The organ

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uplzNEEagrI

[+ WilliamM]

The sad, sudden death of Jack Paar's daughter, Randy.

 

http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/social-diary/2012/remembering-randy

 

It's not widely known that Jack and his wife were close friends with Mary Martin and her husband. The Paars visited Mary several time in her home in Brazil, very difficult because her ranch was in the middle of nowhere, many miles by dirt roads from Brasilia.

 

All true, but Mary Martin also fits in this forum.

[+ honcho]

Around 1:10-1:20 of this, in a movie house on a cinerama sized screen gave me the most intense feeling of wedding motion to music I had had in my young life ... (I had already started playing oboe then... I think I was in 9th grade).

 

I still think of that scene every time I should have the occasion to play the Blue Danube waltz (and it does come up from time to time).

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIH6Ht8ZqiE

[+ WilliamM]

@AdamSmith Difficult to believe: I saw Judy Garland perform three times in the 1960s, but have never seen "The Wizard of Oz."

 

Thanks for the truly wonderful post.

[AdamSmith]

@AdamSmith Difficult to believe: I saw Judy Garland perform three times in the 1960s, but have never seen "The Wizard of Oz."

 

Thanks for the truly wonderful post.

You simply must.

 

Life will be transformed.

 

Very literally.

[+ WilliamM]

 

You simply must.

 

Life will be transformed.

 

Very literally.

 

I did not know much about Judy Garland when I saw her perform at a sold-out Boston Garden in the Oct. 1961. I was a freshman in college.

 

She was sensational, just Judy and an orchestra in a large sports area. So I must see "The Wizard of Oz."

 

Thanks, Adam.

[+ sync]

I recall a television interview featuring someone who worked on the set of the The Wizard of Oz movie who commented that there was a problem controlling the actors who portrayed the Munchkins. Because it was the first time that they had been in an environment with so many others like themselves, they were always disappearing with each other for some slap-and-tickle.

 

Good for them.

[AdamSmith]

The Sandwalk...

 

 

...Charles Darwin's 'thinking path.'

 

On 12 January 1846 Charles Darwin leased a 1.5 acre strip of land from his neighbor, Sir John Lubbock for £1 and 12 pense a year for twenty-one years. Darwin planted this strip of land with hazel, birch, privet, and dogwood, and had a wide gravel path built around the edge. This was to become Darwin's "thinking path" where he strolled every morning and afternoon with his white fox-terrier, Polly, while his children played among the trees and bushes.

 

"The Sand-walk was our play-ground as children, and here we continually saw my father as he walked round. He liked to see what we were doing, and was ever ready to sympathise in any fun that was going on." (Francis Darwin, Reminisces of his father, from "The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters", Dover Publications, New York, 1992, page 75.)

 

 

The Sandwalk has two sides, the "Light Side" and the "Dark Side". The Light Side is well lit from the west and has a fresh breezy character to it, and is very charming. The Dark Side has a rather ominous character. It is quite dark and gloomy, with insects flitting about and strange noises coming from the woods. The moss covered trees make odd creaking sounds and one gets the uncomfortable feeling of being followed by someone.

 

Sandwalk Entry

 

Into the 'Dark Side'

 

The 'Dark Side'

 

The 'Dark Side'

 

Sandwalk woods

 

Around the corner

 

The 'Light Side'

 

The 'Light Side'

 

More here... https://www.aboutdarwin.com/pictures/Sandwalk/Sandwalk.html

[AdamSmith]

First found from this piece...

 

Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too

Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours.

 

When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days.

 

Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours.

 

How did they manage to be so accomplished? Can a generation raised to believe that 80-hour workweeks are necessary for success learn something from the lives of the people who laid the foundations of chaos theory and topology or wrote Great Expectations?

 

I think we can. If some of history’s greatest figures didn’t put in immensely long hours, maybe the key to unlocking the secret of their creativity lies in understanding not just how they labored but how they rested, and how the two relate.

 

Let’s start by looking at the lives of two figures. They were both very accomplished in their fields. Conveniently, they were next-door neighbors and friends who lived in the village of Downe, southeast of London. And, in different ways, their lives offer an entrée into the question of how labor, rest, and creativity connect.

