Tag Archives: music

Surely ‘Tis Better to be Bombastic than Merely Bumptious

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graphite drawing

As my music teacher once told me, "if you make a mistake, be sure to make the same mistake again, and with real conviction, when you get to Verse Two."

No one will be surprised to hear that as a kid with no sense of direction, space or straightforward western left-to-right/top-to-bottom reading I never did master reading music. Apparently I was a pretty decent prevaricator and persuader, though, because I faked my way through my five years of piano lessons by conning teachers and friends into playing my assignments for me up front ‘so I could get a feel for how they worked’–so I could phony them up by playing primarily by ear when lesson time came around again. Not to say that this flim-flam actually made me a good player. I had the decency to stop taking lessons when I was old enough that the act was wearing as thin as a starlet’s underwear. My teachers deserved to work with students with a certain amount of potential, after all. But I learned lots of fun and useful things from them in spite the inevitable moments of frustration and drudgery inherent in beginner’s practice. Not least of which was that the root not just of learning, but of potential innovation and variant excellence is the Mistake.

This is not meant as license for licentiousness–free rein to make egregious errata just for the lazy-ass or mean-spirited fun of it. But there’s a great difference between tripping on the invisible banana skin and bounding around boisterously without regard to the laws of gravity just to see how much I can liven up a dull funeral service. There’s a yawning gap between plonking a wrong note in the heat of a performance and sabotaging a poor defenseless deceased composer because I don’t care enough to learn her work properly. Despite my inability to make head or tail of those dots on a score, I did earnestly try to learn the proper notes right through by however devious the means.

I can neither confirm nor deny that the keyboard biff-ery that inspired the above gem of guidance regarding consistency of form used to disguise a melodic pratfall in any way improved upon the intended character or direction of the piece. Can’t even remember what I was playing. But you can be sure that the technique offered was a face saver, if not a life-saver, many a time after. Sometimes it’s just best to own up to my impressive capacity for fallibility right off, and enjoy a good horse-laugh at my own expense along with all of the other merrymakers in the room. Sometimes, though, I would rather take a page from the Bluffer’s Guides and adopt a meant-to-do-that nonchalance. There’s only so much I can take of being the unintentional class clown. Part of me dreams of Emma Peel sang-froid, a fantasy that however insanely unreachable is yet not easily quashed.

After all, it has served as the inspiration, time and time again, for all sorts of larger than life ideas, stories, poems, artworks and practical on-the-spot excuses, and who among us does not need those! Dogs, however voracious, can’t be expected to digest every available hunk of homework; traffic cannot account for the vagaries of my inspired life behind the wheel at every moment; and certainly the good taste and etiquette handbook, no matter how comprehensive, simply doesn’t have the capacity to cover my every gaffe and blunder in thought, word and dork-dyed deed. So thanking my lucky stars, and my long-ago mistress of pianistic peregrinations, I will continue on my hapless yet happy way, pretending to know what I’m doing in life while covering my blunders with bluster and the best imitation I can give of correctness. Whatever that is.

graphite drawing

What I MEANT to say was . . .

Perhaps this will Ring a Bell

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Perhaps if you've stood near the cathedral in Uppsala . . .

Yesterday I spent the whole day at church. No, I’m not nearly that dedicatedly religious–I’ll leave that to the clergy and others far more willing and capable–but since my husband conducts choirs at that church and they sang (a lot) at three services between 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. yesterday and I like to hear his choirs when I can, not to mention keeping a hard-working guy company through a long day . . . well, we both spent the whole day at church. Except for a lunch break, I mean.

There were reasons besides the music that it was a worthwhile day to be at church all the day long. I’m sure some would say my everlasting soul is in dire need of such a thing, since I’m admittedly not so very pious by nature. But as I’m not conducting or singing or working like the rest of the people who attend multiple services, there is also welcome space in the forms of a mass for me to meditate and maybe refresh my strength for a bit.

The benefits of a church marathon yesterday certainly included being among people that took the solemnity and significance of 9-11’s tenth anniversary to heart and really did spend a day of remembrance and service in honor of those lost and those others who have continued to pay the price for ten years. More importantly in my book, I think many of those people with whom I ended up spending the day understand equally that the significance of the date is only validated and saluted properly by finding the most positive ways to move forward and renew all things touched by wounds of the day’s history. So amid the seriousness, there was a great deal of kindness and generosity and joy.

Certainly didn’t hurt for us to have a visit from a truly dear longtime friend who stayed after the second service and took us to lunch!

The other happy peculiarity of being in church all day was the reminder of how much I love the sound of church bells. While they were rung on this occasion for some less-than-ecstatic reasons along with the usual markings of time and ceremony, their very presence in the air, softly change-ringing through the nave and tolling across the neighborhood, was a benison I find particularly sweet. It brings not only consciousness of the best of the words and acts in hand but also of all kinds of good associative thoughts.

The bells do always bring with them reminders for me of their tolling for various loved ones who have died over the years: grandparents and close friends, other relatives, deeply connected neighbors and colleagues and cohorts of many kinds. Though I never cease to mourn the loss of those dearest to me, the bells generally bring up more welcome and cheering memories of them, perhaps because something comforting and pleasing in the sound of a well-tuned bell makes it hard for me to hear it as ominous or depressing.

