Dr. Metablog

Trees Old and New

When we arrived here 54 years ago, the land was heavily forested but with a limited pallet of northern conifers and deciduous trees. In the first category were pines both red and white, three kinds of spruce, balsam fir, larch and hemlock. Among the hardwoods were sugar maples and red maples, ash, beech, red oak, black cherry, white, yellow and gray birch, quaking and big tooth aspen, and alas butternut and elms, which have both now succumbed to plagues. Common in the area but absent from our particular property were red cedar, cottonwood, basswood, walnut, and black locust. In the 70s of the last millennium, I planted cedars and cottonwoods;  they are now mature and replicating themselves. The walnut that I planted fifteen years ago is now 25 feet tall and very handsome. I have only one basswood, which I found as a seedling and transplanted to to a prominent place;  I've been waiting all these years for its descendants. The black locusts that I grew from seeds harvested in Colorado are now starting to make an impression on the landscape. I've also added some trees that might be able to survive our warmer winters: a hickory (growing very nicely), a swamp white oak, a bur oak (and its lone offspring) and a sycamore (which has survived two winters).  I've also experimented and failed with some trees that grow just a bit south of us: catalpa, horse chestnut, "Crimson King" maple, little-leaved linden, and ginkgo. Perhaps I'll try again now that the weatherh as warmed. One of my neighbors has successfully reared a metasequoia; it's tempting to try but I think on the whole I'd rather stay with north American trees. On the other hand, we'll need some new trees to take the place of the ash, which are soon to be decimated. 

My Life in Objects -- XV (Dvorak)

 

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The George Szell -- Cleveland Orchestra recording of Dvorak's New World Symphony, which I purchased sometime about 1952, was the first "long playing" album that I ever owned. The record jacket illustrated above is not, I'm sorry to say, the correct one. I couldn't locate the proper image on the internet, and my own copy of the recording failed to make the cut when we moved to smaller quarters in 2009. The design of the jacket is, however, imprinted on my memory: a water color of a rural landscape against a neutral blue-gray background. The Symphony was No.5 in those days but the reissue uses the renumbered system which became conventional in the 80s, I believe, and caused the New World to be demoted, or promoted, to No.9. Whatever the number, whatever the jacket, I listened to that recording hundreds, many hundreds of times, and I know every note.

Although my mother loved classical music and listened daily to WQXR, our family did not own a phonograph. Eventually, sometime around 1953 or 1954, a record player appeared courtesy of my older brother Eugene, who set it up in his bedroom and also bought a few albums. His collection consisted of a few Broadway musicals and some pop standards (Sinatra and the Mills Brothers for sure). He allowed me to use his machine when he wasn't at home. What an opportunity! I memorized Oklahoma and Guys and Dolls, among others.

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I was home from school of a week. Was it whooping cough? The radio became my constant companion (no TV in those years). Every day for a week, I listened to a "dramatization" of a novel by Dumas. I believe it was Twenty Years After, but I can't be positive. The story was not memorable, nor were the performances, but the "background music" was to my ears astonishingly beautiful. On Friday, when the story came to conclusion, it was announced that the music that had entranced me was the New World Symphony.  

After I gained access to Eugene's record player, I saved my nickels and for $1.98, the standard price of LPs at that time, I bought a copy of the Symphony. It was an expenditure of significance, even for someone who was pulling down $.75 an hour shelving books at the local public library.

Having discovered that one could buy and own recorded music, I little-by-little added to my collection. By the time I graduated from college, I owned ten or a dozen recordings. I remember Dennis Brain's performance of Mozart's Horn Concertos, Paul Kletzki's version of Mahler's Symphony #1, an Angel recording of Bach's Magnificat, and a Prokoviev Lieutenant Kije Suite. There were a few others that I can no longer remember. But none of them were as important as the Szell Dvorak, which was my gateway to the classics.

I'm listening to it now. Via Alexa.

"What Wondrous Life is This I Lead"

"Now for my life," the doctor* boasted, "it is a miracle of [eighty] years, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry." Sir Thomas didn't know the half of it; if his life was a miracle, then mine is a hundred times more so. Yesterday the miracles started first thing in the morning when I drove (I own a horseless carriage -- a circumstance Sir T. couldn't possibly have imagined) to our spanking new hospital to have my innards inspected. The MRI doughnut deployed a couple of teslas worth of magnetism to spin my protons into images, a process which, though incomprehensible to me, is a heck of a lot less agonizing than extracting the information from my personal body with scalpel and stand-by sponge, and is significantly more informative than inspecting my urine, which is what a seventeenth-century doctor like Browne would have done. Later, I took a short walk to the local bank to take care of business and moved some, well, not exactly money but virtual or magic money from one account to another. Back home, I conversed by cell to NGP who was on the road to Virginia in a horseless carriage of his own. Inasmuch as he was behind the wheel, we skipped the face time feature. Nevertheless the long-distance mobile communication experience was plenty miraculous. The climax of my day was a walk to a neighborhood theater where Angela Hewitt blessed us with an exquisitely rendered performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations. She was in a zone; I was riveted. Is it more wondrous that Bach composed the Variations, that Ms. Hewitt performed them with such delicate power, or that the concert took place right around the corner, almost at my doorstep?  After the Bach, the day being now almost over, along came still another miraculous moment when I watched, supine in my own bed, in real time, the last minutes of an NBA game beamed in from Boston, Massachusetts, two thousand miles to the east, and almost at the Atlantic Ocean. It was an excellent game -- a stunning win for the Brooklyn Nets, and an equally remarkable triumph for my pixel-rich widescreen TV. It was a long day and a varied one, and I was beat, so while snuggling a-bed with the lady friend (an intimacy that is not only a miracle but a piece of poetry to boot), I instructed Alexa to give us a little opera. Alexa complied and chose WQXR in NYC, and for a drowsy hour we were grateful operavores.

No question but that my day was comprised of a series of miracles, each one more incredible than the other.

Nor do I even bother to tally daily miracles so commonplace that we cease to notice them: water in (both cold and hot) and waste out, electricity, central heating and A/C, refrigeration, natural gas to cook by, big bright cheerful windows, etc.

"What wondrous life is this I lead."

*Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, first published 1644.

"Hurrah for the Pumpkin Pie"

Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and here am I in a nostalgic mood, harking back to those songs that we sang in the PS 217 "assembly" in the 40s and 50s of the last millennium. With Miss Georgia Keiselbach at the piano, we marched, in size places, decorated in white shirts and green ties, into the school auditorium and warbled our dear little hearts out every Thursday at 10:00 am.

I remember very well the stirring but perplexing Thanksgiving hymn that began 

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Looking backward, I admit that I understood the first line of the stanza but was pretty much boggled by what came next. "Chasten" and "hasten" make a wonderful internal rhyme, but who does He hasten and how exactly does He chasten?  A syntactical mystery for sure. Were we expected to believe that the Great Signifier in the Sky "chastens and hastens" His own will?  Why in the world should he be asked to do so?

Nor did I grasp the meaning of third line, because I didn't recognize that "the wicked oppressing" meant "the oppressing wicked" or more precisely "the wicked who are oppressing someone." But who were they "oppressing"? Apparently, the "distressing", that is, the people who are distressed. And who, to be more specific, were the innocent distressed who were being oppressed. Us?  Our teachers? Let me now confess that I sang then and remember at this moment the line as "now cease us from distressing", thinking that we, the pupils, must have been the "wicked" and that it was our now enlightened task to cease from oppressing the distressed. I read the line as a provocation to guilt, even though I knew that I myself, third-grader, had never oppressed anyone.

Nor was I the only confused 10-year-old, because BB, my PS 217 classmate and consultant on our assemblies, remembered the line as "The wicked oppressing now seize us from distressing" -- a sentence which is way beyond my parsing skills.

Of the last line of the quatrain, I grasped "Sing praises to his name" but "He forgets not His own" opened another can of confused worms. I construed "His own" to be shorthand for "his own name." But what kind of Lord forgets his own name?  As BB, equally misled, says, 'it's god, just three letters; how hard is that?"

The hymn goes on for another four puzzling stanzas, though to tell truth, I don't remember whether they were required of us PS 217 choristers. I for one am retrospectively pleased that we omitted the stanza that included the lines "We praise thee, O God, our Redeemer, Creator,/ In grateful devotion our tribute we bring" which surely seemed even then a trifle too theological. 

Despite the fact that I was mostly clueless, I rather enjoyed belting out the hymn's anapests. It's a joyous, rollicking piece of music. Whether it was appropriate for a public school in the heart of immigrant Brooklyn is another question. But hey, it was the 50s, before we all became so multicultural.

Nevertheless, out of spirit of curiosity, and because it's now so easy even for us lazybones to investigate such questions, I turned once again to wikipedia and typed in "We gather together." Warning: surprise in store.

It's a Christian hymn (of course) written in 1597 by one Adrianus Valerius to celebrate the victory in the Battle of Turnhout, a turning point in the Dutch Protestant war of liberation against Spanish Catholic domination. It first appeared in print in a 1626 collection of Dutch folk and patriotic songs but didn't find its way to the New World until 1903 and became popular only in 1935 when it was included in the "national hymnal of the Methodist-Episcopal Church." During World War II, which was entering its last phase when I was a kindergartner in PS 217, the hymn became popular because "'the wicked oppressing' was understood to refer to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan." Which is, I suppose, how an anti-Catholic Protestant hymn came to be included in our curriculum. After all, it was out of such strange and unpredictable meldings and divagations that Brooklyn/American culture was formed.   

