“Digory had never seen such a sun…You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. And as its beams shot across the land the travelers could see for the first time what sort of place they were in. It was a valley through which a broad, swift river wound its way, flowing eastward towards the sun. Southward there were mountains, northward there were lower hills. But it was a valley of mere earth, rock and water; there was not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass to be seen. The earth was of many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
GENESIS 2:4-7
4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. 5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— 7 then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.
ST. THOMAS’S PRAYER BEFORE STUDY
Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of our understanding. Take from us the double darkness in which we have been born, an obscurity of sin and ignorance. Give us keen understanding, retentive memories, and the ability to grasp things correctly and fundamentally. Grant us the talent of being exact in our explanations and the ability to express ourselves with thoroughness and charm. Point out the beginning, direct the progress, and help in the completion. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.
ART APPRECIATION
This painting is one of van Gogh’s paintings of the night sky and the effects of light at night. In this painting, we see a more realistic nighttime sky. We see a contrast between the two different types of light: starlight and light coming from the gas lamps, reflected on the river.1
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was born the son of a preacher in 1853 in Holland. He pursued a career in art for most of his life; he was never considered successful, though he worked tirelessly for days, sometimes without stopping to eat! Even though he painted over 800 works, only one painting sold during his lifetime. Van Gogh’s works are characterized by large, sweeping brush strokes using paints in a very thick amount. Sometimes he would store the paint on with a knife, almost like working with clay. Van Gogh also painted still lifes of fruits (lemons and pears) and of flowers (irises and sunflowers). Today, several of his paintings rank among the most expensive in the world! Other painters that lived during van Gogh’s lifetime were Jean-Francois millet, Paul Gaugin, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet. 2
MUSIC APPRECIATION
“Lullaby,” op. 49, No. 4 by Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms may have written the world’s most famous lullaby. Wiegenlied, Op. 49, No.4 was dedicated to Brahms’ former lover, Bertha Faber, after the birth of her son. The melody found its way into the first movement of Brahms’ Second Symphony in a slightly altered form.
3
Johannesburg Brahms (1833-1897) was one of the big “Three B’s” of the classical music world and is most widely known by modern audiences for his melodic lullaby, but his influence goes much further afield than simple children’s tunes.
The son of a lower middle class family, Brahms was born in Hamburg of the early 19th century; a scruffy port city filled with exotic traders and seedy traffickers alike. Although in an earlier era, it had been home to a number of fine musicians, it was, at the midpoint of the 19th century, a unseemly and unlikely a place for a future legend to arise as one might imagine. Although admittedly he was no child prodigy, he occasionally dislikened himself to the young Mozart, Brahms would tell listeners on later occasions that his father, a trained musician himself, often arranged Brahms’ early concerts in the public bars of the town. Bars of that place and era doubled as houses of ill-repute; it was an entirely shocking inverse portrait of Brahms’ life overlaid by evoking the measure of natural and wholesome adoration Wolfgang’s father’s evidenced for his child in securing him appointments to all the finest courts of Europe.4
- Lange, Krista, and Leigh Lowe. First Grade Enrichment: Classical Core Curriculum. Teacher Guide. Memoria Press, 2017. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Judd, Timothy. “Brahms’ Wiegenlied, Op. 49, No. 4.” Timothy Judd, Suzuki Violin Lessons, 7 Oct. 2015, timothyjuddviolin.com/tag/carnegie-hall/. ↩︎
- “Johannes Brahms: Kennedy Center.” The Kennedy Center, http://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/b/bo-bz/johannes-brahms/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024. ↩︎
Providence School of Tifton 