Morning Meditation: Tuesday, August 27, 2024

ART APPRECIATION

In this Impressionist work, you can see bright colors and choppy brushstrokes. You see a scene from everyday life. Cassatt loved to capture mothers and their children in everyday life. When her family moved to Paris, she would often paint them drinking tea or relaxing in the garden.¹

Mary Cassatt (1845 – 1926) was born into a wealthy family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a child, she visited Paris’s great art museums, and she wanted to become an artist. Her family at first disapproved of this idea, because women in that day were usually not permitted to study art and to sell paintings. However, Cassatt attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and then moved to Paris to further her art studies. Cassatt’s paintings were accepted into the Salon, an important exhibit in Paris. She traveled around Europe as a successful artist, and later became friends with Edgar Degas, another famous Impressionist artist.²

MUSIC APPRECIATION

Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, BWV 1052: I. “Allegro” by Johann Sebastian Bach

The music of J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052, has an interesting, hybrid genealogy: it contains repurposed material from two of his cantatas and may have originally been written as a violin concerto. The three-movement concerto begins with a driving, menacing opening theme and virtuosic passages, followed by a slow a mysterious middle movement in G minor. By contrast, the intricate counterpoint and brisk tempo of the third movement are characteristic of Bach’s finales with an extravagant keyboard cadenza that guides the music toward a major key before a final, enthralling return to D minor.³

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was born in what is now Germany. He came from a family of musicians and was taught to play the organ by his eldest brother. Soon after this, in his teenage years, he began to focus on composing and performing keyboard and sacred music. Hundreds of his compositions, such as his church cantatas, were created for a religious context; he also composed an enormous amount of secular music, much of it purely instrumental.⁴