"We gather together" was not our only Thanksgiving song. We also sang the entirely unobjectionable 

          Over the river, and through the wood,

          To Grandmother's house we go;

          The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh

          Through the white and drifted snow - oh.

I found this song lovely but otherworldly, because my own particular grandmother lived not over the river but in a tiny third-floor walk-up on distinctly unpastoral Coney Island Avenue, where there was an occasional tired horse, pulling a vegetable wagon, but there were few sleighs.

But as it turns out, "Over the river" too has a history.  

   

That's a portrait of its author, Lydia Maria Child. She looks rather forbidding, as though she might have taught sixth grade at PS 217, but on further investigation she turns out to have been a radical and revolutionary woman to whose accomplishments I wish we had been introduced. Born in 1802, she started her writing career with the novel Hobomok which depicts and approves of the marriage of an Indian man and a white woman. It caused a small scandal. In 1833, she published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans which proposed the immediate emancipation of slaves, arguing that slavery was as harmful to slave-owners as to the enslaved. It was the first anti-slavery book printed in America. Ms. Child was also an early advocate of women's rights and spoke favorably of sexual passion. Of course she was ostracized from polite society. In 1844, she published the small innocuous poem for which she is remembered, which concludes "Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?/Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!" -- a sentiment to which there can be no possible objection or dissent.

"The Lost Chord"

Insomnia once again -- a nightly affliction, a family trait. Perhaps we lack a gene that lets others sleep from dusk to dawn. Have I noted here that I want my tombstone inscribed with the motto, just beneath my name and dates, "No More Insomnia, Forever."

During the wakeful nights, I've taken to listening to old-time radio. My favorite: WHRO out of Norfolk, Virginia. Last night, I heard some tenor from the 1920s (perhaps John McCormack) in a scratchy recording (tuba for bass) wail or warble "The Lost Chord"-- quite the 3 am treat it was. A flood of memories arose, because "The Lost Chord" was one of the songs that we learned during the PS 217 assembly back there in Flatbush in the 1950s. I recalled with some amusement that our determined "music specialist," Miss Georgia Keiselbach, a big lumbering woman with a trained contralto voice, tried gamely to inculcate an anguished mid-Victorian quasi religious parlor song into the minds of a roomful of fidgety 10-year-olds. Quite an experience. I was entranced by Sir Arthur Sullivan's melody, but I have to admit that the lyric was incomprehensible to me then and is still quite a challenge to this day.

So I investigated. Onto the internet, which, fortunately, works very well at 4 am.

The words to "The Lost Chord" are by Adelaide Anne Procter, after Tennyson apparently the most popular poet of her day, although I must confess that I had never heard of her even though I'm supposed to know something about nineteenth-century English literature.  

Here's Ms. Procter's fervid poem: 

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music 
Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight,
Like the close of an angel's psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexed meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

It may be that death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in Heav'n
I shall hear that grand Amen.

I'll paraphrase (even though I know that paraphrase is not a nice thing to do to a poem): in a reverie at the organ the poet experiences something grand that is aesthetic, transcendent, ineffable, and fleeting. The "lost chord divine" -- note the Miltonic deployment of adjectives -- stands for the hope or wish or belief that there is such a place as heaven and that it's a place where weariness, fever, pain, sorrow, perplexity, strife, and discord are superseded by the "infinite calm" and "perfect peace" of the "grand Amen."  A not unusual or extraordinary nineteenth-century sentiment where the hunt for the disappearing god was frequently mediated by art -- in this particular case by the art of music. 

As long as I'm reducing the poem to its paraphraseable meaning, I might also add that Procter, like many poets before and after her, has conflated religious and sexual longing. I derive this meaning, inaccessible to the roomful of quavering sopranos of which I was one, and very likely unsuspected by Miss Keiselbach herself, from the vocabulary of passion in which the poem is couched: "crimson," "touch," "lay" "love," "trembled."  And from the sentence, "It came from the soul of the organ,/  And entered into mine," where it might be argued, slightly frivolously, that any line of poetry that contains "came" "organ" and "entered" has got to be about a symbolic sexual encounter. Especially when the ambiguous word "mine" can denote either "my soul" or "my organ." So in this extravagant reading, in which it is once again clearly demonstrated that you can take the boy out of Brooklyn but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy, "The Lost Chord" is not only about the search for "perfect peace" but also for the perfect orgasm which will provide infinite calm to the poetess when she "dies" -- a word which is itself a Victorian euphemism for sexual climax. The lost chord is the big O (and I don't mean Oscar R.)

Just for fun of it let me also adduce a couple of sentences from the wikipedia article on Adelaide Anne Procter: "Modern critics argue that Procter's work is significant for what it reveals about how Victorian women otherwise repressed feelings." "One critic suggests that Procter may have been a lesbian and in love with Matilda Hays; other critics have called Procter's relationship with Hays 'emotionally intense.'" "Procter became engaged in 1858. The identity of Procter's fiancé remains unknown, and the proposed marriage never took place." "In 1851, Procter converted to Roman Catholicism." "Procter never married. She became unhealthy, possibly due to her charity work, and died of tuberculosis at the age of 38." I'll let my loyal readers connect the dots.  

"The Lost Chord" is a fine song and deserves to be revived. On YouTube, you can listen to a remarkably accomplished version by Enrico Caruso. Which you can access to at any time, even in the midst of a long insomniac night.

Gender-blind Casting?

Last Saturday, we hiked to the multiplex to hear and watch the Met's HD performance of Idomeneo. Once again, the opera did not disappoint. Early Mozart and glorious, especially the rousing choruses, while soprano Nadine Sierra was a luminous Illia. A silly story, of course, but for once there was a happy ending--a young man and a young woman, of different heritages, were allowed to marry--hurrah. Not without the forgiveness of a god--in this case, Neptune, who could have saved everyone a lot of trouble if he had been quicker to act but unfortunately didn't bother to theophanize until the passing of four hours (including extended intermissions) and three long acts of melodic anguish and dread.  

Nevertheless, I was troubled. "And what was it this time, Mr. Malcontent," you ask.  

It was the "trouser" role. The "hero" of the opera, Idamante, the guy who gets the girl, was played by Alice Coote, a soprano, a middle-aged woman not at all "boyish," but full-figured, prominently bosomed, and generously hipped. She was costumed as an ancient Cretan soldier, with an ineffective corset under her corselet and with a circle of what looked like old-fashioned elongated leather shaving strops or giant bookmarks hanging from waist to ankle. But her outfit did not fool me, even though I'm very good at suspending disbelief. Trust me, I can suspend like crazy.    

And I know that there's no point going to the opera if you can't suspend disbelief. One would think that once you accept the idea that the performers are going to aria at each other whenever they are together and aria at the audience when they are alone, and that they are followed wherever they go by a 100-piece orchestra, you can believe anything at all. But I have to admit that I boggled at Coote/Idamante and that I was sufficiently distracted that my pleasure in the opera was compromised, diminished. At the climax, I thought, "oh no, don't let them kiss." (They didn't, when they should have, and would have, if Idamante had been not a soprano but a tenor or baritone -- is it possible that the director was as squeamish as I.)

Idamante is customarily (but not always) played by a soprano because the part was originally written for a castrato, in this case Signor Vincenzo del Prato (no doubt known to his buddies as del Prato the castrato, or perhaps, as gli italiani would say, del Prato il castrato). I suppose that it is considered "authentic" to sing the part in the register in which it was composed. But why not transpose it down an octave and give it to a handsome tenor. Yes, it would be different, but to my eyes, much better. After all, authenticity has already been compromised --  Alice Coote is no Vincenzo del Prato. Nor do I hear even the most enthusiastic supporters of "period" performances call for a restoration of castrati.  

Shakespeare's women were played by boys. But even the new Globe, with its fetish for ancient ways, does not insist on a boy Cleopatra or a boy Juliet. And all to the good, in my opinion.  

"Maestro to the Pit"

Several times a year, we attend the opera -- that is, we wander over to the Metropolitan Opera widescreen HD broadcasts at our local movie theater. Last week, it was Dvorak's Rusalka --overproduced, over-costumed, a mighty silly story, but nevertheless glorious. Sung in Czech. Of course, I didn't understand a word, but then I never do expect to do so, even when the opera is sung in a language with which I'm supposed to be on speaking terms. But it's not the libretto which we savor, it's the music. 

Nevertheless at each performance there's a solemn  moment when language moves front and center. It comes after the preliminary fol-de-rol and acknowledgements and interviews and trailers-for-next-month's performance are finally dispensed with. Now, at long last, the camera locates the head-setted director, who sits at huge intimidating console of buttons and knobs and switches and lights. And now here they come, the words of magic and enchantment: "maestro to the pit."

In that pithy, incantatory sentence is encapsulated all the ritual power of language. It's a hieratic moment. After such a magnificent statement, everything else is anticlimax (linguistically speaking).

Freed by these words, the shamanic conductor heretofore invisible, steps up, turns his back to the audience and faces the orchestra, brandishes his baton, and initiates the business of the day. 

