Classical music and studying: the 14 greatest pieces for brain power.

By Maddy Shaw Roberts

Salzburg Symphony No. 1 (‘Divertimento in D major’) – Mozart

The perfect, high-spirited slice of musical motivation to throw you head-first into your study session. Extensive interplay between the violins will drive you on and set you up for an efficient day of revision.

Canon in D – Pachelbel

An easy-but-a-goodie. The way Pachelbel’s Canon builds on that one, steady cello line makes it the ideal concentration soundtrack.Take a deep breath, a warm sip of tea and listen to this beautiful, minimal piano piece. Sometimes, the simplest melodies can bring the deepest thoughts…

Goldberg Variations – Bach

A masterpiece of classical repertoire. Bach’s music has a deep, disciplined measure and precise structure that make it the ideal soundtrack to a stimulating study session.Time to up the pace a little. Brahms is the perfect pace-quickener for when you need to blast through long passages of text – and when that brass fanfare hits, it’s just pure joy.

Time (Inception) – Hans Zimmer

Intense, moving and disturbing: Zimmer’s main theme for Inception has the power to take you into a world of pure focus, determination and brain power.

The Well-Tempered Clavier – Bach

Fingers starting to feel a bit clumsy on the old laptop keys? J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is a masterpiece of precision, designed to train your mind as well your keyboard technique.

Etudes – Chopin

Lunch break is over, you’ve had a coffee, now let’s get back to it. The ambitious arpeggio passages in Chopin’s fiendish Etudes are the perfect brain-trainer.

Piano Concerto No. 23 – Mozart

It’s long been rumoured that listening to Mozart is good for focusing (some studies even say it could make your baby smarter). While there may be no proof in that particular pudding, the gorgeous rising melodies and beautifully balanced rhythms in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 will guide you into the right mindset.

The Hours – Philip Glass

A genius work of minimalism. Simple layers on simple layers build, creating beautiful cross-rhythms to spur you on in the moments where it feels like the revision may never end.

Etudes – Debussy

Debussy designed each of his etudes to focus on a different practice technique. The perfect framework for an efficient study session.

A Beautiful Mind – James Horner

For those moments when you feel like your brain just isn’t up to it, pop this on. Horner’s gorgeous orchestration and spinning melodies give you the power and drive to make you feel capable of anything.

I Giorni – Einaudi

A gentle, hypnotic piece to bring you peace while you work, and to help you breathe if you ever feel like there’s just too much on your plate.

Moonlight Sonata (I) – Beethoven

A slow, hypnotic set of arpeggios lulls you into Beethoven’s most loved solo piano piece. Reflective and calm, it’s the ideal background music to your studies.

Hank Mobley

From Wikipedia:

Henry "Hank" Mobley (July 7, 1930 – May 30, 1986) was an American hard bop and soul jazz tenor saxophonist and composer. Mobley was described by Leonard Feather as the "middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone", a metaphor used to describe his tone, that was neither as aggressive as John Coltrane nor as mellow as Stan Getz, and his style that was laid-back, subtle and melodic, especially in contrast with players like Sonny Rollins and Coltrane. The critic Stacia Proefrock claimed he is "one of the most underrated musicians of the bop era."

Imagine architecture that isn't just a box, imagine architecture with a sign of humanity, with humor...

The Hoot Hoot I Scream shack built in the mid-1920s in Los Angeles. Originally located on E. Valley Blvd. in Rosemead before it moved to Long Beach, where it was finally demolished in the mid-1950s.

Imagine the discipline this took to create....

Nicolas-Sébastien Adam -  Prometheus Chained.

From Wikipedia:

In Greek mythology, Prometheus (Possibly meaning "forethought") is a Titan, culture hero, and trickster figure who is credited with the creation of humanity from clay, and who defies the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humanity as civilization. Prometheus is known for his intelligence and as a champion of humankind and also seen as the author of the human arts and sciences generally. He is sometimes presented as the father of Deucalion, the hero of the flood story.

