politicians to be experienced ensemble musicians?  Would they come to office with a better understanding of unity, of teamwork, of collaborative leadership?  Imagine a string quartet of President, Vice-President, Speaker of the House, and Senate Majority Leader practicing long hours together on an Adagio by Schubert.  Perhaps the entire country would be in better shape.