Insider info. While considering what image to post with the lyrics to my song, rather than create an entirely new painting, I found this favorite 1998 watercolor of a friend's backyard garden in the Schaerbeek neighborhood Brussells where I landed and exited my European tours. Thanks to Monique and Arnaud for such extra hospitality.

It's the 88th day of the year and World Piano Day.

I've never heard of this day before but spotted it sliding by on some social media this morning and decided to make a post because I love the piano and piano music.

I'm just sharing a quick list of my favorite pianists over the course of my journey and you might want to think of yours today.

My father was an early audiophile and bought records from Sam Goody at his first shop in New York. As I was thinking of my list here, I realized that I associate each pianist with either a particular composer or performance.

In the early days of vinyl, there were only so many recordings. Because my father was crazy about Beethoven, he brought home Artur Schnabel's recordings of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas as each volume was released on vinyl. I may as well have been breathing those recordings (and Toscanini's set of Symphonies) through my early childhood.

Once I was trained to properly handle LPs, the amplifier, turntable and diamond stylus, Walter Geisiking introduced me to Debussy, Dinu Lipatti to Chopin, and Van Cliburn to Rachmaninoff.

During the summers, my dad would take me down to the old Robin Hood Dell for evening concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The night that Van Cliburn performed, it rained. All of the Friends of the Dell in the excellent up-front seats scurried off under umbrellas and I followed my dad down the center aisle in the rain where we sat on the cement steps and watched Van Cliburn play up close and personal with water flowing down beside us.

Around this chapter of my musical life, Columbia Records placed a plastic insert in Time Magazine with a recording of Dave Brubeck's Take Five as a promotion for Time Out. I played that thing over and over until the stylus cut clean through the grooves of that flimsy plastic. That was my introduction to jazz piano.

Once I came of babysitting age, I helped a couple of neighborhood doctors with their children and after those children were asleep, I'd flip through their album collection. One evening, I found a recording of Mozart Piano Sonatas and put it on to listen. I kept thinking that I heard someone else in the house. It was dark and I was creeped out. After walking all around the house, looking upstairs and down, I finally realized that what I heard was on the recording. It was the pianist humming along. That was my introduction to Glenn Gould who introduced me to Mozart's piano work and J.S. Bach on the keyboard. In those days, maybe still, he was highly controversial. You either loved him or hated him. I loved him.

Briefly, I worked for John Sears who ran the music department at John Wanamaker's flagship store in center city Philadelphia. We mostly sold pianos there and had a special, separate, beautiful room with high windows overlooking the streets below entirely dedicated to a grand Bösendorfer piano, or maybe two. I can't remember. There were extra keys under a hinged cover at the top or bottom of the keyboard. Able musicians would often glide in to try it out. One day a customer mentioned something to John about a Chickering piano. I remember John Sears saying "Chickering, Chickering... Abraham Lincoln once owned a Chickering!"

That was during the phase I hung out with composers and record store managers who brought me all sorts of wonderful recordings. One of those was Robert Tear's recording of Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel with Gerald Moore providing the accompaniment. That was my introduction to Moore who wrote and recorded the The Unashamed Accompanist, a revelation and delight.  Unfortunately, that recording has completely evaporated but, fortunately, Will Liverman and Jonathan King recently nailed that cycle magnificently.

In my early 20s, my then husband gave me one of my best birthday presents ever: season tickets to the Great Pianists series at Royce Hall. I remember breathlessly watching  Vladimir Ashkenazy, and saw Andre Watts, maybe Byron Janis and Alfred Brendel. I particularly remember Walter Klein's performance because mid-whatever piece it was, one of the ivories flew off into the audience and at the end of that movement or piece, Klein turned to the audience and asked if there was a piano technician in the house. There was. The key was repaired. The performance went on.

At some point, someone gave me a recording of Ursula Oppens performing Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated. It's a monster performance. I am a serious fan of any sort of counterpoint and the form of  theme and variations. This is still one of my most favorite pieces of music. Here's Rzewski performing it himself.

