A note—
E, D, C♯—
held, not going anywhere.
The rose at the window—
petal and spiral,
not in stages.
The notes fall like sand—
broken,
and whole.
Category: music
Lifted by the Trumpet’s Breath: On Music and the Aural Trinity
The first sonorous caress that flows from the trumpet at the opening of this exquisite piece elevates heart, mind, and soul toward the heavens—tickling the senses, stirring the intellect, and penetrating the depths of spirit. The sound of the music then envelops me whole, encompassing my being as both serene comfort and nourishing balm.
Over the years, I have found the greatest pleasure in musical compositions that awaken what I have come to think of as the aural trinity—heart, mind, and soul—music that refuses to address only one dimension of human experience. There is the tickling of the senses, that physical, almost tactile delight in pure sound; the stirring of the intellect, where architectural beauty and mathematical precision reveal themselves; and the penetration of the spirit, that ineffable movement beyond analysis into pure being.
And if, by chance, anyone should wonder at my musical inclinations, I can offer no clearer explanation than the thoughts above. Yet I hasten to add that the genres and traditions encompassed within this aural trinity are far greater and more varied than one might suppose—and surely different for every individual.
Songs I Thought I Understood: A Requiem and Reflection in Ten Refrains
These ten poetic reflections revisit the protest anthems, lullabies, and cultural hymns that shaped a generation—songs we once sang in innocence, defiance, or hope. But time has sharpened their meanings, revealed their silences, and unsettled their assurances.
Songs I Thought I Understood is not a repudiation of the music, but a reckoning with what we missed—or could not yet see—in the melodies we inherited. Each piece responds to a specific song, not by rewriting it, but by listening anew with older ears and quieter questions.
Songs I Thought I Understood
A Requiem and Reflection in Ten Refrains
by Donald S. Yarab
“For the ones who heard the songs and still ask the questions.”
The Ten Refrains:
Puff Remembers (after “Puff the Magic Dragon”)
The Valley Below (after “One Tin Soldier”)
The Flowers Still Bloom (after “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”)
The Needle Lifts (after “This Land Is Your Land”)
The Submarine Below (after “Yellow Submarine”)
No One Was Saved (after “Eleanor Rigby”)
The Wind Still Blows (after “Blowin’ in the Wind”)
Can It Be (after “Let It Be”)
Neon Psalm (after “The Sound of Silence”)
We Have Not (after “We Shall Overcome”)
Puff Remembers
(after “Puff the Magic Dragon”)
Somewhere over the rainbow,
Once upon a time,
In a land not so far away—
Yes, with dragons.
Puff—I remember him well.
He sailed without maps,
Carried no sword,
Only stories.
But Little Jackie Paper—
No, I never knew him.
He came, they say, with sealing wax,
With strings, with child-sized laughter.
And then he left.
As children do.
As they must.
Puff stayed behind,
Watching the tide pull dreams from the sand,
Waiting longer than most would,
Believing perhaps too much.
Now I am older than Puff was then.
The toys are gone.
The books are shut.
Even memory, sometimes, forgets its lines.
Still—
Sometimes I think I hear the flap of canvas,
The creak of rope,
The rhythm of a boat
That knows its way through time.
He may be out there yet—
Not waiting, exactly,
But still sailing,
With room for one more story.
The Valley Below
(after “One Tin Soldier”)
I remember One Tin Soldier,
The mountain people, the treasure buried deep,
The message of peace—
Unspoken, unread,
Trampled by riders from the valley below.
As a child, I did not understand
Why they came with swords
To claim what was freely offered.
I did not understand
Why they could not wait,
Why they did not read.
They were simply the People in the Valley Below.
But now—I know them.
They live not far from here.
They speak in votes and verdicts,
In profits and justifications,
In silence, and in slogans
Worn smooth with use.
Some are kind, some mean well.
Most are afraid.
Many never climb.
And though the treasure still lies buried—
That old dream of peace,
The circle unbroken,
The better world whispered in songs—
I see fewer walking toward the mountain.
Fewer still willing to wait.
The child I was weeps,
Not for the dead soldier,
But for the living who will never read
The words beneath the stone.
The Flowers Still Bloom
(after “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”)
The flowers—I see them.
They bloom each spring,
In roadside ditches,
In tended gardens,
In places untouched by war
Only by accident.
