The Ridges Landowners Association
A residential community just outside Santa Fe, NM
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Dear Friends and Neighbors,
The daylight hours are getting longer and warmer, and some of the trees and plants are just starting to bud out. Those of you, like me, who garden are getting ready to plant and the garden tour is not too far away. The geology tour this year will be into the Galisteo Box where converging faults have created beautiful exposures of bedrock. A new event this year will be an astronomy night where you can deep dive into the humbling vastness of our Milky Way Galaxy.
The Roads Committee has acquired bids for repairs to Immanuel and Rey de Reyes, where drainage and erosion are problematic, and those of you who live on those roads are being contacted by the Committee to inform you of the work to be done.
I really enjoy riding my mountain bike around our beautiful neighborhood where I meet and chat with a lot of you.
Hope to see you all soon,
Dennis McQuillan
President
Are you ready for a possible wildfire? As wildfire danger is high because of the ongoing drought, it is time to review the information from the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ RSG! Program and the USDA Forest Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, and the U.S. Fire Administration. Their publication, entitled Ready, Set, Go provides a checklist of items to help prepare for a fire, including to go kits that can be assembled and made ready to grab in case of wildfires in our area. Please take another look at this valuable information and stay safe!
Protect it and Inspect It:
Do: Have your system pumped generally every three to five years, depending on number of people in household.
Think at the Sink:
Do:
Don’t:
Don’t Overload the Commode:
Do:
Don’t:
Shield your field:
Do:
Don’t:
Don’t strain your drain:
Do:
Don’t:
For further information, please consult the EPA website: https://www.epa.gov/septic/how-care-your-septic-system
Please submit your photos here.
This is a recipe for a light, nourishing soup from Patricia Corres
1 medium onion, chopped
1 t minced garlic
1 bay leaf
2 T minced parsley
2 small tomatoes, chopped (or sub canned)
1 can minced clams (or use fresh clams if you have them)
2 cans chicken broth (low sodium) (or use homemade)
1/2 C white wine
1 t lemon juice
1/8 t crushed saffron (optional)
1/4 C uncooked rice
Salt and pepper to taste
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In a soup pot, sauté onion and garlic in olive oil (about 2 T) over medium heat until softened. Add bay leaf, parsley and small tomatoes, sauté another few minutes. Add remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Stir and cover partially. Let simmer about 15 minutes. Season with salt and pepper if needed.
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12 large shrimp, peeled, deveined, and cut in half
1/4 C ham chopped into small pieces (if you have it, jamón serrano is good–otherwise, a lean ham like prociutto or other cured ham is fine)
1 hard boiled egg, shelled and chopped fine.
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Add shrimp and ham and cook just until the shrimp turns pink. Add the egg bits last and serve
All the cute little piles are piling up along our roads. We don’t have an in-roads poop fairy to clean up. Please be respectful.
Seeking Truth and Beauty in The Timeless Time
I gratefully acknowledge and pay tribute to the traditional inhabitants of this beautiful land I currently call home, situated in the heart of the deep Indigenous history of Native New Mexico, from ancient Paleo-Indians to Keres- and Tanoan-speaking peoples who were raided by the Comanche.
The Views editors asked me to provide a few thoughts about my recent work as a musician for this edition of the LOA newsletter. These twenty-four months, The Timeless Time, have been profoundly challenging for me as a performing artist as all of my in-house concert activity ground to a total halt from mid-March 2020 onward, and all plans for returning home to Australia were obliterated. That sad summer, aside from sewing masques and giving them away, as they were in short (or no) supply in shoppes, I created the Salone all’Aria Aperta (open air salons) for my neighbours. Groups of four came en masque to sit in lawn chairs outside the opened windows of my studio from whence I played a series of concerts entitled The Art of the Fugue, each beginning with one of the Preludes and Fugues from Daß Wohltemperierte Klavier by Johann Sebastian Bach, and ending with a selection from the vast, century-long repertory of Ragtime. These events were precious occasions in which I could share my music with others, even if the audience was small and on the other side of a wall!
Many of you have been staunch and generous supporters of the music festivals that I created for the Santa Fe community at San Miguel Chapel: The OutBach® Festival of [Mostly] American Music (2018) and The OutBach® Festival of [Mostly] Women’s Music (2019) co-sponsored by The Women’s International Study Center. For 2020 I had planned The OutBach® Festival of [Mostly] Beethoven’s Music in honour of his 250th birthday on 16th December, with the first concert devoted to my performances of the ethereal, profound, majestic final three piano sonatas. Of course, that festival could not take place, but I began my online “career” playing each of the sonatas individually for audiences that could view and listen via an iPhone or other MAC device on Face Time. My skill in setting up ZOOM sessions was yet to be honed.
