Months ago, my friend Elke gave me a gift certificate for a CD at the Third Ear. I was certain that I would come home with a disc of Israeli music. Her daughter, Nico was going to help me select something current. I went numerous times to the Tel Aviv store, but could never quite decide. A few days ago, I went again, but this time I tip-toed up the stairs to the room that boasts Jazz, Ethnic, and Classical music. I had thought to get Hadass Pal-Yarden's Ladino recording, "Yahudije" because I liked her on Yinon Muallem's recording. No luck!

Music has been a sustaining constant throughout my life. As a boy, I used to go with my father to Mass where I revelled in the mystery and the chant. In school, I sang in choral groups, played cello in orchestra and piano in various chamber music groups. I tried my hand at composition, wrote a string quartet and finally learned to read alto clef properly. I wrote some dreadful 12-tone pieces and soon found myself writing Coplandesque stuff as sort of 12-step musical recovery. When I started university, I was a music major. I loved theory and counterpoint but soon found that I had rather particular tastes. I have always been quite keen on music up to the early Baroque period, but only liked some Classical stuff, not much from the Romantic period (okay,so what if there was that year that I read Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse and played too much Chopin, Scriabin and Szymanovsky...and sighed a lot? It was a phase, I tell you...).

So, it was not a huge surprise that, given my druthers, I came home with music composed between 1570-1645. I'm just a renaissance kind of guy, I guess. Thanks to Elke's thoughtfulness, I came home with three cds: viol music by William Lawes and madrigals by Don Carlo Gesualdo (the composer and notorious 16th century murderer) and Orlando de Lassus!


The viol quartet, Phantasm, jumping for viol joy!

Here is just a hint of the music. Some people have comfort food.
I have comfort music. What's even better than listening to it is performing it!

My landlord, Kobi came over this morning so that Adrian, Niko and I could renew our contracts for the coming year. We each moved in to the building on the September-October cusp last year. Who knows where the time goes? I've been in this flat for a year already! After that was settled, I went to the outdoor market to pick up some vegan victuals (what does that sound like cat food?), as we're heading in to a three-day weeked. Wednesday evening ~ Saturday, everything is closed in Israel with the alignment of Sukkot and Shabbat. Normally, we just have a one-day weekend. Then, just before Sukkot began, my buddy, Eric pedals over from Jaffa for a visit. He brought me a book by Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.

Time for some shut-eye!

Tags: adrian, de lassus, elke, eric, gesualdo, kobi, lawes, niko
Current Mood: touched
Current Music: Kate Wolf: Who Knows Where the Time Goes?