Of Course I Had To Do It….

I couldn’t resist, and if got away with it, it’s only because of the extreme generosity of Penélope.

She was the coach, sitting behind a table and listening and commenting on the poems being recited by the high school students who are participating in a program called Poetry Out Loud. So Penélope—a long, willowy woman—was making rather general comments, and seemed a bit at sea. At one point I stopped to listen to To Helen, by Edgar Allan Poe. You’ll remember it, of course:

To Helen

BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

Helen, thy beauty is to me

   Like those Nicéan barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

   The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

   To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

   Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

   To the glory that was Greece,      

   And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

   How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand!

   Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

   Are Holy-Land!

Penélope had nothing particularly to say, and asked if anyone had anything to say.

Guess who did!

“Grandeur,” I’m telling the girl—probably 16, and almost certainly suffering Asperger syndrome. She had been saying it “grander.” Then I went on pretending I was writing. Penélope went on to urge the students only to make gestures that were “organic.”

Marc’s red cape!

Look, students want to know how to do things, which means that the comments have to be specific, practical, and lead to different results—one hopes better. And anyway, what is organic, and how do I know if a gesture is organic or not? At this point I had made several comments, and Penélope asked me if I had any comments.

“Could I stand up and fall flat on my face?” I asked.

“I’m not really good with poetry,” I said. “And a lot of this stuff I don’t know, so I’m winging it. But let’s do this—you recite a stanza, and I’ll recite the stanza, and we’ll see how they differ, and which is better, if any.”

So we were off—and my first question was, “who’s Helen?”

The student didn’t know.

OK, so I explained, even hauling out the tired line of, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” Then we got into the question of the “t”—would it be an American “t” which is almost a “d,” or would it be a good English “t?”

We did similar work of “barks of yore”—the “ks” was getting swallowed. Oh, and what about lengthening and relishing that alliterative “weary, way-ward wanderer?”

And so we spent twenty minutes or so, digging in, discussing meanings, discussing what words are important, what words less so.

“If every word is important, then none of them are important,” I said. At this point Penélope had sat down.

“I’m learning so much from seeing you coach,” she told me.

Right, so the next student was going to do Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I won’t burden you with all of it, but here—in all its dreadful familiarity—are the first lines:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you,

Weep, and you weep alone,

For the brave old earth must borrow its mirth—

But has trouble enough of its own.

It was time to come clean.

“Look,” I said, “you’ve gotta know: this poem is not considered out of the top drawer. In fact, most people this it’s pretty awful.”

News to the student!

“So you’re gonna have to make a decision. On the one hand, you have to own this poem, to say in your voice ‘I know what you think of this poem, I know you think it’s trash, but guess what? I believe it, and you’re going to, too!”

So we played with that, stepping forward, locking eyes with the audience, using a stronger, firmer tone of voice.

“The other alternative is to play it straight, but to try to bring out some meaning in the poem that we’ve been missing.”

Finally, I asked the student if he had analyzed the rhyme scheme of the poem.

He looked blank.

“You mean like ABBA?”

“That’s part of it,” I said. “But is this poem in iambic pentameter? What are the five—think it’s five—types of meter?”

The student’s lip quivered.

“We don’t get that stuff in our school,” said one of the other students. “We’re in 10^th grade, and we’re still studying adjectives.”

Hunh?

“You know, ‘the car is red’—which word in that sentence is an adjective?’ That’s what the teacher does every year….”

“It is NOT your fault,” I tell the kid. “It’s a sin that no teacher has taught you this….”

There were surprises—why would any student choose Emerson, so I asked, midway through working with the student on the poem:

The lords of life, the lords of life,—

I saw them pass,

In their own guise,

Like and unlike,

Portly and grim,—

Use and Surprise,

Surface and Dream,

Succession swift and spectral Wrong,

Temperament without a tongue,

And the inventor of the game

Omnipresent without name;—

Some to see, some to be guessed,

They marched from east to west:

Little man, least of all,

Among the legs of his guardians tall,

Walked about with puzzled look.

Him by the hand dear Nature took,

Dearest Nature, strong and kind,

Whispered, ‘Darling, never mind!

To-morrow they will wear another face,

The founder thou; these are thy race!’   

“It’s about the death of his child,” said the student.

“Whoa!” I said. “Let’s go back. I confess, I had no idea—and I don’t much like Emerson, though my grandmother did.” So how to put more emotion in, without being a ham?

