You’re on a roll here. I normally have pickling cucumbers but not this year. However I have 10 jalapeño peppers but still waiting for more tomatoes.
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Yeah, lots of canning this week, and none of it was grown by us. We just had so much of it we needed to do something with it.
We are now starting to get ripe green beans, cukes and tomatoes, so we ought to be busy with more canning.
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One of THE most detailed recipes EVER! Well done and THANK YOU!
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Yer welcome. Most folks probably know how to make canned salsa, but I wanted to give details to those who don’t.
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Got a chance to listen to a few of his choral pieces, very nice. I particularly liked this one, seems like you have two tempos, the voices are slower, but there’s a busy tenseness in the strings underneath.
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Oh dude, this is great. I’d not heard this piece before, but it’s exactly the kind of stuff that made me like him.
Yeah, he really likes those uneasy, driving string accompaniments, I don’t know enough music theory, but the rhythm here is something else, and the voice leading… I especially liked the parts after 1:20 and 2:15, and the Amen section
Dang, thanks for sharing!
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Well glad you liked it. I also listened to the C minor Miserere, which seems to be a more popular work of his. This piece appears to be in A minor, so there’s already some darkness there, and the strings’ theme seems to accentuate that.
Reminds me a bit of Mozart’s Confutatis in his Requiem with its menacing strings part.
Confutatis is a good comparison. The Mozart definitely feels more cohesive, organized, maybe balanced is the word what I’m looking for. But, the slightly unhinged side with Zelenka is just devilishly attractive to me.
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True. In that piece the first part (hellish?) is the foreboding string lines and low voices, and then it transitions into a blissful (heavenly?) section where you hear the high voices, and light string accompaniment before it goes back to the original motif.
I appreciate these chats on this type music, I hope I don’t sound pretentious or like I know it all, because believe me, I don’t. My training came from being in high school band many eons ago, but I have always had an interest in all kinds of music. My music directors back then made a big impression on me on how important music can be in our lives, and I’ve never forgot that.
So, I try to learn about music theory and having a technical background, there’s a mathematical aspect of it that appeals to me that may not be true for most people. But, there’s the emotional part of it that can’t be measured or analyzed too. Sometimes there is a classical piece that I will be listening to, and it just touches me to the core, I can’t explain it, but it can be very emotional. I saw this quote on a music store years ago, and thought it interesting:
“When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they’ve never had, and never will have”
― Edgar Watson Howe
I’ve done research into how different types of sounds can have an actual beneficial or detrimental effect on the human body, it can be very powerful. But, I’m going off into another tangent.
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This is always a danger. It’s unfortunate, but probably unavoidable. The most stimulating and interesting discussions of, well, pretty much any topic are going to be in the more esoteric, complex, or intellectual side of things. But, complex and intellectual aspects of given subjects are also how people with subject matter expertise, or those who covet it, try and lord it over the plebs. Because being smart or sophisticated or knowledgeable confers status, a lot of people are going to display smarts, sophisticated, and knowledge, real or not, for the sake of status. And it’s not like those things shouldn’t confer status–they should. It’s just chasing status is such an ugly, ugly behavior it stinks up all the good and proper status.
But anyway, it is indeed always a pleasure to get to talk about classical music.
I like the Howe quote.
I’m convinced music is, ultimately, a rational activity. Themes, key changes, rhythms, they are also parts of some sort of musical idea no less intelligible than the themes, character arcs, and pacing of a novel. Bad or poorly made music is unreasonable. Tying in to the Howe quote: in much the same way that Plato argued, either literally or by analogy, that learning is the process of uncovering what is already innately known to the soul, listening to music is an exercise in hearing musical ideas that, while you might not have heard them before, you still recognize them.
But, that’s enough poorly understood Platonism for one day. : D
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Canned Rattlesnake beans last night. We picked about a full bushel basket from a 20ft row that we have trellised between t-posts. After stringing amd getting rid of buggy pods, we had enough to fill 7 quarts. These were pressure canned at 10lb pressure for 25 minutes.
My wife picked another bushel basket this morning and I just finished stringing them and about to prepare the jars, rings and lids. Pics to follow.
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Maybe Howe was riffing on Plato. But yeah, I get that. Mozart and Bach seemed to tap into the divine more than most composers, and I’m not talking about their sacred works, which are plentiful (especially Bach). Beethoven did to a certain degree as well.
Yeah, I’ve tried to compare the two in that way. But, with music, you have the schematic of the music score on paper, in cold black and white, so it can be interpreted in many different ways. Listening to a Karajan, Bernstein or Kleiber version of Beethoven’s 5th, you hear some interesting differences. Same with how Hillary Hahn or Perlman plays Bach’s Dm Chaconne.
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I have zero classical music knowledge/appreciation
Our first batch of salsa for the year. My wife will probably do at least two more rounds of similar quantities before freeze up. We’re out of quart jars (full of pickles) and will soon be out of pints. Time to pick up some more jars I guess.
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Are those pints or quarts?
I just got back from a trip out west, so my wife was quite busy with the canning work while I was gone. Our sweet corn looks like it’s time to pick, plus we have more tomatoes as well. So, looks like I’ll be busy this week. Canning, mowing, cleaning, etc.
pints
I’ve found out thru intense research that one pint of salsa lasts about two days here.
We’ll never make it through winter…
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Even if you throw a few Carolina Reaper and/or Ghost peppers in the batch?
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Well, our first two batches (33 pints?) were medium hot, my wife doesn’t like the hot stuff, although I’m the one who eats most of the salsa.
We have some habanero and ghost pepper plants in the garden, but they’re not close to being ripe. Did you spice your batch up?
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Yup
One thing about drought and unseasonable heat (in central MN) is that hot peppers grow very well. Just today my wife commented about how much earlier our hot peppers ripened this year.
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Your point about the differences of interpretation reminded me of something: I wish classical music was a little less rigid when it comes to playing things exactly as the composer wrote them. Shoot, even transcriptions are usually very faithful to the original score.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a good thing that musicians try their best to play what the composer intended. And it is a very good thing that period performances exist.
However, just because those are good things, does not imply that the opposite are bad things. Looser interpretations, covers if you will, can be very interesting. Bach’s Prelude no. 1 from the WTC book 1 honestly sounds very nice in a Romantic style, and it certainly sounds nice on a piano rather than a harpsichord. And, while it would be sacrilege, I think I would even enjoy more creative “elaborations” on that work. We know from Schubert and from the dozen or so pop songs that use it, the piece is very flexible and works quite well when reworked into some other piece. My favorite Pachelbel’s cannon is a reworking as a “Cannon and gigue.” Similarly, baroque-ifying later music is often really fun. If we are being honest, that’s how we even got “Albinoni’s” Adagio.
Schakowsky gets looked down on for some of his orchestral arrangements of Bach, but, while I revere Bach, I can still enjoy Schakowsky getting silly with the tubas. Actually, there’s an orchestration of the Passacaglia in Cm, I think performed by the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra, that I may even prefer to the original organ work. And that’s all just arrangements–The Piano Guys, unserious as they often are, demonstrated how popular more liberal alterations to classical music can be. Imagine what an actually serious version of what they do would be like.
Anyway, just something that came to mind.
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