Thursday, January 3, 2019

Auld Lang Syne



PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: For those who can’t zoom, the actual music titles are, “Sleepers Awake” and “A Patriot’s Prayer.” Minor White suggests: “Photograph things not just for what they are, but for what else they are."



4 comments:

Ginnie Hart said...

When I first saw this on FB yesterday, Ted, it took my breath away. My mom was an accomplished pianist (she did her piano debut in NYC at age 12), and I grew up in a home with a Steinway upright, always with music scores on it. This image makes me drool! I wish I had taken it!

Emery Roth said...

I'm so happy to have touched a nerve. My mother and grandmother were also pianists, but I doubt they ever played hymns, and my mother would have nothing less than a Steinway grand until it was damaged and she settled for a Yamaha. By then she had pretty much stopped playing.

Ginnie Hart said...

Thankfully, my mother did so much more on the piano than hymns! In her last 2 years, with Alzheimer's, she would sit down at the piano without sheet music in front of her and would let her fingers remember the classical music she played as a girl and young woman. She'd get so far, start all over and add a few more scores, start over, add a few more scores until she could almost finish the entire piece. It was quite something.

BTW, it was only recently that I discovered Mom's upright Steinway was built "exactly" like a grand piano except in the "vertical orientation." I did not know that growing up.

Emery Roth said...

Sadly, my mother had a stroke which left her numb on the left side, After her stroke it took serious urging to get her to sit down and play. She'd do it for awhile and then get disgusted, slam down the keyboard and walk away.

She grew up playing with her mother who was also an accomplished pianist. When my father was fighting in the Pacific during WWII, in order to save money my mother rented an apartment w/her sister and mother. My aunt was married to a professional cellist, and my brother remembers enjoying chamber music concerts in that apartment w/two grand pianos back to back and a cello.