Thankful: For People Who Dare to Share

Love the Lord your God with all your heart 

and with all your soul and with all your strength 

and with all your mind'; 

and, Love your neighbor as yourself.

Luke 10:27

A heart filled with love, compassion and kindness is a heart that wants to share.  So much of modern life aspires to gather to one's self, rather than giving out to others.  In my area of livelihood, however, giving to others is part and parcel of the gig.  Music is meant to be shared, to be savored, to be experienced - not hoarded for a singular enjoyment.

I am fascinated by flash mobs - people who secretly gather together in a public forum and measure by measure build a musical presentation for any and all who are within earshot.  Mall are a favorite place, as well as parks and city squares.  In Copenhagen, Denmark, however, one enterprising professional group decided to flash mob the subway, with delightful results.  Relax and enjoy the Copenhagen Philharmonic present Morning from the Peer Gynt Suite.

  

Thankful: That My Brain is Still in Working Order

Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus...

Philippians 2:5

 

A couple of years ago, my daughter introduced me to lumosity.com, a website for training your brain - or, in my case, keeping your brain active and alive.  Lumosity has a whole raft of games for speed,  vocabulary, short-term memory, and many other components.  I really enjoyed many of the games, especially Word Bubbles Rising - a timed game that calls on your word memory bank.  I would try to link into Lumosity every day, or at least several times a week.  Then the website decided they needed to crank up the charges for playing their nifty brain games, and the $79.99 price tag knocked me out of the ring.

To prevent the grey matter from getting rusty, I now turn to brainbashers.com for my daily mental stimulation.  Brainbashers has logic games aplenty, puzzles, Japanese word and number puzzles, crosswords, fill-in's, and every other conceivable puzzle you might think of.  I start my Internet day with the daily jigsaw puzzle (48-piece classic cut), then move on to Japanese nonogrids - my favorite numbers game.  I have to be careful - I could literally waste half a day doing this stuff.  But my brain gets its morning exercise, and my memory gets a little practice.

Doctors believe that brain stimulation staves off Alzheimers.  In a recent study by the University of California-Berkeley, brains scans revealed that  ...people with no symptoms of Alzheimer’s who engaged in cognitively stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein that is the hallmark of the disease [UC Berkeley New Center].  If reading, writing and playing games can help to prevent dementia in later life, I am happy to make Brainbashers a daily morning habit.

Thankful: For Students to Keep Me Young

Is any one of you in trouble?  He should pray.

Is anyone happy?  Let them sing songs of praise.

James 5:13

 

I have been teaching voice in a local high school Arts Specialty Center for the last five years.  Each year I have two classes, the incoming freshmen, and the second-year sophomore vocalists.  My usual student count per class is 8-9 singers - a lot of people to instruct in only an hour and a half.  But this year my freshman class has 11 kids - ten girls and one guy.  I have approximately 6 minutes per class for each student, so I have to be creative in order to teach them anything at all.

This nine weeks, we are studying the wonderful world of Spirituals in the form of duets.  The ten girls are paired up into five duets, and the fellow is singing a duet with me.  Studying African-American spirituals is a wonderful lesson in handed-down music, jazz, blues, slavery, and the creative genius of an oppressed people.  Last week we began to listen to artists who specialize in spirituals.  Foremost in that contemporary group would be sopranos Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle.  The clip below was taken during a concert of spirituals at Carnegie Hall in 1990.  It is a spectacular example of a little-known song and two fabulous singers.  Enjoy!