Cassandra Sciortino

Beauty will save the world. San Francisco Soprano ~ Harpist Art Historian

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St Louis Art Museum after 3 day intensive Gregorian chant and polyphony practicum and conference and Saint Frances de Sales Oratory. (at Saint Louis Art Museum)

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Oncidium foundling feeling at home enough to bloom on an urban window sill ... third round for this intrepid orchid who has not minded be shuttled along from wide open windows and garden views to double pane glass, silence, and vertiginous views of marble.

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It has been a five year wait but this orchid foundling bloomed; my first San Francisco flower.

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Rose Window, originally in the Temple Methodist Church in San Francisco, and created by Cummings Studio (San Francisco). The windows were later bequeathed to the Morris Chapel, University of the Pacific (Stockton, California) where they may seen today. 

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Before the beautiful—no, not really before but within the beautiful—the whole person quivers. He not only ‘finds’ the beautiful moving; rather, he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it. The more total this experience is, the less does a person seek and enjoy only the delight that comes through the senses or even through any act of his own; the less also does he reflect on his own acts and states. Such a person has been taken up wholesale into the reality of the beautiful and is now fully subordinate to it, determined by it, animated by it.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

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Edwardian tea dress sewing in process from draping--inset with antique embroidered French wedding handkerchief

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Listening...&...waiting (photo: Ingmar Sciortino)

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My mother and I once upon a time

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Sunlight from the west; through harp strings

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Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the horn between season and season, time and time, between Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who wait In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray For children at the gate Who will not go away and cannot pray: Pray for those who chose and oppose O my people, what have I done unto thee. Will the veiled sister between the slender Yew trees pray for those who offend her And are terrified and cannot surrender And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks In the last desert before the last blue rocks The desert in the garden the garden in the desert Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed. O my people.

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The lovely Venus at Trinity Place meets my father's marble sculpture: Fleeting Feminine Form. Thank you Daddy--it is a treasure and a precious part of my world now. #trinityplace #sanfrancisco #philipsciortino

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Trinity skyline

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San Francisco. Thank you Kathleen Powers for this photo. Home is where the harp is...but it takes time for music, like warmth, to fill my new space.

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Julie Kent  American Ballet Theatre

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Roberto Bolle and Svetlana Zakharova in “La Bayadere”

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sveta why do you do this to me

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Svetlana Zakharova - Stretching & Warm-up in Italy .

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Oh my, gorgeous!

Suzanne Farrell and Conrad Ludlow in Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco

(She’s my director. What?!!! How am I so fortunate?)