Panic on the Plaza

“You’re shaking, Marc” said Mendoza, the nice kid who makes me tuna sandwiches (for which I pay him, of course), and then I realized, ‘yes, I am.’

Well, I covered by telling him, “too much coffee,” but I suspect he knew: that wasn’t it.

And that’s when it hit me: that’s why I flubbed all those auditions—those many, many auditions which involved hours of glorious playing at home, a wrenching ten minutes of sheer musical hell, a taxi-ride-with-tears-suppressed home.

I am a racehorse, not a plow horse. At any loud noise I startle, panic, bolt. And today, merely by going off to read names with two loved ones—something I have done for months now—I was nervous.

Yes—we’re a third of the way through the 30,000 LivesProject; today we finished Hawaii and began Illinois. And Raf’s mom, Ilia, strolled as always into the plaza, dispensing greetings, muzzling kids heads, assuring all the little girls they were “tan linda, nena.”

“Besos,” she tells me; we kiss.

I have been sitting in Plaza de Armas on a green resin chair, next to which is another green resin chair, on which artfully is draped a shirt and blue jeans. And I have been pondering my body, specifically my brain, which is firing neurons down to my adrenal glands, which is making me want to run, not fight.

Do I know that I am not in danger?

Yes.

Do I know that I am scared, shaking, dreading the moment when I will have to start reading names, approaching people, trying to engage them and—more often than not—getting no response?

No.

Does my body know?

Yes.

That’s the thing—I may rationally have known that I was under no threat, as I waited those hours for my moment to fail the audition to come. My body, however, was screaming a different story. And it’s curious—both the body and the mind play the cello. Yes, those are my fingers on the fingerboard, holding the bow—but those body parts are under the control of the mind.

And for all those years when I was failing auditions, I never really knew that.

Or did I?

Yes, I had been a psychiatric nurse; yes, I knew something about physiology. But at the core, there was something wrong with me, something bad about me, something shameful.

“You have to believe in yourself,” friends would tell me.

“You have to see it, really envision it, make it real,” they would say.

“Did you want to fail?”

Why was I sabotaging myself? What dark corner of my psyche hid the roaring beast that would spring to attack me, those auditions behind the curtain? What was wrong with me?

It was savage—enduring and cleaning up from those auditions. It would take a couple of months, before the pain would start to ebb. I could talk to no one, I who was so flawed that I had caused myself once again to fail.

“It’s OK,” I told him, that guy in his thirties and forties, that guy who lives in me, that wonderful guy. “I’m here, remember? I walked you to El Morro and showed you my door and pounded on it and taught you and protected you. And remember, I read you and laughed at you and thought, ‘shit, how did he do that?’ Remember? And I still do.”

“I know,” he told me. “Thanks for that. Thanks for being here.”

“You’re wonderful,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter about those auditions.”

“Right, so can I get the cello out?”

“We gotta call Rodrigo, the repair guy.”

“Can you do that for me?”

“Yes.”

An old lady is pushing her walker towards me; the wind blowing her chestnut hair, the smile leaping up in her face.

“Besos,” she says.

We kiss.

All three of us.  

Two Musicians, One Message

Well, I’m not immune to it. I have a dark side; I can feel envy, jealousy; the dark night of the soul occasionally visits me. So that may be why I had an absolutely negative reaction to the TED Talk that Ji-Hae Park gave today.

Park is first of all a wonderful violinist—she’s got a stunning technique and plays with terrific energy. She started off the talk by playing Vivaldi, and she nailed it. Then she spoke, and it was all over for me. She had, you see, struggled many years from depression, and then she had realized: the amazing power of music! So then she got cured, and went on to play at Carnegie Hall! Oh, and she was playing the Petrus Guarnerius of 1735, which a German foundation had lent to her.

So her message was play, play your life! Music will change your life, it had lifted her out of depression, now she is playing all the major halls, and prisons and leprosaria as well! And at the age of 28, she has decided to do a crossover album, a merge of rock and Baroque music.

I should be nicer; I should be able to have some empathy. I know something of depression myself, having been intermittently suicidal for many years; I also know something about music, having played the cello, also for many years. So why was I so antagonistic to Ji-Hae Park?

