Death of a Composer

He was one of those lapses—one of those guys I was supposed to listen to one day, one of the composers I was going to get around to hearing. Because for much of the last two or three decades, there wasn’t much time for music, and when there was, it was generally after a dinner with Raf. Not the time you want to be experimenting with music you may or may not like; time instead for music you know will go with the second bottle of wine and the cigar.

So I managed only recently to hear another composer, Henryk Gorécki, whose third symphony everyone—including those normally chilly to classical music—loves. And yes, I had heard Arvo Pärt, especially his Passio; in fact, so mesmerizing or so narcotic is the music that, after a performance, rushing to get to a night shift, I missed the subway train I had taken for years and ended up not at Rush Presbyterian but on the South Side of Chicago.

OK—I’ll toy with you no more: the guy I’m talking about in those first two paragraphs is John Tavener, often lumped with the Estonian Arvo Pärt and the Polish Henryk Gorécki. Why? Because their music has this slow, ethereal, spiritual side that makes you long to be in a student apartment with cheap wine and a joint in your hand. And Tavener fit the bill, since the Beatles featured him on an album. Here’s what The Guardian had to say:

The music Tavener was famous for in the 60s was tumultuous, chaotic, modernist, and radical – another world from the Orthodox-inspired spirituality of his later works. His wacky cantata The Whale was the piece that inaugurated the new-music firebrands of the London Sinfonietta in 1968, and it was also his first release on Apple a couple of years later, with its mix of electronics, football rattles, serialism, crunching dissonance, and even a whip.

It may be the whip, but the description alone had me running for Mozart. And then Tavener got religion, this time in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church. So then the music changed; here, from The New York Times, is his account of what happened:

“I stopped composing,” he said, “and I listened to Indian music, Persian music, all music from the Middle East. I listened to American Indian music. I listened to any music that was based on traditional ideas. That’s when I started to question what on earth happened to this Western civilization and why the sacred seems to have been pushed out gradually by the domination of the ego.”

In fact, Tavener’s disinclination for this music dominated by the ego extended to Johann Sebastian Bach for a time, though by 2007 he was back to playing Bach. And he had had popular success—composing The Protecting Veil in 1988, when cellist Stephen Isserlis performed it at the Proms. Then there was the Song for Athene, sung in 1997 for the funeral of Princess Diana.

And as usual, the more that the general population embraced him, the more the critics sniffed. Here’s Mark Swed, chief music critic of the LA Times, in a generally favorable tribute that still manages to get the headline John Tavener: Composer, Showman, and Spiritual Guide (disclaimer—in the old days, the journalist didn’t write headlines, and so Swed would be off the hook. Now? Who knows?)

That is Tavener's 1987 cello concerto in which the solo part seems to hang in the air, going nowhere and in no hurry for 50 minutes or more, depending on how much the cellist cares to milk the ethereal mystery.

OK—I’m listening to the concerto, called The Protecting Veil, and yeah, I see what Swed means. It’s disjointed loveliness, and that may be the point; Swed says it himself, the essence of Tavener’s work is “seduction.”

And there is something of a showman in a composer who can write and or stage an all night affair called the Veil of the Temple, performed overnight at the Temple Church in London—yes, the same one that figures in The da Vinci Code. Here’s what Swed has to say:

Beginning with a "Mystical Love Song of the Sufis," Tavener made room in "Veil of the Temple" not only for the traditional Christian Trinity but also Mary Theotokos, St. Isaac the Syrian and the Upanishads. Besides vocal soloists and the Temple's large choir, the instruments included the church organ, an Indian harmonium, a duduk (an ancient Armenian flute), Tibetan temple bells, a deep-honking Tibetan horn and a Western brass band.

It was a magnificent night, ending with the dawn illuminating the church's stained-glass windows. The audience roamed the church, found a pew to snuggle in and sleep on or went outside for coffee. Tavener seemed to be enjoying himself greatly, chatting with people, hanging out. It wasn't a party, but it wasn't an overly solemn occasion, either. One went to be amazed, not preached to. It was — again, that word that I thinks fits Tavener's music better than any other — seductive.