Another surprise:

 All Hallows’ Eve

By Dorothea Tanning

Be perfect, make it otherwise.

Yesterday is torn in shreds.

Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes

Rip apart the breathing beds.

Hear bones crack and pulverize.

Doom creeps in on rubber treads.

Countless overwrought housewives,

Minds unraveling like threads,

Try lipstick shades to tranquilize

Fears of age and general dreads.

Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,

Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.

Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise

You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

I was learning, too—what was the story behind the poem? The poet, it turned out, had been physically abused as a newlywed. What was the tone? Irony? Anger? Despair? And what about that last word, that whole last line? We played with different ways of saying “werewolf,” and then, of course, how you’d say the word “newlyweds.” We spat it out, we sighed it, we shrugged it off.   

It was a mixture of technique and interpretation, and so we played around—could you whisper and still be heard in the back of the room? What was the softest you could speak, and still be audible?

There’s something that happens when teaching, when you step into the river and let it carry you where it may. One kid, thin, shy, and quite possibly gay—looked at me with the eyes of an animal in pain, an animal who knows and trusts—you will pull out the splinter, the pain will be gone. It’s an experience like none other—a kid putting his soul for however long in your hands.

Teaching. It’s something I never much wanted to do…

…but really glad I did.

Not Enough Rope

Well, being a bear of very little brain, it took me a while to realize that, even if I wasn’t particularly proficient in Polish (though I do know the word pederastia which is…), the computer is! And so all you have to do is hit the little “translate this page” and the computer, after some thought, will give you a charmingly literal translation. Here’s a nice sample:

In the Vatican's diplomatic career structures could envy him many a clergyman.

Got that? What could be clearer? Definitely better than this, the Polish homologue:

Kariery dyplomatycznej w watykańskich strukturach mógłby mu pozazdrościć niejeden duchowny.

OK, so the syntax is a little screwy, but if you can wait until the end of the sentence to figure out what we’re talking about—both grammatically and logically called the subject—all will be well. Think of it as a game, perhaps, or a linguistic who-done-it. Keeps you in suspense!

And so I realized, yesterday, that the Polish press, unlike the Dominican press, is playing up the story. And they are embellishing their articles with photos like this:

Yup, Wesolowski himself….

And so I spent an interesting afternoon in Poland, yesterday, learning that Padre Alberto Gil, a fellow Pole working in the little mountain town of Juncalito, had taken 3 trips to Poland with about ten boys each time. My first reaction, of course was, “yeah?”

I had an interesting conversation this week with a friend who had been sexually abused by a Baptist minister while his parents slept in the room next to the minister, who was “sharing” his bed with my friend. And Carlos, my friend, swears that in most cases, the mothers either know or suspect that abuse is going on. But why don’t they speak out? Is it fear? Is it a lifetime of poverty, which grinds in the lessons of helplessness and despair and futility?

At any rate, Gil made three trips to Poland with assorted kids—where did the money come from? I’ve been through towns in the Dominican Republic that must have been the equivalents of Juncalito—for all I know, I’ve been through Juncalito. Didn’t look like there’s much money there. And if there is, they hide it well.

So were the Poles sponsoring the trip? And where was that money coming from? How wonderful, those Poles welcoming with open arms (in how many senses, one wonders?) those cute Latin kids!

Even so, it’s a little hard to wrap my mind around the how a parent would allow a child to go off with a priest for over a month. But as I think of it, it makes more sense. First, of course, the parents must have been dazzled by the idea—Europe! My child’s going to Europe! The world is opening for him, who knows whom he could meet, what door could open for him! How wonderful that Padre Alberto….

Then, of course, there’s the reverence for the Catholic Church. Over eighty percent of Puerto Ricans are Catholic—what percent of Dominicans? Probably much higher. Watching videos of families affected by the abuse in Juncalito, I got a visceral sense of the betrayal these families suffered.

Lastly, maybe we should ask if the abuse in the church isn’t structural. The organization is set up in a way that fosters abuse. There’s the hierarchical structure. There’s the control of power at the top, and the demand for complete obedience. There’s the demand to defend the church at all costs, and the terrible consequences doled out to anyone who blows the whistle. Even the pomp, the rituals, the fancy clothes—all contribute to the belief that they are special, invincible, infallible.