"Maestro to the pit."  I love the idea that the generic term for conductor is "maestro." I love the quasi-oxymoronic juxtaposition of "maestro" and "pit."  In fact, I love the word "pit" in this context. Not a hole in the ground, nor the pit of hell, nor a place in which to chuck pieces of dismembered bodies. No, an orchestra pit, which is a horse of an entirely different color. Good thing it's not the custom to say "conductor to the podium." How flat, how banal, how unsacral. No dignity, no grandeur, no poetry.

No, it's "maestro to the pit." And let it always be so.

And by the way, I make a pretty good barbecue sauce, and I'm proud to say that my spare ribs are semi-famous. Let the word go forth, that now and forever, whenever I'm called to the grill, it's going to be "maestro to the pit."

Another Gosse-Pearlman Xmas

And so we've come to the end of the "holiday season" once again.

Another Christmas, another winter solstice, another St. Lucy's day with its deepest of midnights. Even here in ever-sunny Colorado, things are a bit gloomy. However, I have every confidence that another spring is just around the corner. I don't need to bring greenery into the house in order to prevent the dragon from swallowing the sun. The days, now so abbreviated, will lengthen and in five weeks we'll see the first crocuses and a week later the daffodils and pussy-willows. It's going to happen. But as always, the last days of the year challenge me.

I'm relieved and happy that Christmas and the whole Christmas business is done and gone. No one wants to be a scrooge and I don't want to frown on carols and gift-giving and plum-puddings and good fellowship, but in my heart, let me confess, I don't like the holiday. I can't make sense of the virgin birth or the sacrifice of the only-begotten son. I don't even respect the story-- to me it's just dressed-up scapegoating. Moreover, Jesus' revolutionary message about caring for the poor seems to be ignored or repudiated by Christianity's most vociferous advocates. And then there's all that incongruous stuff that has accreted around Christmas -- the hype and the commercialism and the religious chauvinism and the reindeer and the tactless triumphalism. It's both incomprehensible and offensive to me.

And I'm in good company. I have allies. Let us go back to the beginning of the American experience with Christmas.

If the profoundly religious seventeenth-century founders of our country had a single favorite Biblical moment, it's when the Lord (speaking through His prophet Amos) severely condemned the vanity of holidays. "I hate," said the Lord, "I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies." The Lord of Hosts specifically enjoined against the attempt to placate him by sacrificing animals (a matter of topical concern in Amos's time). "Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts." Nor did He rest with these easy-to-follow injunctions, but He went on to condemn all musical tributes as well. Nor more chants, glees or carols: "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols." Our Puritan forefathers recognized that the Lord opposed not only rituals and music but all formal observances and rote piety. The Ancient of Days was moved not by empty ceremony but by right action and good behavior. Instead of squeaking timbrels and sounding brass, why, "let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." Taking these uncompromising sentences as their guide, our founders dug in their heels against the ostentatious celebration of all holidays, especially Christmas.

I applaud the old guy, the Father, and I revere Amos. His mantra bears repeating: "Let justice come down as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." 

The neglect of "righteousness" in favor of buying things makes me melancholy. I would be happy to see fewer purchases and more good deeds. It would help us through the dark months.

The winter solstice is a sensitive time for me because it's the anniversary of my father's birthday. He arrived to no poorer family on the planet on the darkest day of the year, the twenty-second of December, 1904. ‘And they called his name Emanuel, God with us,’ -- but whether by accident or design, I have no idea. My father lived a long and just life. He had many virtues -- one of them that he was the least materialistic person ever. He had no possessions and craved none. But he was righteous.

I don't know how anyone could write a biography of Emanuel, my father. There was so little plot, so little conflict in his life. He went about his business, raised his family, kept to the straight and narrow. His memory is a blessing to us.

At this time of the year I turn once again to one of the most challenging fathers in literature. The voluminous works of Sir Edmund Gosse are not much read nowadays except by specialists in Edwardian literature, but Father and Son (1907) still stands as one of the world's great autobiographies. 

The father in Father and Son is the biologist Philip Henry Gosse, whom Charles Darwin once called "an honest hod carrier of science." The older Gosse was a minister and a leader of the Plymouth Brethren, a very strict, very puritanical splinter of English Protestantism -- one that could easily have taken Amos as its prophet and leader. According to his son Edmund, P. H. Gosse held that the celebration of Christmas was "nothing less than an act of idolatry. The very word is Popish, [my father] used to exclaim, 'Christ's Mass!' Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast, adapted from horrible heathen rites, and itself a soiled relic of the abominable Yule-Tide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me [that is, Philip Henry's son Edmund Gosse the autobiographer] blush to look at a holly berry." 

A passionate man, Philip Henry Gosse. A difficult father. Can we Imagine how Philip Henry Gosse would have suffered to behold a twentieth-century American Christmas: muzaked "Silent Night" in a shopping mall. Or even --horror of horrors --the odious, saccharine "Little Drummer Boy." There's not a sappier song in all of creation.

In Father and Son, Sir Edmund recollects a Christmas of his youth. One boyish year he defied his father and, putting his immortal soul in danger, secretly ate some Christmas plum-pudding that had been offered to him by 'rebellious' servants. But then, overcome with guilt and stomach-ache, he flew to his father, crying out "Oh! Papa, Papa, I have eaten of flesh offered to idols!" Philip Henry then "ran with me into the midst of the startled servants, seized what remained of the pudding,... and ran till we reached the dust-heap, when he flung the idolatrous confectionery on to the middle of the ashes, and then raked it deep down into the mass." 

A frightening episode for a nine-year-old -- but beautifully told. Only an accomplished writer of comedy (and one who was steeped in Dickens) could have invented a phrase as marvelous as "idolatrous confectionery," where the triviality of the noun undermines the high seriousness of the adjective.

Compared to Amos and to the Plymouth Brethren and to Philip Henry Gosse, my own resistance to Christmas is trivial. I'm a dissenter, but a dissenter in moderation.

In fact, I'm not even a Puritan -- I'm delighted with the baked ham and the sweet potatoes. Moreover, I have devised a Christmas custom of my own. Every December 25, I reserve three hours to listen to Handel's Messiah -- not out of piety or reverence, but because the oratorio is so marvelous that it's almost -- almost -- sacred.

There are many Messiahs, but In our house, the performance of choice is, inevitably, the extremely intelligent Pearlman version (Boston Baroque Orchestra and Chorus-- Martin Pearlman, Conductor [Telarc 80322]). Blessings and honor and glory and hallelujahs be unto George Frederick Handel and unto his unsurpassed oratorio.

So this year and every year: rejoice greatly but appropriately, ye sons and daughters of Zion! 

Othello/ Otello

I prefer my opera to be aural rather than visual. Opera is a form that is made for listening, not watching -- at least in my view. The music, Mozart or Verdi, is frequently transcendent and most satisfying. But on those occasions when I venture to the opera house and I have to deal with the cultic, cachectic audience and the grand-opera worshippers as well as the ridiculous plots, the unhandsome singers, the interminable intermissions, the staginess and artifice and the general all-around silliness -- as well as pay through the nose for the privilege of doing so, well then, I'm not always a happy fellow.

I know the sound of Verdi's Otello moderately well, having played the Placido Domingo version often enough for the laser to have bored holes into the cd. Moreover, as it happens, I'm moderately familiar with Shakespeare's play). But I had never seen a performance of Otello until this past Saturday when we betook ourselves and our bagels and our Granny Smiths to the Century Theatre to watch the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD performance. It was, frankly, glorious -- Renee Fleming in the electronic flesh, moving us to tears with the willow song (along with Verdi's bonus, dubious Ave Maria).  

She was superb; so were the orchestra, the costumes, the sets, even the overacting, villainous Iago, who would have twirled his mustachios, if he had had them, and the non-acting, expressionless Othello.

Our "guide," a robust, comfortable mezzo whose name I should know but didn't catch, made the claim that Verdi's Otello improved upon Shakespeare's Othello. A highly dubious claim, I think, but then, I don't know how to measure the value of the grand "Othello music," that Shakespeareans so much admire, against the cellos and the bassoons. Whether for better or worse, however, there's a heck of a lot in Shakespeare's play that didn't make it across the centuries and genres and into Verdi's opera. More than can be said in a paragraph or a blaguepost. 

For starters, Shakespeare created a multi-layered society, not just elaborate sets. His city of Venice has a sense of itself as a successful, orderly, civilized, and advanced community. Into this world strides Othello, not only an outlander but an African and a erotic exotic. Although Venice needs his soldiership, he's still a black man in a racist world who marries a willful patrician lady who prefers him to  the "wealthy curled darlings of the nation." It's an unlikely, perilous match: he's "declined into the vale of years" while she's very very young. He's a soldier who's been around the world; she's the secluded mistress of the house affairs. He's commanding; she's naive. 

Verdi must have loved Othello, although not necessarily for the right reasons. How could a play that ends on a bed, with a climactic murder-suicide, not have excited the instincts of the composer of Aida. Nothing more appropriate for grand opera than Othello and Desdemona -- and yet o so simple a representation compared with Shakespeare's rich figures and complex society.

Imagine a Merchant of Venice in which Shylock is not Jewish, or a King Lear in which Lear is a troubled forty-something and you're well on your way to grasping an Othello in which melanin is replaced with melodrama.    