But where are they,
Even now?
Where are the promises they once held—
The wreaths we laid,
The songs we sang,
The lessons we said we had learned?
Where are the girls who picked them,
And the boys they gave them to,
Before uniforms,
Before funerals,
Before forgetting?
They bloom still,
Unconcerned.
Nature does not mourn the fallen.
It only covers them.
We placed our hope in petals
And let them drift into the graves—
Answers too proud
Or too ashamed
To be spoken.
Yes, I see the flowers.
But I see them differently now.
They are not peace.
They are not memory.
They are what grows when nothing else is left.
The Needle Lifts
(after “This Land Is Your Land”)
This land is your land,
This land is mine—
That is what the song said.
And we sang it,
Hand in hand,
Before we knew
Who drew the lines.
From California to the New York island—
Yes, the rivers still run,
The redwoods still rise,
But whose boots
Are turned away
At the fence?
Whose tent
Stands just outside
The melody?
I walked that ribbon of highway once.
I saw the “No Trespassing” sign,
Half-buried in dust.
And behind it—
Nothing but wind,
And memory.
This land was made for you and me.
But the deed was never signed.
Or if it was,
It has been lost
Beneath centuries of ash and ink.
The voices fall quiet.
The turntable slows.
The needle lifts.
And still the land stretches,
Unresolved.
The chorus unreturned.
The question unsung.
The Submarine Below
(after “Yellow Submarine”)
We all lived there, once—
In the Yellow Submarine.
Or so we sang.
A vessel of laughter,
Of porthole dreams
And choruses in perfect time.
We believed in it,
In its bright hull,
Its cartoon courage,
Its watertight world
Where everyone belonged
And nothing intruded.
Unity,
We thought,
Could be painted in primary colors.
Could float beneath the noise,
And keep us safe.
But the world knocked.
And the hull bent.
And the sea
Was not always blue.
Some never boarded.
Some were told
There was no room.
Some were thrown overboard
Before the song began.
Now I wonder—
Was the submarine ever real?
Or just a dream we made
To keep the waters from us?
If it sails still,
It does so
With ghosts at the helm,
And a quiet
We mistook for peace.
No One Was Saved
(after “Eleanor Rigby”)
Eleanor gathered the rice like a rite—
Not a wedding,
But a funeral in disguise.
No one noticed.
No one asked
Why she did it alone.
She lived in a world of quiet corners,
Of teacups with dust,
Of pews that creaked
For no one in particular.
I did not see her then.
Not really.
She was background—
A figure in a verse
I sang without knowing.
And Father McKenzie—
He wrote his sermons by candlelight,
Even when no one came.
He believed in the act,
In the speaking itself,
As if God were listening
Even if the people were not.
I used to think
They were odd.
Sad, yes—
But distant,
Part of another time.
Now I see them in doorways,
At bus stops,
Scrolling through silence
On glowing screens.
I see them in myself,
In the way I answer fewer calls,
In the prayers I no longer finish.
All the lonely people—
They are not elsewhere.
They are not lost in some old song.
They are here.
And no one was saved.
The Wind Still Blows
(after “Blowin’ in the Wind”)
I remember when the answer
Was blowing in the wind.
We sang it as if that meant
It was near,
As if the breeze would carry it to us
If we just opened our hands
Or listened hard enough.
But I have stood in that wind now.
Not once.
Not in youthful chorus,
But in silence.
And the answers do not ride so lightly.
How many roads?
Too many to count.
Too many lined with names
Etched in metal,
Or cardboard signs that ask
Not for peace,
But for spare change.
How many ears must one man have
Before he hears the cry?
Enough to wear out the listening.
Enough to forget which voice was his.
The cannonballs still fly,
Though we call them by different names now—
Policy.
Preemption.
Profit.
“Necessary force.”
Yes, the wind still blows.
But the answers,
If they are there,
Have long since been scattered
Across deserts,
Across oceans,
Across generations too tired
To ask the questions anymore.
Can It Be
(after “Let It Be”)
When I find myself in times of silence,
I do not hear
The words of wisdom.
I hear the ache of asking
Whether silence is answer,
Or simply absence.
Let it be, they said.
And I tried.
I tried to let the world
Unfold as it would,
To trust in the slow work of time.