I look at Wesolowski, in the photo above—this man who was dressed in all his finery, this man surrounded by all the devotion of his parishioners, this man who, hours after the ceremony, would be chasing limpiabotas (shoeshine boys) on the malecón of Santo Domingo.

He thought he could have everything, could get away with anything.

Sadly, for the most part, he has….

Did an Employee of the Vatican Commit Crimes on US Territory?

Well, let’s start with two caveats. First, it may be that reality—subjected to the blazing light and sopping humidity of the tropics—gets a little warped. In fact, I once hesitantly breathed this theory to Harry, a native of Old San Juan.

“Of course,” he cried, and told me the following story:

A gringo comes to oversee a factory in a small mountain town. The factory is running well, but the workers tend to call in sick a day or two every week. What was wrong? Clearly, the workers were unhappy: the gringo sought to increase morale by giving them higher pay. The result? The workers now called in sick three times a week!

“They weren’t interested in money,” said Harry, “they just wanted enough for their rice and beans and a caneca (flask) of rum. So when they got paid more, they didn’t have to work as much. See?”

It makes total sense, really—it’s just a different way of thinking. And so after living here for over twenty years, and after having written well-past-exhaustively on the topic of priestly abuse, who’s to say that my own sense of reality isn’t a bit warped? 

Second caveat: being a blogger tends to lead to a sort of conspiracy mindset. You read a lot about something, and then go on to the next thing, and then—weeks or months later—the first thing crops up again. You’ve now forgotten most of what you read, which makes it easy to believe that Machiavellian forces are at work.

So now—at long last—let me tell you what I remember.

A lawyer in Minneapolis, Jeff Anderson, has been an early and rigorous fighter for justice for the victims of clerical abuse. And he has had to fight long and hard to get a few dioceses to reveal their internal records. Chicago, for example, released in January of this year a collection of over 6000 documents that exposed what was happening internally in the diocese.

That’s great, but it’s only half the story. Yes, if within the diocese’s records there are Vatican letters, you can get a glimpse of what is going on in the Vatican. But it frequently is the blandest, most opaque glimpse. So the logical thing to do would be to go to court and ask for the court to tell the Vatican to hand over its records. Especially logical since the diocese is required to report all cases of clerical abuse to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) which used to be the Holy Office, and which—more colorfully and forcefully—started out as the Inquisition.

Thus, local bishops were writing off to Ratzinger and the CDF, and guess what? God’s time is infinitely, majestically, gloriously… slow. So the bishops waited and waited, often for years at a time. In the meantime, the bishops were stuck with seriously sick priests; you can—almost—understand why they were shuffling them around to new victims in different parishes. What else could they do?

So what happened when lawyers went to court to ask the court to force the Vatican to reveal its records? Ah, cried the Vatican, but those bishops aren’t our employees! They are paid by the diocese, not the Vatican!

For this, the word jesuitry was made.

Hard shift to the southeast, specifically Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico—once defined by the US Supreme Court as not being the United States but pertaining to the United States (anybody up there get that? Drop me a line, if you do…)—falls within US jurisdiction.

And things have been a little strange in Arecibo. For one thing, six priests have been expelled in three years, and our local newspaper, El Nuevo Día, reports that there have been 20 cases of priestly abuse, as well as a federal lawsuit brought by one of the victims. Here’s what The New Day has to say in today’s electronic edition:

Fuentes de El Nuevo Día indicaron que agentes de ICE-HSI se acercaron al secretario interino de Justicia, César Miranda, y al fiscal general José Capó para colaborar e intercambiar información con la investigación que comenzó el gobierno estatal la semana pasada y así ellos también poder abarcar ángulos de jurisdicción federal.

“Hay mucho interés en indagar sobre los detalles de abuso sexual de menores por parte de sacerdotes y todo lo que ha salido publicado provoca que haya que actuar de inmediato”, dijo una fuente federal.

(“Sources for El Nuevo Día indicated that agents of IE-HIS approached the interim Secretary of Justice, César Miranda, and the Attorney General José Capó to collaborate and exchange information with the investigation which the state government began last week and thus to be able to also cover any angles that are of federal jurisdiction.

‘There’s a lot of interest in investigating the details of sexual abuse of minors on the part of priests, and everything that has come out publically makes it necessary to act immediately,’ said a federal source.”)

Now then, here the waters turn murky, as the runoff of politics surges into the pond.

