The usage of Instrumental Musick in our Public Worship of GOD, hath been long since disrelished among His Faithful People. Justin Martyr long ago exploded it. Yea, Aquinas himself, as late as less than Five hundred Years ago, decried it. Indeed it was one of the Last Things which the Man of Sin introduced, in the Worship of our SAVIOUR, which he had already fill’d with a Multitude of Superstitions. We will then for the present look on the Jewish Trumpets, and Organs too, as a part of the Abrogated Pedagogy.

—Cotton Mather, India Christiana (1621)

That’s it: from now on, every prelude and postlude gets listed in the church bulletin as “Abrogated Pedagogy.”

Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda’s grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence — the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.

—Willa Cather, My Ántonia

In honor of the American day off of Labor Day, a bit of far-out ambience gracing one of the more famous days off in the cinematic canon. In John Hughes’ 1986 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the title character memorably hijacks a parade float to lip-synch “Danke Schoen” and “Twist and Shout.” You remember:


But what’s that banner, over on the left, behind Berwyn’s own Vlasta the Polka Queen?


Why, that’s a banner marking the 20th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians! Ferris Bueller, avant-garde jazz fan.

Here’s some of the AACM’s most well-known progeny, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, performing in Finland in 1987. The bassist is Malachi Favors, who I’m reasonably certain (but not at all positive) is the one on the 20th-anniversary banner.

Over at The Faster Times, more Beethoven ephemera: towards a taxonomy of Beethoven’s Fifth ringtones in genre fiction.