I have been listening quite a bit to Takemitsu’s “From me flows what you call time.” I got in the mood for it a while ago and pulled up my playlist on Spotify. The playlist was still there, but the title of the piece was dimmed and would not play.

I have found this over and over on Spotify. Music that they used to licence suddenly is no longer available. Mildly annoying I guess. I own a recording of this that I love (by the BBC orchestra). When I tried to import it to a Spotify playlist it informed me that feature was only available on the premium version. I pay for Spotify but apparently don’t have the “premium” version.

My itch to hear it increased until I copied it to both of my computers from my exterior hard drive where I keep a copy  and was able to listen to it that way.

Last night after an exhausting day, Eileen and I sat down to relax. I thought I would go through Netflix and see if I could come up with something to “rot our minds’ (as we say to each other).

I kept throwing movies that might fit the ticket on our queue. I was moving by genre. When I pulled up the “comedy” section the first one was “Big Lebowski.” I was shocked. This movie is one of my all time favorites. I had just that day on the drive home fantasized about buying a used DVD of it so that i could watch it once in a while. It was definitely not previously on Netflix.

So we watched it.

It looks like part of the strategy of these subscription services is to licence stuff for a limited time. I remember last December. Toward the end of the month, all of Woody Allen’s movies began to have a little description added on Netflix: soon to be unavailable. Sure enough after January 1 there were no Woody Allen movies on Netflix. But strangely they are gradually returning.

Odd.

I have been slowly and meticulously rehearsing the Widor toccata for about four weeks. The meticulous part comes in trying to play every note either staccato as marked or for the exact length and precisely releasing the note.

This seems to have paid off. At the vigil, I was dead tired by the time the postlude arrived. I had not played Widor all the way through at tempo at any time during the previous four weeks. This did not seem foolish to me as I know the notes pretty well and have performed it many times.

I did start it a couple of times at a performance tempo (under the marking on my score but still fast enough). When I did this, it went so well that I stopped and saved it for the performance.

Sure enough. When I performed it Saturday night, despite exhaustion there was a precision and clarity I was proud of. I stumbled a little on Saturday night at one point introducing an accidental I had never played before. This was surely my lack of concentration not poor prep.

Yesterday however I played it very well. Wow. That works.

Poking around on Facebooger I was surprised how many of my colleagues had performed Widor for Easter. I had always thought that it was the rock and roller in me that succumbed to playing this popular piece at a high feast. But it looks like it was played in several local churches in West Michigan and other places.

So all I have to do is get through today’s ballet classes and I will have survived the Holy Week marathon at the age of 63. Whew.

Andrew Porter, New Yorker Classical Music Critic, Dies at 86 – NYTimes.com

This famous critic was an organist. I did not know that.His collection of articles from the New Yorker (Music of Three Seasons: 1974-1977)) is neatly tucked between Persichetti’s Mass for Mixed Chorus (A Cappela) and Poulenc’s Gloria on my bookshelf.