The highest Catholic official on the island, Archbishop of San Juan Roberto González Nieves, is a strong proponent of independence and rubbed it a little too hard into people’s noses. So the statehooders had him investigated for four things, one of which was covering up abusive priests. And thus, in an investigation that lasted years, the papal nuncio—the Pope’s own ambassador and yes, a Vatican official—came to Puerto Rico, and were did he stay? Not in San Juan, but in…

…Arecibo.

The papal nuncio for the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico was Jozef Wesolowski, and where is he now? Apparently in the Vatican, where he fled—or was recalled—just before investigative news series was about to show him walking the malecón of Santo Domingo in search of something other than lovely seascapes.

Authorities in the Dominican Republic have in some accounts asked for extradition: the Vatican has no extradition policy and Wesolowski, as a diplomat, enjoys immunity. But there are reports that Wesolowski didn’t behave much better in Puerto Rico than he did in Santo Domingo. Here’s what the Dominican press said about Wesolowski in Puerto Rico:

Según los testimonios difundidos por Burgos, en su programa Código Calle, del canal 29 de Santiago, Wesolowski es acusado en Puerto Rico de encubrir a los sacerdotes pederastas.

Los fieles católicos se quejaron ante el obispo puertorriqueño monseñor Iñaqui y ante el propio Wesolowski, pero no recibieron el apoyo que esperaban.

Un seminario fue cerrado, pero todo se mantiene en silencio, y el obispo Iñaqui [Sic.] fue promovido, en lugar de ser sancionado.

(“According to witnesses’ statements broadcast by Burgos in his program Código Calle on channel 29 in Santiago, Wesolowski is accused in Puerto Rico of covering up pederast priests.

Faithful Catholics protested to Puerto Rican bishop Iñaki (former bishop of Arecibo) and in front of Wesolowski himself, but never received the support they expected.

A seminary was closed, but everything was kept silent, and the bishop Iñaqi was promoted, instead of sanctioned.”)

Remember what I said about reality being different in the sun-drench vibrant air of the tropics? We seem to have Wesolowski—a man now accused of pederasty—investigating the archbishop of San Juan for covering up…pederasty. Who’s guilty of what? I sure don’t know.

And am I wrong in thinking that…

…a Vatican official may have committed crimes in the United States? This case is unique, the case we’ve been waiting for. At long last, a US court has the right to petition the Vatican to release its records, its internal documents, its policies and directives to bishops. At last, we can throw open the doors of the Vatican and take a look inside.

Am I the only one who sees that?

A Bow to a Bow

Well, it was a revelation, and I’m happy to say it was a good one.

I had to taken my bow to my luthier—and if you don’t have a luthier, you should get one, if only because it adds total class to be able to say “my luthier.” Of course, you could be a little clearer by saying “string instrument repairman,” but in a choice between clarity and class? No contest….

Actually, his name is Rodrigo, and he’s a totally cool guy. More to the point, he’s a serious luthier, having studied at Indiana University’s Violin Making and Repair Program. So he was the person to whom I fled, several years ago, when I detected the perfect round hole, about the diameter of a pencil point. What was it? I knew too well—a termite.

“I’ll have to freeze your cello for a couple of weeks,” said Rodrigo.

He explained it all carefully. Did I listen? Of course not—I knew it had to be done, I knew he was the man to do it. But how was I going to live for the next two weeks, imagining my cello in a meat locker?

Two weeks later, I was back in his taller, or workshop (OK, how about atelier?) And while I fully expected the cello to sound as good as it had before, it didn’t.

“It sounds much, much better,” I told him.

“The concert master of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra used to take his violin to New York for the least little thing,” his mother boasted, “now, he won’t let anyone but Rodrigo touch his violin….”

Mothers get to say stuff like that.

So there I was on Monday with a bow that had its hair firmly attached to the frog (yup—bows have frog: that’s the black thing under the player’s hand; it has a screw in it, so that you can tighten the hair.)  The problem? The hair had popped out at the other end of the bow (logically called the tip).

So there were two orders of business, beyond getting the bow fixed. The first was to ask about getting a baroque bow—very important, since I’m doing Bach and Beer every day. And the baroque bow is designed to do so something very important: messa di voce. It’s when a sustained note starts quietly, gradually becomes louder, and then becomes soft again. Done right, it’s ravishing.

As I knew he would, Rodrigo had the answer, with the happy news that a good baroque bow wouldn’t cost me too much—under two hundred bucks. And if my father had collected Leica cameras, can’t I collect bows?