As a result, even when Verdi brought tears to my eyes, it was because I was seeing through the opera to the play that lies beneath it.

And sometimes I was crying because I so desperately missed the beauties and the profundity that Verdi had not seen fit to include.

A Splendid Sentence

All that is good and all that is bad about opera is summarized by the following splendid sentence. It comes from a plot summary of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore. Prepare to savor. 

"At the pre-wedding feast, Adina and Dulcamara entertain the guests with a barcarole."

Is that genius, or what? 

Here's the situation: the plot's a little thin and needs to be padded. Barcaroles were big in the 1840s. By good fortune, Donizetti just happens to have one in his drawer, or perhaps he has been thinking about gondoliers since his last trip to Venice. So let's slip a barcarole in there. 

Moreover, the barcarole is beautiful. Perfectly wonderful and enjoyable. It's as lovely as the excuse for its performance is ridiculous.

That's why we love grand opera -- its inevitable and constant juxtaposition of glorious and absurd. 

Thanks, Metropolitan Opera in HD, for bringing it to our attention. Let's hope for many more afternoons of such transcendent, splendid silliness.

Ah that in real life we could while away our empty hours with barcaroles.

Vegetable Love

As a rule, I'm as fickle as the legendary varying flag, but just now I have made a firm unwavering commitment. My absolutely most favorite line of poetry -- are you ready now, readers -- is (drumroll)l: "If you really want my peaches, gotta shake my tree."

Is that poetry or what? It's teasingly inexplicit yet at the same time very, very suggestive.

I first encountered the line in a mid-1950s doo-wopper by The Clovers (later famous for "Love Potion Number Nine") called "Lovey Dovey."

Well, you're the cutest thing that I did ever see
I really love your peaches, want to shake your tree.
Lovey dovey, lovey dovey all the time
Lovey dovey, I can't get you out of my mind.

The line's subversive sexuality penetrated even our twin-bed, Eisenhower-era, Ozzie-and-Harriet world.

Peaches/trees has a complicated history. Wikipedia tracks it to a song composed by Irving Berlin in May 1914: “If you don't want my peaches/ You'd better stop shaking my tree,” but I'd be willing to bet the orchard that Irving did not invent but borrowed the line, probably from something bluesy. Berlin's peaches warn us off, but Bessie Smith's 1923 peaches are both active and abundant: "If you don't like my peaches then let my orchard be." Bessie was the kind of gal whose peaches would be given away by the basketful. Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1929 peaches, on the other hand, are proprietary: ("you swore nobody’d pick your fruit but me/ I found three kid men shaking down your peaches free"). Ah yes, we must all be faithful to just a single source of fruit.

I'd wager that the peaches have appeared in fifty or a hundred songs in the last century.

The line floats from song to song, but wherever it settles, it's always suggestive of sexual desires and needs. Even when peaches are forbidden fruit, they're also ripe and luscious oozers of juice. Shake that tree properly and they fall into right into your mouth. 

Andrew Marvell would have loved "If you really want my peaches, gotta shake my tree."  Here's his witty mid-seventeenth century version of the trope. It's in a stanza from his best poem, "The Garden."

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Marvell's garden is not for strolling and smelling. It's a garden in which the fruits attack the "speaker" in an active, science-fictiony way. No nibbling here. Instead, "The luscious clusters of the vine,/Upon my mouth do crush their wine." "Luscious clusters... crush" is one sensous mouth-filling phrase. And those fine fruits, "the nectarine and curious (curious =s unusual, not investigative) peach" require no shaking whatsoever. These fruits are animatronic.

Marvell's "Garden" is as good a version of pomological love as Irving Berlin's -- without even taking into account the brilliant and accomplished iambic tetrameter couplets.

La Traviata "Updated"

I prefer to hear rather than to see grand opera. The cd and the radio are my preferred media. Stay at home, sit in a comfortable chair, listen carefully, be ravished.

When you go to the opera, you re-discover that the plot is all silliness, the characters incomprehensible, and the intermissions interminable. 

Nevertheless, there I was, yesterday, at the Met's HD screening of Verdi's La Traviata, the most melodic and romantic of operas. The orchestra and the singing were, as expected, glorious. But the staging was all strained novelty and misguided cleverness.

Can there be an opera less in need of cross-dressing and a gay subtext that La Traviata?  Why would anyone want to clothe both the male and female choristers in severe, gray, men's business suits?  If the story is all about boy-girl romance and sexual intensity and sexual pleasure, why not encourage the men and gaily-dressed women to dance and flirt and try to get together after the downright way of generation?

Opera, when I take the trouble to see it, should be as pleasing to my eye as it is rewarding to my ear. 

But this time, officers of the Metropolitan Opera, I was forced to shut my eyes, and just listen. It was just like staying at home, except that the chair was less comfortable. 

Addendum:  today I read an interview in the April 26 NYRB with the tenor Jonas Kaufmann. Here's an excerpt:

"You see, the conductor believes that the audience is only coming to hear the orchestra and is not interested in the story, the sets, the singers. The director believes it's an all visual thing. So there is this constant fight over what each person believes is the most  important part. I've seen semi-staged or concert performances of operas that were more thrilling than staged ones. Why? Because it's better to have nothing than to have something so disturbing that it distracts you from enjoying the music and that doesn't allow the music to create its magic."

Exactly my point.

 

Reposted: Duke, Duke, Duke

Ain't it shocking that Gene Chandler's excellent song is now almost half a century old?  Seems like just yesterday.

This be the verse in its full splendor.   

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes, I'm gonna love you
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

And when I hold you
You will be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And the paradise we will share.

Yes, oh, I
I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

1)  "Duke of Earl" is classic, though late, doo-wop. Therefore it's lineally descended from songs in which a supporting male quartet sang meaningless syllables: doo wop, wop, wop. In this revisiting of the genre, nonsense doo doo doo de wop has been superseded by words that carry meaning of a sort: duke duke duke of earl. Return we now to the pages of history: in their turn, doo wop quartets were themselves secular offspring of gospel quartets, where a reverent foursome would sing do lord do lord, do lordy lord (a good example: the unnamed backup quartet supporting Georgia Peach in "Do Lord Send Me").

2)  It's a fascinating process: Gene Chandler's replacement of doo doo with duke duke is in fact a return to the roots, except that the previous and inherent religious content has undergone secularization. "Lord" has become "Duke," while the heaven of gospel has transformed into the "dukedom" of doo-wop.

3.  It's easy to deride the naive faux-aristocratic title "Duke of Earl"; but would the song preserve its meaning if it were "Duke of Buckingham?" "Earl" may sound silly, but because it's a generic title rather than a specific one it carries allegorical significance. "Duke of Earl" is no one and therefore everyone. 

4.  It's entirely likely that the word "earl" was chosen because of it echoes "lord": liquids "r" and 'l" and unemphatic vowel. 

5.  The first line of the lyric --"As I walk through this world"-- introduces a secularized religious motif (an inheritance from the song's gospel forbears). Some will notice the echo of the initial phrase of the most famous of all religious allegories, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1672): "As I walked through the wilderness of this world." Gene Chandler, walking through this world, is reborn just as Christian was reborn in the classic allegory. Not religiously, but in a worldly way. He is not saved; he is duked.

6.  Why the aggressive "nothing can stop me now?" What obstacles stopped the Duke of Earl in the past, before his duking? The triumphalist language is highly developed but the obstacles remain vague and unarticulated. Audiences find their own meaning in the lacuna, but indignities historically suffered by the black underclass lurk only slightly below the surface of the lyric.

7.  The transformation from a previous but unknown and unarticulated existence to an aristocratic, unstoppable Duke of Earl takes place offstage, nor is any explanation offered for the metamorphosis.  It's entirely magical.

8.  Because it's magic, it's pure fantasy. Pastoral fantasy in fact, which, curiously, is simultaneously primitive ("paradise") and sophisticated ("dukedom").

9. But it's a shared paradise: the duke along with his duchess. The retreat to domesticity is almost Victorian: "ah love, let us be true/ To one another...."  This particular Duke does not know that "Two paradises were in one/ To live in paradise alone."

10.  The Duke retreats to domesticity and yet he seems to stake out ("nothing can stop me now") new territory to conquer, in which regard the spacious lyric seems to embody contradictory or even incoherent vectors of thought. However, the enthusiasm of the singing obliterates the ambiguity of the lyric; in sum, the song is remarkably optimistic -- which is just one of many reasons for its continued popularity. 

Songs My Mother Sang

My mother had a pretty fair soprano and as a young adult performed in amateur musicals. She sang in that high, quavering style that I associate with artists of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Ruth Etting ("America's Radio Sweetheart"). I remember that sometimes, when she wasn't busy putting the laundry through the wringer or scrubbing the sink or dusting under the beds, she'd sit at the old Hardman piano and sing the songs of her youth. She sang tin pan alley songs, Gilbert and Sullivan ballads, so-called "Negro spirituals," and also what I now know to be Victorian parlor songs. Her taste was formed in the earlier part of the century (she was born in 1905) and had as far as I can tell ceased to change after about 1935 with the arrival of my older brother and diapers. My mother sang, for example, 1919's "Look for the Silver Lining": "A heart, full of joy and gladness,/ Will always banish sadness and strife./So always look for the silver lining,/ And try to find the sunny side of life." She sang "I've been Working on the Railroad" (first published in 1894) with the refrain "Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah/ Someone's in the kitchen I know/ Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah/Strummin' on the old banjo."  Neither she nor I knew that "Dinah" was a generic name for a female slave, nor did we speculate about what the heck was going on in that kitchen. She sang "Oh, the old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be,/Many long years ago."  She sang a version of what I can now identify as Ed Haley's 1894 hit, "The Fountain in the Park", with the familiar lyric "While strolling in the park one day,/ In the merry, merry month of May,/ I was taken by surprise/ by a pair of roguish eyes..."  Sorry, but I can't remember the rest. She sang, "Shine on harvest moon/ Up in the sky."  And also "Aint She Sweet." And "Home Sweet Home" ("Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,/ Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home").

