Abe Effress, 11, playing saxophone in Marina Del Rey I have been playing saxophone since I moved to Los Angeles from the mountains of Colorado four years ago. This year, I wrote a piece for piano and submitted it to the Composers Today program for young composers. I became very interested in making music, and have started to realize it is a passion that I want to pursue. I decided to really challenge myself with this new song, “Misted.” This is the first time I have composed music for two instruments, piano and saxophone. The saxophone that you hear was inspired by a spider that has been living outside of my windowsill in the room I share with my brother. This song is in a minor key because for one day the spider was not there and it made me sad when I thought my new friend had gone away. Many of my creations, especially my writing, are dark and gnarled, like the branches of my mind. In this song, I also included my love for music production in the form of a beat, which I added in GarageBand. When I started making songs on GarageBand this summer, my parents decided that I could get an Instagram account for my music, fiction stories, drawings, and any other art created by me. The positive response I have been receiving from real professionals in the music production industry has motivated me to work even harder. Here is a link to the full audio with the piano and drums; and this is the link to me playing the saxophone part out on the Pacific Ocean in Marina Del Rey, and to more of my work on You Tube. There is a video of the spider on my Instagram page, @wearing_a_wig. I really hope you enjoy “Misted.” I did my best to write down the notes for both instruments even though the piano is naturally in a different key than the alto sax. Thank you for taking the time to check out my work! From the Stone Soup Editors: Do you play saxophone? Download a printable copy of Abe’s composition, ‘Misted’, and try playing it yourself. Leave a comment for Abe below, and if you do try his music yourself, send us a recording of yourself playing his piece. Enjoy!
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: September 8, 2018
MaCall, I don’t feel like I’m on a magical island”. Illustrator Zoe Hall, 12 for Sisters by Cameron Manor, 11. Published March/April 2010. A note from William Rubel There are four projects for today, one new one and three that we’ve been reminding you about for a little while: a new Instagram project, a recipe with headnotes for the December issue, a last call for the Concrete Poetry contest, and a look back to summer journals. Instagram #whatsinmybackpack I’d like to encourage all of you to follow our Instagram account and to contribute to it. We have images from our archive and images related to current content, and many of you recently sent us images for our #whereiwrite campaign. Thank you! You will see those entries when you go to go to our Instagram account. We are now starting a new hashtag program. We know that nearly every one of you wears a backpack to and from school. We want to know what’s inside! Please send us photographs of #whatsinmybackpack. There is an entry category for this Instagram project here, on the Stone Soup online submissions page. Whether you include the pack itself in the photograph is up to you, but I think it will make a more interesting photograph if it is included. I also think that however you compose it, you will find your own photograph more interesting as the years pass. It has been more than forty years since I unpacked my seventh-grade pack for the last time. It would be amazing to have a photograph of what had been in it! Recipes: December food issue deadline extended to September 20! Thank you to those of you who have sent in your recipes. We are working through them and will get back to the recipe writers very soon. We also have some really nice writing about food (or related to food), without recipes, thank you! To the rest of you—OK. We get it. This is not a good time to think about holiday cooking. I know it is September, and December and holiday eating seems far away. But, we have deadlines to meet, so we have to think about it now. Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, New Years—December is holiday time in lots of places. That means family visiting time. It is eating time. It is the time of year when nearly every family is in the kitchen, cooking. So. What foods mean something to your family? Favorite holiday dishes—favorite cookies—favorite main dishes—favorite homemade drinks and snacks. Or, maybe it isn’t even a food you like very much, but it is a fixture in your family and so has some good stories surrounding it. Remember: we are not a food magazine, and we are international. Just because the issue is being published in December, it doesn’t have to only contain winter recipes for a cold climate—you can send us anything at all, and it will be online in all the other months of the year too. As I’ve said in previous newsletters and as you can see by looking at last year’s food issue, all recipes must be preceded with a story that talks about the recipe or the food in some way. A great recipe without a great story won’t get published, but something the other way around just might! Concrete Poetry We extended the deadline to midnight, September 15. Poems are coming in—thank you!—so there will not be a further deadline extension. First prize is $50, second prize is $25, and the third prize is $10. I’ve written about this contest in previous Newsletters and you all know the drill. Go to the submissions page, find Concrete Poetry, and click on “more” to read the contest guidelines, or go straight to submit here. Journals! I have not forgotten about the Summer Journals. We have a few in the wings waiting to go online. Are any more of you ready to share yours? Please send me images of a few pages from your journal, along with a passage that you’d like to share. Do this by replaying to this email, or submit to our blog category. I’ll be writing more about journals in another Newsletetter. Until next week What’s behind the paywall? Here is the business news. We at Stone Soup are all extremely pleased with the number and quality of book reviews being sent to us each week. There are new reviews being posted weekly. There are also new blog posts every week. We love the work these Stone Soup writers are doing and feel they are good enough to be folded into the larger Stone Soup literary project. Up to now, access to the book reviews and blogs has been free. And, they are still free today! However, I have just asked our programmer to include them into the Stone Soup paywall so there will be a limit on how many you can read for free. So, non-subscribers—please check out the extraordinary work being done by our reviewers and bloggers. Today, I read the two book reviews—of To Kill a Mockingbird and Beasts Made of Night—posted this week by our young reviewers. They are both interesting reviews—very topical in these turbulent times. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at stonesoup.com! This week, it’s all about books. You’ve read lots of great book reviews by Vandana R over the past few months. This week, she has written a lovely piece about her book collection, and why some of her books mean so much to her. Are you a Jane Austen fan too? And which books are in your backpack (or locker?) Don’t miss Mirembe Mubanda’s topical review of the exciting and thought-provoking Beasts Made of Night by Tochi Onyebuchi. Have you also read this book? Leave a comment and tell Miremebe and us what you thought. And, as William mentioned above, we have Maya Viswanathan’s review of the classic To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. If you haven’t read it yet, be inspired by her review. If you have, leave her a comment on the blog! “MaCall!” I screeched, snatching up my favorite
Vandana’s Book Collection
Photo by Rebecca Wilson via Flickr. The first book I remember buying from my own money was Finally by Wendy Mass (I recently sent a review of it to Stone Soup, inspired by the Newsletter). I felt grown up carrying the shiny paperback home by myself, and even more importantly, I’d never identified with a character so much. From that moment, Finally and I were best friends, and although the copy became worn and smudged with time, the story never grew old in my eyes. At this moment in time, a few weeks after I began seventh grade, the book that means the most to me is Emma by Jane Austen. I carried it with me in my backpack on the first day of middle school, over a year ago. My new school was giant compared to my elementary school, and I was surrounded by strangers. For the first few weeks, I felt lost and alone. But every time I opened Emma at lunch or between classes, the familiar characters and old-style language seemed to wrap their arms around me and transport me to a place which I knew like the back of my hand. I think of those days with nothing more than vague but fond memory now; but Emma continues to be my all-time favorite book. My book collection consists of books which really mean something to me. It can be something that inspires memories in me, has characters I identify with like I do with no others, or simply strikes me as a book which is second to none. When I check out something from the library which I’m unable to part with after weeks and even months, then I know it belongs in my collection and I usually buy a copy off Amazon or from the bookstore. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the books are also by Jane Austen – upon reflection, the humor and archaic language appealed (and still does appeal) to me more than any other style. I like to keep my locker at school filled with books, so a large percentage of my collection is crammed against the walls of the locker. The rest I keep at home, because all readers know that one can’t have a room without a book collection of some sort inside it.
