April 1st
All Fools' Day - The earliest written references in English to the tradition of playing tricks (those who fall for them being "April Gowks", or "Noodles") is from the late 17th Century (in an entry for 1688, John Aubrey refers to it as "Fooles Holy Day"): there's no reference in any earlier letters, poems, or dramas, though there are from France and Germany. By the 19th Century, it had become customary to play tricks on apprentices and new employees - sending them on "a fool's errand" to collect a tin of striped paint, or a long weight, or (in the printing trade) an italic full-stop. Newspapers expanded the tradition, initially printing fake job adverts ("Assistant Rhubarb Consultant for West Midlands County Council" and news items - taken up famously with the Beeb's Spaghetti Harvests in the late '50s, and Patrick Moore's 1976 hoax "Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect" broadcast on Radio2 in which listeners were urged to jump into the air at 9:47am, as they would experience a moment of floating, due to the joint influence of Jupiter and Pluto on the Earth's gravity at that exact moment. Hundreds of people 'phoned in to confirm that they had indeed stayed above ground for longer than usual at that moment - and one caller actually claimed that she and eleven iof her friends had been "wafted" from their chairs and floated around her [presumably quite large] Living Room at that time. John Lenon and Yoko Oneo were also keen on using the day - in 1970, they announced that they were both about to undergo "sex change" operations, and three years later they declared that they had created a new country called Nutopia, which had no laws, no boundaires, and whoise National Anthem was the First Movement of John Cage's 4' 33".
I suspect that Wikipedia might be entering into the spirit of things this year - but the world has become a place where even the most extraordinary celebration might actually be happening somewhere!
I do believe - I want to believe that it's also "Fossil Fools Day" (to encourage awareness of global warming) - but then I was taken in both by the "dfiscovery" of a recording of Chopin playing his Minute Waltz, announced in the April issue of a now-defunct CD review magazine in the early '90s (AND the same magazine's advertisement of a CD of RVW's 4th & 5th with the VPO conducted by Boulez! It's so easy to be duped when you want the thing to be true!
Also on this date: Scotland recaptures Berwick-upon-Tweed back from the English (1318); Handel's Judas Maccabaeus is premiered at Covent Garden (1747); Friedrich von Klinger's play Sturm und Drang is premiered in Leipzig (1776); Frederick Muhlenberg is elected the first Speaker of the US House of Representatives (1789); the first three chapters of Dickens' Hard Times are published in the author's weekly magazine Househoold Words; the remainder is published over the following twenty weeks (1854); Herman Melville's The Confidence Man is first published (1857);
Singapore becomes a British Crown Colony (1867); the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company is founded in Chicago (1891); the Territorial Force [forerunner of the Territorial Army] is founded (1901); Germany becomes the first country to adopt SOS in Morse Code as a distress signal (1905); de Falla's La Vida Breve is premiered in Nice (1913); Franz Schmidt's Notre Dame is premiered in Vienna, with Marie Gutheil-Schoder as Esmerelda (1914); the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service are merged to become the Royal Air Force (1918); the Welsh Church Act of 1914 is enacted, disestablishing the Anglican Church in Wales (1920); Adolf Hitler is sentenced tio five years in "fortress confinement" [the most lenient of imprisonment] for his part in the failed Munich Putsch (1924 - he serves nine months, spending the time writing Mein Kampf; Josef von Sternberg's film The Blue Angel premieres in Berlin, giving Marlene Dietrich her first starring role (1930); official Nazi policy of boycotting Jewish-owned businesses begins (1933); six German JU52 bombers attack the city of Jaén in Spain - there are no "legitimate" military targets, and 159 people are killed, and hundreds of others injured (1937); Nestlé introduce Nescafé (1938); near the village of Fântâna Albă ["White Well", now in Ukraine] Soviet Border Guards open fire on civilians trying to get to Romania: up to 2000 people are killed (1941); the Big Bang theory is first proposed in The Physical Review - readers might have looked at the date and wondered - especially as names of the co-authors are given as "Alpher, Bethe, and Gammow - all highly respected astro-physicists, but Hans Bethe's name has been included by George Gammow, just to make the joke (1952)ANC member Henry Fazzie is sentenced to 20 years imprisonment under South African sabotage laws (1965); Copland's The Tender Land is premiered in New York, conducted by Thomas Schippers (1954); the first photograph of Earth taken from space is transmitted from satelite TIROS-1 (1960); the Pakistan Army carry out an attack on civilians in Jinjira, Bangladesh, killing over 1000 people (1971); the Heath Government enacts the Local Government Act in England and Wales (1974); Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne establish the Apple Computer Company (1976); following a national referendum, Iran becomes an Isalmic Republic (1979 - exactly five years to the day after Ayatollah Khomeni had called for such status); the Poll Tax is introduced in Scotland (1989); same-sex marriage is legalised in the Netherlands (2001); and Bob Dylan receives his Nobel Prize for Literature at a private ceremony in Stockholm (2017).
