Today at the Editor’s glance: We might get some updated Covid numbers this morning–for Flagler and Florida. All government offices and many private sector businesses are closed for New Year’s Eve. A reminder: while a new Florida law makes an exception, on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, to the ban on the setting off of fireworks, the exception does not apply in cities or counties where an ordinance bans fireworks. Palm Coast and Flagler Beach have such ordinances in effect. Nevertheless, law enforcement must see individuals setting off fireworks in order to have a cause of action. It will not respond merely to complaints. So be considerate. Follow the law. Go to Beverly Beach to set off your fireworks (no ordinance in effect there). Speaking of quiet: I’d like to end the year on this note–“Delightful rest, beloved pleasure of the soul,” Bach’s Cantata BWV 170, Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, dating from 1726 for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity, in conjunction with the Gospel reading from Matthew, Chapter 5, just after the Beatitudes, the verses about one’s sense of justice surpassing even the laws on the books. In other words, don’t do the right thing only because someone may be looking. You are being more just when someone is not looking. The opening movement, those plaintive strings, that grateful cadence, is all we need to set the tone for an end to this miserable year and an better start to the next. Georg Christian Lehms’s text to the aria has that Lutheran grimness in parts, the inevitable heaven-hell finger-wagging, but cast that aside for the more lyrical lines and be transported by the music.
Contented peace, beloved delight of the soul,
you cannot be found among the sins of hell,
but only where there is heavenly harmony;
You alone strengthen the weak breast.
Contented peace, beloved delight of the soul,
For this reason nothing but the gifts of virtue
should have any place in my heart.
Here’s the cantata in full, performed by the Netherlands Bach Society:
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Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Al-Anon Family Groups
Flagler County Commission Morning Meeting
Beverly Beach Town Commission meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
Astronomy Club of Palm Coast Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
“What you’re hearing in what we call Black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that, like the spirituals, can really happen only off the page—not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, break beats, or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. Writing down the asides and ad-libs and overdubs and yelps and wails, the extended solos, the mumbled running together of rhymes seems, if you think about it, like a fool’s errand, the flowers wilting under hot water that Zora Neale Hurston was talking about. It’s not that Black music isn’t written. It certainly is. But so much of its glory can’t be captured in recorded notes alone. That results from spontaneity. It resides between the notes, in personalities, in grunts, sighs, gestures, timbre, inflections, phrasing. You wouldn’t be trying to capture the arrangement of notes, per se. You’d be trying to capture the uncatchable: the spirit.”
–Wesley Morris, from “Music,” in “The 1619 Project,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones (2021).
Ray W. says
John Updike, the extraordinarily bleak author of the Rabbit books, tried to capture the essence of Black music with his characterization of Rabbit visiting a hole in the wall nightclub for the first time in his hometown at the invitation of a Black coworker. The despair, hope, talent and soul-destroying railings of a young Black women, who shakes off the weight of alcoholism and drugs for but a moment, moves Rabbit to wonder as she stands from a table and sings an impromptu performance to the crowd emphasizes my belief that everyone possesses gifts that can emerge if the moment is encouraged and then seized. Such vignettes, snapshots, glimpses, are a universal human condition. Some ancient Greek philosophers believed that truth, beauty and justice sprang from the same well. If they were right, the trick would be to recognize the location of the well and to ensure that everyone can drink from it.