Sparks from the Fire

Welcome to Part 2 of the Ira Awards!  If you have no earthly idea of what the Ira Awards are, then go to Part 1 and find out.  Besides, who would start anything with Part 2?

Joni Mitchell-Self Portrait

If you’ve already read Part 1, then welcome back!  Tonight let’s start with Joni.  In Part 1 I opened with the expression “A poem doth not a lyric make”.  Joni Mitchell, in my book, comes the closest to writing poetry that works as lyrics.  It is her genius to do so.  Even though she can make it work sometimes, I still wouldn’t try it if I were you.  Joni Mitchells only come along once in a lifetime.

Joni writes a lot like Paul Simon – she paints an impressionistic picture.  She is a poet at work on a lyrical canvas.  She sometimes tells a story, but that story often just has splotches of through line and she leaves it up to the listener to fill in the blanks.  She is also, you may already know, an accomplished painter whose work often graces her album covers.

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I just woke up with this idea — all because I had a song running through my brain.  At first it was to give my own imaginary award for the Top 3 Inspirational songs or pieces of music of my own life.

Bill Haley and the Comets

It rapidly expanded to the following:  Here they are by category.

TOP 3 CLASSICAL
1. Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Henryk Górecki

Górecki said of this, “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music […] somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed.”

Why this first?  Because with it, I was inspired to fall in love with my wife.  An easy pick.

2. Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) by Igor Stravinsky

Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein said of one passage, “That page is sixty years old, but it’s never been topped for sophisticated handling of primitive rhythms…”, and of the work as a whole, “…it’s also got the best dissonances anyone ever thought up, and the best asymmetries and polytonalities and polyrhythms and whatever else you care to name.”

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