The next order of business was to see if Rodrigo had a spare bow lurking around, waiting for the errant cellist to drift by and claim it. Well, it turns out that Rodrigo has a seriously good bow—which he would lend Yo-Yo Ma, maybe—and another bow, a French bow with German weight. Guess which one I got?

There’s a difference between what you know intellectually and what you know experientally (well, computer, if Sarah Palin can do it, why can’t I?). Because when I start playing with that bow, it was what Stanley said to Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire: “baby, we’ve had this date from the very beginning!”

“The bow is more important that the instrument,” said a cello teacher to me when I was in my teens. So why had it never occurred to me: I had a very good cello, but I had never gone from what were essentially student bows to a better bow.

And if your cello is your sound, your bow is your voice. Or perhaps your speech, since the bow was somehow, miraculously suggesting nuances that I hadn’t thought of. I swear—that bow was telling me how to play Bach.

Bach—which I was playing because I had grown tired of killing myself playing stuff like the Dvorak concerto or the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations. They’re great pieces of music, but for the cellist? It’s a battle: one cellist against 100 musicians. I had gotten tired of working so hard, and besides, it’s strangely unusual how infrequently the Berlin Philharmonic or the London Symphony are calling me these days….

But the bow was having none of that. It wanted a robust, full sound—or maybe it was that just by using the weight of my arm, the bow produced a wonderful, warm sound.

It was, as I say, a revelation. Equally revealing was how much I didn’t know about bows, or bow makers. I knew that François Xavier Tourte (1747 – 25 April 1835) was a big name among bow makers, but I didn’t know that he’s big enough to be called, “the Stradivarius of bow makers.” (If so, my computer is less than impressed—“Tourte” gets red-squiggled, whereas “Stradivarius” sails right through….)

Not only was he a fine maker, but he was the father of the modern bow: he lengthened it, devised the little screw that tightens the tension of the hair, and also came up with a new way to make the curve of the bow. Previously, it had been carved; Tourte cooked up the idea of heating a straight stick of pernambuco, and then, on the edge of a wood table, carefully producing the curve.

For all this, he deserves to have his picture in Iguanas; here he is, in an engraving from 1818:

  

 Nor did I know that the experimentation with the bow is still going on, until I stumbled across Benoît Rolland, a Frenchman of—quite logically—the French School. Because there are, you see, at least three distinct schools of bow making: the French, German and English schools. I get this from a sentence from Rolland’s website:

A musician can sense whether a bow belongs to the French, German or British traditions.

But it occurred to me: shouldn’t there be an Italian school, since the modern violin originated in Cremona, Italy? But it appears no—the origin of the modern bow occurred later, and happened simultaneously but unconnectedly in France and England (John Dodd was the Tourte of England…).

At any rate, Rolland studied at Mirecourt, sometimes called “the Cremona of bow making” and was awarded the prestigious Maitre Archetier d’Art, which beyond sounding totally cool, has only been awarded a few times in history.

Nor is that the only thing Rolland has won—he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012—and they don’t hand those babies out like candy. Why did he get it? Well, the quote below is drawn from his website:

Initially using marine technology, he conceived the first carbon fiber bow of concert quality. Bringing the project one step further, he invented a new generation of bows including a tension mechanism that allows the performer to adjust at will the camber of the bow. The bows embodying this invention were awarded First Prize Musicora in 1994 (also selected for Musicora Anniversary, 2004), and are distributed under the trademark Spiccato®.

Right—so I’m a bit more knowledgeable about bows and bow making. What don’t I know? How I could possibly give Rodrigo’s bow back to him.

Sorry—that’s not Rodrigo’s bow.

Not any more….

So here’s what I going to say to him: “Rodrigo, you’d better let me buy this bow, because I really don’t want to have to steal it!”

Bad Party, Terrible Hangover

The good news?

I did not wake up this morning with a hangover.

The bad news?

The island did.

Whatever you think of the current governor, nobody can dispute that, on at least one point in the news conference yesterday, he was right: both the major parties that rule Puerto Rico got us into this mess. And that is? Yesterday, after years of waving red flags, Standard & Poor’s degraded our credit rating to junk status.

Terrible golpe al país shouts the The New Day’s headline in a special 15-page extra to today’s regular printed edition. Conscientious blogger that I am, I read all 15 pages, which told me basically what I knew, as well as some things I didn’t.