Well, Tavener was felled by Marfan syndrome, which I knew about because at one time Abraham Lincoln was thought to have suffered it. And it seemed likely—Marfan sufferers are unusually tall, with long limbs and bony fingers. And they’re prone to at least thirty generally horrible conditions, among which is that you may have sudden cardiac arrest at any time. In short, you’re a time bomb, which does have some psychological consequences; here’s what he told the Times:

“It attacks the main valve to the heart, it attacks the eyes, it attacks the mind — there isn’t much it doesn’t attack,” he told a Times interviewer during one of his rare visits to the United States. “And the big danger of Marfan is that you can suffer a rupture at any time, and you go quickly. So I suppose I live with the thought of death very much in front of me, and this may well have a bearing on the way I think generally.”

Right—I can see that. And now the life is over, and the critics are wondering: where shall we put him? Top drawer? Showman? Hack? Celebrated for the wrong reasons? Mystic minimalist?

Where does he go?

Nor is it the case that history will judge, since history has a way of being rewritten, revised, reworked. Bach was forgotten until Mendelssohn came along. Vivaldi soared in the 70s and has fallen since. And some worthy composers are routinely neglected.

But the conundrum to me is that old one: the separation of popular and serious. Is it always the case that music that is accessible to the masses and loved by them is necessarily inferior? Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Copland’s Appalachian Spring—can anyone deny their musical worth? Yet even these masterpieces have just a little tarnish on them—the serious listener should be listening to Barber’s Essay for Orchestra, or Copland’s Third Symphony. What if Tavener’s music was great and popular?

Or what, perhaps, would happen if we stopped worrying about great? A man of the cloth in a Davies novel defends “bad” religious art—the sweet, androgynous Jesus with his bleeding heart exposed. Right, it’s not a Tintoretto, but if all the Marías and Josefas and Pilars love him and come to Christ through him…well? Isn’t there a place in the world for bad art, of which there is a lot more than good art? Shouldn’t we leave our snobbery at the door, as we welcome the common folk in? Tavener’s music appealed to people. Punto. So get over it….

I once saw a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, which made a gazillion dollars and was a major motion picture starring Julia Roberts and was translated into every language included Bushman Click and three languages invented just for the purpose. Oh, and NASA shot copies of the book into all corners of the universe, so amazing and so successful it was. I exaggerate, but that’s how it must have felt to her. And then what was she supposed to do? How do you top that? I imagine her sitting down to write her next book, and starting out with the first word, “the….” Instantly a chorus of disapproval swells up: “a disappointment,” “not on the same level as…,” “after her first book….”

So Tavener’s music will live or die, and that’s as much as he or any of us will know about what we spend our lives doing. We go on for a time, Gentle Reader, and then?

That’s it….

Forget the Gutemberg….

It was a thing to see, and somehow I had missed it. So I circled back, after reading somewhere on one of the walls of the J. P. Morgan Library that an edition of the Gutenberg Bible was always on display in the East Room of the original library. And yes—there it was, and why had I missed it? Not because of its size, which is as large as you would imagine (think coffee table book). No, a docent had been in front of it, along with 20 other people. And so blown away was I by the room itself, that I had somehow missed the Gutenberg. Here’s what I was standing in….

Not bad, hunh? And by the way, the little display case by the door holds the Gutenberg Bible.

Which was a bit…well, ordinary. Which come to think of it may be the point—it was the first book printed in moveable type. And that means that it was designed to be mass-produced, it was meant to be available to many more people than the rich patrons who commissioned hand-copied books. And so there are decorative elements, yes, but nowhere near the elaborate ornamentation of illuminated manuscripts. Here’s a juicy manuscript:

And here’s the more sober Gutenberg….

Right—and that’s the first page—the rest is much simpler.

Well, Pierpont—as he liked to be called, so happy to oblige!—had the dough to do what he wanted, and what he wanted was to collect. He had been left 12 million plus by Pop, named Junius—very classy name, though the computer is red-squiggling it—in 1890, when Pierpont was in his early fifties. And from then on, Pierpont combined finance with collecting on a major scale. Actually, two major scales—since among other things J. P. Morgan was the only man in the country that could step in, in the financial Panic of 1907, and save the American economy from collapsing. How did he do it? He got all the big boys together, knocked their heads together, and put together a deal for how to save the day. Then he went back to collecting.

And Pierpont, educated with a degree in Art History from a German university, certainly knew what he was doing. Here, from the Morgan’s website, is a description of his habit:

During the last two decades of his life—from the 1890s until 1913—Morgan spent some $60 million on art (about $900 million today). From the beginning, it was clear that Morgan's collecting tastes could only be described as encyclopedic—what he amassed in such a short period encompassed virtually the full range of artistic and human achievement in Western civilization, from antiquity to modern times. 