Well, we could start by saying that even in the darkest hours of my depression, music was never able to lift me out of it. Lexapro 20mg or music? Sorry, it was only the Lexapro that did it.

Actually, the cruel trick of depression is that you cannot do the things that you need to do to get better. So when I was really depressed, I couldn’t even listen to music—I was too depressed, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.

The other thing that unnerved me about Park was the difference between her orgiastic energy when playing, as opposed to her little-girl affect when speaking. Is it a cultural thing? Is it my prejudice?

And why did I feel—it was only about her? Curious, I turned to a clip of her playing Beethoven Spring Sonata. Of all compositions, it’s one that is absolutely democratic; the piano is fully the equal of the violin. But even when the piano clearly has the theme, Park never steps back, plays her supplemental stuff quietly and lets the piano shine. She’s always on top.

Last rant—why do classical musicians always get so defensive? Why do we think that by adding a drum and sweetening up the music, we can get other people to love classical music? We’re just giving the message—no, we’re not good enough.

I watched the clip below twice.

Right, then I turned to another musician, and had the opposite reaction; I was moved to tears by the story he told. And notice, please, the music Gupta chooses to play—two pieces by Bach, the most cerebral music for the violin. Right, his technique isn’t anywhere near Park’s. But I suspect his heart is bigger by far.



And I was curious, as well, about the piece Park felt was insufficiently interesting and had to be jazzed up. I knew the piece—La Follia—and I knew that many baroque composers had written variations on the tune. In fact, Wikipedia tells me, over 150 composers have used the theme, among them being such non-Baroque composers as Liszt and Rachmaninoff.

But here’s the un-rocked version.

You choose....

When the Criminals Wear Three-Piece Suits

Great news, Readers—only one in four houses in the United States is underwater!

That’s only 13 million mortgages. However, if you count the number of people who have not paid off 20% of the mortgage, the figure goes to 43.6% or 22 million homeowners. (If you don’t have sufficient equity, you can’t sell the house, so you’re essentially stuck with it….)

Look, as a group, bankers have never been easy to love. And when people make stupid decisions about money, the first group they point the finger at are bankers, who tend to make good decisions about money.

And it’s also the case the banker of years past was a different breed. He lived in the community, he knew everyone in town, he knew whose marriage was shaky, whose kid had a major illness, who didn’t have money now but had an elderly uncle who did. All of those things have financial implications. Sure, he answered first to his shareholders—what company doesn’t—but he also answered to his community. And he could be proud: the bank grew the town, funded the businesses that paid the workers who went out and bought food and clothes and a house and a car.

Somehow, that world drifted away. Twenty years ago, I lobbied the bank hard—at one point I was calling Luis, the guy in charge of our putative mortgage, three times a day—to get the mortgage. Luis, punctilious to a fault, wanted to see everything from income tax forms for the previous three years to several months of paystubs to a letter assuring that I was employed and had no disciplinary action taken against me.

Ten years later, I was sitting in front of my computer, blinking in wonder at an advertisement—“YOU qualify for a $700,000 mortgage with no down payment! Instant authorization guaranteed!”

And it was true. People who should NEVER have gotten a mortgage got one, and it was no problem for the bank because they were going to sell the mortgage before the first payment was due, so hey—no problem!

And let’s be clear—everybody knew about this problem. I found out about the impending doom to come while sitting in a Jacuzzi with my brother-in-law. Right—he worked as an assistant / advisor to a congressman, but that’s hardly a miniscule esoteric group.

So the world had changed and banks had merged so much that bankers had lost connection to their community, and if Citibank or JPMorgan failed the entire Western Civilization would be wiped out. Which nearly happened, and the damage, though not cataclysmic, was still huge.

Well, three years ago, Congress passed a law, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was the most extensive reform of the financial industry since the Great Depression. Dodd-Frank put tighter controls and regulations—all serious and sensible things designed to combat a reoccurrence of the whole mess. And guess what? The New York Times this morning revealed that the banks are back in Washington, and virtually writing legislation that would roll back significant parts of Dodd / Frank.