But the song that stands most vividly in my memory was "Bill" from Showboat. It's a lovely song, but I took it wrong. When my mother sang "I used to think that I would discover/ The perfect lover some day," I  decided that she was finding fault with my father, to whom I was most loyal. In my mind, my father was noble and manly and intelligent, and I resented her singing about "Bill, who's not the type at all/ You'd meet him on the street and never notice him." The refrain was particularly painful to my seven-year-old self: "And I can't explain,/ It's surely not his brain that makes me thrill./ I love him because he's I don't know,/Because he's just my Bill."

I've since learned about fiction, and make-believe.  I can forgive her. 

Some Carter Family Favorites

"Wildwood Flower," of course. The tune would have made Bach proud, the story is classic, and the diction and metaphor absolutely perfect: "You've gone and neglected your pale wildwood flower." "Single Girl, Married Girl," which I can never hear without tearing up (or coming very close -- depends on my mood). No one has ever written a lyric that is more succinct or more straightforward: "Single girl, single girl, she goes to the store and buys,/ Married girl, married girl, she rocks the cradle and cries."  "Keep on the Sunny Side," which is perfectly cheerful until it goes all faux-religious in the last verse. If, on the other hand, you're looking for heartfelt religion, there's "No Hiding Place Down Here," which was later and better realized by Dorothy Love Coates and the Gospel Harmonettes. And also the very wistful and lovely "Oh, I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes/ Who is sailing far over the sea/ I'm thinking tonight of my blue eyes/ And I wonder if he ever thinks of me." But my favorite, nowadays, is, "Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone." The lyrics are Victorian/goopy, written (by A. P.) in a highly artificial off-the-wall literary and poetical style -- but yet, when accompanied by guitar and autoharp, and song by Mother Maybelle, against all odds it comes out quintessentially beautiful. "Will You Miss Me" taps into the common fantasy of observing our own funeral. Her'e's the lyric:  Stanza 1: "When death shall close these eyelids,/ And this heart shall cease to beat,/And they lay me down to rest/ In some ?flowery ?boundary ?tree (the words are unintelligible). (2) Perhaps you'll plant a flower/ By my poor unworthy grave;/ Come and sit along beside me/ Where the roses nod and wave. (3) One sweet thought my soul shall cherish/When this fleeting life has flown/ This sweet thought will cheer when dying/ Will you miss me when I'm gone?  (4) When these lips shall never more/Press a kiss upon my brow,/ But lie cold and still in death/ Will you miss me then as now?" Chorus (after every stanza): "Will you miss me,/ Will you miss me when I'm gone?" In its lugubriousitude, "Will You Miss me" is very like the great Londonderry air, "Danny Boy."

There's something luxurious about a good gloomy wallow.  

In Which the Blogger Loses his Cool

The Takacs Quartet graces us with six superb concerts a year.  It's true that they sometimes hanker after strange new composers -- Psathos, Part etc. -- whose compositions set my teeth on edge like the vile squealings of the wry-necked fife or like a brazen canstick turned or like the gratings of a dry wheel on an axletree  -- but mostly they play what distinguished Quartets are ordained to play, that is, the great central European tradition from Haydn to Brahms.  But last night, the Takacs, eek and alas, ventured into new and grim territory.  Horribile dictu, they offered an original, commissioned Drama that purported to be Serious and Illuminating.  It warn't.  It was a interminable playlet about Beethoven's last years founded on the composer's letters and conversation books.  It was barren.  It was predictable, uninsightful, reductive, shallow, witless, dull, and pretentious.  I started to squirm (boredom feeding on embarrassment and embarrassment on boredom) after a couple of minutes, then broke into a sweat, but after a few minutes resigned myself to my middle-of-the-row captivity and I did what I always do in such situations -- recited to myself long-ago-memorized poetry.  When the Drama mercifully ended, I was consoled to hear the woman in front of me (a member of the music faculty) say to her companion, "Do you think they know how bad that was?"

Do they?  I hope so.  I hope that the playwright, a tyro named  ------ Morse, recognizes that he's not Tom Stoppard or even Tom Stoppard diluted to a 1% tincture, and that he takes up a profession that inflicts less pain on innocent bystanders.   

I left dispirited, especially for the actors, who tried to force a marriage of Shakespearean style of performance to prosaic vocabulary and sentence structures.  I do not use the word "Shakespearean" in a good way:  I refer to that highly artificial, unnatural way of speaking and moving that, inherited and debased from an ancient tradition, has stupefied and narcotized dutiful culture-hungry audiences at summer festivals all over America.  Shakespeare himself was clear that he did not want his actors to strut and bellow, but strut and bellow was what they did last night.  If the actors did not split the ears of all the groundlings, they certainly split mine.  Why do they speak in that ridiculous manner when their aim should be "to hold the mirror up to nature."  It's wrong of me to say so, but I felt that I could look into the soul of the actor who played Beethoven and see a man who imagined that  he was playing Lear at the Old Vic, when he was in fact performing in a play that might, just might, satisfy the requirements for an M.A. in creative writing at some off-brand college ("he's worked very hard on this so we might as well pass him"), and that he was going to show "them" how it's done, but instead he offered us sufferers a copy of a copy of a pale copy.

Egads, I'm breaking into a sweat again just thinking about it.

I pay good money to hear the Takacs -- and concert after concert, I get my money's worth, and much more.  I want Schubert.  I want Mozart.  If I wanted amateur theatricals, I would go to he local dinner theater.  Or to the high school around the corner.  

Ditch the Didge!!

The downtown mall is home to a motley assemblage of street buskers. Some are excellent and welcome performers: the occasional string quartet, the accomplished visiting bluegrass band, a witty gaggle of a cappella singers. Others are less excellent but still tolerable; the contortionist, the magician with the rings that divide and rejoin, the sword-swallower, the zip-code man, the fire-eater, the too-young violin student supervised by his mommy, the juggler whose act hasn't changed since the days when he was known as a joculator. And then a step lower still: that inaudible French girl who struggles with her ukelele. Less welcome are the drummers: bang, bang, bang with no discernible rhythm, just noise great enough to set off sympathetic vibrations in your own personal pancreas. But the worst of the worst is the didgeridoo-master. After decades of practice, all that the didge player can produce is an ugly drone. One note. It goes on and on, relentlessly, and it's dull, grating and loud. If you haven't heard it, imagine a big old bagpipe, playing one note at the bottom of its range, for ever, and ever, and ever. Worse still are didgeridoo assemblies: didgetets or didgeridoo chamber orchestras. 

The didgeridoo comes to us from northern Australia, where it was invented more that 1500 years ago. Perhaps it hasn't evolved because it's thought to be sacred. While the rest of the world developed wind instruments that played a variety of colorful notes, the non-innovative didge people embraced an unchanging and exceedingly boring drone. They are patient people. One by one, native Australians said no to the bassoon, the clarinet, the horn, the sax, the flute, the piccolo, the trumpet, the tuba, the oboe bright and cheerful, and decided that a branch of a eucalyptus tree, naturally hollowed by termites, was all that they needed in the way of wind-instruments. In another fit of imagination, they invented the bull-roarer, an instrument that hasn't yet taken a bow on the mall, but trust me, it won't be long.  

Let's face it;  the didgeridoo is an instrument that hasn't produced a pleasant sound in many thousands of years. It has no plans to do so. Didgeridooists are barking up the wrong tree -- it's never going to be music. It's always going to be noise.

Which brings me to my point, which is that would-be mall performers should not be permitted to busk until they have passed a performance test and have been granted a license. The Board of Acceptability would consist of some of the more traditionalist faculty of both the Music School and the Department of Theater and Drama. The chairman would be an open-minded but engaged citizen, such as Me.  Approval must be unanimous. We (the Board) would strictly enforce standards of artistic excellence. Life would improve.

Rhinestone Cellist

The hype and hoopla at sports arenas are truly deplorable, especially to aged eyes and ears. At a Washington Wizards game in DC a couple of weeks ago, members of the starting team were introduced not only with spotlights, screeching, and "music" but also with bursts from a high-powered flame thrower. Even fifty yards away, I could feel the toasty heat.  

Wild over-the-top absurdity and irrelevance, in my opinion. I go to a basketball game to see a basketball game, not to be danced at, kiss-cammed at, or showered with gift certificates, free pizza, and t-shirts.