He acquired art objects numbering in the thousands, in a wide range of media—from bronzes, porcelains, watches, ivories, and paintings to furniture, tapestries, armor, and ancient Egyptian artifacts as well as the rare books, manuscripts, drawings, prints, and ancient artifacts that are the core of the Morgan.

For years, the bulk of Morgan’s collection was in London, and to accommodate it all, he had to buy the house next door to the one he inherited and knock through the walls. Why? Because at the time, there was a 20% import fee for art coming in to the United States. So he and Isabella Stewart Gardner and some others got together and scotched, and then he began to move it all over to the States. (One ship he had intended to use was the Titanic—fortunately, the collection couldn’t be appraised in time to make the voyage….)

And the bulk of his art went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was the trustee and then president from 1904 until his death in 1913. But the manuscripts? They stayed in the library—which his son Jack opened to the public in 1924.

And so, today I saw a document signed by Elizabeth I, a Mozart manuscript, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with marginalia in the composer’s hand, and a ravishing drawing of da Vinci. But what fascinated me the most?

This:

Cuneiform—from a couple millennia before Christ. It was the world’s first written language, and was etched by reeds into clay and then hardened. And it is, as you can see, exquisitely small, and virtually illegible. And how had anyone possibly deciphered it, given that the language had died out some centuries after Christ?

As it turns out—the same way that someone deciphered the Rosetta Stone. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Meanwhile, in 1835 Henry Rawlinson, a British East India Company army officer, visited the Behistun Inscriptions in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522–486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in the three official languages of the empire: Old Persian, Mesopotamian Aramaic, and Elamite. The Behistun inscription was to the decipherment of cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone was to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

I stared for some ten minutes, went away, and came back again. And though the exhibit stated that the language had been invented for mercantile purposes, none of the texts quoted had anything to do with commerce. Instead, they were of love, birth, eagles, fertility. A whisper of immortality chiseled in a lump of clay, hurled through millennia…. 

Monday Evening Uplift

Having a hard time of it, this Monday? Tired already, and it’s still just the first day of the week? In need of a little inspiration?

You might consider a Chicago doctor, Donald R. Hopkins, who’s had a long distinguished career in tropical medicine. How distinguished? Well, he was one of the team that eradicated smallpox, which left people looking like this….

Nor was that the worst of it: smallpox also killed about a third of its victims. It also was a cause of blindness, and left victims scarred for life. And the disease, which is thought to have started in humans in 10,000BC, was eradicated in the late seventies.

Hopkins has an interesting history—he grew up in a community of Bahamians in Coconut Grove in Miami. Education was important in his family, and he scored a scholarship to study at Moreland in Atlanta. Then it was off to the University of Chicago, where he was the only black student in his class in medical school. And then, partly to avoid the Vietnam War, he joined the Public Health Service.

And he was interested in tropical diseases, because he had seen trachoma in Egypt; the parasitical disease spread by flies that leads to blindness. In 1967, his boss asked him to go to Sierra Leone, to spearhead a new approach to fighting smallpox: instead of vaccinating the mass population, teams would attack individual outbreaks, starting at the center and working outward. Would it work? Yes.

Hopkins went back to the C.D.C., and rose through the ranks, finally retiring as acting director in 1987. But he didn’t stop working, and he joined up with former president Carter to tackle still another problem: the guinea worm.

Gentle Reader, you may want to skip this paragraph, and for the truly squeamish, you definitely don’t want to see the video below, which features—at 2:00—a guinea worm being extracted from a human leg. Because that’s what happens: villagers drink water infested with microscopic worms, which grow for a year or so and then emerge, from any part of the body, though usually it’s the legs or arms.

And unlike smallpox, the disease doesn’t kill—it just incapacitates. And as you might imagine, it’s very painful, since the worm secretes an acid which breaks down connective tissue and allows it to escape. No wonder that the disease is called dracunculiasis, or “afflicted with little dragons.” Also no wonder that the first reaction of anybody who has had the worm extracted is to put their injured leg in water. It might be a good idea for the victim, but it’s definitely a bummer for the rest of the village, because the moment the wound is immersed, millions of larvae are released. So the cycle starts all over.

The worldwide program to eradicate the disease began in 1980 with the C.D.C.; in 1986, The Carter Center stepped in; according to Wikipedia, “at that time India, Pakistan, Yemen and 17 countries in Africa were endemic for this disease and reported a total of 3.5 million cases per year.”

