This week on “Picture Perfect,” for Black Friday, we flee “civilization” for the relative safety of the wilderness.
We’ll hear music from “Born Free” by John Barry, “Hatari!” by Henry Mancini, National Geographic’s “Grizzly!” by Jerome Moross, and “The Jungle Book,” by Miklós Rózsa.
I’d rather face Shere Khan than mall traffic. Join me for “The Call of the Wild,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
In Easton, Pennsylvania, the phrase “Beat P’burg!” can have more than one meaning.
P’burg is short for Phillipsburg (New Jersey), home of the Stateliners, longtime rivals of the Easton Red Rovers. The two teams face off on the campus of Lafayette College in an annual holiday bloodsport, the nation’s oldest high school interstate Thanksgiving football game.
How intense is the rivalry? During the NFL strike of 1988, the game was selected for national broadcast, the first high school Thanksgiving contest ever to receive that honor. At a point, I could swear, one of the announcers forgot himself and was caught muttering, “This is some good sh*t.”
The broadcast has been posted on YouTube (follow the link below). Take a gander at the traditional Easton bonfire (around the 2-minute mark), which is set each year on the eve of the game. This fire can be seen for miles. Unfortunately, the way it is shot, it is difficult to deduce the scale. At the time of its lighting, the wood is piled as high as a house, frequently with a car or an outhouse balanced on top. Don’t ask me where they’re still able to find outhouses. This is Easton.
Do not confuse the bonfire with the garden variety campfire glimpsed at the 1-minute mark, which is only there to warm Easton students who sleep out the night before, in order to guard the wood from attempts by P’Burg to light it off early. One year, there was an actual assault with flaming arrows. In the weeks leading up to the game, mice and even pigs have been released in the halls of Easton Area High School with little maroon P’s painted on their backs.
I won’t tell you who won the 1988 contest, a classic Easton-P’Burg nail-biter, in case you want to watch it.
The coach was my high school history teacher, Bob Shriver. It’s sobering to think that all these kids are now around 50 years-old. Shriver is still around. I met him by chance at an Iron Pigs game this summer. You can hear the voice on the loudspeaker at the end of this video begging fans to keep off the field.
The game was televised a second time, for its 100th anniversary, on ESPN2 in 2006. On that occasion, Easton trounced its longstanding opponent, 21-7. Season championships are a big deal, of course, but the Thanksgiving game is a matter of pride, and both teams play with an impressive amount of heart. In all, Easton has taken the laurels 61 times, and Phillipsburg has been triumphant 42. There have been five ties. Unusually, one of these, from 1993, became the subject of a 2009 rematch, with players returning to take part in the Gatorade “REPLAY” series. On that occasion, Phillipsburg was victorious.
The rivalry dates back to 1905. Tickets are a hot commodity, and every year the stadium sells out in advance to 20,000 hyper-passionate fans, many of whom begin tailgating in the early daylight hours. In the good old days, it was possible take a stroll over to Lafayette Tavern to partake of some half-time refreshment. In recent years, once you leave the premises, you’re not allowed back in. Savvy fans know not to enter until they are fully fortified. Though bags are searched at the gates, it’s not exactly Checkpoint Charlie. I can’t imagine that there has ever been a year that liquor has not been smuggled in. Following the game, traffic, vandalism and vomit clog the trail down College Hill and back across the bridge to New Jersey. At some point, Lafayette College started boxing up its monuments.
The Easton-Phillipsburg Turkey Day game is first on this list of greatest high school football rivalries published in yesterday’s USA Today.
For the vanquished, Thanksgiving dinner loses all its savor. Needless to say, passions run high, and yesterday’s contest ended in a good old-fashioned donnybrook.
Still, I have to say, it is pretty thin brew next to the games of my youth, when fans would swarm Fisher Field to topple the goalposts. This, of course, would devolve into mini skirmishes that sent blood-spattered fans home to Thanksgiving dinner with loose-toothed smiles on their faces. As a native Eastonian, I know this, perhaps, better than I should.
BEAT P’BURG!
