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Back before The Six Week Gap, I had started a series of posts in this category exploring the work of Japanese composers. I think I only lost three of those posts, but those were all the posts in the Japanese Composers series, so I guess now we’re just going to start over. Yay! [bangs head on desk] Japan is a fascinating culture in just about all respects, but musically as well. It has its own music traditions that date back thousands of years, but since Japan’s opening to the West in the middle of the 19th century, the influence of WesternDown the rabbit hole….

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My Aunt Alice–my father’s big sister–used to own a cottage in the Poconos, and we would visit her there once or twice each summer, during the 1980s. One year, which probably would have been summer of 1984 because I was going into 8th grade, she asked me what I was going to be studying in the coming year. On the specifics of science, 8th grade at that time was half a year of intro physics and half a year of intro chemistry, and when I mentioned the chemistry thing, Aunt Alice brightened up and said, “I know a chemistry joke!Down the rabbit hole….

Tuesday Tones! (The title of the music series over a bit of music score.)

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Well, if you remember back to before the Great Functionality Disaster that ate six weeks of content of mine, I was in the midst of a series of works composed by Japanese composers. And I’m going to get back to that, but for now, here’s an old favorite of mine. Why am I choosing this one? Because of a certain sonic effect in the third movement! Yes, it’s relevant to something I’ll be posting in the near future. Here is The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. (This is a very fine performance, by the way, but what appears to beDown the rabbit hole….

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On our back dock at The Store, we keep, among other things, a rack housing the supply of wood that we have on hand for various carpentry needs throughout the year. And many years–not every year, but quite a few of them–a bird, usually a robin, will make a nest in my woodpile. This year was no different, and as soon as I saw her making the nest I started keeping tabs on things. By sheer accident of a couple of pallets nearby, I was able to actually get a good vantage point to track the progress of Mama’s eggs and,Down the rabbit hole….

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One minor waterway that makes its way through the Buffalo region is Scajaquada Creek. It’s a small stream that rises somewhere in Lancaster, NY, and flows westward through Lancaster, Cheektowaga, and Buffalo before finally draining into the Niagara River near where I-190 and NY198 split. Owing to its urban nature and the fact that occasionally there are sewage overruns, it’s not the cleanest run of water around. And in Cheektowaga, the stream was actually diverted years ago into an underground culvert that’s about three miles long. It only emerges again in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. What’s it like inside thatDown the rabbit hole….

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With this new format on this site, I’m experimenting more with Featured Images and such to make the front page a bit easier to follow…but anyway, I don’t have a lot of time because we’re off in a few minutes to go see a REALLY BIG TRAIN. So in keeping with that, here is my favorite train song of all time. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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As I continue working through this site’s new look and functionality on the back end, I suppose it’s time to figure out how posting music looks and works here. I haven’t listened to this in quite a while, but it’s always a delight to come back to: the ballet “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda. The opera is one that to this day I’ve never heard, but it’s still a mainstay on the international repertoire, even though full stagings are infrequent because the opera’s complexity and scale makes it expensive to do. Ponchielli is almost entirely knownDown the rabbit hole….

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One last meta-post for now, though I obviously still have some tinkering under the hood to do. I especially want to get rid of the way “Share this post” shows up on the main page as if it’s part of the text of the post. That bugs me. Also, though I like the appearance of this WordPress theme, I still haven’t figured out how the widgets work, so currently I’m not sure how to fix my sidebar the way I want it. (One of my blogging quirks is that eventually I always come to not like my sidebar set-up.) I’mDown the rabbit hole….