Log24

The Toys Left to right: June Montiero, Barbara Parritt, and Barbara Harris

From the website http://www.history-of-rock.com/toys.htm —

In 1964 they were signed by the Publishing firm Genius, Inc., which teamed them with the songwriting duo Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell…. The writers took a classical finger exercise from Bach and put a Motown bassline to it and “A Lover’s Concerto” was born.

September 1965: “A Lover’s Concerto” on the Dynavoice label went #4 R&B, crossed over to pop charts #2, and also became a #5 hit in England. In 1965 the song sold over a million copies. The Toys began appearing on television shows such as “Shindig!,” “Hullabullo,” and “American Bandstand,”  toured with Gene Pitney, and appeared in the film It’s a Bikini World.

Other sites giving further details on Bach’s Minuet in G:

Search for the sheet music and a rendition of the work at codamusic.com’s Finale Showcase Search Page.

Seeing and hearing the music on this site requires that you download  Coda’s SmartMusic Viewer, and possibly requires that you adjust your browser settings, depending on the operating system you use.

For another look at Bach’s music, along with a midi rendition, you can download Music MasterWorks composing software from the Aspire Software site…

http://www.musicmasterworks.com/.

Then download the midi file of the Minuet in G itself,  “Minuet in G,  BWV841” (M.Lombardi), from the website

http://www.classicalarchives.com/bach.html.

(To do this, right-click on the minuet link and use the “Save Target As” option, if you, like me, are using Internet Explorer with Windows.)

After you have downloaded the midi file of the minuet, use the “File” and “Open” options in Music MasterWorks to display and play the music.

A comparison of these two versions of Bach is instructive for anyone planning to purchase music composition software.   The MasterWorks creates sheet music from its midi file that is quite sophisticated and rather hard to follow, but this music accurately reflects the superior musical performance in the downloaded midi file versus the rendition in the online Finale Showcase file.   The Showcase file is much simpler and easier to read, as the rendition it describes is also quite simple.

The Gentle Rain

For an even simpler version, those of us who were in our salad days in 1965 can consult our memories of The Toys:

How gentle is the rain
That falls softly on the meadow.
Birds high up in the trees
Serenade the clouds with their melodies.

Oh, see there beyond the hill,
The bright colors of the rainbow.
Some magic from above
Made this day for us just to fall in love.

Those of the younger generation with neither the patience nor the taste to seek out the original by Bach may be content with the following site —

A Lover’s Concerto in Venice

To a more mature audience, the picture of a Venetian sunset at the above site (similar to the photo below, from Shunya’s Italy)

will, together with the lyrics of The Toys, suggest that

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven….

This line, addressed to Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” contradicts, to some extent, the statement by Igor Stravinsky in The Poetics of Music (1942, English version 1947) that music does not express anything at all. Stravinsky is buried in Venice.

From  Famous Graves:

Igor Stravinsky,

Venice

At Random

Today’s birthday: poet Stanley Kunitz  —

“I’m Stanley Kunitz. I live in New York City. I published my first book of poems some 70 years ago. Back in 1926, I was roaming through the stacks of the Widener Library at Harvard. While I was walking through the section on English poetry of the 19th century, I just at random lifted my arm and picked a book off the shelf. It was… an author I was not familiar with, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The page that I turned to and began to read was a page devoted to a poem called “God’s Grandeur.” I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I opened this book and started reading that poem. It really shook me, because it was unlike anything else I had ever read before. When I started reading it, suddenly that whole book became alive to me. It was filled with such a lyric passion. It was so fierce and eloquent, wounded and yet radiant, that I knew that it was speaking directly to me and giving me a hint of the kind of poetry that I would be dedicated to for the rest of my life.”

Keats and the Web

From a letter of John Keats on the Web:

“There is the passage in a famous letter of John Keats, 19th February, 1818:

Now it appears to me that almost any Man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel — the points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful circuiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Web of his Soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean full of symbols for his spiritual eye, of softness for his spiritual touch, of space for his wandering, of distinctness for his luxury.”

This seems not unrelated to the observations below on commonplace books and Web logs. 

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Saul Steinberg in The New York Review of Books issue dated August 15, 2002, page 32:

“The idea of reflections came to me in reading an observation by Pascal, cited in a book by W. H. Auden, who wrote an unusual kind of autobiography by collecting all the quotations he had annotated in the course of his life, which is a good way of displaying oneself, as a reflection of these quotations.  Among them this observation by Pascal, which could have been made only by a mathematician….”

Pascal’s observation is that humans, animals, and plants have bilateral symmetry, but in nature at large there is only symmetry about a horizontal axis… reflections in water, nature’s mirror.

This seems related to the puzzling question of why a mirror reverses left and right, but not up and down.

The Steinberg quote is from the book Reflections and Shadows, reviewed here.

Bibliographic data on Auden’s commonplace book:

AUTHOR      Auden, W. H. (Wystan Hugh),              1907-1973. TITLE       A Certain World; a Commonplace Book   
            [selected by] W. H. Auden.
PUBLISHER   New York, Viking Press [1970]
SUBJECT     Commonplace-books.

A couple of websites on commonplace books:

Quotation Collections and

Weblets as Commonplace Books.

A classic:

The Practical Cogitator – The Thinker’s Anthology, 
by Charles P. Curtis, Jr., and Ferris Greenslet,
Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, Massachusetts
c 1962 Third Edition – Revised and Enlarged

A Commonplace Blog

William Safire blogs the word “blog” in his On Language column today.  He specifically mentions xanga.com —

“Blog is a shortening of Web log. It is a Web site belonging to some average but opinionated Joe or Josie who keeps what used to be called a ”commonplace book” — a collection of clippings, musings and other things like journal entries that strike one’s fancy or titillate one’s curiosity…. To set one up (which I have not done because I don’t want anyone to know what I think), you log on to a free service like blogger.com or xanga.com, fill out a form and let it create a Web site for you. Then you follow the instructions….”

I’ve been looking for a weblog editor, and Xanga seems like it’s the best.   Too bad they can’t host pre-existing domain names…. I registered the URL log24.com some time ago, and want to use it.  But I also want to use Xanga’s neat entry software.   My solution: Use Xanga for day-to-day entries, with the new URL log24.net (just purchased), and use my log24.com site as an archive.

P.S. Don’t forget to install the xTools button in your browser; it only takes a few seconds and lets you publish anytime, from anywhere on the Web… and it’s free!