Interestingly, the solution to the problem isn’t a medicine: it’s a simple change of behavior and education. Merely filtering drinking water through cloth will rid the water of the worms. But as Hopkins says, working with the local leaders and respecting and understanding village traditions and customs is crucial. Which is why he credits his experience of segregation and prejudice in the South as a young man: it’s given him the sensitivity to work with others.

An example might be the obstacle that was preventing the Sudanese civil war; again, here’s Wikipedia:

One of the most significant challenges facing Guinea worm eradication has been the civil war in southern Sudan, which was largely inaccessible to health workers due to violence.[6][56] To address some of the humanitarian needs in southern Sudan, in 1995, the longest ceasefire in the history of the war was achieved through negotiations by Jimmy Carter.[6][56] Commonly called the "Guinea worm cease-fire," both warring parties agreed to halt hostilities for nearly six months to allow public health officials to begin Guinea worm eradication programming, among other interventions.

And guess what? It seems to be working, and we are down to less than 600 infections a year. In 1986, the number was 3.5 million. So there is every chance that Carter, currently age 89, will see the eradication of the guinea worm before he dies.

Well, Gentle Reader, it’s still Monday but…

…feeling better?

A Musical Labyrinth

OK—here’s what it looked like….

But that was hardly the point—the piece was billed as an “audio installation,” and it was done by the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, who had used the motet Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis in 1570 as the basis for her piece. And it was a simple concept, really—the motet is composed for forty separate voices. Yup, forty people all singing a different part. And Cardiff had recorded each part, and played each through a separate speaker. Thus, you have forty disembodied voices—all joined together to sing one amazing work.

The idea was that you could walk around from one speaker to another, and experience the work as if you were both singing or—alternatively—walking around and through a choir.

Did I do it, the two times I heard the piece?

Nah—as an orchestral musician, I know the feeling of being in a cello section, and hearing the distorted sounds of various members and sections of the orchestra. But yes, there were people moving around—attracted perhaps by this voice or another. As well, some people were slowly circling the room; one father was allowing a girl held in his arms to point out where she wanted to go.

But I wanted to experience the work as Tallis had intended me to—with a choir behind me, ahead of me, and on both sides. Actually, there are eight choirs of five voices each; here’s a great description via Wikipedia:

It is most likely that Tallis intended his singers to stand in a horseshoe shape. Beginning with a single voice from the first choir, other voices join in imitation, each in turn falling silent as the music moves around the eight choirs. All forty voices enter simultaneously for a few bars, and then the pattern of the opening is reversed with the music passing from choir eight to choir one. There is another brief full section, after which the choirs sing in antiphonal pairs, throwing the sound across the space between them. Finally all voices join for the culmination of the work. Though composed in imitative style and occasionally homophonic, its individual vocal lines act quite freely within its fairly simple harmonic framework, allowing for an astonishing number of individual musical ideas to be sung during its ten-to-twelve minute performance time. The work is a study in contrasts: the individual voices sing and are silent in turns, sometimes alone, sometimes in choirs, sometimes calling and answering, sometimes all together, so that, far from being a monotonous mess, the work is continually presenting new ideas.

The work is not often performed, as it requires at least forty singers capable of meeting its technical demands. The discipline that comes with performing the masterpiece is highlighted in the importance of the conductor and the performers alike. Whilst performers are distributed throughout a venue, the conductor becomes truly the hub for the piece throughout, as often there is little or no visibility between the performers, and a large venue will present acoustical challenges, not regarded with traditional choirs co-located.

OK—so what’s the experience like? Well, you’re awash in sound, even though the piece starts with a single voice from the back. Part of it is the echo—and for an echo, what better place that the Fuentidueña Chapel in The Cloisters? 12^th century, almost austere, with the dominating presence of a painted crucifix hanging from the opening of a half dome. Thus, it was a combination of new and old—the music and architecture matching, the speakers and technology varying.

And the piece itself has always struck me as one of the strangest I know. It’s surprisingly dissonant, and seems almost modern at times. It always feels as if Tallis has slowed down time—everything is a sonic deep underwater oceanic swell. You’re as suspended as the crucifix, though you are, in fact, experiencing the passion.