I'm back home in Boulder again, and last night I heard performances of Prokofiev, Beethoven, and Brahms by the ever-so-formal Escher Quartet. Lord-a-mercy, did they ever make me long for a little sporty glitz. The Eschers (three men and a woman, all of whom appeared to be in their 20s) conducted themselves as if they just woken up from a long day of sleeping in their coffins. They were utterly joyless. They resolutely avoided looking at each other or at the audience or betraying the least emotion. The expressions on their faces did not say, "magnificent music"; they said, "is that curdled milk, or what?" They plucked and sawed at their instruments with as much enthusiasm as if they were cleaning out the septic system. Their playing was exact but uninspiring--but what can you expect from three mortgage brokers and a dental hygienist?  The Eschers acknowledged the generous applause of the audience as if they were feudal overlords hearing the petitions of dung beetles. 

Whenever I go to chamber music concerts, I feel young. Actually, I am young, because in the chamber-music crowd, anyone without a walker or an oxygen bottle is a kid.

The Escher should loosen up a bit -- and perhaps attract a younger and livelier audience. 

Here's the fantasy. Cue spotlight. Cue big-voiced announcer. "And now, on cello, from Thousand Oaks, California, in his fifth year, out of the Manhattan School of Music, Andy Janss." Janss runs on to the stage, carrying his cello overhead, his rhinestones glittering in the lights. He high-fives the other members of the group, shakes the confetti off his shoulder-length hair, tosses some talcum powder into the air....etc. etc.  Crowd roars. He plays with enthusiasm. So do his comrades.

But let us not sacrifice the dignity of classical-music. No flame throwers.  

Starlight, Dewdrops, etc.

The Stephen Foster songbook was a staple of my childhood. My mother sitting at the old Hardman baby grand, sang "Camptown Ladies" and "O Susanna" and "Old Black Joe." But times change and Foster was pushed to the sidelines years ago. Too racist, too sentimental, too 'soft'. It's undeniable that the lyrics of many of his songs are reprehensible.

Now we're enjoying a Stephen Collins Foster Revival and Festival in our very own home. It began with the discovery of the "American Dreamer" cd that Thomas Hampson recorded in 1992.  Hampson, opera lovers will know, is the world champion of living baritones, and in this cd, he does Foster proud -- to the inventive accompaniments of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason. No question but that Foster was a truly superb melodist -- with a long string of songs that would have gone double-platinum, if there had been such a thing, in pre-Civil War America.  

Hampson sings the Foster songs as if they're Schubert lieder, but there's another recent cd, "Beautiful Dreamer" -- a "tribute album" in which Suzy Bogguss, John Prine, Allison Krauss, Mavis Staples and a bunch of excellent lesser-known (to me) but wonderful musicians lay into these tunes with enthusiasm and verve. Who would have guessed the "Beautiful Dreamer" was country before country was cool? Pure country.

Foster was a better melodist than poet. Often his lines are awkward and time-bound and mawkish, but occasionally he hits the nail on the head. I like "beautiful dreamer, queen of my song"; I think that "slumber my darling the birds are at rest" is fine, but a succeeding line in the same song -- "thy pillow shall sacred be" -- is bad beyond ordinary bad; "weep no more, my lady" is positively Shakespearean and "all the world is sad and dreary/ every where I roam" is well-rooted in the medieval contemptus mundi  tradition; "long may the daisies dance the field, frolicking far and near" is far too pseudo-Wordsworthian for my palate. Foster's best lyric, in my view, is "Hard Times Come Again No More" --  "'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary/ Hard times, hard times, come again no more/ Many days you have lingered, around my cabin door/ Oh! hard times, come again no more."  It's inspired, heartfelt, and eternally pertinent -- and also, wedded to an excellent melody. "Hard Times" was not known to me in the days of my youth -- more's the pity.  

Old guy, maybe a bluesman, bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, sits on a bench in the middle of the night, downtown, playing air-sax, nodding. Young fellow comes by, cheerful, asks him, "Crosstown buses run this way?" Blues guy looks up, pauses for a second, and then drawls, "Doo--dah, doo-dah."     

Modern Radio

For the new downtown apartment, we've purchased a Sonos ZonePlayer. What does this oddly-named machine do?  It simply allows me to capture the signal of radio statios all over the world (through the internet connection), pipe them through the amplifier, and broadcast them on our old but functional speakers.

Quite a step up in standard of living, especially since over-the-air reception in our mountain town is severely compromised by the bumpy terrain

With this new device, I can listen to classical music stations from all the capitols of Europe -- all over the planet, in fact. I can choose from among 5 or 6 crystal-clear stations dedicated entirely to opera, as well as a few that specialize in the baroque period, or in chamber music, or piano. There are also five Beatles stations, one of them from Moscow!  Several "big band" stations. An all Grateful Dead specialist beaming directly to me from Connecticut. An all Bruce, all the time.

I love the "Paris Chanson" station, twenty-four hours a day of Edith Piaf and friends, from Tokyo.

But so far my favorite is the all doo-wop station out of Winter Haven, Florida, which, on demand, has the power to return me to my teen-age years. Just now I heard the Jacks' plaintive, "Why Don't You Write Me," a song which functioned, earlier in my life, as a personal anthem of self-flagellation. And just at this moment, a glorious version (and one that I didn''t know) of the much-recorded "The Glory of Love."  Aural bliss!  

What's missing?  A good American roots (1920s and 1930s) station. A station specializing in 1940s and 1950s black gospel -- definitely not "contemporary gospel" -- which, according to AH, the world's expert, is called contemporary because it is both a "con" and "temporary."  An all Gilbert and Sullivan station -- but perhaps that would be a gift too precious to imagine?

But if  there can be eight all-Elvis stations, shouldn't there be at least one that is all-Haydn, all the time?

And yet I've only begun to search.  Who knows what other pleasures are out there in modern radioland?

Life Lessons from F. P Schubert

Our local chamber players, the Takacs, performed the Schubert Quintet (D.956). It's a glorious work -- one of the finest in the entire chamber repertoire -- and was brilliantly performed.  It's a turbulent, nervous, tense piece of music. With the last notes, the entire audience rose simultaneously to cheer.  There were fist-pumpings, whistles, "bravos," "yesses," and other spontaneous shouts of pleasure from the octogenarian listeners.  It was a rock and roll moment at Grusin Hall. 

I cheered too, but not so much for the Takacs as for Schubert.  It's so often the case that the interpreters are rewarded while the creator is neglected.  Here's Schubert, dead of poverty and syphilis and mercury poisoning at age 31, never having made a nickel out of his many compositions.  In desperate straits, with only two months to live, Schubert sent his new quintet to the Leipzig publisher H. A. Probst. Probst rejected it, asking instead for something "easily understandable."  The world "does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious precedures of your mind's creations."  The quintet was first performed in 1850, twenty-two years after Schubert breathed his last.

Is there a moral?  Yes, I think there is.  If you're in the composing or painting or novel-writing business, do it your own way -- not the easy way.  If you lose, you lose.  So what?  If you win, you win big.

More on Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" condenses centuries of tangled racial strife into a brief lyric. The song begins in rural, impoverished, perhaps southern, America: "I was born by the river, in a little tent."  Then, with a glance at the old man river who just keeps rolling, it alludes to African-Americans as on-the-lam outsiders: "Just like the river, I've been running ever since."  The third stanza, now shifted to an urban location, refers specifically to the insult of segregation (shortly before writing the song, Cooke had been barred from a Shreveport hotel): "I go to the movies and I go downtown;/ Somebody keep telling me, don't hang around." The second stanza is surprisingly confessional for a man who had started his career in gospel and had sung lead for the Soul Stirrers;  it's about loss of faith. "I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky." Nevertheless, despite all the reasons for losing heart, including the lack of support from brothers of different political factions, Sam retains an uncompromisIng optimism: he will "carry on, yes I will." The song is a miniature allegory of a triumph over separation and persecution. It celebrates endurance, perseverance, fortitude in the face of long odds.No wonder that Barack Obama adapted Cooke's affirmative "Yes I will" into "Yes we can."

Sam Cooke himself didn't get to the promised land; he was shot, under "mysterious circumstances" in December of 1964. "A Change is Gonna Come" was released posthumously.

It's Been a Long Time Coming

I'm enchanted that our new president chose to cite -- or "sample" as they say in the world of pop music -- one of my favorite, and one of the most important of the songs of the 1960s. Here's the borrowed sentiment, delivered in Chicago on November 4, just after Obama cleared the electoral hurdle: "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America." The big O's citation is to the refrain of Sam Cooke's great anthem, "A Change is Gonna Come": "It's been a long time coming/ But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will." 

Those who know their Sam Cooke will appreciate Obama's sentence. To the Cooke-innocent, the "change" is a new administration and new policies. To the Cooke-knowledgeable, the "change" to which Obama refers is a tectonic shift in American racial politics.   

So I'm reproducing Sam Cooke's lyric right here.  If you're one of my coevals, you probably know the song by heart. If you don't know it, you should. If you're curious, you can see and hear Sam and Otis Redding and a host of others sing the song on You Tube. Here's the lyric.  It's one great, inspiring song. 

"I was born by the river in a little tent

And just like the river I've been running ever since.

It's been a long time coming.

But I know a change is gonna come.

It's been too hard living, and I'm afraid to die.

I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky.

(refrain)

I go to the movie and I go downtown

Somebody keep telling me, don't hang around.

(refrain)

I go to my brother, I say help me please,

But he winds up knocking me down on my bended knees.

(refrain)

There's been times that I thought I couldn't last long,

But now I think I'm able to carry on.

