I came across this 1920 Charles Burchfield watercolor in my Tumblr feed this morning. It’s called “February Thaw” and it is in the collection at the Brooklyn Museum. Burchfield spent a good deal of his life in Buffalo and this is pretty much the way things look around here now.
My brother and his wife are headed to Spain for Holy Week. We have been enlisted to provide tips. I wish I could do more that that and join them. Peggi and I were in Granada for Holy Week about twenty years ago and it was unforgettable. Palm Sunday, the start of the week, is still eleven days away but but we are getting in the mood by playing Miles’ “Sketches of Spain.” There is a song called “Saeta” on the record that I really love.
In Spain the “saeta” is an unaccompanied song where the singer shows his or her ardent devotion to a particular image of Christ or the Virgin. A Jewish tradition dating to the 16th century, the saeta is often performed outdoors during Holy Week (next week ) as local parishes’ prized statues are paraded through the street in long, winding processions. A saeta performed from the balcony of an apartment overhead can be a stunning emotional experience.
The processions there are usually accompanied by a rag tag band and the band always stops for the spontaneous performance of a saeta. This song recorded last week at the Little Theatre and now entitled “Saeta” is in the spirit of those bands.
A beautiful post. I would like to lift that gorgeous music and put it on my blog sometime.