Because it is deeply moving music—less music than experience. And about music, words fail. Can I tell you transcendent, as Jim Dwyer, a writer in The New York Times called it? Of course. But it also feels as if Tallis is working out some psychic odyssey—it has the feeling of being a musical labyrinth. And what’s a labyrinth? Here’s what one writer had to say:

The Sacred Labyrinth Walk, Illuminating the Inner Path, is the ancient practice of "Circling to the Center" by walking the labyrinth. The rediscovery of this self alignment tool to put our lives in perspective is one of the most important spiritual movements of our day. Labyrinths have been in use for over 4000 years. Their basic design is fundamental to nature and many cultures and religious traditions. Whatever one's religion...walking the labyrinth clears the mind and gives insight. It calms people in the throes of life's transitions.

For me, Tallis had stepped through the centuries, taken me by the hand, and led me—eyes closed, body swayed—through to the center; then he had taken me back to the same shore. Or rather, not to the same shore, though it was and wasn’t. Why? Because I was different.

Up the Hill Alone

They were two pewter candlesticks, a pewter bowl and a pewter vase—all with strongly and somewhat crudely rustic Norwegian designs. Oh, and a Russell Wright bowl which I had given her to match the Russell Wright vase, which she already had. So—six objects, and I was sobbing over them. That was all that was left of her.

It wasn’t, of course. It just felt that way, those six objects that had been taken out of my mother’s house a month ago and sent to New York. A renter has been found for the house in the woods where my mother had lived and where she had died, and so John and Jeanne had gone out and taken even more of the personal possessions out the house. And that meant that when I came into their apartment four days ago—I was greeted by the Norwegian chest that had been in the place she had designed for it all those years ago. (Note—I just added it up, and it’s over thirty years….)

It looked beautiful, it looked wrong. And I decided, it would be best to go around the apartment while I was along—examine every nook and cranny, and find everything from my mother’s house that was now living in my brother’s house.

Winnie the Pooh—the edition from 1946—was on the tea table. The blue and white ginger bowl was in the hall. There were some post Art Deco-ish vases of which my mother had been fond. And there was a whole raft of small pieces that we had to go through.

“The trouble was the coffee ladies,” I told John. “Every time a member of her coffee klatch went off somewhere, they had to bring something home, and then Franny had to put them somewhere and keep them there forever because who could offend the coffee ladies?”

She was like that….

So John and I went through the box, and soon made a game of it.

Marc (holding reproduction Egyptian cat): Barbara Shaw in the souks of Cairo!

John (moving his head sideways like an Egyptian, imitates native): 50 piasters.

Marc (imitating Barbara): 50! 25, and not a piaster less!

Life teaches you how to get through some moments—and no, no tears were shed over the chulerías that Franny had had forced on her all those years. But what to do about the stuff she had used, had liked, had admired? Such as the Russell Wright stuff, or the Norwegian pewter?

“The last thing we need is more stuff,” I said to Jeanne. “Who else do you know who has eight or ten china sets between them? Oh, and three sets of silver?”

But it also seemed like I had to have them—and what, beyond memories, do I have of my mother? And that’s when the thought hit—this is all that’s left of a woman who had laughed and loved and told stories and wept on the passing of her man. I had held her ashes in my hand and thrust them into the earth—and that I did dry-eyed.

I looked down at the six items on the floor and thought of her hands holding them, lifting them to her eyes. I saw the roadside flowers we had gathered that would go into the Wright vase that would end up on the Norwegian wood-burning stove. I thought of the time I had played cello at Herb Fritz’s barn in Spring Green. Fritz, a friend of my parents and a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, had long died; his widow, Eloise, was soldiering on. And on the grand piano was a beautiful plain blue vase, with sunflowers stuck into it.

“Our own van Gogh, as Herb used to say” said Eloise.

It was the last time I had played for my mother.

“How much stuff is still in the house?” I asked Jeanne.

Who may have taken it as criticism—“there was just no way we could get it all out in one weekend,” she said.

“It’s not that, I just want to know how much more of this I have to go through…”

The answer?

Some more.

There’s a house in the middle of the Wisconsin woods that, one day, will be another man’s or woman’s pride and problem—not John’s, who is waking up at 3AM to worry about it. There will be a long, graveled driveway wending through green woods in summer, gold in fall, and grey and black in winter—and that driveway, once so welcoming, once leading to arms yearning to hold me? That driveway will tell me ‘no, not today.’