Birthdays today include: William Harvey (1578); Jean-Henri d'Anglebert (1629); John Wilmot (1647); Abbé Prevost (1697); Otto von Bismark (1815); Feruccio Busoni (1866); Edmond Rostand (1868); Sergei Rachmaninoff (1872); Edgar Wallace (1875); Lon Chaney [snr] (1883); Wallace Beery (1885); icely Courtneidge (1893); Eddy Duchin (1909); Sydney Newman (1917); George Baker (1931); Debbie Reynolds (1932); Ronnie Lane (1946); Susan Boyle (1961); Phillip Schofield (1962); Chris Evans (1966); ... and Milan Kundera is 90 today.
Final Days for: Eleanor of Aquitaine (1204); Scott Joplin (1917); Helena Rubinstein (1965); Max Ernst (1976); Marvin Gaye (1984); Martha Graham (1991); Yevgeny Yevtushenko (2017); and Steven Bocho (2018).
And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Sunday, April 1st, 1979 were:
Bach & Handel: the last in a series of prigrammes combining selections from "The 48" (played by Gustav Leonhardt) with Handel's Concerti Grossi Op 6 (played by Colleium Aureum conducted by Franzjosef Maier).
Rural Rhymes a selection of poems about the countryside read by Robin Holmes
Your Concert Choice: Boccherini Symphony in d minor, Op 12 No 4 (La casa del diavolo); Brahms Horn Trio; Field Rondo in E major (Le midi); Lambert The Rio Grande; Mozart Eine kleine Nichtmusik.
Music Weekly: including an article on de Falla's Atlantida and a conversation with Andrei Gavrilov
Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Tennstedt's debut concert with the orchestra - Blacher Concertante Music; Tchiakovsky Violin Concerto [with Henryk Szeryng; Beethoven 5th Symphony
All Fools' Day - The earliest written references in English to the tradition of playing tricks (those who fall for them being "April Gowks", or "Noodles") is from the late 17th Century (in an entry for 1688, John Aubrey refers to it as "Fooles Holy Day"): there's no reference in any earlier letters, poems, or dramas, though there are from France and Germany. By the 19th Century, it had become customary to play tricks on apprentices and new employees - sending them on "a fool's errand" to collect a tin of striped paint, or a long weight, or (in the printing trade) an italic full-stop. Newspapers expanded the tradition, initially printing fake job adverts ("Assistant Rhubarb Consultant for West Midlands County Council" and news items - taken up famously with the Beeb's Spaghetti Harvests in the late '50s, and Patrick Moore's 1976 hoax "Jovian-Plutonian Gravitational Effect" broadcast on Radio2 in which listeners were urged to jump into the air at 9:47am, as they would experience a moment of floating, due to the joint influence of Jupiter and Pluto on the Earth's gravity at that exact moment. Hundreds of people 'phoned in to confirm that they had indeed stayed above ground for longer than usual at that moment - and one caller actually claimed that she and eleven iof her friends had been "wafted" from their chairs and floated around her [presumably quite large] Living Room at that time. John Lenon and Yoko Oneo were also keen on using the day - in 1970, they announced that they were both about to undergo "sex change" operations, and three years later they declared that they had created a new country called Nutopia, which had no laws, no boundaires, and whoise National Anthem was the First Movement of John Cage's 4' 33".
I suspect that Wikipedia might be entering into the spirit of things this year - but the world has become a place where even the most extraordinary celebration might actually be happening somewhere!
I do believe - I want to believe that it's also "Fossil Fools Day" (to encourage awareness of global warming) - but then I was taken in both by the "dfiscovery" of a recording of Chopin playing his Minute Waltz, announced in the April issue of a now-defunct CD review magazine in the early '90s (AND the same magazine's advertisement of a CD of RVW's 4th & 5th with the VPO conducted by Boulez! It's so easy to be duped when you want the thing to be true!
