An Astronomical Moment on my Morning Walk

I was on my daily walk this morning, walking due south along a suburban street in Spanish Fork. It was about 6:30 am. The sun hadn’t come up yet so it was still dark. I happened to look to my left, and I saw Venus rising over the mountains to the east. When I looked to my right, I could see Mars setting. And then I turned my face forward and looked up and and I saw Sirius directly in front of me. In that moment I felt … “triangulated,” like I was attached by strings to those celestial objects and pinned like a photograph on a TV detective’s cosmic cork board. I was moving at a fairly brisk pace, but I may as well have been on a giant treadmill, with the Earth rolling beneath me as I walked in place.

Entrata

When I was a junior in high school I heard this piece on the radio and was captivated by the repeating bass line ||: do _ re | do _ re :|| (I guess I was a minimalist even then). I later transcribed what I could remember of it (a brief stretch beginning around 0:41 in the recording linked below) in a notebook I carried around with me. In that notebook I titled it “Introit (Orff),” not realizing that it was actually an arrangement of William Byrd’s “The Bells.” I’ve thought about the piece off and on over the years. This morning I was thinking about it again and I finally found it — not “Introit” but “Entrata.” And just as wonderful as I remembered it.

Carl Orff, “Entrata”

[This entry was originally a Facebook post from 17 January, 2020.]

The Salt Lake City Public Library

I was struck this morning by a memory of going to the old SLC public library, when it occupied the building that now houses the Leonardo Museum. It was a late morning in the summer, probably a Saturday, and I was on the west side of the 5th floor where the music and art holdings were. I was sitting at a table thumbing through a copy of Steve Reich’s Writings about Music. I had just graduated from high school.

The southwest corner of the 5th floor was devoted to the library’s record collection. I listened to a lot of new music and even some recordings of Balinese gamelan (distributed by outfits like Nonesuch in their Explorer series). The guy at the desk, seeing that I was interested in new music, even made some suggestions: a mix of hits, like Pendercki (the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima was a sonic gut punch) and misses, like Xenakis (I still just can’t). That record collection is where I learned about music written after 1900.

Everything felt new, even though it was library-old. Even the dust motes lit by the sun coming in through the windows on the east side where there was a little courtyard with a pool.

Man, I miss that place.