‘She came and she went about her business, but she’s gone. And you should go, too. Go away—back to your life, back to the living. Let her molder here, if she wills, or slip through her woods on the back of the cold winter winds, of sit on the rocks you both sat on, when you were wailing. When she could wail. And now?’

‘She could be rough, that mother of yours. Remember how she told John, who was wailing for a lost child, that he had to suck it up, stop crying, get on with his life? And why? For Jeanne. So he squared his shoulders and did it. Now, let’s see you’

And I do it, of course. I square my shoulder and lift my chin and turn around and begin the trudge up the hill…

…alone.

The Upper West Side

Has it always been like this, or am I just noticing it?

One of the bad things about depression is that you do a remarkably poor job of seeing the world. You’re internally absorbed—lost in your misery of defeat and despair, so you’re barely able to peer out anyway. And if you do—what do you see? Right: it’s not pretty.

And so when I came to New York all those many years as a depressed person, the city overwhelmed me, and I retreated by going deeper within. Completely unnecessary, of course, since the city bore me no grudge and certainly wasn’t hostile. It may, in fact, have been doing its best to beguile, and I was churlishly refusing its efforts to engage me.

Which is to say that simple things came hard—hailing a cab, engaging in conversation, dealing with a doorman. Absurd to the non-depressed; real to the others.

And yesterday I flew in to Manhattan, since Erica, one of my nieces, is celebrating her 40^th birthday. So there I was, mostly decaffeinated and walking through what had to be the longest airport terminal I have ever paced, searching for the AirTrain—the little tram that carries you around to different terminals, and then finally to the subway. OK—at this point the subway has lost its “sub” and is now just a “way:” it’s running on land, not under it. And of course I got confused, went the wrong way, and instead of going into Manhattan, I was heading for the last, outer limits to the city, across a long stretch of an inlet of the Atlantic, water mixed with marshes with russet and gold reeds with feathery white plumes. Ducks and geese were circling above, and the fall colors were spectacular against a grey, sullen sky. It was New York as the Indians must have seen it, and it was magical.

“Why are you taking the subway in?” asked John, when I called to tell him of the adventure. I was now waiting as I would for a half hour for the train back into the city.

John takes a cab, which takes forty minutes and 80 bucks. But the subway costs six bucks. Do I need to say anything further?

Well, I can also tell you—it takes two hours, especially if you go the wrong way at first. And then you land—if like me you have absentmindedly gotten on to the Eighth Avenue Express—at 125 Street. You get out, and are immediately behind a black guy who is muttering, “and the fucker raped a fucking two-year old.” This information—jarring as it is—is made more jarring by hearing him repeat it ceaselessly as he walks behind you down the platform. ‘Right,’ you think, ‘it may be better to be behind this gentleman’ and so you stop, pretend to fish something out of your pocket, and proceed out to the heart of Harlem.

Not a problem, since Harlem is considerably more upscale than it was—still, you’re one of the few non-brothers on the street. Right, so you call Jeanne, and then hail a cab. Oh, not before getting completely drenched in a sudden thunderstorm.

Life on the Upper West Side—very nice. It’s a neighborhood that pushes affluence to the border of opulence. What keeps it from going over the border? It’s understatedness—everybody is a corporate lawyer or has just written the definitive text on the expulsion of the Moors from Andalucía or has returned from a sabbatical in Oxford researching…. You get the picture.

And the apartment where John and Jeanne live is very much their creation—filled with books, crammed with interesting food, and spacious: a pre-war, the hallway into the dining room is almost the exact length of a bowling alley. And on entering the apartment, I saw that every light was on, and that the black extension cord led to a vacuum. And Ángela, from Guatemala, was there cleaning.

We’ve met, we’ve chatted, and so we greeted each other. So I went to do my thing—which was to rent a cello. I’ve just gotten back my calluses, and I didn’t want to lose them. (Think about it, Reader—you spend three hours a day pressing your fingers rapidly on steel strings: what do you think your fingers feel like at the beginning?)

So I google “rent a cello New York City” and there it is: a place ten blocks away. And started four years ago by a nice guy named Elliot, when his daughter wanted to learn the violin, and he realized there were no acceptable, reasonably priced instruments to be rented. So I call him up, and tell him I want a cello for the week, and the answer?

No. He only rents for three months.

And here is where I know—I am not the depressed, mousey character who is trying to slip by, hoping the city won’t bite me. Because I want a cello, and he has a cello, and I have a credit card so…?