But still the wars came.
Still the towers fell.
Still the hands reached out
And found nothing waiting.
Mother Mary—
She comes to some.
But others
Find no visitor
In the night.
Let it be?
Can it be?
Is there something
We have not yet asked,
Some word not spoken
Because we were told
Not to speak at all?
There will be an answer—
So the song promised.
But I have learned
That sometimes
The answer is another question.
Neon Psalm
(after “The Sound of Silence”)
Hello darkness—
It does not answer.
It scrolls.
It flashes.
We used to whisper to the void
And hope it heard.
Now we shout
And hope it trends.
The prophets write in hashtags,
Their sermons flickering
Across shattered glass,
Their congregations swiping
And moving on.
No one walks the quiet streets,
No one weeps in the back pew.
The cathedral is a comment thread
Lit by the glow
Of the god we built
To hear ourselves.
No one dared disturb
The sound of silence—
That was the line.
But now it is all disturbance.
The silence
Is what we fear.
I remember when words
Had gravity,
When they settled in the chest
And waited
To be spoken with care.
Now even grief
Is curated.
Still—
Somewhere beneath the algorithms,
Beneath the noise mistaken for voice,
Beneath the sponsored silence,
I believe the old language
Waits.
Not to go viral.
But to be heard.
We Have Not
(after “We Shall Overcome”)
We shall overcome—
That is what we sang.
We locked arms,
Lit candles,
Marched softly into nights
Thick with dogs and doubt.
And some did overcome.
Some bridges held.
Some laws changed.
Some doors opened.
But not all.
Not for everyone.
Not everywhere.
And not for long.
Some came after
And tore down the signs,
Or rewrote them in finer script.
Some left the door ajar
Just wide enough
To say it had been opened.
I do not mock the song.
I remember it.
In the bones.
In the breath held
Before a verdict.
In the quiet
After a child is buried.
We shall overcome—
We whispered it
When shouting would not do.
But the road is longer
Than the hymnbook said.
And the hill steeper
Than memory allows.
We have not.
Not yet.
Still—
There is something in the singing,
Even now.
Even if the words tremble.
Even if the chorus
Grows thin.
Exploring Life’s Seasons: A Folk-Country Ballad Inspiration
This past week found me felled by a viral affliction. Partaking neither in food nor drink, and scarcely participating in sensible cognition, I was confined to bed for more days than I care to recall. Yet, as the affliction ebbed and fragments of normalcy returned, I turned instinctively to the rejuvenating essays of Montaigne and Ralph Waldo Emerson—sources of intellectual nourishment I revisit whenever my spirit requires renewal.
Immersed in their timeless prose, I found myself drifting into a peculiar, lyrical state of mind. Suspended between the lingering exhaustion of illness and the clarity that accompanies recovery, I began reflecting on the seasons of life as illuminated by these great essayists. One restless night, as I contemplated the transformations we undergo from youth to old age, a thought emerged: our lives might be divided into three distinct seasons. The first is the boundless optimism of youth, the second the tempered cynicism of middle age, and the third, a kind of amiable reconciliation in later years.
Initially, I intended to encapsulate each season in a simple couplet, but inspiration soon carried me beyond that modest aim. Each season grew into a stanza, and those stanzas evolved into lyrics for a song. To the surprise of anyone familiar with my usual preferences, I envisioned the piece as a folk-country ballad—an entirely unexpected departure. Adding a touch of mischief, I deliberately included a non-grammatical line to irk a particular friend who finds such lapses intolerable to his Germanic sensibilities. With lyrics in hand, I collaborated with Udio.com to set the lyrics I had written to music. The result is a short composition titled Three Seasons We Live.
This song traces the journey of life through its phases: from the bright-eyed optimism of youth, through the shadows of midlife cynicism, and ultimately into the serenity of autumnal reflection. Its brevity is telling of my still-recovering stamina; I am reserving my energy for Vitruvian Man Unbound, a work that remains in need of substantial emendation, refining, revising, reorganizing—and likely, the painful excision of several dozen eight-line stanzas. I simply got carried away with the iambic pentameter once I got started.
In the meantime, as Monty Python would say, “And now for something completely different.” I invite you to listen to this heartfelt piece, an unexpected blend of introspection and melody, crafted during a week marked by convalescence and quiet inspiration.
