Katherine Jung ‘26 is a journalist, Calliope and PCR editor, and writing center tutor at Pingry. She is also a dedicated violinist, studying at Juilliard Pre-College and playing in Pingry’s string orchestra. In her column, For the Record, she hopes to connect the community through music and personal stories.

Autumn passed by without a trace, sandwiched tightly between summer and winter. The beginning of October was spent refreshing my Weather app and hoping that the daily high would drop below 70°F, while I melted away in my chemistry classroom, struggling to do redox reactions. My hopes came true later—but not quite in the way that I expected. Shivering beneath heaps of fuzzy blankets and watching the sky go dark before 5:00 p.m. felt odd after so many months of long sunny days. My seven-minute weekend walk to Coco Fresh Tea and Juice (the greatest boba shop in boba history, according to me) is not a journey for the weak. So for those like-minded people who wish to relive the days of multicolored leaves crunching beneath our boots and squeezing out fresh apple cider, I have some songs that can bring us back to the golden days we miss. In case my romanticization of the second-to-last season of the year seems like an exaggeration, even Albert Camus (my favorite philosopher) called autumn “a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

First up: Autumn from The Seasons, Op. 67 by Alexander Glazunov. I had never listened to Glazunov’s music before I heard my friend playing his violin concerto, and I was immediately awed by the soaring melodies in the second movement—and her amazing performance. The Seasons is an allegorical ballet representing the four seasons (in this order: winter, spring, summer, and autumn) and has no plot, instead focusing on the emotions and qualities of each part of the year. It’s an interesting choice to put autumn last; ballets often end on a dramatic note, so one might expect summer or winter to end the piece. Breaking conventional ideas about seasons, Glazunov leads into the finale with chromatic scales in the woodwinds and strings, which I initially interpreted as the swirling of leaves from tree branches to the ground. However, Autumn is about the joy of the grape harvest; the bright and lively bacchanale leads into the calmer petit adagio. We often see autumn as the season when the world starts to become colder, yet Glazunov interprets autumn as a warm time of year filled with drinking wine and celebration. I’m not endorsing underage drinking, but I think that we can all get figuratively drunk on life, as Emily Dickinson states in I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed; especially in fall, when the combination of summer light and fall foliage cast a golden glow over everything (metaphorically and literally). 

Next, a song that I’ve always loved: Autumn in New York by Vernon Duke, covered by many of my favorite artists including Frank Sinatra and Chet Baker. There’s something magical about fall on the Northeast Coast—I might be biased, but our region is synonymous with apple picking and walking down small streets lined with maple trees (or is that Canada?). Duke called it a “genuine emotional outburst,” written for personal reasons rather than publicity; he was spending the summer in Connecticut and missed his hometown of New York City. He never would have imagined that his tune would become a popular jazz standard today, and a fall classic in the minds of many. Soaring instrumentals surround the upbeat theme, conjuring up images of cozy autumn days. Yet the music takes a darker turn harmonically in the middle, and Duke even says that autumn in New York is often mingled with pain. The golden glow of this season is unfortunately not the cure to life’s woes and sorrows; the fond recollections of chatting with family around the fireplace and walking through paths in Central Park with a rainbow of leaves scattered on the ground are mixed with equally bittersweet and melancholy memories. During cold and dark times, it’s easy to lose hope for the future; just as Autumn in New York returns to its main theme at the end, leaving off on an open and almost hopeful note, the time will pass and your own autumn in New Jersey (or wherever you’re reading this from) will return to warmth and peace.

Finally, since all good things come in threes: 4'33" by John Cage. This is probably the only classical piece that can be played by any combination of instruments without any arrangement; it is quite literally 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Although it’s not something I would pay to watch at Carnegie Hall, Cage wrote the piece with a powerful message in mind. He wanted to prove that any sound can be interpreted as music. He has an interesting view of the ambient noises around us; the sound of someone breathing, papers rustling, maybe even the soft whirring of an air conditioner or heater. This controversial and certainly unique piece demonstrates that there is no such thing as complete silence and breaks the boundary between music and ordinary life. Many describe 4’33” as an intense listening experience, despite the lack of notes; it compels people to pay attention to the most minute aspects of their surroundings. Cage’s message can be applied to more than the concept of sound; during his piece, many different images come to mind including that of autumn. Autumn is often viewed as a silent season, a preview to winter; birds begin to leave their nests to fly South and leaves turn brown and fall to the ground. However, over the course of three months and numerous walks across campus, I have realized that Cage was right: there is always noise, even among what we perceive as silence. 

It’s slightly over a month until the first day of winter, December 21st. For now, I’ll drink my pumpkin spice lattes, and re-read The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe even though Halloween is over. And for the remaining few weeks, I’ll take in the few hours of sunlight and warmth that we have each day.

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To contact the author: Katherine Jung '26