Katrina E' Venuta a Trovarci (Foto, Sandy)

Dear Sandy,
° Hot sticky sweltering steamy sultry threebathaday Summers, like New Orleans without the beignets.
° Droughty dusty brownedged thriftless Summers, like Tuscany without the olives.
° Bonechilling icecrusted snowless bitter Winters, like Hell after the power was shut off.
° Spotty fever ticks, tartytongued vipers, tornadoes four seasons a year, like Kansas without Technicolour munchkins.
° The New Madrid fault just itching to rip open the Earth and drain the entire Mississippi into the Yangtze.
° Say what you like about our climate, from childhood on we were secure in one article of faith, to wit:

At least we don’t have hurricanes.

° Then howcome at 4 this morning I was awakened by rain blowing in ten feet across the porch and into my bedroom onto my face and pillow? With twigs, branches, trunks snapping like matchsticks? With the sound of somebody’s tin roof clattering down the pavement?
° Katrina, what a blow she was!

§§§§§

° Not but one thing to do about it. Senator Prissst and his minions, fresh off their Pyrrhic triumph over Death Most Holy (the Terry Schiavo affair), must pass a law against hurricanes.
° Childlike truths must remain sanctified.

° Swimming in my own element, Giac.

Ave atque Vale (Foto, Lettye)

in festo ss. trinitatis, ad assumptionem

Dear Lettye,

Ah, that Rhapsody. In D-flat major, cognate key to the one Bach himself couldn’t compose in, indeed I wonder if he could even play it; I can think of a total of a baker’s dozen of measures that Couperin, Mozart, and Haydn cursed with all those sharps, and boy did they ever strip down the textures for safety’s sake. But Piers just glides through, even more slickly than the first time I heard him play it. Midway through there’s a registration, during the buildup, that “splits”, one can hear the octave magadising with the foundation, probably unavoidable. The conclusion grand enough for a basilica.
Bastien is lost in wonder and contemplation.
No, Bastien is simply lost en route to Mass this morning. I used to think he avoided Andrew’s voluntaries, and gave him full credit for his loyalty. But no--though perhaps he’s heard it rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed.
At least he’d have the decency not to mention those couple of measures of magadising.
I wonder if it is nervewracking to know that someone is listening so attentively, even if always listening only for confirmation of the player’s prowess?

“Reach me down that there box of shells, Aunt Tacky, the rhinoceros are loose in the back room!”
But it was no such thing. A surreptitious glance at the new stoplist confirms that when Piers swooped down on that HolyHolyHoly phrase so commandingly that first time, ‘twas not the Aeolian-Skinner Rinoceronte en chamade he employed, but rather the new digital 16foot Hippoposthumos straziato. So that the alarm one naturally felt at first hearing was translated into tender compassion for the suffering of the Attislike, callow steer.
During the Sequence I observe that Piers makes an error of taste. Just at the moment when the text turns Incarnationy, redolent with shepherds’ bagpipes and drones, he underlines the phrase with one of the multiple trumpets currently at his disposal.
Though perhaps it would have been a little tedious to reduce all the verse so that the new digital 8foot Corno di Copia could whine plaintively during the Xmasy phrase.
And it was the only quibble I had with his entire serviceplaying that Sunday, so perhaps it wasn’t up to much, as quibbles go.

Love, Giac.

((Excerpt from Piers trinitatis i, "Smudging"))

Urbi et Orbi (Foto)

Suor Angelica a sua zia Principessa:

Mio figlio! Mio figlio, il figlio mio!

Figlio mio!

La creatura che mi fu, mi fu strappata!

Creatura mia! Creatura mia lontana!

. . .

Parlatemi di lui!

Giac Urbi et Orbi:

Perchè tacete?

Perchè? perchè?

Pietas Moram (Foto, Piers)

Dear Deliciae Meae Lepores Mei Piers,
° Visit Netflix now, Desk Set.

BY the SHORES of GITCHe GUmee, BY the SHIning BIG-Sea-WAter
STOOD the WIGwam OF NoKOmis, DAUGHter OF the MOON, NaKOmis . . . .