Here’s the Times on the subject:

In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)

All of this, of course, doesn’t come without a price, which the Times points out, in the paragraph below:

And as its lobbying campaign steps up, the financial industry has doubled its already considerable giving to political causes. The lawmakers who this month supported the bills championed by Wall Street received twice as much in contributions from financial institutions compared with those who opposed them, according to an analysis of campaign finance records performed by MapLight, a nonprofit group.

Of course, some high-minded congressmen had scruples; check this out:

“I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amount of fund-raisers by its legislators,” said Representative Jim Himes, a third-term Democrat of Connecticut, who supported the recent industry-backed bills and leads the party’s fund-raising effort in the House. A member of the Financial Services Committee and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, he is one of the top recipients of Wall Street donations. “It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we live in.”

Wow—gotta feel sorry for Himes, and what our wicked world has done to him!

Or not—since it seems other people are living in other worlds. The Internet has decided to drift off somewhere so I can’t tell you the number—but there are millions of houses in foreclosure. Oh, and does anybody remember the little scandal of 2010, when the banks were foreclosing on the wrong properties, were robosigning documents, were engaging in various forms of fraud?

Eric Holder, our Secretary of Justice, came out in March saying that some banks were too big to jail. People howled, and he stepped back; an aide told Congress recently that she “didn’t think that he (Holder) meant that.” But what is true is that not one of those guys who got us into this mess has been jailed.

The bastards are back in business. The rest of us are still stunned, still struggling to get back on our feet, still rubbing our eyes and wondering what hit us.

Oh, and the bastards own Congress….. 

A well-rested governor

Right—so the gov got off. He walked. They couldn’t pin it on him.

Of course, six of his aides were convicted, including two really reprehensible guys named Tim Russell and Kevin Kavanaugh, who diverted $60,000 from a charity for veterans into Caribbean vacations.

Well, I’m from Wisconsin, as well as from the Caribbean. I understand—yes, it gets cold up there. And I understand Rachel Maddow as well, and her justifiable fury that people would scam money by using veterans—men and women who sacrifice, potentially, their lives for those of us who haven’t fought.

And I also know that real evil exists. What I don’t know is how Governor Scott Walker, who reportedly worked in an office with ten people back in the days when he was Milwaukee County executive, didn’t know that the five people he had hired were crooks. But let the Wisconsin State Journal tell the story:

The investigation, which uncovered illegal campaign contributions to Walker's campaign, illegal campaign activity by his taxpayer-funded staffers, embezzlement of veterans' funds and other misdeeds, had dogged Walker since even before he was elected governor in November 2010. Walker consistently insisted that he was not a target of the probe, even though his top aides who sat just feet from his desk — including former Milwaukee County deputy chiefs of staff Kelly Rindfleisch and Tim Russell and constituent services director Darlene Wink — all were convicted of wrongdoing.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/local/crime_and_courts/prosecutor-closes-john-doe-investigation-into-former-scott-walker-aides/article_5952999e-8283-11e2-b977-001a4bcf887a.html#ixzz2U8Oo4dr5

The more you read about Walker, the more you realize: he combines serious sleaze with a complete lack of ethics. There was the ten-minute call with the guy he thought was David Koch, of the famous Koch brothers. And what about Walker’s solution to Wisconsin’s pesky public record laws? Allegedly, he set up a private little email system—the router was in an armoire near his desk. Oh, and then there is an email from Walker to Russell about Darlene Wink, who would be convicted of using county time to do some politicking for the state GOP.

Here’s the email:

I ask you—how much more of a smoking gun do you need?

Well, he didn’t go into the fight empty handed. He had at least 160,000 bucks to hire some good lawyers with, and he certainly did.

So the governor went free, while two of his aides went to prison. And one of them, Kevin Kavanaugh, the bookkeeper for the veterans’ group Military Order of the Purple Heart, actually is a vet with a purple heart. So what was the scam? He cooked the books—he was supposed to be giving at least 600 bucks to the wives and children of soldiers killed in action.

On one of my many trips to Wisconsin, three or four years ago, I spoke briefly to a boy in the navy. We were waiting for an elevator—he had never stayed in a hotel before. He was excited, delighted to be an adult, awed by the wonderful world he was being promised.