“Do you have a cello,” I ask.

“Is anybody using the cello?”

“Are you getting any money out of the cello?”

“Well, you are in business, aren’t you?”

And so I go to see Elliot, who has agreed to rent me for 100$ the very best cello China can mass-produce. Expensive, but this is New York.

And so I get the cello and am practicing and playing with the sonorities and thinking, ‘wow, am I lucky to have the cello I have,’ and Ángela comes to say goodbye. She pauses, unsure of what to say, and then says, “I don’t understand the music, but I like…”

“If you like it, you understand it,” I said. I was playing Bach cello suites, and the movements are based on dances. And dance is integral in every culture, so what’s the big deal? It’s not dissimilar to the folk dances of Guatemala—just dressed up.

She left, I put down the cello and thought. And here’s where I am, this day after meeting the city on its own.

I’ve just wandered through John and Jeanne’s apartment—the one Ángela cleaned, yesterday—wondering how to say this and here it is: the class lines are invisibly but rigorously defined. When I traveled through Brooklyn, I was one of two whites in the subway car. Then, magically, there were two stops when the blacks all got off and the whites all got in. What had happened? The black people were getting off to do their jobs in the stores and the cafes and the homes of the white people. Then, at Columbus Circle, all the white people got off—because the next stop was Harlem.

Elliot—the cello guy—lived in an apartment very similar to the one that Ángela was cleaning. And he had checked me out, and must have known that, well…I was one of his kind.

“Where are you from,” he had wanted to know.

“Oh, we have an apartment in Old San Juan,” I said. Notice—the “have” implies ownership, and I’m not saying that I’m from Puerto Rico, which has many a slum.

“And what do you do down there?”

“Oh, I’ve just finished writing a book….”

“Could you fill out the contact information and send it to me?”

We had been doing over the phone what dogs do when they meet—sniffing each other’s behinds. And now he would do it electronically, via Google. Fair enough—I had done it to him.

And the doorman, when I got to Elliot’s building, had no terror for me, and turned out to be a pleasant chap.

I’m lucky to live in the world of books and space and cleaned-by-somebody else and cellos. But I wonder—are Ángela’s kids going to be able to get into my world? Because none of the black people on the subway—getting on in Brooklyn—looked as it they had had much chance. And if that’s true?

We’re fucked.

Guarding the Palace

Right—there’ll be no shirking here. Previously, I had the doubtful responsibility of buffing up the English language skills of 500 Wal-Mart associates. Before that I was a nurse. Then there was the cello, to which I’ve recently returned. And now?

Defender of Buckingham Palace!

It seems that The Queen’s Guard—the one that gets changed every day, you remember—is completely slipping up. Because take a look at the picture below!

Yup—it’s a firework exploding against Buckingham Palace.

OK, having taken on Putin (see here and here) and won, a few days ago—he now assures us that he’ll welcome LGBT folk with open arms and vodka bottles—I was all in the mood for a nice quiet time. But no, with the slackers apparently overtaking the Guard, somebody has to step up to the plate. What if the queen had been strolling on her balcony?

So I turned to The Guardian for the dope, and discovered that the protest was part of a worldwide demonstration against austerity cuts; here’s what they had to say on the topic:

Similar events were staged in cities in Japan, Australia and New Zealand in opposition to austerity cuts, corruption and an increase in state surveillance.

Well, the event attracted hundreds of people, of whom 11 were arrested. In addition to the fireworks directed at the palace, a fire was started near the gates of the building, and the Lord Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square sustained damage. And apparently things got a bit heated—here’s more from the Guardian:

Ceylan Hassan, 24, a university graduate, who was among the protesters in London, said: "They started shouting 'move back, move back', but we had nowhere to go. The police started pushing us, screaming 'move back, move back'.

"There was a fire on the right hand side of the monument and people started throwing things."

OK, so I absorbed that, but then the question became: who was Anonymous, apparently the group behind the protest? And what were they all about?

In fact I don’t know—or rather, they don’t. But here’s what Trent Peacock (love the name, by the way), an Anon (as they call themselves) had to say, as cited in Wikipedia:

We [Anonymous] just happen to be a group of people on the internet who need—just kind of an outlet to do as we wish, that we wouldn't be able to do in regular society. ...That's more or less the point of it. Do as you wish. ... There's a common phrase: 'we are doing it for the lulz.'