Chiaroscuro: The Battle Between Light and Shadow within Our Souls
The Good God and the Evil God
By Khalil Gibran
The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountaintop. The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.” The Evil God did not answer. And the Good God said, “You are in bad humor today.” “Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have often been mistaken for you, called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.” And the Good God said, “But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.” The Evil God walked away, cursing the stupidity of man.
In my youth, I eschewed the simplistic notion that humanity was innately good or evil. Rather, I opined that humanity was innately confused—a collective of beings adrift in the vast ocean of existence, grappling with the manifold complexities of our condition. In those earlier days, my worldview was perhaps influenced by the idealism of youth, a belief that clarity could be found in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding.
Now, decades later, having traversed the cacophony of life’s myriad experiences and having engaged with countless multitudes of my fellow beings, I have arrived at a more somber conclusion. The confusion I once recognized as a fundamental aspect of our nature has revealed itself as a fertile ground upon which the basest and blackest of motives take root. It is not merely that we are confused, but that this confusion often serves as a pretext for succumbing to base emotions—emotions that, when left unchecked, lead us to actions driven by hatred, fear, and greed. Those driven by a lust for power know how to play upon, manipulate, and inflame these emotions to their advantage.
Over the past thirty or forty years, I have borne witness to the pernicious effects of these emotions, observing how they fester and metastasize within individuals and societies alike. In my professional and personal endeavors, I have encountered those whose actions are fueled by malignant self-interest, an insatiable hunger for power, or a profound disdain for “the other.” These observations have led me to a troubling realization: that the very forces that drive individuals in their personal lives—those same dark and destructive impulses—also drive nations, shaping the course of history in ways both overt and subtle.
It is here that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s reflection in The Gulag Archipelago resonates with particular poignancy: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Solzhenitsyn’s insight challenges the comforting illusion that evil is an external force, embodied in others who can be isolated and eradicated. Instead, he exposes the profound and unsettling truth that this dichotomy of good and evil resides within each of us. It is a truth that underscores the very essence of our internal struggles—a reflection of the chiaroscuro that defines the human soul.
This inner conflict and the murkiness of moral judgment were starkly impressed upon me during my youth by a singular event: the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador. Romero, a man of deep faith and profound courage, became the voice for the oppressed, the spokesman for the innocents caught in the crossfire of a brutal civil conflict. His murder, carried out while he was celebrating Mass, was not merely an act of violence; it was an act of profound darkness, a chilling reminder of the depths to which humanity can sink when driven by fear and hatred.
Romero was assassinated in 1980 less than a month after he wrote the U.S. president as follows: “I am very worried by the news that the government of the United States is studying a form of abetting the arming of El Salvador…. The present junta government and above all the armed forces and security forces unfortunately have not demonstrated their capacity to resolve, in political and structural practice, the grave national problems. In general they have only reverted to repressive violence, producing a total of deaths and injuries much greater than in the recent military regimes whose systematic violation of human rights was denounced by the Inter-American Committee on Human Rights. … As archbishop of the Archdiocese of San Salvador I have an obligation to see that faith and justice reign in my country, (so) I ask you, if you truly want to defend human rights, to prohibit the giving of [U.S.] military aid to the Salvadoran government.” His plea was a direct appeal to the moral conscience of those who held the power to influence the course of the conflict, an appeal which was ignored.
What made this tragedy all the more harrowing was its connection to misguided American foreign policy—we are, after all, the “good guys.” In our fear of communism, a fear that pervaded the geopolitics of the era, we chose to support the bleakest and most ruthless elements within El Salvador with over $5 billion in military and economic aid after the assassination of Romero (equivalent to over $12 billion in 2024). In a population of under five million—of which nearly one million fled the country and nearly 85,000 were killed during the conflict—that level of spending did little for the people but clearly enriched the greed-driven American military-industrial complex and the wealthy in El Salvador. The irony was bitter: in our quest to combat what we perceived as a greater evil, we found ourselves complicit in the oppression and murder of the very innocents we claimed to protect. The financial and military support we provided did not foster peace or justice; instead, it fueled a cycle of violence and repression that devastated a nation, while enriching those who profited from the machinery of war.