It's been a long time coming,

But I know a change is gonna come, o yes it will."

Talk about the ability to say a lot in a little.  O yeah!

Takacs Geezers

At Grusin Music Hall last night to hear the Takacs play Beethoven and Schumann, always a delight, and also a quartet by Bartok, which is, I'm sorry to say, even after many exposures is still screechingly hard on my tender ears (except for the very amusing pizzicato 4th movement).  Perhaps some day I'll "get" Bartok, but it's been forty years of hard listening and frankly, I'm not there yet.  I'm still hopelessly stranded in melody, harmony, and rhythm. 

Meanwhile the chamber music crowd get older and older.  Anyone with the least amount of pigment in his/her hair is young;  in fact, anyone without a wheel-chair, a walker, an oxygen bottle, or a "minder" is young.  Grusin is the place I take my septuagenarian self in order to feel youthful and vigorous.  I admit that it's a strategy that doesn't have much of a future, but I'm not thinking long term.   

I think Ed and the Takacses should accommodate to their elderly audience.  For example, when it comes time for the violin to play solo parts in the highest register, the notes are barely audible.  It can't just be me having this problem because half of the geezers in the auditorium have sprouted hearing aids.  I think that Ed should make an effort to play the high notes a lot louder.  Or possibly, plug in that near-Strad that he wields so well.  I'm sure that there's a electronic program designed to amplify the top of the register. 

On the other hand, If the Takacs wants to attract a younger audience, there are some changes they might make.  For one thing, it's time to give up on the all-black tuxes.  Why must they all dress like Johnny Cash?  Sequins would be good, or anything glittery.  And those shiny black shoes in an age when footwear has become plastic and colorful?  What's with that?  And how about a little chest hair (or in the case of Gerri the violist, a little bosom)? Bring that Broncos/Buffs/Coors crowd to Grusin!! A new generation of Brahmsophiles.  And why must they just sit there like lumps when they could move around the stage a bit.  An occasional dance step.  Slap that cello, swing those violins from side to side. 

Lots of room for exciting innovations in the world of the classical string quartet.

Lebanon, Puccini

I'm just back from Lebanon (that would be Lebanon, New Hampshire) where I heard a performance of Puccini's Madame Butterfly.  If you pay no mind to the ridiculous racist orientalist anti-American story, it's a pretty good opera.  The orchestra, though small, was excellent and the singers top-notch.  The music is a little on the overwrought side, and the garish emotional display makes Dostoevsky seem in comparison like drawing-room comedy.  It's a sad, dated story.  While Emma Bovary found the solution to her problem in arsenic, Anna Karenina in the locomotive and Edna Pontellier in the water, Cio-cio-san elects the knife -- more evidence, if more is needed, for women's paucity of choices in the grand old days.  But great melodies, no question.  The opera crowd was, as usual, a little on the geriatric side -- and as a consequence I felt quite youthful bounding up to the balcony.  At breakfast the next day, a friend admitted to being moved by Cio-cio-san's suffering.  "Did you cry," I asked.  His reply:  "I'm not saying."

Duke, Duke, Duke

Ain't it shocking that Gene Chandler's excellent song is now almost half a century old?  Seems like just yesterday.

This be the verse in its full splendor.   

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes, I'm gonna love you
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

And when I hold you
You will be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And the paradise we will share.

Yes, oh, I
I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

1)  "Duke of Earl" is classic, though late, doo-wop. It's lineally descended from songs in which a supporting male quartet sang meaningless syllables: doo wop, wop, wop. In this revisiting of the genre, nonsense doo doo doo de wop has been superseded by words that carry meaning of a sort: duke duke duke of earl. Return we now to the pages of history: in their turn, doo wop quartets were themselves secular offspring of gospel quartets, where a reverent foursome would sing do lord do lord, do lordy lord (a good example: the unnamed quartet supporting Georgia Peach in "Do Lord Send Me").

2)  It's a fascinating process: Gene Chandler's replacement of doo doo with duke duke is in fact a return to the roots, except that the previous and inherent religious content has undergone secularization. "Lord" has become "Duke," while the heaven of gospel has become the "dukedom" of doo-wop.

3.  It's easy to deride the naive aristocratic title "Duke of Earl"; but would the song preserve its meaning if it were "Duke of Buckingham?" "Earl" may sound silly, but because it's a generic title rather than a specific one it carries allegorical significance."Duke of Earl" is no one and therefore everyone. 

4.  It's entirely likely that the word "earl" was chosen because of it echoes "lord": liquids "r" and 'l" and unemphatic vowel. 

5.  The first line of the lyric --"As I walk through this world"-- introduces a secularized religious motif (an inheritance from the song's gospel forbears). Some will recall the opening sentence of the most famous of all religious allegories, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1672): "As I walked through the wilderness of this world."  Gene Chandler, walking through this world, is reborn just as Christian was reborn in the classic allegory. Not religiously, but in a worldly way. He is not saved;  he is duked.

6.  What is the significance of aggressive "nothing can stop me now?" What obstacles stopped the Duke of Earl in the past, before his duking?  The triumphalist language is highly developed but the obstacles remain vague and unarticulated. Audiences find their own meaning in the lacuna, but indignities historically suffered by the black underclass lurk only slightly below the surface of the lyric.

7.  The transformation from a previous but unknown and unarticulated existence to an aristocratic, unstoppable Duke of Earl takes place offstage, nor is any explanation offered for the metamorphosis. It's entirely magical.

8.  Because it's magic, it's pure fantasy. Pastoral fantasy in fact, which, curiously, is simultaneously primitive ("paradise") and sophisticated ("dukedom").

9. But it's a shared paradise: the duke along with his duchess. The retreat to domesticity is almost Victorian: "ah love, let us be true/ To one another...."  This particular Duke does not know that "Two paradises were in one/ To live in paradise alone."

10.  The Duke retreats to domesticity and ayet he seems to stake out ("nothing can stop me now") new territory to conquer, in which regard the spacious lyric seems to embody contradictory or even incoherent vectors of thought. However, the enthusiasm of the singing obliterates the ambiguity of the lyric; in sum, the song is remarkably optimistic -- which is just one reason for its continued popularity. 

No Words, No Words? Hush.

A few nights ago, I attended a performance by our local treasure, the ever-glorious Takacs Quartet. Without asking my leave, they chose to play works by Aarvo Part and Philip Glass. I suppose that there must be virtues to "minimalist" music, but a single motif played over and over again in the same tempo, with the same unvarying dynamics, and in the same non-key -- what's the point? Music without melody, harmony, or rhythm is like a novel without a plot or like a severely abstract painting. Sorry folks, I'm antediluvian. A relic. I want a story and I want it dressed in rhyme and meter. It's exhilaration that I crave, not forty-five long minutes of total ripvanwinkleization.      

I was already in a sulky mood at the intermission when Mr. and Mrs. Talkative behind me, after gushing over the minimalists, directed their intellects toward Shakespeare. Mrs T. announced, "You don't need to read a Shakespeare play before seeing it. Just read a plot summary so that you know what's happening." Mr. T. agreed:  "Absolutely. Going to the theater is all about the costumes and the set and the business. As long as you have a general idea of the story, you don't need to understand the words."   

No need to understand Shakespeare's words?  Go to the theater and ignore the words of the finest poet in human history?  What are the Talkatives thinking?  The costumes are the work of the costumer; the business is the work of the director and the stage designer. The only part of the performance that is Shakespeare's is the language. 

One of the teachers of my youth, the late and much lamented Alfred Harbage  -- the finest Shakespeare scholar of his generation -- used to say that he didn't care what the actors did on stage as long as he could hear the words.  I'm not nearly so tolerant. I don't want Rosiland and Orlando to send email messages to each other -- I want them to articulate. I don't want Cinna and Metullus Cimber to be dressed as blackshirt fascist thugs. And I certainly don't want Snug and Bottom to ride to the Duke's Oak on motorcycles. Such antics are stupid and distracting.

The performance for which I'd pay a premium price is one at the Theatre, or at the old Globe, or at the Blackfriars during the years when Shakespeare was teaching the parts to Burbage and Hemmings and Kemp. Dollars to doughnuts he insisted that the actors pronounce the words distinctly.   

After the grating intermission, the Talkatives ran out of insights and my indignation began to wane. Eventually Ed, Andras, Karoly and Gerry returned to the stage and played one of Haydn's great Opus 76 quartets. It was transcendent -- melodic, intelligent and intelligible, warm, robust and sensuous. It was music.   