The most distinct aspect of the beauty of bells’ ringing for me, though, is more strictly secular: all of the memories evoked of places I have loved to be, journeys taken, cities visited, hidden jewels of towns in obscure corners of lyrical countryside singing with the ringing of chime-like carillons and roaring urban canyons clanging with bold abandon. In part this is because of the those very connections made with memories of other loved family and friends, many in this case (happily) still living. I’m suddenly drawn back to a wintry day of walking through falling snow in the sharp cold of Basel with my sister and our cousin as the cathedral bells shout above us, echoing from corner to corner, we three stopping only to buy roasted chestnuts from a street vendor purely to heat our hands in our pockets. Then I’m in the outlandishly plush green hills of Oberstaufen in Bavaria, meandering the summer trails near town with my husband and finding one tiny chapel after another, almost like farmstands in their numbers and miniature simplicity but each exquisite in its own well-loved way, amid a sort of soft chattering of bells as one calls to another–all interwoven with the very different bells tinkling on the necks of “guest cows” equally enjoying the spa town as they roam their summer pastures.

steeple photos + text

Ring for me, sing for me . . .

I think I can fairly say that I caught the gist of the bishop’s thoughtful homily yesterday, the lilt and import of the liturgy and readings and ceremony, after attending three fairly elaborate services. I know that I bathed in the sounds of the choirs and the sonority of the organ very gladly. And soaring over it all, or undergirding it, was the recurring theme of the ringing of the bells. That was a particular grace-note on this very particular day.

Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff

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album cover portrait

You old romantic, you!

In my early record collection was a lovely, only slightly scratchy LP, with an equally well-aged photographic portrait on its cover, of Sergei Rachmaninoff playing his own compositions. Needless to say, if you’re a big gooey fan of sweeping, high intensity passionate music like I am and you’re going to have a limited audio selection, it’s beyond stupendous to have such a jewel in it. I undoubtedly increased the mileage on that piece of vinyl tenfold, listening to it in a virtually continuous loop at times, before the era of CDs rendered my old faithful stash of LPs–at least the equipment on which I played them–obsolete. I’m no sophisticated audiophile, able to detect the finer distinctions between LP and CD, let alone to wring the delicacies out of super-duper-HD-splendiferous solid plutonium audio wire with sprinkles on it. But I know gorgeous and moving music when it smacks me upside the head. So of course I’ve always been a sucker for Sergei.

My fabulous blogger friend XB at ‘In Search of My Moveable Feasts’, offered a 25 July rumination on Rachmaninoff and the question posed in some circles as to whether he should be considered a second-rate composer. In some ways, asking me that particular one boils down to what is always treated as quite the prickly question: whether there is a direct relationship, either as equivalents or as antagonists, between popularity (wide public approval, say) of an artist or his work and their level of critical acceptability and the kind of greatness that somehow transcends the current stamp of approval. I’m not entirely sure I buy that these are mutually exclusive evaluations. But at bottom, the very happy obsession to which I confessed earlier answers the question for me far enough for my purposes: Mr. Rachmaninoff makes music that moves me deeply and without which I would be loath to spend any great length of time, and that’s my brand of critical success.

Meanwhile, the portrait above, which was based on the album cover photo, was a surprise to many. It was made as part of a portrait show honoring many of my favorite influences, particularly artists of every stripe, each of whom has played some role in pushing me ahead artistically. It wasn’t until the show was hanging in the gallery that others pointed out and I saw for the first time the marked resemblance between Sergei Rachmaninoff and the also marvelous Vladimir Horowitz in profile, all the more intriguing considering how well known Horowitz is for playing the compositions of fellow eastern Europeans like, say, Rachmaninoff.

In a final confessional note, I will say that an additional major source of my attraction to this great Rach star is his glorious choral music, most notably the exquisite Opus 37, the All Night Vigil (in popular parlance, his ‘Vespers‘). That my life-partner was in the midst of rehearsing an upcoming production of that miraculous piece when we came together could possibly be blamed in part for this addiction. The Sweet Nothings he whispered to me in his sleep being Church Slavonic seemed plenty romantic! As it has transpired, I have now been blessed to be immersed in this piece several times again as he’s conducted it in rehearsals and concerts with an array of different choirs. Given my experience, if Greatness is partly defined by the sophistication and complex subtlety that grows and changes with repeated exposure, never losing but rather increasing in richness over time–I would call Rachmaninoff decidedly first-rate. Whether anybody else buys that as valid or not, I’ll happily wake up any day to a faint humming of ‘Bogoroditse Djevo’, whether it’s from the CD player or from the other side of my bed.

The Feast that Never Ends

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Thanks to our kind friend Joelle, I met fellow blogger XB tonight over dinner. Her blog, ‘In Search of My Moveable Feast’ at http://www.xiaobonestler.com/, is a wonderful melange of food and culture spiced with her delightful wit. I’m also reminded by both blog-mate and the friends around the dinner table tonight–composer hosting, saxophonist and pianist and conductor gathered around the table with me as we all enjoyed the meal and conversation–that shared love of culture and other naturally crazy things is an endless banquet of marvels and wonders.

ratatouille ingredients + blackboard text

To dine is divine, and among friends the conviviality never ends . . .

Is the conversation inspired by the food? The food by the gathering? The gathering by the conversation?

Of course all three happen. In the case of a tableau like tonight’s at table, there can be so many possible tangents to pursue. Avidly swapping bits of life-story over splendid bowls of creamy cool beet soup with yogurt leads to thoughts of yet other meals, stories, and gatherings. Discovering common interests with newly met friends over a glass of wine: how can that not lead to further tales (tall and otherwise) and onward to inspire more the pleasure of dolmas and Greek salad, these then becoming sustenance for other hungers for knowledge and enjoyment?

It is, clearly, an infinite table, this one where strangers sit down to untasted treats and rise up as well-filled and newly minted fellow sojourners. Art is the avenue where all of these fine riches intersect: thought and music and speech and history and language and hope and hilarity and the sharing of ideas in inspiring new ways.

I don’t doubt that the cats, from their respective corners, were moderately bemused by our various enthusiasms, but I for one found in all of it great nourishment.