[Above: portion of letter from Aaron Copland to Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Original in the Library of Congress's Aaron Copland Collection.] [Below, click Play button to begin Appalachian Spring, the seventh section. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical [...]

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The great tangled rope of popular music (American and otherwise) includes so many disparate strands that to speak of it as a single “thing” invites ridicule: show tunes and jazz, bluegrass and ragtime, country, folk, rock, metal, rap, and hip-hop… And then what about “easy listening”? and popular classical music, like Gershwin’s and Copland’s? New [...]

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From whiskey river: Have you been to the source of a river? It’s a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient [...]

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A couple weeks ago, I posted on the importance of selecting a good title for your work. Here’s what I said then, in part: I’ve struggled for years, off and on, with the title of the WIP. When I tell you I’ve been calling it Grail, I know that instantly summons up certain… certain somethings [...]

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[Image at the right depicts Swedes celebrating Midsummer's Day in a maypole dance. I found this at sweden.se, "The Official Gateway to Sweden."] By tradition, June 24th is Midsummer’s Day. (So you know what that makes the evening of June 23rd, right?) It’s a public holiday in Quebec and a handful of countries in Europe [...]

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Every now and then The Missus and I look at each other over a meal or while rambling through cable TV’s Food Network and wonder, Who first thought to do X with this recipe? Okay, reasonably, I know we’re beneficiaries of tens of thousands of years of trial-and-error. Somebody in a grass or furry loincloth [...]

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In a side conversation on a recent post here, my pseudonymous occasional correspondent known as “Froog” recently undertook some research for me. I’d come across this extremely cool wallpaper (well, I think it’s cool; that’s it at the right, and you can click the image to see a larger version); alas, I knew nothing about [...]

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[Gotta get back into the online rhythm again after a couple days off... digging out the draft of a post I'd meant to put up some time ago...] If I had my own personal MacArthur Foundation-like setup for rendering “genius grants” to people in all walks of life, I would give one tomorrow to Mark [...]

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In the previous post, I sort of blew off the significance of the day as if I didn’t take it seriously. It’s not a joke. I’m trying real hard not to get too puffed up and all “Gee aren’t we Americans wonderful?!?” (As a column in today’s paper said, we don’t even know yet whether [...]

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The Missus roamed the aisles of the video store a few nights ago, not looking for anything in particular. (Which is to say, she’d ceased looking for anything in particular: it was one of those in-between times when all the “new releases” on our must-see list had already been claimed by renters with more disciplined [...]

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