Apex and The Bad Boy Blues: Wednesday, February 27th!

Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman. -Marian Anderson, singer (27 Feb 1897-1993) 

Mom and Lynette in Mexico

Olivia Rose!! A few more pics xoxo Ayn Great grandparents!!! So happy about the new addition to your family ❤️ She is beautiful I am happy you will be meeting her soon, Corinne!! Love and hugs Judy 
 

Hi all, This coming Thursday, let’s take a snowshoe in the Wilson Lake area. It is west of Peachland, near Silver Lake. We will: -meet at 0900 at IGA parking lot in Summerland (0840 at Home Hardware north parking lot in Penticton) -carpool and drive to the Wilson Lake trailhead -snowshoe…there are a few choices we can make about our route as we go -find a suitable place for debriefing and refreshment -return Are you up for it? If so, let me know. Cheers, Jim 
Hello to all,

I am canvassing for the Heart and Stroke Foundation in memory of my Dad, who suffered a stroke late in his long life that took away his ability to speak. Also, this year, I am encouraging you to donate to support research on congenital heart disease. Old friends lost their daughter in her forties from an infection because she had a small congenital heart defect.  

Why Heart & Stroke over other charities? Not only does the Foundation support research, it has an effective program for ensuring what is known is adopted in practice - see their "For Professionals" page at https://www.heartandstroke.ca/what-we-do/for-professionals. As a health librarian, I often saw the gap between research and practice - it is crucial to transfer research into practice, as the Foundation does.

Also, the Heart & Stroke Foundation is effective at public education. Notable is their FAST "Signs of Stroke" program described at https://www.heartandstroke.ca/stroke/signs-of-stroke. They are leaders with their preventive approach, realizing that preventing heart problems and strokes is better than treating them. Please help me reach my fundraising goal by making a donation today. We all have many demands on our charitable dollars so certainly understand if you cannot donate to the Heart & Stroke Foundation right now. Thanks for your understanding of this intrusion into your inbox.

Right now your donation will be matched by Shoppers Drug Mart. Since it is late in Heart Month, I am once again asking for your support when it will be doubled. Thank you for your support! Jim


The Husband Hunters by Anne de Courcy: The invention of the "Four Hundred," the preeminent members of New York society in the Gilded Age:

"Yet at that very moment, as the Gilded Age began, a new social format was being created that would give shape and structure to the fashionable world for the next few decades -- and launch those daughters of the newly rich, the real-life 'buccaneers', across the Atlantic. At the heart of the stratagem designed to create what would become known variously as 'Society' and the 'Four Hun­dred' was one man, a Southerner named Ward McAllister. ... Even in an age of social striving, he was known as a snob.

"Connected by birth to some of the old New York families, in 1852 he had married an heiress and a few years later had settled in Newport, where his style of entertaining soon began to be copied. ... He had ... travelled extensively in Europe, where he soaked up everything he could about court and aristocratic customs. On his return to America he determined to become the self-appointed arbiter of its society and the customs it should follow.
 

"He had already been successful in shaping the society of New­port. Now, he decided, it was time to tackle the one city in America pre-eminent in wealth, drawing power, sophistication and general glitter: New York. A man might have made a fortune by planting a Midwest prairie with wheat -- but it was to New York that his wife, avid to spend this new wealth, now insisted they move.


"McAllister's cleverness lay in realising that the newly rich were there to stay; more and more millionaires appeared each year and the relentless tide of wealth would soon flood the passive Knickerbockers completely -- unless something were done about it (not for nothing were these newcomers known as 'the Bounc­ers'). He also recognised that any society had to have a leader, whom everyone would accept without question -- if not, it would degenerate into a formless mass riven by bitter internal struggles.

"There was only one person fit for this position and she, al­though beleaguered by the strivings of 'Bouncer money', as parvenu wealth was called, already occupied it. Caroline Astor would continue to be the queen.

"He decided to use the most desirable members of both old and new as the foundation stones of the new order. To select these, he formed a small committee ('there is one rule in life I invariably carry out -- never to rely wholly on my own judgment'); a little band that met every day for a month or two at McAllister's house, making lists, adding, whittling down, forming judgements.

"Eventually, twenty-five men, all wealthy, some from old fam­ilies, some from the new rich but all considered to be men of integrity, were chosen and invited to become 'Patriarchs', as they would in future be known. They would give two and sometimes three balls a season, as exquisite as possible, with each Patri­arch in return for his subscription of $125 having the right to invite to each ball four ladies and five gentlemen, this number to include himself and his family; all distinguished strangers (up to the number of fifty) would also be asked, their names to be run past McAllister. Everyone asked to be a Patriarch accepted immediately.

Samuel Ward McAllister

"As McAllister had rightly foreseen, the exclusiveness of these balls was what gave them their magnetic power. 'We knew ... that the whole secret of the success of these Patriarch Balls lay in making them select ... in making it extremely difficult to obtain an invitation to them, and to make such invitations of great value [so that] one might be sure that anyone repeatedly invited to them had a secure social position.'

"The first of the balls was given in the winter of 1872. With them, McAllister achieved absolute social power. "Applications to be made a Patriarch poured in, the great ma­jority turned down but often with the door left tantalizingly ajar."


The Husband Hunters, Anne De Courcy, St Martin's Press, 2017.

Rakehell


MEANING:
noun: A licentious or immoral person.