Except for a little Brubeck, the only jazz pianist I was familiar with was Mose Allison because he played the folk circuit and we became acquainted after I traced his hands on a sheet of copy paper with a ballpoint pen one night upstairs at McCabe's. Aside from George Gaffney, I probably watched him perform more than any other jazz pianist. I treasured his every gig but always hated his pick up drummers because of the way they smacked the cymbals. Apparently I didn't mind sharing my opinion with Mose although of course, Mose must have liked them fine.

I can't leave out Keith Jarrett. I wore out a couple of copies of his Köln Concert.

After I suddenly fell head first into the cream of jazz royalty, on any given day, I would find myself, for example, standing between Ray Brown and Joe Williams in the control room of a Hollywood recording studio with Norman Granz a little off to one side watching Tommy Flanagan warm up on the other side of the glass. What a lovely man and lovely player.

Then there was the time I was sitting in the dressing room somewhere near Santa Clara, California while Sarah was making up before a performance. I heard a pianist running through some rehearsals on stage and said, "Wow, Sarah! Who is playing piano out there!? They're fantastic!" Honestly, sometimes Sarah would look at me as though I had just fallen off the cabbage truck. This time, though, she looked at me in her make up mirror and then turned around to look at me directly to make sure she could believe what she had just heard me say. It was Count Basie. When Basie came back to visit, I gushed like, Oh wow! I've never heard you play before! You're so great! Something to that effect. He looked me up and down, walked over, poked me in the sides and said, "Yeah. You're just a young chicken."

In the mid-80's, I had a box seat just behind and overlooking Murray Perahia at the old Asolo Theater in Sarasota, FL.  A stunning performance. His recording of Schubert's Impromptus is one of my favorites.

The last great piano concert I can remember is Emmanuel Ax performing one of Brahms' Concertos with the Nashville Symphony. Mighty.

The last piano recording I became obsessed with was Igor Zhukov's live performance (and possibly arrangement) of Cesar Franck's Prelude, Fugue and Variation in B minor.

I've left off beloved pianists and recordings, like Ellis Marsalis, Jr. and his Loved Ones album with son, Branford. But enough is enough. (Except that, thinking of Ellis Marsalis, Jr., I have to say that I'm a fan of Harry Connick, Jr.'s playing, too.)

I'm going to go walk now and listen to that Zhukov recording which I can't seem to get enough of.

More on World Piano Day.

This past week I've been looking at and learning about traditional Ukrainian embroidery patterns. Personally, I favor the plant and floral over the geometric patterns. I found an antique example and copied that in watercolor. The project was challenging, time consuming, hard on the eyes after many hours, but there it is. Once I moved from pencil to watercolor, I kept feeling as though I was working on a coat of arms. In a way, these two forms of design are similar in that they both employ coded patterns representing in one case families, in the other, cultural regions which represent a type of family. While shields offer physical protection, the embroidered patterns offer magical or energetic protection.

I dove into these patterns and related clothing art because I like them and have never before been prompted to learn about them but also because as a result of watching the unfolding assault, murder and destruction in Ukraine, I arrived at a decision.

While I do feel it's necessary to stay abreast of developments on that front, my personal life is just fine now after a long stretch of it not being fine. So, while everything is in order in my life, I am focusing on everything I have to be grateful for and am committed to appreciating the beauty I am surrounded by and to creating beauty in every way that I can. Ideally, in thoughts, words and deeds though I am having a human experience after all and do forget my high ideals at least several times a day. Fortunately, I've had a lot of practice creating beauty so that's mostly a matter of sitting down to do the work.

It is work to keep our thoughts and attitudes properly adjusted in the face of so much information coming at us so fast and so relentlessly. And so much of this information is horrific because, frankly, that's part of what is happening and, traditionally, is what sells soap.

