Randomness: Music, poetry, and Star Wars edition

Sometimes I play a piece of classical music to call the children to Morning Time.  Usually it's something by whatever composer we're studying, but today it was the beautiful Kyrie from Haydn's Missa in tempore belli, which my fifteen-year-old daughter and I will be singing this spring (the whole Mass, that is, not just the Kyrie).



There's a point where the words "Christe, Christe eleison," are sung dramatically with a long pause on the last note and the music stops for a breath.  Then the soloist comes back in with "Kyrie eleison, eleison."  It happens at about 3:17 in the video above.

When the soloist started singing again, my eleven-year-old said, "I thought that wasn't the end!"

After the song was finished, we talked about how you can tell whether a song is finished by the way it feels -- it has resolved the conflict.  That Christe eleison ended on a cliffhanger.

Then someone mentioned "The Empire Strikes Back," and somehow we started talking about all the Star Wars movies and how the Anakin Skywalker that was portrayed in episodes two and three couldn't possibly have grown into the magnificent Darth Vader, and eventually we segued into our day's reading from The Fairy Queen.

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From Canto V:

VII

The Sarazin was stout, and wondrous strong,
And heaped blowes like iron hammers great;
For after blood and vengeance he did long.
The knight was fierce, and full of youthly heat,
And doubled strokes, like dreaded thunder's threat:
For all for praise and honour he did fight.
Both stricken strike, and beaten both do beat,
That from their shields forth flyeth fiery light,
And helmets hewn deep show marks of eithers might.


VIII

So the one for wrong, the other strives for right;
As when a Gryffin seized of his prey,
A Dragon fierce encounters in his flight,
Through widest air making his idle way,
That would his rightfull ravine rend away;
With hideous horror both together smite,
And souce so sore that they the heavens affray:
The wise Soothsayer seeing so sad sight,
The amazed vulgar tels of wars and mortal fight.


IX

So the one for wrong, the other strives for right,
And each to deadly shame would drive his foe:
The cruell steele so greedily doth bite
In tender flesh that streams of blood down flow,
With which the armes, that earst so bright did show,
Into a pure vermillion now are dyed:
Great ruth in all the gazers hearts did grow,
Seeing the gored wounds to gape so wide,
That victory they dare not wish to either side.

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I'm having to rethink our school day.  Mike has been home on furlough since the beginning of April -- the contract his company was working on came to an end and the bidding and selection process for the new contract dragged out for weeks and weeks.  We've finally found out that the whole thing is done and he'll be officially out of a job on Friday... maybe.  The way things have been going I wouldn't be at all surprised if it works out differently after all.

So our days feel different and flow differently, and because some of the new jobs he's looking into are work-from-home jobs this might be the new Normal.

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By the way, you could consider that a prayer request.  We really, really, really want to be closer to my mom, so ideal for us would be a job somewhere between Little Rock and Oklahoma City.

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The girls and I are watching a new drama, a melodrama called Angel Eyes about a girl who loses her sight in an accident.  She is befriended by a guy and his family, they fall in love (well, I mean the guy and the girl, but really it's his whole family and the girl), but then the family suddenly has to leave the country because Reasons, and it's years before the guy is able to go back to Korea and find the girl.  In the meantime, a corneal transplant surgery has restored her sight... so she doesn't recognize him when he comes looking for her.

So far, this show has been just perfect -- the acting, the music, the script, the camera, the directing and editing, the characterization... Just perfect.

Of course, we're only eight episodes into a 20-episode show, so that could always change.

Here's the title sequence.



I think it's going to have a happy ending, even though it's a melodrama -- they sometimes do.  I'm thinking especially of Missing You, which was the melo-ist melo I've ever watched and had such a happy, well-written ending.