Archive | September 2018

September: National Piano Month

Sep5

All eight of my children have attempted to play the piano, taken piano lessons, or at least tried out piano lessons, and although I can’t say that any of them are concert piano material, they do enjoy playing and composing and generally messing about with music, some more than others. I, on the other hand, can’t play a note. Well, maybe one note.

Pianos are wonderful instruments.

“The piano keys are black and white, but they sound like a million colors in your mind.” ~Maria Cristina Mena, The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena.

Nonfiction about pianos and pianists:
Forever Music: A Tribute to the Gift of Creativity by Edith Schaeffer. Mrs. Schaeffer tells the history of her Steinway grand piano, and she also weaves a story about the fallenness of man and the creativity that God built into each of us. This book would be a lovely gift for any musician in your life or for anyone who cares about music.
Piano Lessons: A Memoir by Anna Goldsworthy. This story of a girl and her piano teacher sounds really good. Has anyone read it?
Piano Lessons: Music, Love and True Adventure by Noah Adams. Another memoir, this time about a middle-aged man who decides to pursue his life-long dream of learning to play the piano. I am drawn to the premise.
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier by Thad Carhart. Yet another memoirist returns to the piano and the company of musicians as an adult and an amateur.
Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson by Tricia Tunstall. I might give this one to my favorite piano teacher.
Mr. Langshaw’s Square Piano: The Story of the First Pianos and How They Caused a Cultural Revolution by Madeline Gould. Pianos and history combined. I can’t resist. Reviewed at 5 Minutes for Books.
Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum by Robert Andrew Parker. Reviewed at Becky’s Book Reviews A children’s picture bio of a jazz great.
Duke Ellington: The Piano Prince and His Orchestra by Brian Pinkney. Another picture book biography.
Giants of the Keyboard by Victor Chapin. Includes chapter length biographies of Johann Christian Bach, Muzio Clementi, Jan Dussek, Johann Cramer, Johann Hummel, John FIeld, Karl Czerny, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Liszt, Clara Schumann, Louis Gottschalk, Anton Rubinstein, Teresa Carreno, Paderewski, Ferruccio Busoni, and Artur Schnabel.

Piano fiction:
Anatole and the Piano by Eve Titus. Anatole, the conductor of the Mouse Symphony Orchestra, goes down inside a grand piano. Picture book.
Nate the Great and the Musical Note by Marjorie Sharmat. Nate the Great, junior detective, solves a musical mystery.
Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Practicing the Piano by Peggy Gifford. Easy chapter book.
A Crooked Kind of Perfect by Linda Urban. Zoe dreams of playing the piano at Carnegie Hall—if she can just get her parents to spring for lessons. however, the tricot the music store doesn’t turn out exactly the way Zoe had envisioned. Can she become a star with her new Perfectone D-60 organ?
Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis. Bud Caldwell sets out for Grand Rapids, Michigan to find his long-lost father, the great jazz musician Herman Calloway and his band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression. Newbery Award book.
The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr. YA fiction about a teen piano prodigy who confounds her family and the concert world by suddenly quitting piano.
A Small Rain and A Severed Wasp by Madeleine L’Engle. Two of my favorite novels by Ms. L’Engle, about concert pianist Katherine Forrester, first as a teenager, then as an elderly, and quite famous, grande dame. Adult fiction.

The Splintered Light by Ginger Johnson

Sep4

Giving thought to how the world, the universe, we live in was created with so many varied elements of sound, light, taste, smell, invention, and shape is not a bad exercise in gratitude and appreciation for the vibrancy and diversity of our world. Ginger Johnson’s The Splintered Light leads the reader on a journey of pondering the immense creativity and inventiveness of a God who could create this world ex nihilo, out of nothing. And yet it’s a story, not a sermon, as Ishmael, the protagonist of this story, learns more about the Commons, a place where the different halls (schools) of Color, Sound, Gustation, Manufactory, Scent, Shape and Motion work together to create posticums, worlds for the colonization of their creators.

“Posticum means ‘back door.’ It’s a room for creation that opens up in the stone wall of the Commons. Back home is a posticum, too, but you’d never know it. Color Master told me it was one of the first. All the oldest posticums are worn out and run-down and only have oval sheep and round chickens. The sheep and chickens in the newer posticums are more refined. Plus, they have all kinds of other creatures as well. That’s how you know the age of posticums.”

Ishmael only left home to find his brother Luc and bring him back to help Mam and the family on the farm, but when he does find Luc in the Commons, Luc is unwilling to leave. And Ishmael himself is fascinated by the new sights and possibilities he glimpses in the many halls and schools of the Commons. The Hall of Hue, where Luc lives and works, also welcomes Ishmael as an apprentice of exceptional promise, but Ishmael is determined to return home and to bring Luc with him, after just one more day, and then another, and then another . . .

It’s hardly an insult to say of this debut novel that when I reached the end I was disappointed that there wasn’t more. I really would like to know what happened to Ishmael and his friends after the posticum closed and the stones rested. Maybe I should use my own creativity and imagine it for myself.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to whatever might come next from this talented new writer, and I really like the fact that she sprinkles lines from one of my favorite poems throughout this book about the diverse and variegated world(s) in which we live and breathe and move and have our being:

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manly Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

And this TED talk that I saw the other day seems to serendipitously belong alongside The Splintered Light:

Oh, today is the official publication date for The Splintered Light.

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This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

Born on This Day: Joan Aiken

Sep4

Joan Aiken, b.September 4, 1924, d.January 4, 2004.

She was the daughter of American poet, Conrad Aiken, and her mother was Canadian, later married to yet another famous writer, Martin Armstrong. Her older sister was also an author, so the writing gene seems to have run in the family.

Joan Aiken was homeschooled by her mother until she was twelve years old. Then, she attended a girls’ school for about four years, and then she began to write. She finished her first full-length novel when she was sixteen. She never attended university. She published over a hundred books in many different genres. Homeschool success story, anyone?

Her books are quite well-written, intriguing, and imaginative. The children’s books that she is most famous for, the Wolves Chronicles, are not going to be to everyone’s taste. They’re rather Dickensian, alternate history, with a touch of Edgar Allan Poe.

Take, for instance, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. It’s creepy and perilous. It’s set in a sort of alternate Georgian England in which there are dangerous wolves everywhere, and everyone knows how to shoot them for self-protection, even children. Add in a villainous governess, a duplicitous lawyer, an orphan sent to a Dickensian school, and a ship lost at sea, and you’ve got Gothic for children. Just scary enough to be fun, but everything works out in the end. The other books in the series are Black Hearts in Battersea (1964), Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966), The Whispering Mountain (1968), The Stolen Lake (1981), Dangerous Games (1999), The Cuckoo Tree (1971), Dido and Pa (1986), Is Underground (1992), Cold Shoulder Road (1995), Midwinter Nightingale (2003), and The Witch of Clatteringshaws (2005).

Then, there’s second series for children, the Arabel and Mortimer books, which begins with Arabel’s Raven and continues on with twelve more volumes. (Ms. Aiken was obviously a fan of long series of books with the same fantastic setting.) I’ll read that one someday, after I finish all of the Wolves Chronicles.

Ms. Aiken was also a Janeite, and she wrote several books that were sequels to or take-offs on Jane Austen’s novels. I’d like to read one of those one day.

More about Joan Aiken:
Happy Birthday, Celebrating Joan Aiken.
Review of Mansfield Park Revisited by Joan Aiken at the blog Diary of an Eccentric.
Joan Aiken’s website.