I had an antique book of murder ballads for a while and the editor wrote a fabulous introduction in which he described how the reports and tales of heinous murders and crimes were the subjects of a large percentage of early broadsides. He also shared that as young child, his mother would hold him on her lap while singing a vast array of murder ballads.

But I digress. Slightly.

We may not have control over war and politicians and the planet, weather and life and death but we  can have control over our thoughts and what we choose to focus on. As with most things, this is a practice.

My go to remedy for refocusing my attention is to stop what I'm doing and to go outside for a walk in nature. Fortunately, I'm steps away from wooded trails filled with plant and animal life and bird song. But you can find the beauty of nature even in the most urban experience if only with plants pushing up through cracks in the sidewalk or in vacant lots, even just by looking up to see the sky. If you know what you're looking for, you can find it. I suggest you look for beauty.

If you can't go outside, bring beauty into your home. Surround yourself with as much of what you define as beautiful as you can. It's worth every penny though it doesn't have to cost a cent.

It's challenging to keep reports of the misery of the world at bay but it is not helpful to dwell on these miseries.  That is not to say that we should ignore what's happening or not help those in need in any and every way that we can. However, we may not be in a position to help in any concrete form.

Thoughts have energy. Thoughts create things like bridges and houses and families and farms and weapons of war. Thoughts create your perception of everything around you. So, how do you want to use your thoughts?

As long as there has been war, there has been music for war.

Music has been composed to inspire and encourage war, to whip up enthusiasm for war, to oppose and protest war, to announce war, accompany war, recover from war, to mourn the dead of war, to celebrate victory, to commemorate and remember war and the dead of war, to describe the effects of war.  From war cries and marches to requiems, music has been part of war.

The earliest musical instruments, the drums and flutes and trumpets have been on battlefields until relatively recently and, along with the bagpipes, still figure into military ceremony.

And then there are all of the songs from the patriotic, the morale building, the protests, the propaganda, the grief stricken, the victorious. There are a million of them stretching back as far as as we have evidence. Johnny's Gone for a Soldier, Dixie, Cohan's Over There, Edwin Starr's War!, Peter Gabriel's Games Without Frontiers, David Gilmore's Cruise. I've written a few songs related to war, myself.

Because there is so much music associated with war and because I wanted to find some emotional solace for what I have been witnessing in Ukraine, I decided to listen to mostly western symphonic music from mostly the 20th century. Surely, I thought, with all of the war and composers connected to war, I will find something to listen to. But frankly, I couldn't sit through any one of the pieces.

I listened to Britten's War Requiem, Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Holst's Mars, and Karel Husa's  Music for Prague 1968, Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw, Ligeti's Kyrie, even some Shostakovich, but nothing captures the frantic blows of Putin's fist and the chaos and speed with which this destruction has unfolded.

This music is all too formal, too organized, even what used to seem so difficult to listen to. These organized compositions are too serene and intelligent and follow too many rules and take up too much time. 

What's happening in Ukraine demands something of an entirely different order. Formal music helps us to frame experience and contend with emotions that are too big, too complex or delicate or traumatized to manage coherently on our own.

The only music suitable for what is unfolding in Ukraine right now is the wailing of banshees and the cries and weeping of keeners.

I've re-read some books from my youth over the past decade. Two of those, I passed along to my brother for his birthdays over the last couple of years.

The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter and Rascal by Sterling North. Read or re-read both of these.

While putting the finishing touches on my new course, I listened to the audio version of Richard Powers' The Overstory. It's a commitment to read at 512 pages but also to listen to at 20+ hours. It's worth it if you have any interest whatsoever in trees.

I really wanted to get into another Richter book so now, I am listening to the audio version of The Trees. I don't know who reads Richter anymore but he writes with intimate knowledge of the beginnings of what has become the United States of America. Anyway, it's a good chaser for The Overstory.

I also recommend this sort of related NYT article if you suffer at all from any anxiety related to all that falls under the euphemism of climate change.