Similarly, the events of September 11 unleashed a torrent of rage and hatred—emotions so blinding that they allowed those who led us to manipulate the nation into engaging in war, torture, and atrocities against parties who had no involvement in the tragic events of that day. But beyond the emotions of hate and fear, there lay another, more insidious motivation: greed. The subsequent war in Iraq, which tore asunder communities, families, and an entire nation—even if it did result in the removal of a dictator—was driven not by a quest for justice related to September 11 but by the lure of access to oil, as openly admitted by administration officials and policy documents. The opportunity to test weapons and expand the influence of the military-industrial complex was also a significant factor, furthering the interests of those who profit from conflict, which cost over $1.1 trillion. Our collective hatred blinded us to these underlying motives, distorting our perception of reality and leading us down a path of destruction. The legacy of this blindness is writ large in the deaths of thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, as well as in the horrors of the torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison under our watch and the ongoing moral quagmire of Guantanamo Bay, now in its twenty-second year.
And today, we are witnessing yet another iteration of this tragic cycle in the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. The world watches as Israel, a nation born from the ashes of the Holocaust, wages war upon the open-air concentration camps that confine the Palestinian people—a war supported and funded in large part by the United States. The threats posed to Israel are real and must be addressed, but the hatred and fear that fuel this conflict have become so pervasive, so deeply entrenched, that they have rendered many unable to distinguish between a targeted response to the provocation of October 7, 2023, and a war of extermination against the Palestinian people. As of August 14, 2024, approximately 40,000 Palestinians have been killed and 97,000 wounded, while approximately 1,140 Israelis have been killed and 8,700 wounded. Though it should be evident, it is not, due to the lens of hatred and fear through which so many view the world—most of the dead and wounded are, in every conceivable way, innocents.
Yet, beyond hatred and fear, the influence of greed is once again unmistakable. The military-industrial complex (a fancy way to say the wealthy and greedy) profits handsomely from the $12.5 billion in military aid being funneled to Israel from the U.S. in this current crisis. This unrestrained flow of arms and support, justified by the rhetoric of defense and security, serves to perpetuate the cycle of violence, ensuring that the conflict remains unresolved and that the profits of war continue to flow.
This inability to discern between combatants and innocents, this failure to grasp the complexities and realities of the situation, has led to a bloodthirsty campaign that is as disheartening as it is devastating. The complicity of our own government, and thus ourselves, in this unrestrained violence, in this systematic destruction of lives and communities, is a burden that weighs heavily on the conscience. It is a stark reminder of the perils of allowing fear, hatred, and greed to dictate our actions, of the moral abyss we approach when we fail to temper our instincts with reason and compassion.
These events serve as powerful reminders of the perilous consequences of allowing fear, hatred, and greed to dictate our actions. They underscore the importance of vigilance, of constantly reexamining the moral implications of our choices, both as individuals and as a society. As Carol Matas so eloquently captures in Daniel’s Story: “We are alive. We are human, with good and bad in us. That’s all we know for sure. We can’t create a new species or a new world. That’s been done. Now we have to live within those boundaries. What are our choices? We can despair and curse, and change nothing. We can choose evil like our enemies have done and create a world based on hate. Or we can try to make things better.” Matas’s words are a reminder that, while we may not possess the power to reshape the world or our fundamental nature, we do have the capacity to choose how we respond to the darkness within and around us.
In this context, the chiaroscuro of human existence becomes not merely a passive observation of the interplay between light and shadow, but a call to engage actively in the struggle. It is a reminder that we must strive, both individually and collectively, to make deliberate choices that reflect our higher aspirations rather than our baser instincts. The battle between good and evil may cut through the heart of every human being, but it is within our power to choose which side we will nurture and which we will resist.
To choose despair is to abdicate this responsibility, to allow the shadows to overwhelm the light. To choose hate is to perpetuate the very evils we decry, to create a world more steeped in darkness. But to choose to make things better—to educate ourselves, to act with integrity, to engage with the world around us in a spirit of compassion and understanding—is to affirm the light, to hold fast to the belief that, despite the confusion and the darkness, redemption is always possible.
In the end, it is this choice—this daily, often arduous choice—to strive toward the light that defines our humanity. It is this struggle, this tension between what we are and what we aspire to be, that forms the heart of Chiaroscuro, both as a musical composition and as a reflection on the human condition.
Northcoast Antiquarian 