This Friday, 29 November 2024 my tenth release of the year, Leftovers III, will hit all streaming platforms (including Spotify). In advance of the EP’s release, I wanted to feature the composition that is the centerpiece of LIII, “Hanging Gardens.”
Before that, though, just take a moment to appreciate this decadent album artwork:
I think I made that sandwich over the summer, and took a picture of it about halfway through. No wonder my blood pressure and waistline are showing such high numbers!
But onto the piece itself. “Hanging Gardens” is the longest piece I have ever composed, clocking in at about 10:46 (I think the YouTube video has it at 10:47). I actually wanted to make it longer—around twenty minutes—to give it a more symphonic feel, but I reached the point where I a.) had to finish it to meet the 29 November 2024 release deadline and b.) I was out of ideas to pour into this enigmatic suite.
I feel like I write this phrase as frequently as Ben Shapiro says his wife is a doctor, but I am teaching World History this year—and I love it. I love getting to talk about ancient history, especially after focusing on the last five hundred years or so for most of my teaching career over the past decade. American history is fascinating, but it’s comparatively short. It’s also useful to remember that there was a lot of history before us, and that even the most ancient and enduring civilizations, like ancient Egypt, were around hundreds and thousands of years before even the Roman Republic. Heck, even the Egyptians talked about civilization that predated them. Whoa!
So here are some posts where yours portly had dipped his toe into the distant past, either historically or musically:
“America’s Roman Roots” – A classic TPP post about the influence of the Roman Republic on America’s Founding
As readers are doubtlessly tired of hearing, I am teaching World History this year for the first time in over a decade. So far it’s been hugely fun, as we have been studying the earliest humans and how people transitioned from the hunter-gathering lifestyle of the Paleolithic Age to the settled agricultural lifestyle of the Neolithic Age. With agriculture came cities and, ultimately, civilization.
There’s been a subtle-but-noticeable trend of late that idolizes the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Wouldn’t it be great to spend a few hours gathering food each day, then lounging by the campfire with your kinsmen and relaxing? Well, yes, if you’re in an area of great abundance, that wouldn’t be bad, but you’re also living with massive food insecurity all the time.
One telling graph in my students’ World History textbooks shows the population of the world prior to the rise of agriculture, and the population afterwards. The transition is dramatic: while the global population hovered around just a few hundred thousand people for millennia, the global population shot up to roughly ninety million people in the first 5000 years following the advent of agriculture. The graph is a real hockey stick.
We definitely have made sacrifices for civilization, and I think Western Civilization has particularly grown quite sick. Crowding a bunch of people into tightly-packed cities is probably not good for our mental health. Some people need to live on forty acres in the middle of nowhere. I suspect that most of us need considerably less space, but there’s something dehumanizing about cramming people into shoebox apartments stacked one atop the other. We’re probably also not meant to destroy our minds and bodies on soul-sucking corporate work for a dozen hours a day, either.
But even with these drawbacks, civilization breeds life. And the struggles inherent in maintaining a civilization create the greatest art and literature the world has ever known.
My argument for civilization will always boil down to this idea: the civilization that produced Bach is a civilization worth preserving.
Yours portly is teaching World History this year, and it has been so fun talking about prehistoric humans. Particularly, I find Ötzi, a Chalcolithic Age European who died roughly 5000 years ago in the Austro-Italian Alps, fascinating. Two German hikers discovered his mummified remains in the ice in 1991, providing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn about the lifestyle and diet of people in prehistoric Europe.
Ötzi has captured my imagination so much, I composed a lengthy piece depicting his icy trudge through the Alps, and his tragic last hours (an arrow pierced his back, likely killing him). Upon his death, snow began to fall, preserving Ötzi’s remains in ice for millennia.
I began composing a slow, morose tuba piece, which is only twenty-five measures long on paper and in my composition software:
The slow 6/8 section captures a gloomy-but-whimsical feeling, as one might feel on a frosty trudge through the high mountains. The 5/8 section speeds up considerably, depicting what may have been Ötzi’s hasty, violent retreat from his attackers.
