🦃Bird-Bolts and Cannon-Bullets XVI

Thanksgiving edition

Nov 23, 2023

This is the weekly roundup of reviews and recommendations, which is usually for only paid subscribers, but today it is available for everyone to read.

Dear reader,

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday—the harvest feast. While I understand its colonialist roots, it seems to me to be a manifestation of the essential, ageless gathering around a table, a nonsectarian and potentially inclusive celebration of gratitude, much needed in these dark times. In that spirit, today I’m celebrating examples of literary and musical phenomena for which I am grateful.

Yours,

John

Listening

Home to Thanksgiving

While there is plenty of Christmas music—arguably far too much—there is less Thanksgiving music, which is why I treasure this record by the Hillier Ensemble, and I spin it several times each year during the holiday week. Though there are some familiar tunes, they are welcome because, unlike much Christmas music, they are not worn out by endless retreading. If you like a cappella choral music, then you will enjoy this album.

The Music of Joseph Haydn

As I write this, I’m listening to the Pražák Quartet’s recording of Haydn’s Op. 77 G-Major string quartet. Scarcely a day goes by that I don’t listen to some Haydn. His music is life-affirming, full of wit, endlessly inventive. It is the soundtrack to much of my life. While I love the music of many, many composers, it is Haydn who is my most regular musical companion. If you have been following my Rotation playlist, you may have noticed that it always includes some Haydn. His music makes life better, and I am grateful for it.

A Magical Moment of Live Music

Last weekend, I was in New Orleans, where I used to live in my graduate-school days, and I heard this band called Personal Space at Balcony Music Club. They are a group of young music students from Tulane and Loyola, and they were having so much fun playing modern jazz classics by the likes of Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and Joe Henderson. It was inspiring to hear such young people playing this music and playing it well. It made me feel very hopeful about the future of jazz. I am grateful for that experience.

Reading

The Novels of Jane Austen

On Wednesday, I wrote about Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. (You may find that post here, in case you missed it.) Austen (along with Chaucer) is my closest literary equivalent to Haydn, because I read and reread her so often that I have lost count. The miraculous thing is that, like Haydn’s music, it is eternally fresh, no matter how many times I revisit. I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence that Austen was Haydn’s younger contemporary, though she didn’t publish her first novel until two years after the composer’s death. I feel confident that if Haydn had lived long enough to read her, he would have enjoyed her novels—provided that his English was advanced enough. (He did spend a fair amount of time in London, hence the twelve “London Symphonies.”)

The Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Lisp and relapse. Eddy of sybilline English.
Splashes between a ship and dock, to which,
Animula, I would come alive in time
As ferries churned and turned down Belfast Lough
Towards the brow-to-glass transport of a morning train,
The very ‘there-you-are-and-where-are-you?’
Of poetry itself. Backs of houses
Like the backs of hers, meat-safes and mangles
In the railway-facing yards of fleeting England,
An allotment scarecrow among patted rigs,
Then a town-edge soccer pitch, the groin of distance,
Fields of grain like the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
To Southwerk too I came,
From tube-mouth into sunlight,
Moyola-breath by Thames’s ‘straunge stronde.’

—from “Electric Light”

The Chaucerian reference there always gives me a thrill when I read this poem. Heaney’s poetry has also been a literary companion for decades, and I am grateful for it.

And, of course, I’m grateful for you, dear reader, as you tolerate my regular glutting of your overstuffed inbox.

What musical or literary or other artistic treasures are you thankful for this week?

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.