Lulz, according to that Wikipedia entry, is “entertainment.” But the group’s idea of entertainment includes hacking—for some of its members—and they’ve gone after some really worthy targets, including Scientology and the Westboro Baptist “Church.” Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Several attacks by Anons have targeted organizations accused of homophobia. In February 2011, an open letter was published on AnonNews.org threatening the Westboro Baptist Church, an organization based in Kansas in the US known for picketing funerals with signs reading "God Hates Fags".[83] During a live radio current affairs program in which Topiary debated church member Shirley Phelps-Roper, Anons hacked one of the organization's websites.[84] After the church announced its intentions in December 2012 to picket the funerals of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, Anons published the names, phone numbers, and e-mail and home addresses of church members and brought down GodHatesFags.com with a DDoS attack.[85] Hacktivists also circulated petitions to have the church's tax-exempt status investigated.[86] In August 2012, Anons hacked the site of Ugandan Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi in retaliation for the Parliament of Uganda's consideration of an anti-homosexuality law permitting capital punishment.[87] 

Good work, guys!

Anons also supported the Occupy movement in its early days, and have protested stock exchanges and major corporations; they also were active in the Arab Spring.

For all this, the group attracts attention, if not notoriety. In 2012, Time Magazine named them on the 100 most influential people; according to Wikipedia, the NSA agreed. Here’s what it says:

In 2012, Public Radio International reported that the US National Security Agency considered Anonymous a potential national security threat and had warned the president that it could develop the capability to disable parts of the US power grid.

I report all of this dispassionately—it’s hard to get a finger on this group’s pulse. But one thing I’ll say: we’re skating quite rashly on the thinnest of ice. The 1% is getting unimaginably rich, and worse, frightenly isolated. The rest of us are forming a collective time bomb of unemployment, poverty, and disenfranchisement.

Anybody remember the French Revolution?

Easy Playing

I knew that he did it—I didn’t know that he did it so well, and to such an extent.

Because there he is, the preeminent cellist of our day, Yo-Yo Ma, playing baroque cello, and playing it damn well.

It may not look like it to you—but there are real differences in the equipment and the technique. First, the strings are gut—not the metal strings that the modern cello has. And that accounts for the softer sound.

Second of all, the endpin—the metal rod that goes from the bottom of the instrument to the floor—is not there. And that means that the instrument has to be cradled in between the legs, a feeling which I, at least, enjoy.

The bow is radically different: here’s one writer on the subject:

Italian music was light and airy, requiring agility and rapidity. German music was more introspective; tempi were slower, and the music frequently required individual string players to produce true chords.

These two musical styles were reflected in the violin bows. The Italian bow was slim and light, the bow strings fixed in relatively high tension, while the German bow was highly arched, and the string tension was fairly loose. In contrast to the Italian technique of holding the bow lightly from above with curved wrist, the German bow was held with the thumb placed under the bow strings. In this way the player could tighten or relax the bowstring tension at will. A tighter tension in the bow was used for single string, single melodic line playing, while a relaxing of the bowstrings' tension permitted playing on two or more strings simultaneously, and thus of course, the playing of true chords.  

The instrument is also held differently—more vertically, with the pegs near the left ear, not behind it.

But one of the most important elements of baroque playing is that the pitch is different. To start with, the A—the note that the oboe plays at the beginning of a concert to tune the orchestra—is not the 440 Hz, but varied from 392 to 465 Hz. But generally, the A was much lower—which contributed as well to a softer, darker sound. And so the standard among baroque players has settled at 415 Hz.

There are stylistic differences, as well. The tendency of the baroque era was to ornament heavily—whatever got written on the page was meant as a guideline, not a Bible. So a performer was free to ornament, and did so.

When I first moved to Puerto Rico, I played in a baroque group, and the experience was a revelation. It was hard, initially, to limit the vibrato, and to create the long, expressive notes that start softly, grow slowly, and then recede again. Most difficult was tuning—the high leading tones and major thirds of modern playing vanish when playing baroque.

But there’s something tantalizing about it—it is the simplest, easiest playing in the world.

“I never want to work so hard again,” I said to the violinist of the group. She knew exactly what I meant: a large, major Romantic work like the Dvorak Concerto is less a piece of music than a battle. To play baroque music is…well, to play.

The last question, of course, is whether Ma gets away with it. Has he really mastered the baroque cello? I drifted over to Amazon.com to check on what the audience was saying.

Predictably, Ma has his critics. But me? I’m convinced!