Ghost fever = Mal de fantasma

I finished reading Joe Hayes Ghost Fever, voted winner of the Texas Bluebonnet Award for 2006-2007 by 23,580 Third through Sixth graders.

Hayes, Joe

Ghost fever = Mal de fantasma / by Joe Hayes. -- El Paso, Tex. : Cinco Puntos Press, c2004.

89 p. : ill. ; 22 cm.

ISBN: 9780938317838
Parallel text in English and Spanish.
Winner of the 2007 Bluebonnet Award

Subjects:
Bilingual books
Ghost stories
Haunted houses -- Arizona -- Fiction
JUVENILE FICTION / Horror & Ghost Stories

Annotation:
Cole Cash made a lot of money renting houses on the other side of the tracks. But there was one no one would rent, not even with six months free rent. No one that is, until Frank Padilla moved into town with his daughters to start life over with his two daughters.

La Llorona y ein deutsches Requiem

Last night Lisa and I were invited out to the symphony. There were two pieces on the program, two musical meditations on death: La Llorona: tone poem for viola and orchestra by Gabriela Lena Frank and Ein deutsches Requiem by Johannes Brahms. La Llorona was commissioned by the Houston Symphony, and had been given its world premiere the evening before. At the start of the program the composer addressed the audience. La Llorona is based on the Latin American legend of the “crying woman,” an unhappy ghost that suffered a violent death. Frank invited us to think of this piece as a “ballet without dancers,” and imagine a troubled spirit unsuccessfully attempting the difficult transition to another way of being.

Until last night I was familiar with La Llorona only from the version Antonio Sacre tells as a scary story on one of his recordings, [1] so it was interesting to hear it told in another, non-verbal, medium. Frank’s was an inventive and beautiful piece of music, melancholy and melodic, interrupted by sharp slapping of boards together and eldritch moaning strings. Something, which I had never seen before, happened in the percussion section. Two of xylophone players leaned alternately over the front and back of their instruments with bows drawing them up across the instruments producing a low vibrant hum.

Lisa and I heard Ein deutsches Requiem together on our first date, Friday the 13^th of November 1987 in Jackson Hall at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville, played by the Nashville Symphony. Perhaps not the most auspicious date or the cheeriest of subject matter for a first date, yet it has turned out well for us. So although pleasant nostalgia may have colored my perceptions slightly, I still must rave about the performance of the Houston Symphony and Houston Symphony Chorus last night. It was a blast, an all-out musical extravaganza, thunderous and thrilling.

---

[1] Sacre, Antonio. Water torture, the barking mouse and other tales of wonder (Evanston: Woodside Avenue Music Productions, 2000) 1 audiocassette (43 min.) (American Story Series; 2) ISBN: 1-886283-15-X

To begin

I begin this blog to learn how to blog. I must confess that I am more interested in learning than in blogging.