Take Some Time To Catch Your Breath (February Calendar Page, printable)

Please Click on this Picture for more Lovely Details

And, feel free to drag it to your desktop 

to print or use as a monthly calendar

Printable Tags for Festive Occasions (free download)

My first podcast is actually not out as a 'cast. Instead I'm doing the first couple of months as youtube slideshows with audio as I build my podcasting skills.

Part1: Folk, Foxes and Francisco

Part2: Folk, Foxes and Francisco

TAGS!

From the pages of this art journal, a collection of original tags designed by The Simple Romantic herself (!)

a) Just in time for the final night of Hanukkah

b) Great for a vintage Christmas look

c) So handy for general birthday and other ‘gifting

d) Also make gorgeous bookmarks

These look mighty fine printed on a piece of postcard stock, which you can usually buy at a stationary, office supply store or a photocopy center. The photocopy stores often sell them individually. Around here I think they might be fifteen or twenty cents for a piece of postcard stock.

Click on any or all of these links for your own Simple Romantic tags. When you get there make sure to click on the tag image, to bring it up in full and glorious printable detail.

• The Assemblage, Dawning of the Music

• A bit of beauty from the Alcazar Palace (Spain)

Other illustrations of and pieces about Spain

• My Favorite Chicken

• Daisy’s Duds

The Assemblage: Dawning of The Music (Part 2 of 2)

To enjoy using this illustration as a beautiful bookmark or gift tag*, click on the image, copy to computer desktop, then print on a piece of card stock paper (available at stationary and photocopy stores).

Permission is granted for non-commericial use only.

Did you miss? Part 1: Live from Polovetsia, It’s Redwood Symphony!

Part 2: The Assemblage: Dawning of The Music

The assemblage is when the music discovers itself. The term ‘assemblage’ is not in my music dictionary, but it’s the most basic and important part of the communal musical experience. Its sense of building expectation makes it my favorite part of concert time. After the pre-concert talk, and long before the concert mistress rises to her feet and calls for attention, the audience is introduced to, or reacquainted with, the players. They stroll on stage, sit down, do a little light tuning, and begin to warm-up their instruments, and practice the solo bits. This night was a particularly fine assemblage. It formed the base of a fantastical, illusory composition.

Like any great work, each instrument enters in her own time. In the case of the assemblage, that arrival is based on absolutely natural timing. Conditions of wind, rain, parking lot perambulation, and the length of the bathroom line each affected the arrival of a player on the scene. He finds his chair, greets his fellows, and begins the ritual of mouthpiece maintenance. She tightens her bow and smoothes on the rosin. The music is coming to life all around her. A flute begins to flutter in excitement, then shrieks, and suddenly drops down in a rapidly descending scale. Vigorous blasts of tooting brass, clear and warm the cold chambers of trumpet, trombone and french horn. Bows dash back and forth with no regularity of motion, each moving on its own path, creating small crescendos and evolving separate tunes out of the mass of sound. I would recognize these abundantly practiced bits later in the great works, but the sense of the individual’s hard-won, repeated effort would be missing.

A really great assemblage captures the spirit that came before the bison’s skin was stretched taut across the void, that would some day emerge as a great kettle drum. It feels the first breath from the first bow that drew across the violin’s ancient forebearer, Grandma Rebec. It is the resurrection of the dawning of music, when a welter of pipes configured itself into a horn.

Just for a moment I wished that I could be recording this. Yet the real joy of this time is that it never can be captured or repeated. The very awareness of anyone’s interest in it as a whole, would compromise the music that emerges on it’s own. The assemblage is the best piece of all. It is live music walking through the door, unstructured and unplanned. It is the quintessential chance composition. It will never be heard again.

It is the perfect jam.

* The wonderful vintage luggage tag background I used for this project is a free public download from the HauntingVisionsStock site. Thank you D-O-H!