More Wind in the Willows

This class is really giving me problems with the rest of my classes...I keep getting distracted by it when I should be doing other things. :O( Example, today I was in the library to write a paper for my History 313 course. What did I end up doing? Reading a book about Wind in the Willows. Why? Because I am really engaging this stuff and it has made its way into my life in all kinds of ways. I can't decide if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I suppose good for me, bad for my grades in other courses. Ah, well...the scarifices we make for really good stories. :O)

I was looking for a place for you guys to hear the Van Morrison interpretation of "Piper at the Gates of Dawn." I could only find little thirty-second clips of the song. If you'd like to listen to those, slightly different portions you can go to this site http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000005ILN/qid=1097119552/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl15/103-8555556-9530269?v=glance&s=music&n=507846 or this one http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?userid=so4qQFw9Lb&EAN=731453710122&ITM=2 . The song is number 5 on the album. I was looking for other artistic renderings of this great chapter of The Wind in the Willows and I found another piece of music that I would like to hear. It's a piano suite compsoed by a woman named Wendy Hiscocks. I couldn't find any way to listen to a sample of it, but, I love piano music to begin with and I would be quite interested to hear her interpretation of the experience that Rat and Mole had on that special morning. The whole four pages leading up to the actual meeting of Mole, Rat, and Pan are full of descriptions of the heavenly music that they hear. How does one begin to create that? How do you create a melody that has people saying, as Rat does, "the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of...the music and the call must be for us." (132) That's quite a lot to live up to. Still, I'd love to hear it. There are actually quite a lot of examples of musical influence of Wind in the Willows. Sadly, not much of it is accessible for free. :O(

I found a few visual artistic representations of "The Piper", too. You can find them at the following addresses (I apologize for my lack of skill at putting pictures up on this thing, it's really much easier on a real website) http://www.globalgallery.com/enlarge/007-17204/ http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/johnmoores/23/dominic_shepherd.asp
http://www.classicpreservation.com/paintings3.html
Check them out. I wish I could paint. Tristan should give the class his rendering of this scene. :O)