The punishment of Prometheus as a consequence of the theft of fire is a popular subject of both ancient and modern culture. Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, sentenced the Titan to eternal torment for his transgression. The immortal was bound to a rock, where each day an eagle, the emblem of Zeus, was sent to eat Prometheus' liver, which would then grow back overnight to be eaten again the next day (in ancient Greece, the liver was often thought to be the seat of human emotions). Prometheus was eventually freed by the hero Heracles.

In the Western classical tradition, Prometheus became a figure who represented human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences. In particular, he was regarded in the Romantic era as embodying the lone genius whose efforts to improve human existence could also result in tragedy: Mary Shelley, for instance, gave The Modern Prometheus as the subtitle to her novel Frankenstein.

Indulge yourself

The colors!

Burhan Dogancayb. 1929, Istanbul.

Colourful Ensemble, 1938, Wassily Kandinsky

The garden steps, 1940, Pierre Bonnard.

The Snail, 1953, Henri Matisse

The Meeting from the portfolio Revolving Doors, 1926, Man Ray.

Roland Petersen  -  The Other Side of the Rainbow   (acrylic on canvas, 1972)

Rosalyn Drexler  -  Maui Wowie (Jean-Michel and Andy Take a Trip)    [acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 1989]

The Teatro Massimo opera house

The Teatro Massimo opera house in Palermo, early 1900s.The Teatro Massimo Vittorio Emanuele is on the Piazza Verdi in Palermo, Sicily. It is the biggest in Italy, and one of the largest of Europe and renowned for its perfect acoustics.

The beauty of blck and white film

A little girl during The Blitz, 1940

Artists at a party in Chelsea, 1949. Photographed by Erich Auerbach.

Harlem, NYC, 1963. Photographed by Leonard Freed.

Vladimir Nabokov, Despair

To begin with, let us take the following motto… Literature is Love. Now we can continue. 

The only people who want to defund the police never lived in a slum. When you live in a slum, I can tell you, you want as many cops around as possible.

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large-- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.”― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

Johnny Shiloh

When I was a boy, The Wonderful World of Disney came on at 7:00 PM Sunday nights and it was a must see program for just about every kid that had a TV. In 1963, Disney produced a made-for-TV film entitled Johnny Shiloh, with Kevin Corcoran (Who died recently of cancer) in the title role. I absolutely loved it. I mean it was a great film for a little boy to see.

The film was inspiring because it was based on a true story, the story of John Lincoln Clem (1851-1937), “the Drummer Boy of Chickamauga” AKA “Johnny Shiloh.”

More than ten thousand soldiers under the age of eighteen served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. Among the youngest John Lincoln “Johnny” Clem who ran away from his home in Newark, Ohio, at age 9, after the death of his mother in a train accident, to join the Union Army. Unable to jin the military, he tagged along behind the 22nd Michigan Regiment and performed camp duties for a standard soldier’s pay of $13 a month, a sum collected and donated by the regiment’s officers.

The legend says that Clem served as a drummer boy with the 22nd Michigan at the Battle of Shiloh where he was almost killed from a shrapnel shell crashed through his drum, knocking him unconscious only to be rescued by infantrymen who from therein nicknamed Clem "Johnny Shiloh."

However Clem more than probably wasn’t in the battle of Shiloh. The 22nd Michigan hadn’t been organized at that point, only coming together in August 1862, four months after the battle. Sadly, the  Johnny Shiloh legend probably grew out of a popular Civil War song, "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh" by William S. Hays.

However, Clem did serve as a drummer boy for the 22nd Michigan at the Battle of Chickamauga and rode on an artillery caisson to the front and wielded a musket trimmed to his size. The story that he shot a Confederate colonel who had demanded his surrender, might be a bit of a stretch. He more than probably only wounded Col. Calvin Walker, whose 3rd Tennessee opposed the 22nd Michigan towards the end of the battle but didn’t kill him. According to Col. Walker he shouted out “I think the best thing a mite of a chap like you can do, is drop that gun.”

After the battle, Clem became known as the "Drummer Boy of Chickamauga" and was decorated by Secretary of the Treasury, later Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Salmon P. Chase, and promoted to sergeant, the youngest soldier ever to be a noncommissioned officer in the United States Army.

