Friday, April 10, 2020

Freeborn Gentleman Who Was




I’ve written before about “classical” music, vs. jazz and what it means to listen to one or the other in an urban or rural context.  Driving, in a car was when I originally had the epiphany, or on a bike, through the woods, classical music seems to adopt to the broadly wrought rhythms of the sky and the wind, and its effect on the canopy, rather than the immediate rhythms of humanity and stop lights and sharp turns. 



I have been searching for American composers and flipped through a gent or two, and ultimately a lady or two and stumbled upon Edmond Dede, and African American freeborn gentleman, who was born in New Orleans and ultimately went on to conduct an orchestra in France.  I find the music a bit bouncy and boisterous, a bit like a musical, song and dance routine but as one song blends into the next, I’ve decided it fits on this trail, if the rhythm is somewhat a-typical of what I had in mind for the country.

I took photos today all the way back in the of the apple orchard, from the point near the steep ravined.  I’ve seen some people who may have been immigrants, who were working on the trees.  Let’s hope we don’t have ICE on the trail or a situation where I need to film them.



On the ride home, as I do these days, I just killed the music altogether.  I want to hear the birds and whatever else nature has to offer.  To my simple reckoning Dede seemed a bit like Aaron Copland and or Vaudevillian  show music.  Not what I'd necessarily associate with the African American experience from time, but then Dede had early on left the Louisiana Delta.  



Thursday 4/02/20


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