Gene Miller: Making music a miracle in a life of pain |
Scary Christmas.
No, no, no, that’s not how I want to start! I want to start in a major key.
Please, take 2 minutes, 52 seconds on YouTube to watch Kelly Boesch’s beautiful and mesmerizing AI-produced dance/costume/music video that will add magic to your day.
Here’s the title: “Saffron and Smoke Surreal AI Dance Video.”
There, wasn’t that wonderful?
Now, let’s go into the tunnel.
“There are no ‘light pieces’ in art,” said Sergei Bortkiewicz, a Polish-Russian late classical period keyboard composer.
He lived from 1877 to 1952, truly a span of eras (maybe they all are).
Born into the Polish upper class, his life was misadventure and horror from childhood through the Second World War.
Ideological clashes and revolutions raged across Europe, and local political eruptions resulted in house arrest for his family, then the confiscation of their home and all assets, ending in deportation.
All of this was followed by the privations of sustained hunger during endless, lethal conflicts that ravaged the landscape.
Many in his family died from typhus, others from stray or punitive bullets in Red Army barrages.
Bortkiewicz, now a mature adult, fled from Yalta (part of Ukraine), eventually reaching Austria.
There, he faced persecution by the Nazis, including the de-listing of........