I looked at him, and thought, ‘he’s so young.’ And then thought, ‘he could be my son.’ Then I thought, ‘and where will he be in five years?’ There was nothing erotic, nothing sexual in my feelings for the boy, but I would have thrown myself at him to shield him from harm. I couldn’t have let my son go off to war. Not these wars, not maybe any war.

“How do they sleep at night,” I once asked Johnny, my New York lawyer brother, referring to some now-forgotten villain.

“Very well,” he said. “It’s you and I who are up at all hours of the night.”

Oh.

Somebody run over to the capitol. Nah, cancel. Of course there are no bags under Scott Walker’s eyes.

Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

Well, a new statistic—there are some 315 million people in the USA, and 750,000 sex offenders. So that means that one person in 420 in the United States is a sex offender. And there’s a little problem—where do you put these guys?

I know about this because the New York Times had a video this morning about a sex offender village in Florida. And I can also tell you—nothing reveals the deep prudery of the United States better than this video. One man, living with his mother, had sex at the age of 18 with a girlfriend, age 16. Another guy was in “gay rehab”—wow, didn’t know we could do that, have to check it out—and mentioned to his counselor that he had touched a boy inappropriately. Still another “computer solicited a minor”—whom he never met.

Granted, no criminal comes right out and says, “yeah, I sadistically assaulted and tortured a little girl, and hey, I’d do it again, in a flash!” But the Times video does make several points. It shows the church member who says that the church got involved because there is almost nowhere to live that isn’t within whatever state limit has been established from a place where kids congregate. So they found a community that had been built to house sugar cane workers; the workers are mostly gone, but the sugar cane fields remain.

Then there is the public defender of Palm Beach, 35 miles away, who makes the point: there’s a big difference between an 18-year old kid screwing his 16-year old girlfriend and a rapist. But they are both “sex offenders” and they both have a label for life.

There’s also the point that not one complaint of a sex offense has occurred in the sex offenders village.

So there are over 100 sex offenders living in the village of Pahokee, Florida—isolated from the rest of Florida by sugar cane. Right, so who are the people in my neighborhood?  Are kids safe?

Don’t have the answer, but according to the NSOPW website, there are eight sex offenders in my zip code.

OK—anything I need to worry about?

Yeah—a guy who tried to commit rape and sodomy in 1974. Another who intentionally committed child abuse. A couple of men who committed lewd acts, and one who attempted to commit a lewd act. (Sorry, but I can’t quite get my head around that. Was he just about to pull down his pants? Was he intercepted in a grope?) Several have moved in from other jurisdictions, and no details are given.

Mind you, there is a school three blocks away from where I live, as well as a school across the street from where two of the offenders live (if the database is accurate).   

All right—another statistic: one in six women will be raped in the course of her lifetime.

That’s serious—that’s something I’d like to know about. What I’m not interested in knowing is what an 18-year-old kid did with his 16-year-old girlfriend. Assuming it was done consensually, assuming no one got hurt, I couldn’t care less. And the video makes a good point—there’s not a lot of work out there for registered sex offenders. Once you’re on the list, that’s it—you can kiss that promising career in food preparation at Burger King goodbye.

We’ve all gone a little crazy, I think. We have the courts giving sentences to kids having sex with kids two years younger than them. At the same time, we have the Catholic Church, which is reportedly still harboring real sex offenders. And, as well, we have a Catholic bishop who has been convicted of not reporting the case of a predator priest.

Yes, I bring you the sorry case of Robert W. Finn, the bishop of Kansas City, who was convicted last year on one account of failure to report Shawn Ratigan, a priest who had hundred of pictures of the private parts of little girls. The pictures were apparently so shocking that the computer technician who discovered them on the laptop Ratigan had brought in for repair later stated: “my hands were shaking so much, I could barely turn off the machine.”

So what did the bishop do? Transferred Ratigan to another place, and told Ratigan to stay away from kids. And what did Ratigan do? Got right back involved with a youth group. Oh, and went to dinner at a parishioner’s house, and got caught by Poppa, photographing with his cellphone the daughter under the table.

For all of this, the bishop has received a suspended sentence, and has agreed to meet monthly with court officials. But the gay guy—or did the rehab work?—down there in the sex offender village, how much time did he get?

A year in the county jail.

