Songs For All Seasons

Happy Father's Day to all those Dads: biological Dads, adoptive Dads, foster Dads, step-Dads and father figures. Men often get a bad rap these days. There's a lot of anti-men rhetoric, and talk of the patriarchy and toxic masculinity, and sometimes with good cause. But there's not enough talk about the good, decent men out there. The ones who don't want to take us back to the time when "men were in charge and women knew their place." The ones who just quietly get on with their lives, being decent human beings and respecting others, the ones who understand that the world has changed, and the ones who have changed with it. One such is my Dad, Bill Cavanagh. He was born in 1940 and turns 85 this year. Although I credit my mum for giving me my first musical teaching, I credit my Dad for getting me into choral singing (and also Star Trek). As a small child I would watch him sing in the church choir every Sunday and long to be up there with him. At the age of 8 I wa...

Today's Song of the Day is my setting of a very famous poem, although many people "of a certain age" may, like me, have been first introduced to it in the film "Dead Poets Society" starring the incredible, inimitable, indescribably funny Robin Williams (can you tell I'm a fan?) "O Captain! My Captain!", by Walt Whitman (1819-1892), was written in 1865, in the wake of President Lincoln's assassination in April of that year.  Although he never met Lincoln, Whitman felt a connection to him and was greatly moved by Lincoln's assassination. The metaphor is that the USA is the ship of state, with Lincoln as its captain/father. Uncharacteristic of Whitman's poetry, the poem was Whitman's most popular during his lifetime, and the only one to be anthologized before his death. In early 1866, a reviewer in the Boston Commonwealth wrote that the poem was the most moving dirge for Lincoln...