° Thus Katharine Hepburn makes Hiawatha sing his singsong. An etude in iambic octameter.
° Of course, we hope that Longfellow intended the much less ludicrous

By the SHORES of GITCHe GUmee, by the SHIning BIG-Sea-WAter
STOOD the WIGwam of NaKOmis, DAUGHter of the MOON, NaKOmis . . . .

An experiment in dactyloanapestiferous trimeter, irresistibly subverted by the drumbeat ictus of the English language itself.

§

° Pietas moram.
° One day our professor, having just reread the complete practical works of the Marquis de Sade, decided we students should prepare and memorise and recite publickly some Latin verse. I reckon it was Horace, for I don’t believe Catullus was the type to use the word pietas.
° I didn’t do the worst of the lot; in fact, with a musical background, I did the best. Not bragging nor nothing.
° But my friend Becca did, by unanimous judgement, do the worst. (She was a genetic monotone, like the Music Stander in Les Choristes.)
° The first part of her recitation went badly enough, but then she concluded, in Hiawathan singsong,

. . . pieTAZZ moRAM,

and the entire class, instinctively channelling Mons de Sade’s teachings, just guffawed. It really hurt her feelings. So we guffawed some more.
° I plainly see you don’t get the joke. Becca had ought to have said,

pieTAS moRAM.

That is, a fifthtone (one guesses) higher on the accented syllables, and the GREEKLONG syllables (with long vowels or concluded by double consonants) held twice as long as the greekshort ones.
° Or to you, Choirmaster that you are, ictus and QUARTERNOTES and eighthnotes. ((Ever mindful that our English ictus is largely a matter of volume, the Latin ictus, perhaps, was largely a matter of pitch.))

§

° Is “Isabel” an anapaest or a dactyl?
° Poe calls it a dactyl, because the ictus is definitely on the “Is.” Isabel.
° Or is it an anapaest, because the English speaker rushes over the first two syllables, and rests on the “bel”?
° IsaBEL.

§

° As I mentioned to you, my Christmas CD of Orff’s Catulli Carmina (Act Two of the Ludus Scenicus beginning with Carmina Burana) is filled out with the, to me, completely unknown Trionfo di Afrodite (Act Three). Apart from a few snippets from Sappho, Sophocles, and Euripides, the entire text of Trionfo comes from Catullus’s epithalamia, 61 and 62.
Splendidly pagan as he is, Orff does not entirely resist--it is not just the fault of the singers--

pieTAZZ moRAM.

Teutonic Hiawathan commonmetrepsalter singsong.

§§§§§

° But Giac can resist.
° Look at Orff’s setting of the “contents execrable” Song 32.

A ma bo, me a dul cis Ip si thil la,
Me ae de li ci ae, me i le po res . . . .

Plainsong, even “eighth notes,” a natural singable accent falling three or four to the line. So near and yet so far.
° But look at Giac’s riff on Orff’s setting:

a MA BO, me a DUL cis IP si THIL la,
me AE DE li ci AE, me I le PO res,
iu B(E)AD TE ve ni AM me RI di A tum.

For, you see, the melody must be rejiggered, line by line, to make natural to the singer the melodic Latin ictus and the metric Greek syllablelength.
° Just as, last Holy Week, there were only two genteel solutions to Rockingham’s

When I survey the wondrous Cross
Where the young Prince of Glory died . . . .

((Either “Where the” goes onto upbeat eighths and “young“ gets a measure to itself, or “Where the young” makes a full measure of even quarternotes))

° And yet, for how many generations did congregations, meek as tinearred lambs, sing

Where the young Prince of Glory died . . . ?

For the waltz tune induced the pieTAZZ moRAM.

§

° What if you, Piers, took a glimpse at the ancient GrecoRoman metres? What if your sortieimprovs connected with the civilised lyreaccompanied songs of two millennia ago? What if you outCameroned Cameron with the Orffic splendour of a cockeyed beat?
° Phalaecean Suite in c-sharp major, di M. Piers Bellow.

° Fixing to dine, Giac.

P. S. Miao! NAM PRANSUS iace(O)ET saTUR suPInus/ PERTUNDO tuniCAMque PALliUMque.

Nota bene: For a distressingly deep discussion of metres, try Edgar Allan Poe’s The Rationale of Verse, but don’t forget your Beowulf. Assumption’s Anglican chant will never be the same again . . . .