Spitball Army

On a sunny Friday in January 1985, I sketched this while sitting on the steps of the State House in Boston. There must have been something of a chill in the air, judging by the woman’s coat. The bas-relief sculpture on the right, completed in 1897, was created by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, an Irish-born American sculptor.

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The Orchestra Rocks;
celery;
interactive journalism

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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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“Oh, Peg — That’s corny.”

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This is a tape that reflected the pushmi-pullyu part of my brain that, at the time, couldn’t decide if it was into songwriters, oldies, classical or blues. That’s pretty representative of my brain all of the time.

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The eagerly-awaited season of lists is currently upon us. The list-generating machine at The New York Times is cranking ’em out like crazy, and their “best ofs” are typically far-ranging and unpredictable. The NYT classical CD list – compiled by four of the paper’s classical music writers – has no overlap with the NPR list previously mentioned here.

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Fred Child has posted his favorite classical CDs of the past year at the NPR website, but don’t expect a scroll filled with the latest, greatest recordings of Mozart, Beethoven or Bach. All right, there is a disc of Mozart and Beethoven violin concertos, but the majority of Child’s selections fill a niche where the boundaries between classically-trained virtuosity, international rhythms, jazz and pop music blur.

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This morning, my radio alarm clock announced the arrival of a new day with the strains of a string quartet. I lay in bed trying to identify whose quartet it was. It sounded like Beethoven, perhaps even Brahms.

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