Tras haber creado mi anterior blog cecilmundo varias personas, muchos de ellos mis alumnos, me sugirieron que creara una secciòn dentro de cecilmundo para publicar mis obras de docencia de idiomas. Dado que la cantidad de documentos de explicaciones, ejercicios y exàmenes de inglès son muy numerosos porque tengo màs de 30 años del ejercicio de la docencia, preferì estrenar blog con mis alumnos a como ellos realmente merecen. En este blog planetcecil no solo iràn mis documentos didàcticos de inglès, sino tambièn la producciòn literaria de varios alumnos que se destacan en las letras. Tambièn darè oportunidad a aquellos que tienen excelentes obras pero que no han logrado publicarlas ya que en mi paìs Nicaragua todo se mueve por la marrana polìtica, y si una no pertenece a determinado partido no verà jamàs publicado su opus. Tambièn tenemos la desgracia de contar con seudoeditores quienes al no conocer verdaderamente de literatura se convierten en mercenarios de la imprenta solo para llenarse ellos mismo de dinero y fama a costillas de los escritores. Todos aquellos que deseen participar en este blog, denlo de antemano por suyo. Aunque lleve mi nombre en un arranque de egolatrìa, yo soy sencillamente vuestra servidora.Cecilia

Las alas de la educación

Las alas de la educación
La educación es un viaje sin final.

La lección de física

La lección de física
Casi aprendida

jueves, 3 de julio de 2008

Music



July Third, 9th Entry to the Colonel`s Scrapbook
A Little Night Music

Birth
1423 Louis XI king of France (1461-83) the ugly Spider King
1883 Franz Kafka Czech, author (Metamorphosis, Trial, Amerika)I would enjoy turning into a bug, Frank, but I already have my own short story about a metamorphosis of a chap into a black cat
1567 Samuel de Champlain French explorer (Lake Champlain)and founder of Quebec
death
1971 Jim Morrison rocker (Doors), dies of heart failure in Parism gets buried at the famous Père Lachaise cemetery
Algeria : Independence Day (1962) Finally alter so much bloodshed to get rid of France


