meet greta.
Pictures taken on and around the 14th of July 2010, when our daughter was born.

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the silver gig. my 25th anniversary CD sacred harp suite. meditations on a classic american songbook epiphany. 50 days, 50 songs: a musical feast keeping the cart before the horse. a provocative lesson on the heart and the wallet memoirs of an amnesiac. delightful musings from an off-the-wall composer a musical offering. the strange recipe for a sunday morning instrumental killer music. my score for sea world's shamu show, and the story behind it passion. some clips from my first solo CD

::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   Marjorie, Carl, Ron   Catherine feeds the baby for the first time. I love that little cap.   Darren took this remarkable picture of a loving gaze between grandmother and granddaughter.   Barry appreciates an extremely important and way cool gift from Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul!   Aunt Kathy immediately made the baby calm and comfortable.   Cousin Isabel came up with a baby-holding schedule for their evening visit; the schedule included others present, but featured her.   Cousin Hannah was overjoyed.   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   For the past several months, we had been kicking around a handful of names. We'd never been able to agree on a boy name, but there were a few girl names we kept coming back to that both of us liked: Ruth Adele, Madeleine Grace, Clara, Eleanor Lind. When the time came, on the baby's third day of life, to actually name her, we ruled out a couple of those names just because they didn't fit this particular person. The remaining ones we kept juggling and switching and trying — and for some reason we added another that hadn't been in consideration: Greta. We'd started off considering Margaret (my mother's name is Marjorie), then it rapidly changed to Greta for some reason. Then, because middle names have to harmonize with first names, and Catherine had been wanting to include her mother's name, Linda, all along, we paired it with Lind. Though neither Marjorie nor Linda seemed to sit just right on this little girl in front of us, the variants did. There was still quite a bit of choosing among the other names we'd considered, but, as we tried to picture our little girl in 4th grade, or in 10th grade, or in college, or in adulthood, the name that kept working was Greta. We've also figured all along that the child might have two middle names, and the second would be a family surname. After considering several of the various names on both sides of the family, we settled on Saenger, my maternal grandfather's surname and my mom's maiden name. While Brake and Wiltse derive from places, Saenger (like a lot of German names) comes from the occupation of some medieval ancestor: not just a singer but a minstrel, a troubador. Hans Sachs, the hero of Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger, was a Sänger. So: we introduce to you Greta Lind Saenger Brake. We hope you like her. We can't wait to find out more about her, to teach her and learn from her as she grows from a baby to a girl to a woman.