 

First, imagine a silent, cloaked figure walking home on a dirt path winding through the countryside. On some mornings he walks with his head down, apparently lost in thought. On others he walks slowly and stops to listen to the woods around him, a habit “which he practiced in the tropical forests of Brazil” during his service as a naturalist in the Royal Navy, collecting animals, studying the geography and geology of South America, and laying the foundations for a career that would reach its peak with the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Now, Charles Darwin is older and has turned from collecting to theorizing. Darwin’s ability to move silently reflects his own concentration and need for quiet. Indeed, his son Francis said, Darwin could move so stealthily he once came upon “a vixen playing with her cubs at only a few feet distance” and often greeted foxes coming home from their nocturnal hunts.

 

Had those same foxes crossed paths with Darwin’s next-door neighbor, the baronet John Lubbock, they would have run for their lives. Lubbock liked to start the day with a ride through the country with his hunting dogs. If Darwin was a bit like Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, a respectable gentleman of moderate means who was polite and conscientious but preferred the company of family and books, Lubbock was more like Mr. Bingley, extroverted and enthusiastic, and wealthy enough to move easily in society and life. As he aged, Darwin was plagued by various ailments; even in his 60s, Lubbock still had “the lounging grace of manner which is peculiar to the Sixth-Form Eton boy,” according to one visitor. But the neighbors shared a love of science, even though their working lives were as different as their personalities...

 

Cont.: http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/darwin-was-a-slacker-and-you-should-be-too

[AdamSmith]

Another example of How to Do It.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmAPizn8MYs

 

The Madeleine main instrument, directed here by the beyond-divine Jeanne Demessieux. Her severe classicism and clarity in handling Franck is the definitive mode and sets the standard for all time, for my money. His music blazes forth and torches the ear and mind like only a very few others, when unencumbered by a performer's failings and diminutions.

 

Fairly immediately obvious which machine this is, to any who have made on-the-ground inspections to know the individual sound of the various great Cavaille-Coll organs. They are simply up there among the greatest productions of the hand of man.

 

To go up into the lofts and simply look and hear -- not dare touch -- have been among the highlights of a lifetime!

 

As noted before, this piece is a mess in almost any contemporary's hands other than the quite marvelous Michael Murray, here on C-C's St. Sernin masterpiece.

 

Seized by yet another Cavaille-Coll (early Romantic!) passionfest tonight.

 

The things his musical machines made possible...!

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

Fall 2008

Fenner Douglass ’42

Oberlin Professor of Organ, 1949-1974

David Boe, Oberlin College

 

Fenner Douglass, whose distinguished and influential career as an organist, teacher, and scholar brought him international acclaim, died April 5, 2008, in Naples, Fla., at the age of 86. His long and productive association with Oberlin began in the late 1930s, when he arrived here from his hometown of New London, Conn., as a student in the College and Conservatory, studying organ with Arthur Poister and earning the BA in 1942. This was followed by four years of service as an officer in the U.S. Navy, much of this on a destroyer escort in the Pacific. Following his wartime service, he was admitted to Harvard Law School but opted instead to continue his music studies at Oberlin, earning the BM degree and, in 1949, the MMus degree. He remained as a member of the Conservatory faculty until 1974, when he accepted the positions of university organist and professor at Duke University, where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1987.

 

At the outset of his career, Fenner became an active proponent of the "historical" organ. This coincided with an emerging interest in Europe and the U.S. in restoring organ-building to its classical roots. Fenner charted a course for the organ department and for himself as a performer and scholar that would leave an indelible mark on the profession and help lay the groundwork for Oberlin’s Historical Performance Program. His plan to equip the new Conservatory complex with mechanical-action organs in six practice rooms and two teaching studios can only be considered bold and innovative at a time when nearly all American organs were built with electro-pneumatic action. It marked also the beginning of a close friendship and professional relationship with the eminent Dutch organ builder Dirk Flentrop, who was later to build the organ in Warner Concert Hall and subsequently the large gallery instrument in Duke Chapel.

 

In what is rare for a performing faculty member, Fenner embarked also on a career as a scholar, focusing his attention on the organ traditions of France. He took his young family to Holland in 1963-64 to carry out the research that led to the 1969 publication of his first book, The Language of the Classical French Organ, widely regarded as the most important reference work on the instruments and organ music of the French baroque period. Its popularity led to a second and revised edition in paperback in 1995.

