a one and a two...

Music has always been a deeply important part of my life. My father was a high school band director before becoming a school administrator and from as early as I can remember I sang in church and school, played the trumpet through high school (braces did a number on my trumpet playing)and played guitar in bands including the "Lightbulbs"-I'm sure you have heard of us...) As an adult I have tried to teach myself the cello (mostly a failure) and am now immersing myself in the recorder. My children are all singers and budding musicians playing flute, cello, piano, and trumpet.
I try very hard to appreciate the incredible blessing that modern times are in regards to music. When I want to listen to the greatest music ever written and performed I have only to push a button. This blessing, of course, has within it a curse. Many years ago, people had to play music in order to hear it. It's scarcity engendered a truer appreciation...
The Boston Unitarians and the Transcendentalists had various reactions to music. Thoreau loved his flute while Emerson had virtually no ear for music at all. Of all the Boston Transcendentalists, only John Sullivan Dwight dedicated himself to music.
An early champion of Beethoven, Dwight created and edited "Dwight's Journal of Music" for which this was the founding statement:

"The tone to be impartial, independent, catholic, conciliatory, aloof from musical clique and controversy, cordial to all good things, but not eager to chime in with any powerful private interest of publisher, professor, concert-giver, manager, society, or party. This paper would make itself the 'organ' of no school or class, but simply an organ of what may be called the Musical Movement in our country, of the growing love of deep and genuine music, of the growing consciousness that music, first amid other forms of Art, is intimately connected with Man's truest life and destiny. It will insist much on the claims of 'Classical' music, and point out its beauties and its meanings, not with a pedantic partiality, but because the enduring needs always to be held up in contrast with the ephemeral. But it will also aim to recognize what good there is in styles more simple, popular, or modern, will give him who is Italian in his tastes an equal hearing with the German, and will even print the articles of those opposed to the partialities or the opinions of the editor, provided they be written briefly, decently, and to the point."

More on Dwight to come...
Blessings