Author: Stacy Horn

Last night I went to the West Village Chorale summer sing of the Mozart Requiem. Summer sings are when choir people get together to sing while our regular choirs are in hiatus. I took this at the corner of West 4th and 6th Avenue. Sigh. The works of man (so pretty) set in the works of the universe (also so pretty).

This is the section I sat in. There were a lot of people from the Choral Society of Grace Church because …

Our director John Maclay was conducting last night. That is him on the left below. If you saw the movie Amadeus you know that Mozart died while writing this Requiem. The last measure he wrote was in the Lacrimosa chorus and I marked that spot on my score with a cross. I always feel so sad when I get to that cross.

Oh God, I just remembered! Last night John went off on this whole tangent about going back in time to ask Mozart what he really wanted with the rest of this score (which was finished by Franz Xaver Sussmayr, someone Mozart had worked with and a friend). But then, John went on, maybe instead we should use the opportunity to give him a round of antibiotics to save him, and just imagine the music we would have had, and his speech just got funnier and weirder from there. I wish I could have recorded it.

By the way, much of what you learned about Mozart in the movie Amadeus is wrong. Salieri was very supportive of Mozart, for instance, and his wife Constanze was an accomplished musician and not an idiot. It was Constanze who introduced Mozart to the art of the fugue and insisted that he write some. Mozart adored her and you can see it in his letters and in the music he wrote for her to sing. That said, I love the movie anyway.

I may have posted about this before, but some of my friends on Facebook regularly post pictures of animals being abused or tested on, and I applaud their intentions, which are honorable, but it makes Facebook almost unvisitable for me.

I think what they’re doing is important so I don’t want them to stop, but I can’t bear it. It upsets me so much. A picture I saw yesterday of this poor monkey tore me up so much I looked around for a way to join the crusade, but I quickly realized I would fall apart in the field. I will have to help in other ways, like drawing attention to the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) and giving them money.

In the meantime, I might have to unfriend the people who post these pictures.

I pointed my camera up at a roof with a storm in the distance. It almost looks a bit tornado-ish, doesn’t it? Dorothy!

If this is your dog walker, your dog is lucky. He was so sweet with the dogs in his care. How do they do it? How do they walk packs of dogs and all the dogs behave and move forward in an orderly, happy, fashion?

I was exploring YouTube not long ago, looking for videos of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and I found this one which also has an audio recording of Vaughan Williams talking about editing an English hymnal (he was agnostic).

Oh look! Vaughan Williams is holding a cat! Another reason to love Vaughan Williams. Here you can see Vaughan Williams sitting on steps. More links below.

[Video removed because the link no longer works.]

This is Leonard Bernstein giving a speech I quoted from in my book.

Composer Morten Lauridsen talking about poetry and choral composition. Thank you, Classical Chops.

Composer Nico Muhly also talking about setting poems to music. Thank you again, Classical Chops.

I was looking for a video of Frank Damrosch, a conductor I wrote about, and instead found this one of his brother Walter Damrosch, who was also a conductor. I’m including it just because it’s so interesting. It was filmed in 1929 and he’s talking about hearing a recording of his orchestra for the first time. He also talks about “seeing” music, and they show the frequencies of the notes/chords he plays (it was filmed in the General Electric Laboratories).

I’ve never really gotten the appeal of shark week, although to be honest, I haven’t given it a chance in I don’t know how many years. I tried it in the beginning and nothing I saw was scary or interesting. Nothing to compare to this account of the USS Indianapolis that I just read on the Smithsonian’s blog Past Imperfect. Mother of God. Oh, I missed Sharknado! I’m thinking I missed the best thing to ever come out of Shark Week? Wait a minute, that was the SyFy Channel and had nothing to do with Shark Week. Oh well, please let me know if I’m missing anything!

Pretty in pink, isn’t New York, pretty in pink, isn’t New York?