Stacy Horn

I don’t know how I’m ever going to thank Violet Snow and her husband Sparrow. A few weeks ago Violet emailed me to suggest I come up to Phoenicia during the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice to sell books. She then got okays from the organizers, accepted delivery of boxes of books, got a table and chair for me, picked a place to set up, met me at the bus with the boxes, table and chair, and then kept me company and was basically responsible for most of my sales. Sparrow, meanwhile, handed out postcards about my book on the days of the festival when I wasn’t there.

Violet is a journalist, and she’s working on several projects, but the one I explored the most is News of My Ancestors, which is based on her genealogy adventures. There are a lot of us who are quite rabid about genealogy (me included) but it takes tremendous skill to get someone’s attention away from their own hunt to read about yours, and to get people who think they’re not interested in the subject at all to give it a try.

Violet Snow sucks you in and makes you care, and she does it like that. In, like a sentence or two. Just go to News of My Ancestors and read one post. That’s all it will take and you will see what I mean.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you Violet and Sparrow. I had a wonderful time. You and Phoenicia and your neighbors are GREAT. I took this picture while we were walking to set up. I spent the day surrounded my mountains. I want to live here, at least part of the time. One of the people who bought books rode by on her bike on her way to swim in the river (sobbing with envy) and she bought books on her way back. I want that life.

This is the second dragonfly I’ve seen on my fire escape in the past couple of days. I took a ton of pictures of him. Usually when I take pictures I decide which is the best and post only one. I couldn’t decide. The wings are so beautiful.

Some people warn against trying to interpret the emotions behind a piece of music. I can see the point of such a warning. We can’t always know for sure what the composer intended, and even if they had a definite intent, everyone reacts to works of art differently.

That said, even though the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, for instance, always argued against attaching specific meaning and emotion to music, he also said, “What the musical composer, in effect, says to his performers is: ‘I desire to produce a certain spiritual result on certain people …”

So maybe the problem is just being too literal or concrete.

Except, even Vaughan Williams seems to concede that it’s okay to get more specific sometimes. I was looking into the history of one his pieces which I love, Toward the Unknown Region. The text for the piece comes from a Walt Whitman poem about death. Here’s what Vaughn Williams said about poetry: “To a listener who understands the meaning of the words the actual sound of those words has a powerful emotional effect but only in connection with the meaning and association of the words spoken.”

Vaughan Williams selected this particular Walt Whitman poem, no other, this one. Yes, you’re getting his interpretation, but he picked these specific words which he then augmented and enhanced with his music. The conclusion is inescapable: when he handed it to singers everywhere, although he realized they would do whatever they wanted with it, he still hoped for something in particular, a “certain spiritual result.”

When I sing it, I can’t stop myself from believing that what I’m feeling is just what Vaughan Williams wanted me to feel. In my head I know that I can’t know for sure, but my heart isn’t buying it.

Ralph Vaughan Williams and his second wife Ursula.

I realize that over the years, aside from my aging, all these pictures I post of myself look exactly the same! I should go through my blog and pull them together and do a “Stacy’s Haircuts Over the Years.”

Yesterday was hair-makeover-day. Earlier this summer, at the raffle held at the benefit for the Choral Society of Grace Church, I won a new haircut from the fabulous stylist Lisa Fiorentino. We scheduled my haircut for the same day I was getting my hair colored for free as part of the Bumble & Bumble Model Project. Bumble & Bumble gives free haircuts and coloring if you agree to let their students do it, which is a great deal because the students are experienced stylists who are just learning a new technique.

Here are some shots from my webcam of the results. They don’t really show the cut well. Lisa gave me a lot of layers which I can play around with, making them go all different directions, which looks all swingy and fun. When Bumble & Bumble blew it dry after the color they blew it straight and under, which is fine, just not as interesting.

Notice how I look best in the pictures where I’m wearing glasses. When I first got glasses in my twenties, people still thought glasses made you look bad and everyone got contacts. I loved how I looked in glasses right from the start. I think these pictures demonstrate why.

A Quick Recap: The City has a contest—if you swim 25 miles before August 30th you win a tshirt. The man and woman who swim the most laps at each city pool win something else, which I found out last night is a dinner. Plus, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners all get the dinner.

I am currently in 3rd place at my pool!! There’s no way I can catch up to the women in 1st and 2nd place, they have twice as many miles as I do. They must swim every day, or twice a day. Plus, I started late. (I didn’t whine when I typed that.)

But my lead over everyone else is solid. If I keep going the way I’m going I should be able to hold onto 3rd place. Unless the people behind me start swimming every night or twice a day.
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In my singing book I tell the story of a riot that took place in Chatham Street Chapel on July 7, 1834. It was started by a choral society and an anti-abolitionist mob, if you can believe it. Interesting riot-buddies. Anyway, the Chapel was torn down and on the site now is, ironically, a prison. I told the story here about trying to get a picture of the plaque commemorating the Chapel, but the prison guards not only wouldn’t let me past the gate to get a picture, they both told me they’d worked there for decades and there wasn’t a plaque about a chapel anywhere. Nowhere, no-how.

So I went around and up to the plaza at One Police Plaza, walked past the benches and into the bushes, leaned over and took this picture. The arrow indicates the plaque. I just thought it would be interesting to show the distance I was from that plaque. Close up below.