The gist of it is that for forty years, the public has allowed our political leaders to engage in politicking, instead of providing services, making fiscally responsible decisions, and running efficient governments. And how did they do that? By doing on a collective basis what many of us do on a personal level: living on credit.

There’s nothing too sexy about economics—nothing as sexy as building a great whacking (thanks, Franny!) stadium or investing a billion dollars in “special communities,” which today remain just as special as they were when the program began. (The program identified poor communities and tried to invest funds for improvements to infrastructure and social services…)

OK—so how bad is it? Some facts lifted from the special edition of today, as well as a New York Times article on the topic:

•       Our debt is almost 70 billion dollars
•       Each person—man woman and child—would have to pay $10, 635 dollars up front to clear this debt. That’s ten times the average per state
•       As a result of this decision, we’re going to have to pay about 940 million bucks, since we promised we would if our rating was sunk to junk status
•       We had been planning to go ask the market to buy bonds that would give us an additional 1 to 2 billion next month
•       Puerto Rico is the third largest issuer of municipal bonds, after California and New York
•       Many of these bonds are collected in mutual funds, which are attractive: you don’t have to pay taxes on the interest you collect on them. Therefore, a lot of mutual funds in the US hold Puerto Rico bonds. However, a lot of the bonds are held by the Puerto Rican middle and upper classes, especially retirees; some 1.5 billion dollars of Puerto Rico debt is held on the island

Now, how’s the economy doing?

•        In December of 2013, the rate of unemployment was (officially) 15.4%
•       Largest employer in Puerto Rico is…the government of Puerto Rico: 27.8% of the work force works for the government. Estimates for the average state public sector range from 10% to 15%
•       Manufacturing accounts for only 9% of the non-farming Gross National Product
•       25% of the commonwealth budget comes in federal funds
•       The population of Puerto Rico is 3.67 million: in 2013, the government estimated that 1.3 million people were working. That means that one in three Puerto Ricans is working

OK—so what was the response on the island? Well, the editorial in The New Day called for…unity. Now is not the time, it said, for finger pointing. The governor, as well, said that now is the time for all Puerto Ricans to come together and figure out what to do with this mess.

Though there were some who couldn’t resist, of course. The governor himself couldn’t resist suggesting that his government, though young, had acted like adults, but that it was time for the local Supreme Court to “put on the toga of adulthood.” Why the jab? Because the Supreme Court had put the reform of the teacher retirement system on hold until the lawsuit brought by the unions had been resolved.

And the President of the Senate came out and said that the current government had been firm and financially responsible; nowhere else in the states had a government acted as Puerto Rico had to correct their problems. Puerto Rico didn’t deserve this betrayal.

The teachers, too, pointed out that since we got degraded to junk status, it was clearly proof that a reform of the retirement system wasn’t needed in the first place.

Yes, you say, but beyond calls for unity—however successfully heeded—what does the government propose to do?

It would be premature, said the governor—donning the mantle of a serious and wise leader—to discuss any specific measure until they had been carefully and thoroughly scrutinized and examined in order to assure that the measures taken will have the maximal impact on the economy while minimizing any adverse effects on the private lives of the people of Puerto Rico, who working together, hand in hand, making ties that extend beyond petty politicking, can go forward confidently towards a better future.

All right—I made that up. That’s what I would have said. The governor doesn’t know what he’s gonna do—so he fell back on rhetoric.

Nor does the average person know what this means: according to The New Day, even business people didn’t really understand what all this meant. The reality is that almost 90% of the students I have taught over the last 20 years have tuned out politics. And now that the crisis is here? Many people are confused.

And the worst of it? However bad the hangover, it was never a very good party anyway….   

Don't Tread on the Banner!

WHAT!

Dammit, I can’t do everything, though I’d be happy to delegate, but really! Whoever imagined that I’d have to check in on the damned national anthem now and again—or maybe even daily—just to make sure that nobody had altered the time signature?

OK—for those of you who had better things to do in your childhood than study classical music, here’s the skinny. Most music is divided into measures, and most measures have a basic pulse or beat. That’s why you tap your feet when somebody is singing. And these measures are either duple or triple—or some variant thereof. Consider a tune you know: Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. There’s a natural stress every four notes (with the third note being slightly stressed as well). Since four is two times two, the time signature is duple.

A triple form? Think Greensleeves, which has a natural stress every six beats, with a slight stress on the fourth beat. Since six is a multiple of three, it’s a triple time signature.