I hummed my first tune in my crib before I learned to walk. I still sing when my students have begun a test. Is it that I envy Nero, eating grapes and playing the lyre while Rome burned? Stubborn, headstrong, dark little me. I have always sang .Of course as a baby my first hummed tune was logically something from Tchaikovsky`s Nutcracker Suite. ;y exquisite aboriginal mother believed that placing me on the crib or sofa to listen to classical music was a very healthy custom,. I agree with her even to this day. As a toddler, I broke everything. The only thing to quiet me down was music. Yes, just like good old Orpheus in Greek mythology, called upon to quiet the beasts. My nose drips, my eyes are red but I happily sing along with that woman I adore, Barbra Streisand, Jewish and tenacious like me, and I bawl I am a woman in love and I`d do anything to get you into my world and hold you within. My neighbors want me to shut up. I have no sore throat, strange flu that I have. Trust me to do things My Way,as that blue-eyed hunk of American beefcake Frank Sinatra sang. So I continue following the Divine Barbra.
I feel like a note that she is going to hit with that mellifluous voice. Music. Prince Korkut of the Osmanlis said that angels had their own language, but they were good teachers so they gave music to humans. Korkut himself was a great composer and luthier. I am a woman in love with music. A musician still lives inside this body, beneath the stars in my eyes as I am as of today and the stars on my epaulets that sometimes twinkle but weigh too much. Sometimes my long fingers still miss the other keyboard, the one belonging to the piano.
It`s my mom`s fault. She was musically gifted. She played the guitar and mandolin. Anything from Chilean cuecas to Vivaldi`s concerto for lute. She was also an Orpheus for me, but she had to make a living along with my dad, cooking as our foremost chef, so she would put me on an easy chair and listen to anything from Francois Couperin to Manuel de Falla and his Amor brujo.. Along with my reddish cat Torta when I already had her. Antonio Vivaldi was my healer, and still is. Even colic is cured by his music for me. Tchaikovsky-whom I loved even more after I found out he had been gay and afraid to leave the closet-the perfect Mozart, jingly Praetorius from the Renaissance, Schubert-who being so ugly and fat like a pig, could produce such majestic and otherworldly beauty in his Unfinished Symphony just because he was infatuated with a whore. I also dreamed with Anton Dvorak the Bohemian who loved trains and was the founder of the New York Conservatory, Verdi, who was also such a great nationalist and did his bit for the unification of La Bella Italia, Puccini with his Madame Butterfly which still makes me get goosebumps when I hear it. Torta and I would sit together amiably and drool. Nobody could move us. Our friendship and cat and slave began under the warm umbrella of Ravel`s Alborada del Gracioso, expanded with Sir Edward Elgar`s Pomp and Circumstances March ·1 (the one used for the Commencement ceremony when I graduated fro high school) and grew to proportions so big it could not fit in the whole Rite of Spring by big-mouthed Stravinsky. Put together with Beethoven`s Coriolanus Overture. I listen to music while I expect the fever to go down, right now, and I feel instantly better. My mood is between happy and tired, but a gentle weariness. It is more like Mozart`s A Little Night Music. I haven`t lost appetite, I feel satisfied and placid. Loved. Music, among other things, seem to be helping me. I unceremoniously blow my nose and to me it sounds like Haydn`s Trumpet Concerto. But I wouldn`t mind listening to the Adagio from the Concerto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra by my long-dead idol Joaquìn Rodrigo or Victor Jara`s famous Pimiento(composed before Pinochet had him assassinated after the 1973 Chilean coup). II had the incredible honor of meeting Joaquìn Rodrigo when I went to Spain in the early eighties. But right now Billy Joel is singing his Uptown Girl, before those awful Irish lads from Westlife messed it up.
Uptown girl. Can a colonel be anyone`s uptown girl? Was I that for the Union on Nicaraguan Musicians when dark, green eyed Alcibiades, a popular musician, arrived at my doorstep to ask for a picture and my biography in order to place me in the Pyramid of Great Composers that his organization has in the huge John Paul II Square by Lake Xolotlàn in Managua? How did I merit that honor, to be next to our Divine Leper Josè de la Cruz Mena, author of such sublime waltzes like Loves of Abraham or Ruins? Next to the co-creator of the son nica Camilo Zapata(who is still alive, with Alzheimer but still trying to get fresh with teenagers), or Justo Santos, author of La Mora Limpia(our second national anthem for Nicaragua)? I am there, in that small Hall of Musical Fame,with windswept hair, looking more like a cover girl than a serious composer. Did the soundtracks for TV dramas such Antheo, Those Years we left Behind, The Rose, Not all that shines Is Gold, This Man from this Land, Breaking Silence and others get me there? I still find those scores melodious, sweet ,cloying but derivative. I never had my own seal as a composer. Smacked of Vivaldi, Bocherini , Giuliani or Chopin. Nothing wrong with those composers. Only that I am not a single one of them. But I was paid for those scores. They are recorded. I was the first timpanist of the National Orchestra before I went to study in France. People, I still compose but never write it on the pentagram anymore. I can still play the piano, even after I fractured both wrists in 1986. But that keyboard never gave me the satisfaction, the adrenalin, the joy that a computer keyboard gives me as a writer.
Those who view me only as a dark ceramic doll dressed in camouflage or a sex object which must wait barefoot, naked and panting to just expecting summons to make noises will never understand me. How could I compose and abandon it? Sometimes you have to give up many things you are in order to become what you really want to be. Once I told a chap in France I wasn`t leaving him for another man, but for another woman. He was puzzled and never understood that I had to leave him in order to become the woman I am now. Every time you go away you take a piece of me, bawls out Jonh Paul Young in his hit. Do I do that to you? I don`t mean to. I never go from you, I always stay and leave my heart in your hands. Make music from it. But then again, being Orpheus is so complicated.
My best friend would call me to sing for him when he was utterly depressed, fat wax.-like tears rolling down his pale cheeks. You are Orpheus and I your beast, he would sigh. That was when I thanked my old teachers, the Spanish Serra, Julio Max Blanco, Salvador Cardenal, et al because they taught me music. Getting Oscar to smile was the best attempt to be made, and I always managed to wring at least a grin from him. He was the one who once told me I would find my own little drop of shining napalm falling from the corner of an angel `s eye. Did he ever realize what a prophet he had become? Now that I see he had the power of prediction I cannot even tell him because he has been dead for almost 12 years.
Music. This whole piece has been prompted by music. My photographic memory has thousands of scores memorized, from Franz Von Suppès Light Cavalry Overture to Bob Marley`s Redemption Songs, Richard Strauss`fabulous Don Juan tone poem lying next to Ananda Shankar`s Cyrus or Barry Manilow`s soppy I can`t Smile Without You, not forgetting Leroy Anderson`s Blue Tango and never forgetting that Karen Carpenter before dying of anorexia nervosa trilled that I Know I Need to be In Love…
because the singing Egyptian goddess of song Om Khaltoum had sung about something similar, making everyone shiver with delight and the sparrow of Paris Edith Piaf made my dad tremble with desire and joy when she sang La Vie en Rose. I thank life that it gave us Neil Diamond`s Song Sung Blue as well as Spanish Francisco Tàrrega`s Capriccio Arabe
Music will never erase the horrors of World war II or the thousands of wars humans had had the bad sense to fight, including the massacre that was perpetuated by people like Francois Mitterand in Algeria until these brave people finally kicked the Frenchies out. But my Jewish self dances when I hear Hava Naguila or the theme from Schindler`s List or the one by Jerry Goldsmith for Exodus. My mother somehow mastered the sirtaki theme by Mikis Theodorakis that served as leit motif through the film Zorba the Greek, and Prince Korkut`s religious music for the dancing dervishes still fascinates me although it was stolen by a white woman to recycle it in the awful film version of Eyes Wide Shut. Silvio Rodriguez`s Madre from the New Cuban troubadours will always be in the same pocket of my military garb that I keep Mexican Juan Pablo Moncayòs Huapango or Anton Dvorak `s Humoresque, or Pachelbel`s Canon or Emerson, Lake and Palmer`s wonderful version of Modeste Mussorgsky`s Pictures at an Exhibition. Many of my short stories have had a musical inspiration. Music keeps me company while I write this humble offering for you to read tomorrow while you imagine that distances can be snuffed out by a simple wave of Zubin Mehta`s baton conducting Brahms` Academic Festival Overture or the drums in Baltimore`s Tarzan Boy hit. I look forward to the day when, wearing a cat as an ornament on my lap, I look into your eyes and smile while I sing something even though I know my voice is not Plàcido Domingo`s. Will I ever hear The Captain of her Heart by Double in the same room as you, my reader, or will Alan Parson`s Time tell me it was all simply a question of days, or months for us to listen to music together?
Music simple unlocks the floodgates of dreams and rises imagination into action, an artilleried helicopter like my Vercingètorix 325 ready to go on mission to blue pools of harmony and mountain landscapes of melody. Music gives us back the sovereignty of our expectations.
That is why, the perfect water for the seed of hope, will always be a song or a symphony.

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