Today is the 19th day, making two weeks and five days of the Omer. Being within Beauty, Humility within Compassion: Hod within Tifert.
The temporal arts are certainly about Being and Presence within Beauty! We were at a wonderful chamber music concert this afternoon. One of the most astonishing sounds was a Shostakovich Sonata for Viola and Piano, but it was played by viola and marimba! I had never heard those two instruments playing together before, let alone Shostakovich. It was otherworldly. I had always thought of Shostakovich, who died in 1975, as contemporary. Today I realized that the real contemporary composer was the young student, Jeremy Rapaport-Stein, born in 1992. He wrote an astonishing piece, el male rachamim, (the title of a Jewish prayer), for two violins, viola, and two cellos.
Prodigies did not end with Mozart. I struggled for a few moments with feeling hopelessly old and out of it. The humility part of Hod within Tiferet can be very helpful. When I was present with the music I could not only get lost in its beauty, but feel joy at the continuity of new generations of brilliantly talented creative artists. May he live longer than Mozart, and someday be an old man who mentors the twenty year old student.
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