Tomorrow evening at 8 PM EDT, on my Twitch channel, I'll provide live accompaniment for the 1925 silent film The Lost World, preceded by the early animated film Gertie the Dinosaur. Come for the dinosaurs and stay for the music! Or maybe it's the other way around.

The Online Library of Liberty keeps buying my articles, and I seem to have made a niche writing about music history. My latest, "The Politics of Music Under Louis XIV", deals with Jean-Baptiste Lully. He dominated the French Baroque through his friendship with the king, who gave him monopoly privileges. There were lots of Italian and German composers in the Baroque era who are still well-known today. In France, there weren't many till well after Lully's death from bringing a conducting staff down on his foot.

Here's the message I posted on Bandcamp to my followers:

A big thank you to the people who donated for Spontaneous Order in September. This morning, in accordance with my pledge, I donated $24 to Martha's Vineyard Community Services and $40 to Doctors Without Borders, rounding up what I received to the next dollar.

To me, these amounts are rather disappointing. It's understandable that strangers wouldn't choose this way to donate; they'd choose more direct channels for donating money. Even those of you who know me might have already donated money to help the refugees, or you might prefer some other cause. No one's under obligation.

Still, evidently my music doesn't have the appeal that I hoped it would. Oh, well.

My new Bandcamp album, "The Road to Freedom," is now available for downloading. Payment is optional. All net receipts for March and April 2022 will go to Doctors without Borders, which is doing good work for Ukraine refugees and others in need of medical help.

This is my first full-length album since "Shrink Wrap Blues" in the early nineties. It's made from home recordings, with some multi-tracking, enhancement, and (most important of all) getting rid of the bad takes in Audacity.

Most of the songs are from this year's FAWM, where I set myself the theme of "Promises Broken, Promises Restored." That was my working title for the album till I realized it sounded like a collection of sad love songs. The subject matter is the (often inconsistent) growth of liberty in the United States, from colonial times to the present. The topics include religious establishment, slavery, prohibition, law enforcement abuse, and more. It's a reminded that, as the title song says, "the road to freedom never is a straight one."

I've created a Bandcamp artist account. There's nothing there yet, but you can follow me to get notifications. I've started recording songs for "Promises Broken, Promises Restored."

February Album Writing Month is about to start! I've met the goal of writing 14 songs two years in a row. This year, I'm upping the challenge to myself by declaring a theme: "Promises broken, promises restored."

The idea is that the road to liberty has often been a meandering one. People proclaimed ideals, then failed to consistently live up to them, and others had to finish the job. But even the proclamation was a step forward. It set a standard to be met and let critics call out the inconsistencies. When the newly created USA declared "all men are created equal" yet allowed some to be enslaved, it still set a standard to be met. Slavery was abolished within a century.

This will mean focusing on some of the less-known voices in our history, the ones who kept pointing out the broken promises. The final steps often came much later, only after these persistent people had changed the national mood. If all goes as planned, I'll turn out songs covering parts of our history that you may not have heard of. Perhaps even ones I haven't heard of yet but will before the month is out.

I already have a few ideas. You can follow my progress here.

It's February, and I'm ready to start on my second February Album Writing Month. For anyone who doesn't know, that's a challenge to write 14 songs in a month. This year there's one less day than last year to do it. I already have an idea for one song, "Deaf Cat Blues." (That's DEAF cat, as in hard of hearing. not...)

Cats, like people, tend to become louder when they lose their hearing. I'll need to make some recordings of Carl to work into the song.

Update: Posted 5 minutes after the opening gun.

One of my fears as I get older is that there are great pieces of music which I'll never get around to hearing. Fortunately, I can knock one off that list. Yesterday I heard Haydn's Missa in Angustiis, which counts as one of his greatest works. It's often referred to as the "Nelson Mass" because of an association with Admiral Nelson's victory over Napoleon in the Battle of the Nile. If I had heard it before, it was so long ago that none of the music was familiar to me.

Some background may help. In Vienna, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, composers wrote settings of the Ordinary of the Latin Mass. The "Ordinary" means the standard text that was used for Mass. These settings generally required a full orchestra, and they seem more suited for the concert hall than the church. But I don't have to worry about their religious appropriateness; the text provides a vessel for a range of emotions, from fear to jubilation. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert all wrote Mass settings.

The orchestra Haydn wrote the Missa in Angustiis for had just had its woodwind section fired. This meant he had to write an unusual scoring, for strings, brass, and percussion. It's an especially dramatic Mass, with some parts that are usually lyrical (e.g., the Benedictus) being full of conflict. The "Qui tollis" especially grabbed me. It feels like an expression of hope when things are grim, which is something we can use these days. Much of it is sung by a solo bass voice, with the soprano and the chorus adding to the mood. The "Agnus Dei" has a similar feeling,

Haydn later wrote a Harmoniemesse, making up for the lack of woodwinds in this Mass. "Harmonie" at the time was a word for the woodwind section, and the Harmoniemesse makes lots of use of it.

"Something dies, but life continues.
It will not forever fail."

Originally I wrote "Beacons in the Darkness" simply as a song about the symbolism of Solstice lights. This year it feels to me like something more. In a post today, denise wrote, "Thank you all for being a light in the darkness." (Not about the song.)

I don't know whether the song means anything special this year to anyone but me, but here's Heather Dale singing it.

Boston's WCRB classical music station has been around for many years and has gone through many hands and management styles. For some time it's been a subsidiary of WGBH public broadcasting. It gets much of its funding from listener donations.

I've twice donated to it, or attempted to. Each time, my donation was apparently turned into a donation to WGBH. I got WGBH materials in the mail, and after a year was repeatedly asked to "renew" my donation, not to WCRB but to WGBH. There's no way to designate the donation for WCRB or anything like that.

Last week I wrote to WGBH through its website. That is, I clicked on WCRB's link for sending it feedback, and the link took me to the WGBH feedback form. I noted that I wanted to support WCRB but have invariably found myself treated as a WGBH donor. Yesterday I got a reply:

Thank you for recently contacting WGBH. We welcome and value your feedback.

Your comments provide an important source of information. Please be assured that we have shared your thoughts with the appropriate departments, management, and production units.


Thank you for contacting us and for your support; take care and be safe.

I translate that as "You think we even care? LOL!"