ETYMOLOGY:
By folk etymology from Middle English rakel (rash, hasty). Earliest documented use: 1547.

“The titular character, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, was a notorious rakehell as well as being a classically influenced, but principally obscene poet and playwright. He was repeatedly exiled from the court of Charles II for everything from abducting his future wife to vandalising a sundial, and died at the age of 33 from alcoholism and venereal disease.” Ian Shuttleworth; Thoroughly Unlikeable, Highly Enjoyable; Financial Times (London, UK); Sep 29, 2016.  

[The Righteous Rakehell For some reason, the word rakehell occurs often in romance titles. Is it due to the belief that women are attracted to bad boys?]

The Music and the Life: Beethoven, by Lewis Lockwood. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), one of the most esteemed classical composers, had superb musical training as an adolescent, first as a violist in the orchestra of his hometown of Bonn, then as a young keyboardist dedicated to learning the difficult and still largely unknown works of Johann Sebastian Bach:

"For a smaller musical center the array of talent [in Bonn, Germany] was remarkable, and playing viola in the orchestra [as an adolescent] with such performers gave Beethoven a first-class introduction to the major orchestral literature of the time, including symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, and many other composers. He also took part in operatic performance as seen and heard from the orches­tra pit. ... By adding the violist's experience of playing inner-voice string parts within the orchestral ensemble and probably also in quartets he undoubtedly gained a stronger feeling for orchestral sonorities and idiomatic playing than he could have had in his more limited role of keyboard virtuoso. 
 

[Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven by Carl Traugott Riedel]  Certainly after the years in Bonn there is no evidence that he ever played a stringed instrument in an orchestra again, and only on special occasions in later life did virtuosi of the caliber of these Bonn players turn up in any numbers to perform his orchestral works. After leaving Bonn and establishing himself as a free-lance composer, he had occasional limited access to orchestras assembled and paid for by a few wealthy patrons, such as the Lobkowitzes, but never had a regular court orchestra at his disposal for any length of time. For each of his own later public concerts of orchestral works he had to put the orchestra together himself. It often included a fair number of amateurs playing alongside a few top professionals such as the violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh and the cellist Joseph Linke.

"Christian Gottlob Neefe counts as Beethoven's only important teacher at Bonn. ... Beyond his role as a mentor and teacher of modern styles, Neefe earned his place in history by introducing the young Beethoven to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His burnishing of Bach's image emerges in a very important notice that Neefe published about the young prodigy Beethoven as early as March 1783, when the boy was only twelve:

Louis van Beethoven [sic], son of the tenor singer mentioned, a boy of eleven years, and of most promising talent. He plays the clavier very skillfully and with power, reads at sight very well, and -- to put it as simply as possible -- he plays chiefly The Well-Tempered Clavier of Sebastian Bach, which Herr Neefe put into his hands. Whoever knows this collection of preludes and fugues in all the keys -- which might almost be called the non plus ultra of our art -- will know what this means. So far as his duties permitted, Herr Neefe has also given him instruction in thorough-bass. He is now training him in composition and for his encouragement has had nine variations for the pianoforte, written by him on a march -- by Ernst Christoph Dressler -- engraved at Mannheim. This youthful genius is deserving of help to enable him to travel. He would certainly become a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he progresses as he has begun.

"This is no mere plea for support of a talented beginner. It is a profession of faith in J. S. Bach as a supreme musical model -- and this at a time when the greater part of Bach's output was still little known and hard to find, except for copies that circulated among groups of enthusiasts who included Bach's sons, a handful of surviving Bach pupils, and a few theorists wedded to Bach's achievements, as well as some lay admirers. It is indicative of Neefe's knowledge of Bach and devotion to his music that in 1800 Simrock com­missioned him to furnish a corrected text of The Well-Tempered Clavier for local publication.
 

"In the Germany of 1783 the name Bach for most people referred either to his best-known son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, then rounding out his career at Hamburg -- or to his youngest son, Johann Christian, who had just died in England in 1782. Musicians knew of old Sebastian's reputation as a leg­endary patriarch of music, but in the age of galant homophony, his music, though of transcendent quality to Bach enthusiasts, seemed arcane and dif­ficult to average musicians. In Bach's lifetime only two cantatas and a hand­ful of his keyboard works had been published, because music prints were expensive to produce in the earlier part of the century. For thirty years after his death in 1750 there were only twelve Bach editions, mainly his late and contrapuntally 'learned' works -- The Art of Fugue in 1750, the Musical Offering and the third part of the Clavierübung in 1761. "It was only from about 1800 on that more publications of Bach's music began to appear, their production picking up momentum throughout Beethoven's lifetime.

What little of Bach was known in these early years was regarded by most musicians as formidably difficult to perform and to understand. That Beethoven could learn to know and play The Well­ Tempered Clavier so early gave him direct exposure to Bach's unparalleled command of musical logic and depth of expression, even if he could hardly integrate it into this embryonic stage of his own compositional develop­ment, which was inevitably aimed at mastering much easier contemporary styles and techniques. Bachian counterpoint remained a latent influence for many years before it reemerged in Beethoven's later life, when he was ready to accept the very different artistic responsibility of coming fully to grips with the intricate mysteries of Bach's art." The Music and the Life: Beethoven, Lewis Lockwood, W.W. Norton & Company, 2003