People, merchandise and display cases all about, and I was in a department store with activity swirling around me. Out of the blizzard of activity, I heard someone sobbing. I wondered what the trouble was, but I could hardly make out any of the soft words. At last, one phrase came to me clearly: “the late 20th century.” And by the tone of voice and depth of feeling, I understood it to mean, not "the latter decades of the 20th century," but “the recently demised century.”
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)
... then at 13 I was getting into traditional jazz, then about 15, getting into Parker, Parker With Strings. I loved the Parker With Strings album, phenomenal [...] I had no idea how anyone could be that good [...] about 20, Hendrix and Sgt Pepper and Bartók string quartets and Stravinsky, and my great epiphany was, I was hearing all these different kinds of music, but for me they were one Music. There was no difference. It was like you have lots of different musicians speaking different dialects, but the Music is One and this was my epiphany. And I was just about to go to University to take the green estate management to take over my father’s real estate firm and coming back from the Majestic Hotel one night, “A Day in the Life.” I didn’t know who it was and it came on the radio and suddenly at the end there’s this piano chord and ... and then I couldn’t go on to University in Real Estate. It had to change, and so I said to my mother and father, “Look....” So then I went on to London to unemployment and ignominy.
— Robt Fripp
Per Note (*4) to this post, I have prepared a version of Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be with bassoon rather than double-bass in the otherwise original quartet version, for use at King’s Chapel.
Imagine my pleasure this morning when friends at church told me that they had visited Grace Episcopal Church in Medford (two towns south of Woburn, Wonder of the North) a couple of weeks ago and that music of mine was played for the Prelude! Do I know the Music Director at Grace Church? I’m not at all sure that I do, but we must meet, indeed we must.
It’s not many days since I re-read The Hobbit with pleasure, and yet fewer days since re-watching the Rankin/Bass animation of that classic (If I knew that John Huston was the voice of Gandalf, I had forgotten. I don’t believe I ever realized that Otto Preminger voiced the Elf-King.) Curiously, twelve years ago today, I made an attempt to watch the Peter Jackson adaptation. The result before my eyes was exactly what you could have plotted from two data points:
The Lord of the Rings movies made so much money, a further incursion into The Hobbit was industrially inevitable, and
Jackson and his screenwriting team were not going to suddenly develop a passion for fidelity to the tone and text of Tolkien’s book(s)
A far, far pleasanter revisitation:
The first time I heard this, back at the dawn of my 20’s, it blew my musical mind, and immediately became part of my composerly DNA. And yes, I love it every bit as much still, as I discovered while turning my PT on to the album this past Friday. The ‘A’ material being in 7 is, erm, only the beginning. There is beguiling subtlety in the supple rhythm/meters of the ‘B’ section. The first two measures are 11/8 grouped as [4+4+3] then our ear is misled into supposing that there is a third repetition, but no! It’s 7/4 (yet not a return to the ‘A’ riff, as it is grouped [4+4+3+3] yet that initial [4+4+3] at first appears to affirm our expectation, which is turned base over apex by that final triplet which delays the big downbeat. I remember almost as if it had been yesterday parsing the meters mentally, and Robert Fripp became immediately and forever one of my musical idols.
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