I’m trying to go over to the church and spend an hour here and hour there doing final filing and sorting. Yesterday, Eileen went with me. She is sorting choral music as I work on instrumental. I have the trio and other instruments file finished and am working my way through the organ music. I’m getting closer to the end of this task. The condition of the collection of music I am leaving behind varies from pristine to very used. Since I can’t imagine needing much organ music for the rest of my life I am only taking important stuff like Bach or good editions that I can continue to learn from or would enjoy having in my collection. If my successors find what I am leaving useful at all, that’s to the good. If not, they can easily discard stuff.

I wrote an entry here recently about how poetry keeps me alive. Music does this as well. There is much of Beethoven’s excellent piano music that I can still manage to get through with my old, misshapen hands. I continue to be drawn to Mendelsohn. I have been working over one of his Song without Words that I think is lovely. Here is a recording of it.

I’ll probably never be able to play it that quickly. This doesn’t bother me. I like it slower anyway but couldn’t find a recording on YouTube in which the player doesn’t play it quickly. I do like the melody very much both the main minor melody and the E major section in the middle.

Eileen has been participating in online auctions. Elizabeth and Jeremy have had success with them and I think this may have inspired Eileen. She bids and then keeps an eye on progress. Sometimes she is outbid and sometimes she wins. It’s a bit like Ebay but what she is bidding on can be picked up at a local warehouse if you win the bid. Yesterday she went to pick up three successful bids. A book case, a wardrobe, and a book.

The book was for me. She didn’t tell me the title only that she was pretty sure I would be happy that she purchased it. I couldn’t think of what in the world she had bought me. She didn’t tell me until later that she had only paid two dollars for the book.

She was correct. I was happy to get the book. It is a volume of the Loeb Library. I love these little books. The Greek books are green and the Latin, red. More and more as I try to access writing that is translated I enjoy having the original next to it. If the original language is a romance or a classical language I can often see some of the meaning in it when I compare it to a translation.

The book is Elegies by Propertius.

I hadn’t heard of this guy but it looks like fun. Propertius knew Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. The poems are in Latin. They were originally translated into English for the first of the Loeb editions by a man named Harold Edgeworth Butler. The translation I have is by George Patrick Goold who was a professor at Yale and also General Editor of the Loeb Classical Library (1974-1999). According to Amazon, this book retails at $28. Cool.