The Liberty Bell

                               The joy of music

As my nieces and my nephew spend the day at home instead of going to school due to the pandemic, they have filled the sound environment with music, and joy has entered my heart.

As soon as Clarissa begins to study The Liberty Bell march by John Phillips Sousa on the clarinet and insists on perfecting her phrasing and avoiding false notes, I say to myself: "How well begins the day of the writer of this blog who defines himself as "a full-time music lover." 

When at night Fernando, my nephew, leaves the violin and continues to create rhythmic and melodic patterns in the percussions, I once again consider that my true vocation was that of a musician and I even dream that I find myself at the back of the proscenium joyfully playing the timpani.

Due to all these circumstances, I have remembered over and over the series of lectures compiled in the book The Joy of Music, by Leonard Bernstein, and I once again congratulate myself for being able to enjoy the joy of music, which in Rafael Arce Gargallo's definition "is the resonance of Heaven on Earth, the echo of Paradise in our exile". 

The niece who does not participate in this musical environment is Diana; but she is by no means alien to art, since in her small atelier she is devoted to painting. Certainly all the arts aspire to the status of music, according to Walter Pater, but the truth expressed in colloquial terms is that painting also has its own. Diana, the painter, who considers that Van Gogh is in the Himalayas of pictorial art, creates some watercolors that speak aloud.

Allow me an autobiographical confession: at the dawn of my youth, I imagined that I would have four musical children who would form a string quartet. It was not like that, but in a way my wish has been fulfilled thanks to the  nephews who have something of artists

Clarissa examines with the author of this blog some of the characteristics of the Liberty Bell march, for which she uses the wonderful software called SmartMusic, in which she plays the clarinet part alone or accompanied by an orchestra; follow the score, listen to the metronome and receive technical instructions as well as an evaluation of her performance

                (Photograph by Josefina Cabrera-Moreno)