A year later, in October of 1863, Clem was captured in Georgia by Confederate cavalrymen while detailed as a train guard. The Rebels confiscated his uniform, and his hat which he held precious because it had three bullet holes in it. He was traded in a prisoner exchange a short time later. (As the youngest soldier in the Union Army, and a war hero, Clem was a nationally renowned figure.)

Clem went on to fight in several other battles and was wounded twice while serving as a mounted orderly. He was honorably discharged in September of 1864 at age 13.

As a civilian, he entered high school and graduated in 1870. A year later,  he was elected commander/captain of the "Washington Rifles" a District of Columbia Army National Guard militia unit. After he failed the entrance exam to West Point, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him second lieutenant in the Twenty Fourth United States Infantry in December 1871. He was promoted to captain in 1882 and transferred to the Quartermaster Department where he stayed for the rest of his career. He was promoted to major in 1895.

During the Spanish–American War in 1898 he served as depot quartermaster in Portland, Oregon and later as a department quartermaster for the Department of Columbia. (Washington DC) and later served in Puerto Rico as depot.  He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1901 and to colonel in 1903. He then served from 1906 to 1911 as chief quartermaster at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.

After the death of his first wife, at age fifty-two, Clem married twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Sullivan. Their daughter, Elizabeth Ann, would later enter a Carmelite monastery in Indianapolis and become a Nun.

In 1915, Clem reached the mandatory retirement age of 64 and retired at the rank of brigadier general. At the time, he was the last veteran of the American Civil War serving in the U.S. Army. In the summer of 1931, at age eighty, he turned back to Roman Catholicism.

Clem died on May 13, 1937, reciting the rosary at his home in San Antonio, Texas. He was eighty-five years old. His tombstone at Arlington Cemetery reads “The Drummer Boy of Chickamauga.”

Brick city. By Matteo Mezzadri

Tis himself, the Great F. Scott

Andy Burgess, Changing Lanes, 2014

London-born artist Andy Burgess, who lives in Tucson, Arizona. He is known is known for his renditions of modernist and mid-century architecture, panoramic cityscape paintings, and elaborate mosaic-like collages made from collected vintage papers and ephemera. 

I hate to admit it, but he's right.

Samuel Barber – Adagio for Strings

Since the 1938 recording, the Adagio for Strings has frequently been heard throughout the world, and it was one of the few American pieces to be played in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The Adagio for Strings has been performed on many public occasions, especially during times of mourning. It was:

Broadcast over radio at the announcement of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death

Broadcast on television at the announcement of John F. Kennedy's death

Played at the funeral of Albert Einstein

Played at the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco

Broadcast on BBC Radio several times after the announcement of the death of Princess Diana

Performed at Last Night of the Proms in 2001 at the Royal Albert Hall to honor the memory of the victims of the September 11 attacks

Played during the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Vancouver; the fatal crash of the luger Nodar Kumaritashvili on the same day added to the performance's emotional affect.

Played at the state funeral of Canadian Jack Layton, the New Democratic Party Leader

Played in Trafalgar Square, on January 9, 2015, by an ensemble of 150 string players led by Thomas Gould of the Aurora Orchestra following the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo.

Played at the National University of Singapore for the state funeral of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore on 29 March 2015

Played by the Brussels Philharmonic on March 25, 2016 in front of the Brussels Stock Exchange following the 2016 Brussels bombings earlier that week.

Played at the National University of Singapore for the state funeral of S. R. Nathan in Singapore on August 26, 2016

Played in Blonia Park in Kraków on July 29, 2016, as the background music for the 12th Station of the Stations of the Cross during World Youth Day 2016.

Played in Central Park in New York City on June 15, 2016, for the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting.

Played at the televised memorial in Manchester, England on May 23, 2017, for the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing.

Played at the digital European Concert by Berlin Philharmonie on May 1, 2020, for the victims of the Coronavirus victims.

Adagio for Strings is the final song on the 2010 Peter, Paul and Mary compilation album Peter Paul and Mary, With Symphony Orchestra. Mary Travers had requested that Adagio for Strings be played at her memorial service.