Yours portly is taking today off from SubscribeStar and the main blog here. All is well, I’m just behind on blogging with school prep this past week.
I’m ready for the first day of school, and working registration on Thursday and Friday has gotten me even more excited for the school year. Seeing the new sixth and seventh graders coming in (my school runs 6th-12th grades), all cute and nervous and excited, really reminded me of why I do what I do.
As I wrote earlier this week, I’m also looking forward to teaching World History for the first time since the 2011-2012 school year. I can’t wait to talk about Ötzi the Ice Man! After the first quiz in World History, we’re going to watch this video, which recreates the doomed Ötzi’s least meal:
For now, though, I’m going to rest up and take care of some mundane chores around the house. This last week has me beat—and I didn’t even teach any classes!
Yours portly is back at work, although students don’t return until this coming Monday. Naturally, I’ve been getting prepared for their imminent return this week.
After a hairy night of elevator-related shenanigans, everyone was pretty ready to hit the road. That said, we still had a long hike through Arlington National Cemetery, followed by a trip to the Holocaust Museum, before heading home to South Carolina.
Sadly, it appears I lost the photographs I took at Arlington National Cemetery, as well as the powerful World War II Memorial from the previous night. It’s a shame, because it’s a humbling and breathtaking place. The cemetery is massive, with graves everywhere; even so, it is running out of space.
We chanced upon the changing of the guard ceremony, where the guards stand vigil over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Our tour group was a bit late hiking up the hill to the Tomb, but our students managed to position themselves in such a way as to witness the guards perform the ceremony.
Even with our typically rambunctious group and dozens of other school groups, it was very quiet. After two long days of trying to explain to them why these places were sacred, the awe and reverence of Arlington did more to quiet their ever-running mouths more than any of my self-righteous jeremiads ever could.
Following the quiet, contemplative morning at Arlington, we had a quick lunch at a mall food court, then headed to the Holocaust Museum—a sobering final coda to our trip.
After MAGAWeek2023 and my extended time out of town, I’ve decided to take this week to rerun some classic hits from the extensive TPP back catalog. Most of the posts are those with very high view counts, though I am presenting them in no particular order. TBT will proceed as usual, and regular posts will resume Saturday, 15 July 2023.
Okay, okay—it’s not Christmas. But, hey, close enough, right?
There will be an actual Christmas post tomorrow morning, though it’s going to be very short. But I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to turn “Flashback Friday” into “Flashback Friday^2,” angering mathematicians and calendar enthusiasts everywhere.
The original post in this “series,” “Christmas and its Symbols,” contains some excellent Christmas wisdom. So often we hear Christmas denounced as a secretly “pagan” holiday because we hang wreaths, put up trees, and dangle mistletoe. But as one meme I’ve seen recently put it (to paraphrase), “Yes, I love to display the trophies of my vanquished foes.”
Last week I took some time to play a few games, notably The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Once my niece and nephews arrived, though, I didn’t have time for much else (although we built some cool planes and helicopters with a big bin of LEGOs). They love Uncle Portly’s “devices”—my Nintendo Switch Lite (the “big device”), Nintendo 3DS XL (the “medium-sized device”), and Nintendo DS Lite (the “small device”). My older nephew will spend hours building levels in Mario Maker 2 if left to his own devices. My niece usually ends up with the “medium-sized device,” leaving my littlest nephew to play whatever I happen to have that will run on the DS Lite.
In digging around for games a two-year old could grasp, I found my old copy of 2008’s Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution. It’s an interesting, almost “abridged” version of the full Civilization experience—what would now be a cellphone app. The game contains the major elements of a Civilization game from the Civilization IV era, and the game bears the stamp of many of that iteration’s innovations (as well as one of the major contributions from Civilization III, culture borders).
Naturally, my nephew wasn’t going to be playing that, but I popped it in one evening after the kids went to bed and found the game highly entertaining.