Clothes make the man, it’s said, and it’s evidently true. Who knew that a Roman Collar was a pass to touch any child anywhere at any time?  

The Dancing Libertarian

Right, here’s a guy with a truly wonderful idea. He wants to get 10,000 lunatics together on the Fourth of July, all of them heavily armed with rifles slung against their backs, gather them at Arlington Cemetery, march them across the Potomac into Washington, troop around the Senate, White House, and Supreme Court, and then march over the bridge into Virginia again.

Adam Kokesh, the intellectual author of this plan, is planning to do this—if he gets the support—to send out a little message. He invokes Tom Jefferson, and the famous line, “when the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Well, there is a little problem. The only guns allowed in DC are handguns, which have to be registered in the city. So the police chief came out sounding quite reasonable—he’s willing to work with any group that wants to come in peaceably and protest. But no, boys, leave the guns at home.

There’s serious craziness out there. But wait—let me go check Adam out.

OK—I’ve just spent 25 minutes with Adam, having watched two clips. The first is a 21 minute affair, and covers his libertarian beliefs, his role in the Afghanistan war, his realization that the war was unjust and illegal, and then his realization that Obama, far from sticking up for the rights and freedoms of the people, was just as bad and in fact worse at jumping into bed with the rich and powerful. The second clip was of Adam standing and being filmed in a no-film zone in front of the White House. A clearly peeved cop, exercising all his patience, has decided not to arrest him.

He’s articulate and intelligent, is Adam, and makes a good spokesman. And yes, there are things I can agree with. Of course he has the right to stand on a sidewalk in front of the White House and be filmed, for which he was not arrested; he also has the right to dance at the Jefferson Memorial, which he did, and for which he was arrested.

And he may be right in his assertion that the cops are abusive and generally disrespective. In fact, I started this day by reading that Puerto Rico is going to have to put 600 million bucks into upgrading our police department over the next ten years. Given that we have a deficit of over 2 billion and are facing likely credit downgrades into junk status, it’s a little difficult to see how we are going to do this. The United States Department of Justice, however, has mandated that the police department correct what Justice deems civil rights violations. So a local federal judge is overseeing the process.

OK—that’s the local news. Adam and I can probably also join hands on the issue of the maker of my computer—a MacBook Pro. Apple, it seems, has shielded billions in taxes by employing multiple schemes that are, by the way, perfectly legal. Corporations can do things that you and I can’t do; here’s The New York Times on the subject.

Congressional investigators found that some of Apple’s subsidiaries had no employees and were largely run by top officials from the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. But by officially locating them in places like Ireland, Apple was able to, in effect, make them stateless — exempt from taxes, record-keeping laws and the need for the subsidiaries to even file tax returns anywhere in the world.

Beautiful! And I also agree with Adam—the statistics on the economy are bogus. Unemployment at 8 point-whatever percent? Does that count everybody who has stopped looking for work? And yes, the rich have certainly gotten richer.

It’s hard, in some ways, not to be cynical, not to feel that in almost every facet of our society we have consistently gone backward. We let our government take away significant liberties in the fear-drenched days after 9 / 11. We’ve engaged in unjust wars and gotten the whole world to hate us. Our cops have too often used force against us.

So I’m happy to report good news; last Friday, May 17, I took part in a march against homophobia, and what an affair it was! Best, how many groups came out and protested, how organized the whole affair was! And despite some estimates of only 200 participants, there were, I can tell you, many, many more.

The mood was great; spirits were high. And yes, there were many kids there—teenagers and people in their early twenties. For the first time in Puerto Rico, there was a large, organized and multilateral march for gay rights, and against homophobia.

Our hour had come. And no, Adam, not with armed weapons slung across our backs….

On Teaching

For over twenty years I’ve been doing something with no real idea of how I’m doing it, or how it should be done.

Apparently, I do it well, however I do it. Well enough to work 13 years at a language school, well enough to convince Wal-Mart Puerto Rico that it should hire me as a full-time teacher. And well enough that old students, when I come across them, greet me with affection, and tell me they only learned English from me.

For years I felt like an impostor—if they knew that I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing, they’d have to kick me out, right? And shouldn’t I go to school, since I was pretending to be a teacher, and figure out the right way to do it? How to confess—I have no idea what a lesson plan is, or how to conduct group activities, or how to assess a student’s progress, or lack thereof.