The Adagio for Strings was one of John F. Kennedy's favorite pieces of music. Jackie Kennedy arranged a concert the Monday after his death with the National Symphony Orchestra; they played to an empty hall. The concert was broadcast by radio.

 Barber knew about these memorial occasions. He did a radio interview about it with WQXR and said, "They always play that piece. I wish they'd play some of my other pieces."

In 2006 a recorded performance of this work by the London Symphony Orchestra was the highest-selling classical piece on iTunes.

I lake that about you

My version of what heaven will be like

Ah! The magic of black and white film.

Black-and-white vintage photographs of New York City in the 1950s taken by Ersnt Haas

Its a dogs life, Eli and Zen.(Zen is the younger one)

My garden updates

We got the waterfall working!

Danny Garden

A Blessing by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness  

That we have come.

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.

There is no loneliness like theirs.  

At home once more,

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.  

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,

For she has walked over to me  

And nuzzled my left hand.  

She is black and white,

Her mane falls wild on her forehead,

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.

Suddenly I realize

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom.

Here's this weeks murder/torture of foster kids story

Investigation finds foster parent raped, abused children for four years

•           Elizabeth Nouryeh @NouryehNeighbor

 •          Jun 12, 2020 Updated Jun 12, 2020

 Chattahoochee Hills Police Department has charged a Fairburn foster parent with multiple felony rape and child molestation charges.

Johnny Lee Summers, 55, was arrested on multiple charges by the North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Department of Public Safety June. The Fairburn man has been charged in Georgia with the following:

•           Two felony counts of rape

•           Two felony counts of aggravated child molestation

•           Three felony counts of child molestation

•           Two felony counts of cruelty to children

•           One felony count of enticing a child for indecent purposes

•           Two misdemeanor counts for battery family violence

•           Two misdemeanor counts of simple assault

Chattahoochee Hills Police Department requested the Georgia Bureau of Investigation in December to investigate allegations of child molestation made against Summers, who was a foster parent. At the time of the allegations, Summers, and his wife, were fostering four siblings in their home.

The investigation has revealed that Summers molested and/or abused all four children in his care. The children range in age from 8 to 16-years-old and lived in the home for approximately four years.

Additional charges are expected. Summers is presently in custody at the Horry County, South Carolina Sheriff’s Office and awaiting extradition.

Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for 30 years

The 'Kentler Project' in West Berlin routinely placed homeless children with pedophile men, assuming they'd make ideal foster parents. A study has found the practice went on for decades.

Starting in the 1970s psychology professor Helmut Kentler conducted his "experiment." Homeless children in West Berlin were intentionally placed with pedophile men. These men would make especially loving foster parents, Kentler argued.

A study conducted by the university of Hildesheim has found that authorities in Berlin condoned this practice for almost 30 years. The pedophile foster fathers even received a regular care allowance.

Helmut Kentler (1928-2008) was in a leading position at Berlin's center for educational research. He was convinced that sexual contact between adults and children was harmless.

Berlin's child welfare offices and the governing Senate turned a blind eye or even approved of the placements.

Several years ago two of the victims came forward and told their story, since then the researchers at Hildesheim University have plowed through files and conducted interviews.

What they found was a "network across educational institutions," the state youth welfare office and the Berlin Senate, in which pedophilia was "accepted, supported, defended."

Kentler himself was in regular contact with the children and their foster fathers. He was never prosecuted: By the time his victims came forward, the statute of limitations for his actions had expired. This has also thus far prevented the victims from getting any compensation.

The researchers found that several of the foster fathers were high-profile academics. They speak of a network that included high-ranking members of the Max Planck Institute, Berlin's Free University, and the notorious Odenwald School in Hesse, West Germany, which was at the center of a major pedophilia scandal several years ago. It has since been closed down.

Berlin's senator for youth and children, Sandra Scheeres called the findings "shocking and horrifying."

A first report on the "Kentler experiment" was published in 2016 by the University of Göttingen. The researchers then stated that the Berlin Senate seemed to lack interest in finding out the truth.

Now Berlin authorities have vowed to shed light on the matter.

Oksana Skorik and Leonid Sarafanov performing Grand Pas Classique Mariinsky Ballet Mikhailovsky Ballet, 2018