A conversation with musician friends who had relocated to Albuquerque from Los Angeles in 2020 led to an introduction (virtual, of course) to Maureen Doolan, who with her late husband F. David Peat founded the Pari Center for New Learning in Pari, Italy. She was looking for an article about music to include in the upcoming journal they publish, Pari Perspectives. I sent her a paper I had written as part of my ongoing book project, Dancing with the Piano. Not only did she include it in the journal, she asked me if I would consider offering an online webinar. Always looking for any opportunity to connect with an audience, I immediately said yes and presented the two-hour session, On the Interpretation of Signs: The Search for Meaning in Music Notation on 26th September 2020.
The success of this offering led to an invitation to create the series that I have named The Quintessence of Music in honor of ether, the Fifth Element, the rarefied space in which the particles of the wider universe dance and inspire me. Thus far, Pari has streamed four webinars, all of which are available to the public free of charge on their website where you will find a host of other thought-provoking recorded events.
https://paricenter.com/events/list/?tribe_paged=1&tribe_event_display=past
Friends of the Pari Center (link below) receive the digital editions of Pari Perspectives. https://paricenter.com/membership/
In addition to the Pari Center webinars, I recorded two films, one for the Cuban Cultural Center of New York entitled Ragtime’s Missing Links: Cuba’s Role in the Evolving Ragtime Tradition in the USA, featuring the music of Manuel Saumell, Ignacio Cervantes, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and Scott Joplin.
For the PROGRAM pdf and full details of the event, click here:
https://www.cubanculturalcenter.org/events/2021/04/ragtimes-missing-links/
An Extraordinary Collaboration: Ferruccio Busoni, Natalie Curtis, and Indigenous Americans is another concert-with-commentary produced for the Society for American Music’s 2022 (online) annual conference. It tells the story of an Italian composer-pianist’s introduction in the second decade of the twentieth century to the music of Native Americans, thanks to Curtis’s 1907 publication, The Indians’ Book. [Natalie Curtis subsequently married painter Paul Burlin, (whose works, many of which boast five- and six-figure price tags!) can now be viewed at the Peyton Wright Gallery on Palace Avenue] and they decided to live in Santa Fe. The property they purchased is now The Inn of the Turquoise Bear!] I am in the process of creating another version of this presentation that provides additional insight into Natalie Curtis and Paul Burlin and the brief time they lived in Santa Fe.
https://paricenter.com/events/list/?tribe_paged=1&tribe_event_display=past
I am immensely grateful to have been able to shelter during these twenty-four months in the serene surroundings of my USA home in this inspiring New Mexico landscape, to enjoy encounters with neighbours when I am on my daily walks, to be reunited with my weaving practice (Music I Can See), to be able watch the nightly parade of constellations and seek deep sky objects from my Star Deck, to connect with my beloved friends around the world for free via Face Time and ZOOM, and to have been blessed with these few but invaluable opportunities to create musical experiences for others. Music remains my Reason for Living.
While no in-person performances are on schedule at this stage, the Pari Center webinars continue, and the next one, The Quintessence of Music: Music and Numbers II, will stream on Wednesday 6th April at 10:00 a.m. MDT. To learn more about this event and to register for it, please go to the link below and “purchase” (at NO charge) the number of tickets you want. Registration provides you with the link to the webinar recording when it becomes available about one week after it streams.
https://paricenter.com/event/music-and-numbers-part-ii/
I hope you can join me for these mind-bending, thought-provoking forays into music, philosophy, and spirituality as I continue my endless search for Truth and Beauty in The Timeless Time. Music is the Cure for Everything.
Dr Donna Coleman weaves, writes, walks, studies and photographs the stars, and contemplates the deepest mysteries of the Universe, which she transforms into interpretations of music ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach to Ragtime and Stride, from Domenico Scarlatti to Charles Ives, to compositions written for her yesterday, to free improvisations in which she collaborates with many of Australia’s premiere Jazz musicians. Her recordings may be purchased or streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Alexa and other streaming services, and many performances are on Youtube. She works as a volunteer in the Archeomagnetism Laboratory at the Office of Archeological Studies.
Photo by Larry Ross