Also on this date: Scotland recaptures Berwick-upon-Tweed back from the English (1318); Handel's Judas Maccabaeus is premiered at Covent Garden (1747); Friedrich von Klinger's play Sturm und Drang is premiered in Leipzig (1776); Frederick Muhlenberg is elected the first Speaker of the US House of Representatives (1789); the first three chapters of Dickens' Hard Times are published in the author's weekly magazine Househoold Words; the remainder is published over the following twenty weeks (1854); Herman Melville's The Confidence Man is first published (1857);
Singapore becomes a British Crown Colony (1867); the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company is founded in Chicago (1891); the Territorial Force [forerunner of the Territorial Army] is founded (1901); Germany becomes the first country to adopt SOS in Morse Code as a distress signal (1905); de Falla's La Vida Breve is premiered in Nice (1913); Franz Schmidt's Notre Dame is premiered in Vienna, with Marie Gutheil-Schoder as Esmerelda (1914); the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service are merged to become the Royal Air Force (1918); the Welsh Church Act of 1914 is enacted, disestablishing the Anglican Church in Wales (1920); Adolf Hitler is sentenced tio five years in "fortress confinement" [the most lenient of imprisonment] for his part in the failed Munich Putsch (1924 - he serves nine months, spending the time writing Mein Kampf; Josef von Sternberg's film The Blue Angel premieres in Berlin, giving Marlene Dietrich her first starring role (1930); official Nazi policy of boycotting Jewish-owned businesses begins (1933); six German JU52 bombers attack the city of Jaén in Spain - there are no "legitimate" military targets, and 159 people are killed, and hundreds of others injured (1937); Nestlé introduce Nescafé (1938); near the village of Fântâna Albă ["White Well", now in Ukraine] Soviet Border Guards open fire on civilians trying to get to Romania: up to 2000 people are killed (1941); the Big Bang theory is first proposed in The Physical Review - readers might have looked at the date and wondered - especially as names of the co-authors are given as "Alpher, Bethe, and Gammow - all highly respected astro-physicists, but Hans Bethe's name has been included by George Gammow, just to make the joke (1952)ANC member Henry Fazzie is sentenced to 20 years imprisonment under South African sabotage laws (1965); Copland's The Tender Land is premiered in New York, conducted by Thomas Schippers (1954); the first photograph of Earth taken from space is transmitted from satelite TIROS-1 (1960); the Pakistan Army carry out an attack on civilians in Jinjira, Bangladesh, killing over 1000 people (1971); the Heath Government enacts the Local Government Act in England and Wales (1974); Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne establish the Apple Computer Company (1976); following a national referendum, Iran becomes an Isalmic Republic (1979 - exactly five years to the day after Ayatollah Khomeni had called for such status); the Poll Tax is introduced in Scotland (1989); same-sex marriage is legalised in the Netherlands (2001); and Bob Dylan receives his Nobel Prize for Literature at a private ceremony in Stockholm (2017).
Birthdays today include: William Harvey (1578); Jean-Henri d'Anglebert (1629); John Wilmot (1647); Abbé Prevost (1697); Otto von Bismark (1815); Feruccio Busoni (1866); Edmond Rostand (1868); Sergei Rachmaninoff (1872); Edgar Wallace (1875); Lon Chaney [snr] (1883); Wallace Beery (1885); icely Courtneidge (1893); Eddy Duchin (1909); Sydney Newman (1917); George Baker (1931); Debbie Reynolds (1932); Ronnie Lane (1946); Susan Boyle (1961); Phillip Schofield (1962); Chris Evans (1966); ... and Milan Kundera is 90 today.
Final Days for: Eleanor of Aquitaine (1204); Scott Joplin (1917); Helena Rubinstein (1965); Max Ernst (1976); Marvin Gaye (1984); Martha Graham (1991); Yevgeny Yevtushenko (2017); and Steven Bocho (2018).
And the Radio 3 schedules for the morning of Sunday, April 1st, 1979 were:
Bach & Handel: the last in a series of prigrammes combining selections from "The 48" (played by Gustav Leonhardt) with Handel's Concerti Grossi Op 6 (played by Colleium Aureum conducted by Franzjosef Maier).
Rural Rhymes a selection of poems about the countryside read by Robin Holmes
Your Concert Choice: Boccherini Symphony in d minor, Op 12 No 4 (La casa del diavolo); Brahms Horn Trio; Field Rondo in E major (Le midi); Lambert The Rio Grande; Mozart Eine kleine Nichtmusik.
Music Weekly: including an article on de Falla's Atlantida and a conversation with Andrei Gavrilov
Chicago Symphony Orchestra: Tennstedt's debut concert with the orchestra - Blacher Concertante Music; Tchiakovsky Violin Concerto [with Henryk Szeryng; Beethoven 5th Symphony
)
(--- -.- )
thought that would wake you up 
....Snelling survived as a given name for several more generations on the American side, down to my grandmother and her siblings......
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