Ummagumma

Note: This is the tenth installment of my continuing series about the greatest symphonies. I plan to conclude with two more posts sometime in the future. By the time we reach Great Symphonies beyond the number Nine the list of distinctive composers narrows considerably. Mahler composed some large portions of a projected five-movement Tenth but he died before he could proceed beyond that. Beethoven , Schubert , and Dvorak are all gone. Yet, two of the greatest composers of all time created their greatest symphonic works far beyond their first nine symphonies. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived to compose 41 symphonies. Franz Joseph Haydn wrote an astonishing 104 symphonies. These two giants of the classical symphonic form influenced many who followed them, including Beethoven himself. Along with Johann Sebastian Bach , who never composed a symphony as I use the term, Haydn and Mozart form the three great pillars of pre-Beethoven composition. Their works are still widely performed and ar...

Typically, I opine about something in my blog posts. This post is not an opinion, or rather it is not a fully formed opinion. It is, rather, the opinion of others, an item of note that I want to file away inside my blog for future reference; a basis for further deliberation regarding a question unasked . It has to do with something I've been considering for years but which I am having extreme difficulty articulating. So, for now, I will plant this note and come back to it later. I might also take a moment to acknowledge the slowdown in the number of posts in recent months. I am working on a number of musings that I want to share with you. I hope in coming months to get much more precise about what I hold to be important and particularly insightful about life itself. My writing is devoted more these days to topics not ready for this blog. They require time and struggle and I have discovered dozens of wrong turns. I know how "heavy" that might sound. It isn't meant to b...

It came of my attention over the weekend that last Thursday night at the O2 Arena in London, David Gilmour and Nick Mason joined Roger Waters for a performance of “Comfortably Numb" in Waters’ latest tour of the 1979 Pink Floyd classic rock concept album The Wall . The appearance, while a major event among Pink Floyd fans , like me, everywhere, was Gilmour honoring his end of a bargain he had struck with Waters last year at a gig benefiting Palestinian refugee children. The troubles of Gilmour and Waters have been previously chronicled by me on this blog . Unfortunately, this brief reunion is not the harbinger of more appearances to come, although there is some previously unreleased Pink Floyd archival material in the works. It was merely a happy episode in Pink Floyd history that probably won’t lead to much of anything else. The performance of “Comfortably Numb” itself was uninspired. It was not Gilmour at his best, though he was certainly adequate. As with the 1980 tou...

Note: This is the third part of a high-level review of my 9th reading of Tolkien's classic prelude and trilogy. All quotes and page numbers are from my original 1975 paperback edition. The Fellowship of the Ring (FOTR) ends with a chapter entitled “The Breaking of the Fellowship.” That break is so severe that it separates more than the primary characters. In The Two Towers (TT) the narrative itself is split down the middle. This creates an interesting story-telling challenge for J.R.R. Tolkien . How do you maintain interest in the main story line when whole groups of characters are missing for hundreds of pages? It is an unconventional approach but Tolkien makes it all work in his favor. Instead of becoming confused, the reader is caught up in a “what happens next?” mentality. Pippin and Merry are taken prisoner by fierce Uruk-hai and end up in Fangorn Forest . Aragorn , Legolas , and Gimli are tracking them through Rohan and end up in the novel’s second largest battle at He...

Like many Americans, I remember where I was on September 11, 2001 . Now, I will always remember where I was on the night Osama bin Laden was killed in a raid by US Special Forces . I was lying in the floor in the bedroom of a home in North Carolina, about to go to sleep. Jennifer and my daughter were with me. We were there to attend the funeral of one of Jennifer’s family members the next day. Just before I dozed off my daughter said, “They killed bin Laden.” It was all over Facebook. Since she lives in the realm of social networking reality, she knew about it PDQ. Being a Neanderthal, my only recourse was to turn on the TV and watch in the darkness of the room as ABC News (the first channel I came to) was busy covering the breaking story with all sorts of expert interviews and reporters blabbing on and on with very few details to work with. We were told the president was going to speak “soon.” Almost 45 minutes later, nearing midnight our time, President Obama did make a brief statem...