And the national anthem? It is triple, not duple.

I tell you this because a friend, a professional flutist, on Facebook posted an article by Anne Midgette of The Washington Post about Renée Fleming’s performance of the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Well, I listened and was impressed, but then I usually am with Renée—she’s impossible not to like. And I think she struck a nice balance: there’s nothing worse than an opera singer pretending to be pop. First, it’s ridiculous; second, it reveals profound insecurity. You’ve spent years learning your art, and you chicken out for a sports event? Come on!

Reading the comments was revealing as they so often are. And one comment from Phillip Bush in particular caught my eye:

The real question re the arrangement, etc., is something I find surprising nobody talks about much: have you noticed that the national anthem (at least in Super Bowl versions) has been altered to 4/4 time? Fleming's version, sadly, was no exception though she did revert to 3 in the final lines (beginning with "oh say does that." Just to see if I was imagining things, I listened to all versions since 2008 and only Carrie Underwood in 2010 sang the anthem in 3 all the way through. (It should be added that Christina Aguilera's version in 2009 defies all attempts at metric--or pitch---analysis.)

Clearly a man I could call my brother! Any man who cares enough to hear seven years of our national anthem—OK, but you know what I mean—is obviously my match for neuroticism. Because I have spent most of the match scratching my head and listening to bourrées, gavottes, loures, minuets trying to figure out what dance form the damn Star-Spangled Banner is, or rather was.

Although it may not be—the Star-Spangled Banner may be based simply on a song composed in 1778 for the Anacreontic Society, a group of amateur musicians in London. And yes, the boys liked a spot of ale or beer when getting together; it might be a little unfair to categorize the national anthem as a “drinking song,” if only because most people, especially drunk, can’t sing the song.

The song is called To Anacreon in Heaven, and it turned out my hunch was right: the original song is sung considerably faster than anyone sings the national anthem today. And as a cellist who has played the Bach solo suites for forty years—wow, and shouldn’t I play them better, after all those years? Oh well….

Anyway, here’s the thing: the suites contain stylized but still recognizable dances that were common at the time. And I swear, To Anacreon in Heaven sounds like one of those dances—I can see people in their elaborate gowns and their stiff, formal gestures dancing to it. And the dotted upbeat—the “Oooh” before you land happily on “say”—that’s the tip off!

So I spent the morning with bourrées, gavottes, loures and minuets, and what did I learn?

Nothing definitive, though I can tell that the base for the Star-Spangled Banner is definitely triple, not duple. Here’s a photo of an edition of 1790:

Right—so who got the bright idea of changing the time signature of our national anthem from ¾ (essentially) to 4/4?

I’m sorry to say that it was Whitney Houston—and I would rather hear chalk scratching on the chalkboard than hear Whitney Houston. But it seemed that Houston thought the national anthem was too “waltz-like.” So Rickey Minor, Houston’s musical director, and Houston tinkered around. Here’s what Minor said:

“The original version is in 3/4 time, which is more like a waltz,” Minor explained. “What we tried to do was to put it in 4/4 meter… We wanted to give her a chance to phrase it in such a way that she would be able to take her time and really express the meaning.”

Well, I went out, bought an anti-emetic, waited an hour, and then braved my way through Houston’s lip-synched 1991 performance; yes, I gagged but didn’t retch. 

My other reaction to Ms. Midgette’s article?

A surprising number of readers thought she was being backhanded, snide, or hypercritical. Though I agreed with the most recent comment, from RAMJ:

I just want to hear the anthem sung straight, the way we sang it in grade school. We were made to feel that it was a serious song with great meaning. There was no embellishment allowed. 

The simple notes provide ample challenge to most any voice, trained or untrained. There is beauty in their starkness. I love that only the gods can help the person that starts singing our anthem in the wrong key. 

I cringe at the current rate of embellishment and self-aggrandizement the anthem has been burdened with. I actually avoid listening, because I know it will be painful.

YES!

Finally, Kurt Vonnegut wandered into my brain, and what was it he had written about the Star-Spangled Banner? Well, here it is:

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks. 

Of course, that wasn’t the way I remembered it. My version had it that the Star-Spangled Banner is the only national anthem that ends with a question—or rather, a constant, never-ending challenge as well as quest: does that star spangl’d banner yet wave over the free and the brave?

Your choice—just sing the damn thing in ¾!