I had vague theories, of course. Nobody learns in a boring classroom. If I’m talking, the students aren't learning. I don’t teach, I observe learning. The teacher makes an environment in which learning can occur.

The above four statements are about all I know about what I do. But it appears that I may be faring slightly better than the men and women who know what they’re doing. Less than10% of Puerto Ricans, The New Day reported yesterday, are fluent in English, despite having twelve years of instruction in the subject.

Say what?

Twelve years is a lot of time. We’re talking, I presume, of an hour-long class five times a week, forty weeks a year for twelve years. That’s 2400 hours of instruction. Could I get a group of kids fluent in English in that time?

I think so.

And the crazy thing, as I read the article yesterday, is that the public school system in Puerto Rico isn’t doing the one thing that I would do, were I in any position to do it. It’s so simple—you want to get out of high school? Then sit down and talk to me in English for half an hour.

That kind of stuff was my metric—could a student go to Bentonville? Could he pick up the phone and talk to a supplier in the States? Wal-Mart made a big deal about “coaching by walking around”—it was abbreviated CBWA. Mine was TBWA—the T being “teaching.” And nothing was more exciting than hearing a student stammer his or her way through a business call in English.

Well, I began wondering about all this last week, when I saw a brief clip of a teacher explaining contractions to a group of students in a summer baseball camp. The teacher is at the board, she is explaining that she takes out the letter “o” and replaces it with an apostrophe.

As a teacher / non-teacher, that made no sense to me. I began to wonder—how would I get that concept across? And that, of course, made me remember the time I taught a seven-year old nephew about negative numbers.

We were in the restaurant Macaroni and Grill, which has good food and terrible service. Fortunately, however, they have paper on the table and crayons. So I began drawing the one thing I can draw, and then, to amuse myself, instructing Luis Enrique about negative numbers. Which happened quite naturally—he had asked me what six minus two was.

OK—it was a test; he had thrown down the gauntlet. Luis Enrique to this day is unconvinced of my general intelligence, and he may well be right. But if a kid asks a question—actually, if any student asks a question—you grab it and run.

Nor was it my intention to get into the negative numbers thing, since I am a complete math idiot. But in seconds we were challenging each other—I replied that 6-2 was 4, now what’s 6-3? He got that and asked me 6-4? And so we got to the question—what was 6-7?

Luis Enrique was stumped. Was it zero? Was 6-7 even possible? I said it was, he was unconvinced.

Without thinking, I drew the famous line with the two little arrows in opposing direction and marked and marked from 0 to 6. And left, of course, plenty of space to the left of 0. And then we repeated the whole thing—what was Luis Enrique doing when he subtracted 6-2? He put his little finger on the number 6, and counted two numbers down to 4. We got to 6-6 with no problem. Then the question became: what to do about 6-7? Instinctively, I grabbed the crayon and marked in the vertical slash for -1.

I didn’t, of course, tell him the number. We had a discussion—what should it be called? When I finally did tell him the name of the number, he got quite easily the hang of it. Which meant that we could tweak it—if he could subtract into the negative numbers, could he add out of them? And then could he do multiplication or division?

In the time it took Macaroni and Grill to cook a pizza, I had Luis Enrique dividing -4 by-2; that’s something that I could barely do, I was learning the stuff as fast as I was teaching it.

Granted, I could do it with one kid—could I do it with 30? That’s a tall order. But rereading Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “Most Likely to Succeed” this morning was revealing: there is absolutely no way of knowing who a good teacher will be until they have taught for three or four years. And the only thing that has been shown to make a difference, academically, to a kid? The quality of the teacher. A good teacher can teach a year and a half of material in one year. 

So Gladwell argues that we should forget about requiring master’s degrees or incorporating technology or lowering class size. Anybody with a pulse and a college degree should be able to teach. Then, we track the teachers and isolate the ones who are great, and these we pay A LOT of money. We can the ones that don’t make the grade.

All of this, of course, will be met with howls from teachers, teacher unions, educational authorities, parents (possibly).

But tell me—does anybody have a better idea?

