Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
Here’s curious piece: a Symphonic Prelude in C Minor, 7
minutes long, conducted by Neeme Jarvi with the Royal Scottish National
Orchestra, believed to be composed by Anton Bruckner as a young man in his
20s. Already it has the daring
chromaticism of his later works, and outlines his compositional output.
However brief, this piece is a complex Sonata structure with
three themes (like the symphonies) anticipating motives in his symphonies.
The piece is paired on a Chandos CD with the Mahler Symphony
#6 in A Minor. I have two recordings of
that work, an RCA record with Leinsdorf from the late 1960s, and a Sony CD with
Maazel (paired with #7). I’ll come back to this work later, but it didn’t
become respectable until Bernstein started playing it in the 1960s. When I was
in the Army at Fort Eustis in 1969, one of the other guys (from Berkeley) was
familiar with the work.
I’ll write a little blurb about this attraction in Gatlinburg TN as a “stage” event, maybe because I don’t have a recent post here. It’s the “Shoot ‘em’ Up Cinema”, where people mount a mechanical horse, take a six-shooter, put on VT 3-D glasses, and ride through a movie experience where they can shoot outlaws.
The attraction now describes itself as 7-D. I know that the Newseum in Washington has 4-D – I think odor, earthquake, maybe moisture count.
It was an interesting experience, to see how well the commercial part of Gatlinburg has recovered from the surrounding wildfire of Nov. 2017.
Nearby Pigeon Forge has a lot of “model world” attractions, like a replica of the Titanic and a model of Hollywood (like a little Vegas).
This work is so unusual I feel I cam make a short blog post about it without playing much of it. It is Randy Gibson's “The Four Pillars Appearing From the Equal D Under Resonating Apparitions of the Eternal Process in the Midwinter Starfield.”
The New York Times story Saturday June 17 on p C2 by Seth Colter Wallas is “It’s Not One Note if There’s All That Texture”. Well, texture can fascinate me visually, as I learned as a teenager. Online the article is “Listening to Three Hours of Music, from a Single Note”.
Don’t know where this was performed, but I can imagine the Poisson Rouge, or maybe the 9:30 Club n Washington.
Of hand, the music reminds me of hemi-sync from the Monroe Institute in Virginia, but I haven't ever had a session long enough to tell if that is really the intention, to provide connective meditation to cosmic consciousness, Rosicrucian style. (I did attend a "Rosicrucian Feast" in a New York City hotel on March 21, 1977, a chilly Sunday night as I recall, when living there.)
Arthur Honneger has a very French symphony “The 3 D’s” and I’ll have to go back and listen to it soon.
The symphonies and orchestral rhapsodies of Irish composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, largely recorded on Chandos, got my attention during the late 1980s and all of the 1990s, when CD’s were all the rage.
The rhapsodies often use Irish folk songs as second subjects, developing them as symphonic material. The Irish Rhapsody #1 in D Minor presents the song “Danny Boy” as a second subject at about the 5 minute mark. The work does not bring the tune to the triumph that it might have. But singer Josh Groban would do so with the song “You Raise Me Up” in 2010, the last year of my own mother’s life.
But my favorite of the Irish Rhapsodies is #4 in A Minor, Op. 141, “The Fisheman of Lough Neah and what He Saw”, here on Chandos with Vernon Handley and the Ulster Orchestra. The fisherman may have seen the Second Coming. The Rhapsody takes another folk song and builds it up to majestic shouts at the end. This work was a favorite on mine in the 1990s, as I worked on my first DADT book during the debate on “don’t ask don’t tell”.
Stanford wrote six symphonies, in the vein of Brahms and Elgar, which we’ll return to later.
Sebastian Letocart is known for his completion of the Finale of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, (he calls himselt Tracotel on Facebook), has a number of other compositions.
One of these is a five-movement a cappella Great Mass in D.
The work sounds like it comes from the Renaissance era to my years, the days of Leonardo da Vinci, with the harmonies and counterpoint somewhat more dense and even more modal.
I can find three of the five movements on YouTube, sung by the Matthew Curtis consort.
The Kyrie
Author Pam Daniels has compiled a rock mixer channel, with a
typical video “Rock Time Warp: Foreplay “ Long Time” with lyrics by Boston Pam
and Tom Sholz.
Daniels, a trangender woman (to female) and literature
professor and author, has authored the biography of Robert Le Blanc in
connection with the repealed “don’t ask don’t tell” policy.
Picture: Mine, at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, 2012.
