Pianist Frank Giasullo’s arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun”.
Featuring:
Art Themen - Tenor sax
Frank Giasullo - Piano
Nicholas Krolak - Bass
Pat Tamminen - Drums
Iron & Wine - The Trapeze Swinger
Photo of the moon I took last weekend with my iphone through my telescope.
Below is the Paul Verlaine’s poem “Clair de Lune”. This poem is the inspiration for the third and most famous movement of Claude Debussy’s Suite bergamesque.
Clair de Lune Paul Verlaine (1890)
Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.
Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L’amour vainqueur et la vie opportune
Ils n’ont pas l’air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,
Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d’extase les jets d’eau,
Les grands jets d’eau sveltes parmi les marbres.English Translation:
Moonlight, by Paul Verlaine (1890)
Your soul is as a moonlit landscape fair,
Peopled with maskers delicate and dim,
That play on lutes and dance and have an air
Of being sad in their fantastic trim.
The while they celebrate in minor strain
Triumphant love, effective enterprise,
They have an air of knowing all is vain,—
And through the quiet moonlight their songs rise,
The melancholy moonlight, sweet and lone,
That makes to dream the birds upon the tree,
And in their polished basins of white stone
The fountains tall to sob with ecstasy.
Gate to the Chateau, Vaux de Cernay by Eugene Atget
“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves” ~ Eli Seigel
How Music is Saving Venezuela’s Children
The remarkable accomplishment of a great humanist, José Antonio Abreu, who dedicated his life to set up the ‘Sistema’ in 1975, an extraordinary music and social project which has been running in Venezuela in an attempt to transform the lives of the nations poorest children.
It has been using classical music to tackle the social problems of a country where 60% of the population live below the poverty line. By offering free instruments and tuition through a network of after-school centres all over the country, the Sistema has kept thousands of children away from the drugs, alcohol and gang-related violence of the streets and has led to the creation of 30 professional orchestras in a country that had only 2 before it started. Currently, 275,000 children attend the Sistemas schools and many of them play in one of the 125 youth orchestras.
At the pinnacle of the system stands the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela under its music director Gustavo Dudamel who is himself a product of the Sistema and is also the musical director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
(Source: bit.ly)