Fifth Shade of Grey—A Walk on the Slow Side

OK—if you’ve been to more than ten weddings in your life, you’ve heard it: the Pachelbel Canon. What’s interesting is that, up until the 70’s, nobody had ever heard of it. Then, it was everywhere—especially after the movie Ordinary People used it.

Two things about the piece—it’s got a ground bass, the musical way of saying that the cello plays the same damn thing over and over. Trust me, any cellist who doesn’t have the Pachelbel Canon memorized has a serious problem.

And yes, it’s a true canon. Nope, it doesn’t fire a ball—it has three violins all playing the same thing two bars apart. It a more sophisticated version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

It’s a bit ironic that Pachelbel is known, now, for just one work, because in his life his music was well known and well received. But there’s a lot of music, only a bit of which I’ve listened to. So let’s start, yes, with the famous Canon.  

And here, because I couldn’t resist…..

Right, so it may just have gone over the edge, there, but it’s actually in the good baroque tradition, which was to deem the written music as a starting point, never an end, for playing. So yes, there was always room for invention, for throwing in a new riff, for ornamenting. Music at the time was like jazz—much more open.

OK—enough Canon. How about a chaconne?



The chaconne is a musical form that takes a short fragment of music and spins off endless variations of it. And this chaconne has a ground bass, as did the canon, and as do many chaconnes.

Oh, and speaking of chaconnes, there’s a great chaconne by Monteverdi. Here it is, with our old friends from L’Arpeggiata.

OK—that was a bit not on the slow side. But how’s this—the famous Adagio from Albinoni?  
  

There are other famous adagios—not the least of which is Barber’s Adagio for Strings. But that’s the work of a different day!

Fourth Shade of Grey—When Opera Isn't Sung

OK—there are some times when opera is not sung, but played. There’s the overture, for example, which starts the opera and which does a couple of things. First of all, it gets people to their seats, if not to stop talking (the tradition had been to ignore the overture and just keep chatting—hint, don’t try it today…). It introduces the themes, perhaps, as well as sets the mood. Finally, it’s just traditional.

Any orchestral music played at any other point in the opera gets called something else. Often, it will be called a prelude, sometimes an intermezzo, perhaps a dance like a waltz or polonaise. And here again, the idea is to set the mood and introduce the themes that will be heard—and sung—later.

So James, in 50 Shades of Grey, has the heroine listening at one point to the Prelude to the first act of La traviata. And it’s typical Verdi—tuneful, cheerful, and sticky. Get ready, you may be whistling this all week.  

Nice, hunh? Right—nothing substantial, but there's a place in the world for light and pleasant. 

But if you want heavy, I can give you heavy. In fact, Richard Wagner mines heavy like Reynolds mines aluminum. And here, I gotta come out—Wagner is one composer that makes me want to run screaming out of the opera hall. Nor am I alone—Clara Schumann wrote that the opera from which the clip below is taken “was the most repugnant thing I have heard or seen in all my life.” And a young Richard Strauss said that the opera, Tristan und Isolde, "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords.”

To be fair, the conductor Bruno Walter said, “So there I sat in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House, and from the first sound of the cellos my heart contracted spasmodically... Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet.”

So there are two camps on Wagner, and very few people who are neutral. Oh, and be sure to eat a full meal before embarking on a performance of any opera Wagner wrote, because after hours five hours of sturm und drang, you’ll emerge famished if you haven’t. Granted, as Mr. Fernández once said, there are beautiful moments in the opera—and hours in between them.

Here, at any rate, is the prelude from the first act of Tristan und Isolde—you be the judge.

Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the people in the opera decide, “hey, let’s dance!” In fact, it was the tradition in the Paris Opera that every opera also had to have a ballet. So Gounod, in his opera Faust, decided to stick a ballet into the last act; in the ballet Faust, having sold his soul to the devil, is presented a series of visions of a particularly ghoulish nature. And though it is often omitted—Faust is an expensive opera to mount, and throwing a ballet into it seriously ups the tab—it adds a lot to the opera.   

The final two pieces are right on the border of terminal sweetness. The first, Massenet’s Meditation from the opera Thaïs, is frequently hauled out as an encore piece, as it clearly is here. The second piece, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana is also frequently performed as a concert piece.