 

He next pursued research into the work of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, the greatest French organ builder of the 19th century. Holding a research status appointment in 1971-72, he again took his family abroad for the year, skillfully gaining access to previously inaccessible documents in Paris relating to the work of this master builder. His efforts resulted in a large, two-volume work, Cavaillé-Coll and the Musicians, published in 1980 and subsequently condensed and published as Cavaillé-Coll and the French Romantic Tradition in 1999.

 

Fenner performed as an organ recitalist frequently in the U.S. and in Europe, often with his wife Jane at his side, assisting as registrant. During much of his Oberlin teaching career he served also as organist and choirmaster at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Lakewood. He was widely admired as a master teacher. This is perhaps best reflected in the success of so many of his former students who are prominent today in the organ profession. He was particularly skilled at holding the rapt attention of groups in a master class or lecture format. His ability to simultaneously teach and entertain with anecdotal material was legendary. [i myself held in my hand, and copied out onto the chalkboard for the class at Fenner's direction, manuscript materials from the hand of Cavaillé-Coll himself. -- A.S.] Among his many stories was an account of his efforts to charm the granddaughter of Cavaillé-Coll into entrusting him with her grandfather’s correspondence, contracts, and related materials.

 

In 1952 Fenner married his student Jane Fetherlin, which began a close personal and professional partnership that continued until her death in 2005. The Fenners loved to entertain students, faculty colleagues, and numerous out-of-town guests from among their wide circle of loyal friends. The large music room in their Morgan Street home contained a Flentrop organ, a harpsichord, and a grand piano, and it was frequently the site of after-concert receptions. [They brought those instruments to their subsequent gorgeous high-Modernist glass-and-steel 3-level home in downtown Chapel Hill, where they often offered warm host to colleagues and students alike.-- A.S.] Devoted parents, they found creative ways to involve their three children, Stephen, Emily, and John, in their travels and professional activities. While still living in Oberlin, Fenner and Jane built a home on Cape Cod that became the center of family activities in the summer months.

 

Even after leaving for Duke University, Fenner maintained his active interest in the organ program at Oberlin. He returned a number of times to serve on the faculty of the summer organ institute. He also was a helpful and enthusiastic supporter of the efforts to build new organs in Fairchild and Finney chapels. Throughout his career he was much in demand as a consultant on major organ projects, sometimes extending his involvement beyond the technical aspects of these projects to cultivating donors. Among such efforts, he collaborated with his brother, attorney John W. Douglass, to raise money from his clients for several major projects at Duke and Oberlin. Their cultivation of a lead gift from Kay Africa made possible the magnificent C.B. Fisk organ in Cavaillé-Coll style in Finney Chapel.

 

Fenner was formally honored on several occasions. Oberlin recognized his achievements in 2001 by awarding him the honorary Doctor of Music degree. One of his last consulting projects was the beautiful Taylor and Boody organ in Bower Chapel at Moorings Park, a retirement community in Naples where Fenner spent his last years. The organ was subsequently dedicated to Fenner Douglass. In 2007 his friends Alan and Marilyn Korest gave for Finney Chapel Oberlin’s 200th Steinway piano in honor of both Jane and Fenner.

 

We mourn the loss of this great colleague and friend.

 

David Boe is a professor of organ and chair of the Oberlin Conservatory’s Keyboard Division. This Memorial Minute was adopted by a standing vote of the General Faculty of Oberlin College on October 15, 2008.

 

http://www.oberlin.edu/alummag/fall2008/losses.html

Yet again. Fenner taught and showed me how to think, and how to relate to reality.

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

Courtesy von Braun's Marshall-based Chicago Bridge & Iron Works...

 

 

...vehicle if memory recalls weighed 6.1 million pounds, power from those five Rocketdyne F-1 engines once built up to full thrust totaled 7 million pounds, just enough, but plenty, to lift it off, once the eight hold-down arms (which were also what the rocket's structure rested on until launch) released.

 

 

 

http://heroicrelics.org/info/saturn-i-and-ib/s-ib-fin/fin-hold-down-arrangement-med.jpg

 

von Braun's risk-management lessons in balancing minimalist lean efficiency against steel-beamed ensured sufficiency have been life tutelage ever since!

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BcHSTj1h7c

[AdamSmith]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs4W7rGI9Do

[AdamSmith]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpJGD3w0yRI

[whipped guy]

Gilligan's Island!!! You crack me up Mr Smith!