I've been re-watching some favorite movies, too. There are scenes in As Good As It Gets that I can watch over and over again without them ever getting old. Some of my favorite moments on film are those between Jack Nicholson and Greg Kinnear in this flick.

But what really slayed me earlier this week was watching The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Alan Arkin gives a master class in acting. It was the first movie that I ever went to see on my own at the Suburban Theater in Ardmore, PA. I'm sure that I cried. I did not realize until I just watched it again that James Wong Howe was the cinematographer. If you want to see a master class in black and white cinematography, watch what Howe does in Hud.

To wrap this up, I've been listening over and over again to Igor Zhukov play César Franck's Prélude, Fugue et Variation, Op. 18. It's a recording of a live performance from the Husum Festival in 1994. I've never heard another pianist bring out the organ in this piece like Zhukov does.

If you follow any of these links and listen, read, or watch, I hope that you enjoy or at least appreciate what I've shared.

Well, here we are. 2021 is behind us now on this day between Hogmanay and the first new moon of the year.

I hope that you have downtime today to relax if nothing else.  It's a good day for reflection or just hanging out though we're often pressured to decide what we want for the coming year. And oh, those resolutions!

I usually don't send out a note on the first day of the year but nothing is usual anymore so why not?

I heard an interesting differentiation the other day between resolutions and intentions. I found it helpful. You may, too.

"An intention is what you're consciously establishing, creating and setting today in the present moment and it moves the energy forward. An intention is how you are going to move something forward, what you're wanting to create or manifest, what your goals are. So intentions are forward moving.

"Resolutions are about resolving   Resolutions are about resolving something that previously occurred or previously happened. So a resolution can be about energy from the past or something that's complete, something that you don't want to experience again. You're resolving not to do that. You're resolving that that's complete so that you can have something new going forward. These are different energies.

"Intentions are about directiing the energy forward. Resolutions are about something that's already taken place, that you want to change or shift, but it's typically an energy you've already experienced and you're basically recreating it, reworking it and resolving to move it forward.

"So i think it can be quite powerful to look at both of these energetic experiences to define if you're wanting to resolve something or intending to create something." --Molly McCord

If you're not ready with resolutions and intentions, that's okay, although I'll bet you really do have an idea of what you'd like to resolve.

You might be ready with new intentions for tomorrow's New Moon in Capricorn at 1:35 pm EST.  New moons are the best time to set new intentions and this one couldn't have better timing for the year ahead. You may also want to take a little time tomorrow to add the moon phases to your calendar for the upcoming year. At least the new and full moons.

I am happy to say that I know exactly what I am choosing to resolve and exactly what I am intending. I hope that you have at least your main points. If not, and if you want to discover those in time for tomorrow's new moon, grab a notebook and a pen and start writing. Now.

If you've been following me over the years, you'll know that I mark as many new beginnings as I can through the first quarter of the year. So, if you're not ready, or if you need a restart or a little push forward, stay tuned.

Meanwhile, let's resolve to let things go as much as we can. It's truly exhausting to carry stuff (thinigs, relationships, behaviours, ways of thinking) that no longer serve us.

My dear friend, Carole (thank you!) just sent me my absolute favorite rendition of Auld Lang Syne and I want to share it with you. Dougie Maclean singing Robert Burn's poem (based on an old Scottish folk song).

Enjoy!

Auld Lang Syne

Robert Burns

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne!

For auld lang syne, my dear,
     For auld lang syne.
     We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
     For days of auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou'd the gowans fine;
But we've wander'd mony a weary fit,
Since days of auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Since days of auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
     For auld lang syne.
     We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
     For days of auld lang syne.

And surely ye'll be your pint stowp!
And surely I'll be mine!
And we'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And there's a hand, my trusty fere!
And gie's a hand o' thine!
And we'll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

For auld lang syne, my dear,
     For auld lang syne.
     We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
     For days of auld lang syne.