Also, the bands have gotten a lot better!
“Table Grace” by Matthew Brown. Ignore the visuals and just listen.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
It is my hope that you’re just about off the roads by the time I’m on the air this afternoon. But in the event that you are stuck in traffic, there’s no reason you should endure it in silence. Drown out your invective, or that of your loved ones, with three hours of musical reminders of why we should all give thanks.
If you’re lucky enough already to be home, perhaps you’re trying to get a leg up on tomorrow’s meal – or a drumstick, as the case may be. I’ve got plenty of music for you, too, to set the mood, while you’re in the process of setting the table. If the music makes your preparations that much more pleasurable, you can always send me a piece of pie.
Either way, I am thankful to have you in the audience. There is no radio without somebody there to appreciate it. If you’ve supported The Classical Network recently with a financial contribution, thank you. If something I’ve played has touched you or caught your interest, thank you for that, as well. It’s important to me that these composers and these recordings endure.
At 6:00, it’s another “Music from Marlboro.” I’ll supply a little cranberry sauce, with Antonin Dvořák’s “American” String Quintet (not to be confused with his more famous “American” QUARtet), along with some potatoes-and-gravy Vincent Persichetti and Elliot Carter.
I hope you’ll join me for a late afternoon/early evening full of harvest, hymns and pilgrims, from 4 to 7 p.m. EST. It’s my way of wishing you a happy Thanksgiving, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Over the river and through the wood, to grandmother’s house we go…
Who are we kidding? We’re not going anywhere.
While you’re whiling away the hours in Thanksgiving traffic, I hope you’ll join me on The Classical Network, on this busiest travel day of the year, as I crown a late afternoon of American music with an hour calculated to put you in a thankful frame of mind.
Sure, in the amount of time it takes you to get where you’re going, Antonin Dvořák very likely was able to cross the Atlantic, to assume the directorship of the newly-minted National Conservatory of Music in New York. Some of the composer’s most beloved works had their genesis in his stay in the United States – the “New World” Symphony and the Cello Concerto in B minor, among them.
Of his chamber music, I imagine none of it is more frequently encountered than his “American” String Quartet in F major, Op. 96. Written during the summer of 1893, while the composer was on holiday in the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa, the work is beautiful and ingratiating to an extraordinary degree. What’s puzzling is why the composer’s equally beautiful and ingratiating String Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 97, composed in Spillville immediately after – and also sometimes identified as the “American” – has not achieved the same degree of popularity.
We’ll get to enjoy it this evening, in a performance featuring a young Joshua Bell, who joins violinist Felix Galimir, violists Ulrich Eichenauer and Judith Busbridge, and cellist Wendy Sutter, at the 1989 Marlboro Music Festival.
Dvořák’s underrated quintet will be flanked by two works by American composers.
We’ll begin with Vincent Persichetti, who was born in Philadelphia in 1915. (He died there in 1987.) Although Persichetti seems to have had more of a lasting influence as a teacher – having molded legions of budding composers through his work at Combs College of Music, the Philadelphia Conservatory, and the Juilliard School – his own compositions are invariably well-crafted and certainly well worth listening to.
Persichetti composed 15 serenades for a variety of instrumental combinations. We’ll hear the Serenade No. 10, from 1961. It was performed at Marlboro, by flutist Julia Bogorad and harpist Rita Tursi, in 1976.
The hour will conclude with an 8-minute Woodwind Quintet by the dread Elliot Carter. Carter is the kind of composer who, for the six decades or so that comprised his artistic maturity, had a tendency to get lost in his own head. (He lived to 103 and wrote right up to the very end.) Not to worry: in 1948, he still had one foot in Audience Land.
We’ll hear Carter’s quintet performed in 2006 by flutist Valérie Tessa Chermiset, oboist Winnie Cheng-Wen Lai, clarinetist Charles Neidich, bassoonist Martin Garcia, and hornist Wei-Ping Chou.
Classic Ross Amico will be your co-pilot, on the next “Music from Marlboro.” Misery loves company, this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Happy Thanksgiving, and safe travels!
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