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Program Note
Even before the pandemic, it seemed you could feel the world had begun to spin just a little faster, and we were all losing our footing. Somehow this reminded me of the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” from Yeat’s The Second Coming. The poem was written in the aftermath of WWI and during the 1918-19 flu pandemic (when Yeat’s wife, Georgie, caught the virus while pregnant and almost died). About a hundred years before, William Wordsworth wrote The World Is Too Much With Us, another reflection on humankind’s awkward coexistence in this world: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours”. Over time, it seems, while things change, they don’t really change that much. When I was a kid in Chicago in the 1960s, especially when things felt more unfriendly than usual, at night I would walk over to the little park around the corner and talk to the stars – and I always felt better for it. So sitting all together, listening together to an overture to the moon and stars just now seems like a good thing. I hope so. Thank you to Steve Lipsitt and the musicians of 3B Society for letting me, after waiting and waiting, finally make music in the world again. I am also forever grateful to Joan Smith for her generous help in funding this return.