November 22 - In case we forgot

When this awful event happened well over half a century ago, today, I was in my high school orchestra rehearsal for the holiday concert and we were working on Handel's Messiah when the loudspeaker broke in.  That was 58 years ago and I know where I was and what I was doing. Actually I know where we were in the music as well. Jim Fox was sitting next to me in the trumpet section. Carl Mezoff was in front of me playing french horn.

That evening, I had an orchestra rehearsal in Saginaw with the symphony and one of the pieces we were rehearsing there was "The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Kahn" by Griffes. We had studied the "Rime" of the Ancient Mariner earlier in the fall and I have to admit I was never a big fan of Coleridge, the poet. That "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" never put wind in my sails and although I think the music of the 1800-1820 times is really something, the poetry left me more than a little dazed and confused. I do like this (Pleasure Dome) poem though.  It was said to be written during a sleepless, opium filled night, and that may be. Kublai Khan never hit my radar and looking at their portraits...unrecognizable. 

Why the connection? Why today?  Well I've given it some thought as to what marks this important or memorable. I suspect that the memory issue here is that from years ago I have a couple big chunks of time that to me are still clear as a bell. I'm doubly lucky in that I have associations that include music, poetry, epic events, and people I know or knew and that I can piece together riding home after school that day and talking about it as we approached the corner of Trumbull and McKinley and then again that evening riding to rehearsal with my trumpet teacher and talking about it yet again. Sam Jones, the conductor actually had started writing an Elegy piece that afternoon and we rehearsed it the next day and played it on TV during the weekend.

Sorry for the jumble of thoughts on all this. I watched the morning national news on three networks and there wasn't a word about it (the assassination).  They should have been listening to my head.

Griffes, the composer, did write a really fine piece. That I like.  Hope you do too.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

(the rest of the poem is down the page after the music)



So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.