The P. S. 217 "Assembly"

During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies." Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their costumes that I'm darned if I can remember what was worn by the young ladies). Before entering the auditorium, classes lined up in "size places." P. S. 217 was particularly strong on "size places" -- a point of particular humiliation for me, because I was, as WS says about R of G, "so long a-growing, and so leisurely" that I was by far the smallest child in every class from first grade to eighth. After we found our assigned seats (boys in one row, girls in the next), our principal Miss Bildersee, a formidable and incredibly ancient woman with nostrils so huge and distended that an agile boy could go spelunking in them, would perform the mandatory reading from the Bible. Blessings on her fond old heart, Miss Bildersee regularly choose melodious passages from the book of Psalms. I was particularly struck by the eloquence of "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful," with its abrupt counterbalancing antistrophe: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away." After the Bible reading and some announcements, there was usually a performance of some sort. Choral readings, the oddest of art forms, were far too frequent. I remember that I was once a member of a sextet of quavering sopranos who memorized and recited the patriotic World War I poem "In Flanders Fields." What in the world was a second-grader supposed to make of "We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/Loved and were loved, and now we lie/In Flanders fields./Take up our quarrel with the foe:/To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high./If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields." (Such poppycock was received as true literary greatness. It would have been beyond utopian imagination that our teachers would have known or introduced us to the distinguished WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg or Siegfried Sassoon or Edward Thomas.) Then our music specialist Mrs. Georgia Keiselbach would sit down at the piano and teach us songs, some of them also left over from the first World War:  "Keep the home-fires burning,/ While your hearts are yearning,/ Though your lads are far away/ They dream of home;/ There's a silver lining/Through the dark cloud shining,/Turn the dark cloud inside out,/Till the boys come home." And also: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/ Who will fight for the right they adore... Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder."  And: "Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway/Tramp, tramp, tramp, the road is free...  We're planters and Canucks/ Virginians and Kentucks/Captain Dick's own Infantry/ Captain Dick's own Infantry," which I now know to have come from Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and which provoked a great deal of surreptitious tittering because it had the word "dick" in it. In those unenlightened days we sang very many overtly religious songs: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" and "Easter Parade." I much admired the tune of "The First Noel" but I had no idea what was meant by "born is the king of Israel" -- the only Israel I knew of was a recently-founded democracy. I loved the Thanksgiving hymn "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;/ He chastens and hastens His will to make known;/ The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,/ Sing praises to His name; He forgets not his own" and many more stanzas, none of which I could parse or understand (still can't, in fact!). Another Thanksgiving song: "Over the river and through the woods/ To grandmother's house we go/The horse knows the way/To carry the sleigh...," which I found to be curiously disorienting because my particular grandmother lived in a tiny third-floor walkup on noisy and sweaty Coney Island Avenue. We sang the immensely mysterious Lord's Prayer (in the Schubert setting, I later discovered). Why did we so?  Were the heathens and Jews among us expected to convert on the spot? I much preferred the patriotic songs, although even they too were permeated with inexplicable theology. We were fervent jingos.   Not one, but two full stanzas of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic": "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me/ As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/ For God is marching on." And two stanzas also of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand/ Between their loved home and the war's desolation!/ Blessed with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land/ Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation./Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/ And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'" I preferred the rousing "O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,/ The home of the brave and the free,/ The shrine of each patriot's devotion,/ A world offers homage to thee" and "God Bless America" as well as the jingoist exceptionalism and cluttered syntax of "Our father's God, to thee/ Author of liberty/ To thee we sing./  Long may our land be bright/ With freedom's holy light;/ Protect us by thy might/ Great God our King." 

Here's a song we were distinctly not taught and did not sing: "This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California, to the New York Island./ From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me." We especially did not sing: "In the squares of the city  -- in the shadow of the steeple/  Near the relief office -- I see my people/ And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' /If this land's still made for you and me."

December 17.  I now remember that we sang musical settings to two familiar poems. The first, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Hey, that's my grandparents you're calling "wretched refuse." The second, Joyce Kilmer's horrid "Trees": "I think that I shall never see/  A poem lovely as a tree...  A tree who's hungry mouth is pressed/ Against the earth's sweet-flowing breast" etc.  This song was only palatable because it allowed us to say the word "breast" out loud. 

(Thanks to Steve and to Barry, graduates of P. S. 217, for jogging my memory;  thanks also to David [P. S. 102].

Graduates of P. S. 217 who happen to stumble onto this site: feel free to add comments or to forward this post to classmates with whom you might be in touch.)

"A Strange Slavery to Beauty"

On September 6, 1664, Sam Pepys purchased for his young wife a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon. At 20 shillings, he knew that he overpaid but he was not at all sorry, because Doll, the 'Change woman from whom he made the purchase was "so pretty, that, God forgive me! I could not think it too much -- which is a strange slavery that I stand in to beauty, that I value nothing near it."  Pepys, God forgive him, was not only enthralled by handsome women, but was attentive to beauty in all its manifestations.  He loved plays and performances, paintings and prints and architecture, as well as music, especially songs and ballads.  Pepys's life was ruled by his "strange slavery to beauty."

 

But why should he have described his fascination as "strange?"  If there is a single trait that distinguishes not just Pepys but human beings as a species, it is an irrepressible love of things beautiful.  For every one of their senses, humans have created an appropriate form of art. Hearing?  Music and song.  Sight? drawing and painting and sculpture and film. Taste? elaborate cookery. Motion?  the dance.  Speech and language?  literature from lyric to epic to novel.  Moreover, there's scarcely a substance that human beings have encountered in their time on the planet that they haven't transformed into something harmonious and elegant.  At first, bone and stone and fur; and then wood and metal and cloth and clay.  Occasionally, some anthropologist will emerge from his laboratory with a theory that the fundamental human trait is  -- you name it -- aggressiveness, or territoriality, or the ability to play games, or an interest in the future, or the capacity for bonding into societies.  Such theories have a bit of truth, but they overlook the obvious.  The essence of humanity, in my view, is the drive to create and to appreciate beauty.  Pepys' "strange slavery" is not a bit strange;  it's universal.

 

As for myself, I believe that I can remember the exact day, hour and minute when I was first struck by beauty.  My moment of ascension occurred in a garden.  I must have been twelve or thirteen years old (and therefore not fully human).  One spring day I tagged along with a gang of schoolyard savages to the Zoo to see if we could get ourselves into a little trouble.  So there we were, running about, screaming and hiding and throwing stones at each other and clods of dirt at the respectable zoo patrons. Someone must have called the cops, because the next thing I knew we had all scattered and I was running as fast as I could.  In those days I was small and spry and any fence that I couldn't squeeze through I could certainly clamber over.  And what's a little barbed wire to a frightened urchin?  Separated from my cohort, I became completely lost.  Eventually, I found myself in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden which was then as now adjacent to the zoo.  I climbed over one or two more fences and entered (not by a gate, but surreptitiously) the famous, mature, refined Japanese Garden -- one of the great artistic achievements in all of America.  I was dazzled in all my senses-- it was a true epiphany.  I particularly remember the red cut leaf maples and the wisteria.  Of course I was too ignorant to know that it was wisteria;  I only knew that I was surrounded by magnificent cascades of blue flowers in abundant bloom.

 

Here are some pictures of the garden.  Just take a look, and then try to imagine an uncivilized pre-adolescent, a scared, sweaty, ragtag child, a product of concrete schoolyards and filthy subways stumbling upon such a amenable place.

 

What good fortune it was to have vaulted that one last fence!

 

I think that I've spent the rest of my life trying to get back to that garden -- or, more accurately, I've spent it trying to recreate and to re-live the aesthetic explosion that I experienced at that epiphanic moment.  When I travel. I make it a point to visit the world-famous gardens, and when I'm at home I work on my own landscape.  But it's not just gardens -- the most ephemeral of art forms --to which I stand in strange slavery.  I've found the aesthetic shiver in other places.  Poetry, Shakespeare in particular, is always at hand.  Is there a civilized soul who can read "Do not laugh at me;/ For (as I am a man) I think this lady/ To be my child, Cordelia" without dropping a pleasurable tear.  The Winter's Tale, which is the finest play in the history of this or any other universe, is a fountain of delights, especially Perdita's "I was not much afeard; for once or twice/ I was about to speak and tell him plainly,/ The selfsame sun that shines upon his court/ Hides not his visage from our cottage but/ Looks on alike" -- a sentiment which may be the most genuinely democratic in thirty-eight otherwise monarchist dramas.  Visual arts also are a constant source of pure delight;  in a gallery of Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum I was once so ecstatic that my heart began to beat uncontrollably.  And in Helsinki, I had a moment of pure architectural joy at the Church of the Rock -- the most beautiful and holy of buildings.

 

But of all art forms, it's music that is most reliably transcendent.  My tastes have evolved over the years:  Dvorak and Mahler are in the past but Beethoven's great fugue still sets my spine on edge and so does the long harpsichord solo in Bach's Fifth Brandenburg.  Recordings usually (but not always) work better than live performances.  When I'm in the right mood, I play the shivery passages again and again.  Nowadays the single most lovely piece of music is the great chaconne from Bach's second violin partita.  Hilary Hahn's performance is my favorite, but the chaconne is almost as exciting in Celadonio Romero's guitar transcription and in the Brahms piano version (for virtuoso left hand only).  The chaconne does all that music can do, and it does it in fifteen unaccompanied minutes.

 

It's not just classical music.  I'm also strangely enslaved to what is now called "golden era gospel" -- the singing of the "Heavenly Gospel Singers" and the "Harmonizing Four" and Clara Ward and Brother Joe May and Dorothy Love Coates and the "Swan Silvertones" and the "Five Blind Boys of Alabama." A small sample of some of my many, many favorites:  Mahalia Jackson's long live version of "How I Got Over"; the "Roberta Martin Singers"' "Standing on the Promises"; Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight singing "Beams of Heaven"; the "Sensational Nightingales" "Brightly Beams";  perhaps the best of the best:  Professor J. Earle Hines, "God Be With You."  In such great music resides the aesthetic ecstasy, that, when we open ourselves to it, makes us most completely human.