Today, another sleeping-cat Sunday from the archives of Arlo & Janis. And more about wine. Prohibition understandably was hard on vintners. Many vineyards ripped out vines of grapes more suitable for wine and replaced them with grapes good for eating or for juices and jams, such as Concord grapes. This practically destroyed a long-established wine industry in the Ozarks and in New York. These regions relied heavily upon “my” grape, the Norton, said to be the only native North American grape that will produce a decent dry wine. Just now are the Norton wines really coming back in Missouri and Arkansas. My favorite prohibition story, true or not, is about desperate grape growers who would ship their produce to consumers with instructions such as, “Do not mash these grapes into juice, add yeast and store for several months in a cool dark place. It will turn into wine!”
245 responses to “More Cat in the Sack”
And Bach… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o
And Debussey.
And Luna Negra
And Brubeck
and Pass
and….. and…and
🙂
And Joe Green (aka Giuseppe Verdi)
GR6: Thanks. The Mozart is now in my ‘favorites’.
c x-p: Hymn tunes. Most of the Welsh ones are good. When they do one of the Beethoven ‘Freude’ hymns, I sing the German to the first verse, discretely. Some of my favorites [e.g., ‘What child is this’, ‘How great thou art’, and ‘Amazing grace’] are good tunes and also have special associations that bring back good memories of different sorts. It’s best not to dwell on the specific theology, which can be pretty soupy or shallow, though I tend to avoid those that dwell on blood sacrifice. ‘In the garden’ is fun to sing, but really, ‘. . . none other has ever known’? Self-centered belief systems trouble me.
Wife, who grew up in a small MC 50 mi. n. of NYC, had a special category, ‘swayers’ [‘In the garden’, ‘His eye is on the sparrow’, and others], to which she would sway side to side, again, discretely.
BTW, his eye is also on the cowbird, the tapeworm, the spirochete, and the maggot.
That should read, “I sing the German from Beethoven’s 9th instead of the first verse.” I would be sore stressed to try to translate the hymns 1st verse [or much else] into German. Peace, emb.
hymn’s
Don’t worry, Lily. I wouldn’t lead you astray. About music. anyway. 😉
Talking about exterminators made me think of a great advertising idea: get permission from the BBC to use a miniature Dalek in your ads: Exterminate, eliminate, destroy, destroy, destroy!
It’s a pleasure to read these latest comments on music … entertaining and thoughtful. emb, have you ever sung in the chorus for Beethoven’s Ninth? Seems as though you must have, to know the words. Thank you to Trapper Jean and to Ghost for the links, which I will listen to later, as I’m listening now to an opera on Internet radio.
emb, your thoughts on hymn tunes and words are close to my own feelings. I love to sing the old traditional hymns, and some newer ones as well; it’s uplifting to join in the “joyful noise” and if I don’t agree with some of the theology, it doesn’t matter.
sideburns, there’s a robotics project for someone! Build-a-Dalek. And equip it with a little bug vacuum to suck up those pesky intruders. Or program it to say “Intruder alert! Intruder alert!” when it acquires a target with the zap sound when it gets it.
” ‘In the garden’ is fun to sing, but really, ‘. . . none other has ever known’? Self-centered belief systems trouble me.” – This is a regular “Special Music” hymn at our church which I am always cast to sing the first verse solo. I have always been told that the speaker is St. Mary ( The Virgin, for the Catholic-minded) and that is how I sing it. I can well believe none other had ever heard that. A “Special Revelation,” our priest tells me.
Charlotte:
Ages ago [’60s], I sang in a local oratorio series, all in English, surrounded by basses who could read music. Elijah [Mendelssohn], The Creation [Haydn], Messiah [Handel; N.B., not “The” Messiah], and maybe one other. Somewhere I read the words to “Freude, Freude, . . ..”. It’s short and I can pronounce German much better > speak it, and it gave wife something to put up with. We did that sort of thing.
It would be fun to be in the bass chorus in Carmina Burana. But I’ve never sung either solo or chorus in LVB’s 9th. I sing along with the radio or CD.
Peace, emb
On 9CL that’s an old Modesty Blaise trick. Willie Garvin would finish someone off when that would happen.
Speaking for my friends in the Bass section, the piece they love to do in Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus while we sopranos sing the chorus for a change
While I have no sense of rhythm, I do have a uniquely large range. While some of the songs make me reach the high notes (O Holy Night, Ave Maria-Gounod), I have always loved to rumble in the bass section. It makes life easier for my accompanist, who usually has to transpose music for the other cantors. Now if I only could follow her lead….
To sing The Hallelujua (sp?) Chorus in the bass section one more time! But it’s not going to happen. The voice is gone and I can’t stand up that long. I’ve got the memories though and it was great.
OF is due to blow soon, and, unlike the people there, you don’t have to stand in the rain to watch:
http://www.nps.gov/features/yell/webcam/oldFaithfulStreaming.html
Yes, some of the happiest memories I have are my choir memories:
Exchanging with other choirs during Christmas
Doing a guest solo of “Were You There” in a largely black Methodist Episcopal Church
Going out to nursing homes and doing concerts
Caroling
Doing oratorios on Easter, Thanksgiving, and Good Friday
So after work today, dad, sis, and BIL came over to help me move. We only got two trips of stuff moved before the dam broke and several inches of rain fell (and fall still). BIL volunteered to pack books. He failed to grasp the ramifications of moving someone with an English Literature degree – fourteen (19″x12″x10″) boxes of books. The growing look of misery as I drug out more books was highly entertaining. I must admit though, lugging the darned things down three flights of stairs, to the truck, and into the new place wasn’t as entertaining.
That’s one of the reasons why I want to live in this house the rest of my life, Mindy Indy. All these books. Must be over ten thousand of them!
Mindy from Indy, your move sounds like all the ones I ever volunteered to help with, except one. That one was a single story house, the rest were upper floor apartments without elevators. I had an older Toyota Van (looked like a 2/3 scale VW bus) so I could load a lot of stuff into it.
When I finally moved myself to Tennessee we had to rent a truck because of my book collection. Then when I returned to Alabama, the 3 boxes I had left fit into my Dodge Caravan. Never again. Just too much stuff, but I miss those books.
Jerry in FL — aw, that’s a darned shame. We’ve seen that you are making the best of it and are brave about your various problems.
Lilyblack — those sure are some swell memories. And you’re piling up more all the time … good for you!
emb — you have had some great musical experiences. There’s so much music out there; none of us can hear or perform all of it.
Yep, the books. One of the reasons I recently mentioned that I probably don’t have another move left in me. My most recently purchased books are electronic, but the ones before them are all made from dead trees.
Speaking of strippers (it was Jean, not me), I found a really interesting video I trying to decide whether or not to post.
And Jean dear, if you prefer to ignore my query about why you had body glitter spray on hand, that’s OK. 😉
The oratorio soc. may have done Brahms’s [German] Requiem. I remember singing [English] words that fit, and don’t recall our doing any other requiem. [My favorite is Verdi’s]. In the interest of time [and maybe the talent available*], all of the oratorios we did were actually excerpts, probably about 2/3 of the numbers. In Haydn’s Creation, we didn’t do any of part 3, Adam & Eve in the Garden and Haydn opining that they shouldn’t try to know too much. Compared to pts. 1 and 2, it’s soupy. Conductor actually was a rather set in his ways and beliefs Lutheran, but guess he realized the ending just was not that good.
*A later conductor, who did Carmina Burana 2-3 times, once did not have a strong tenor, so had a quartet of singers do the tenor solos. Whatever works.
GR6. Post it.