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Happy Birthday, Rhapsody

Happy Birthday, Rhapsody

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Yesterday, after the errands were run and the groceries put away, I sat down at the piano, pulled out the ancient sheet music and played the opening run. For the next 30 minutes, I bungled my way through one of the most important and beautiful pieces of American music ever written, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

A hundred years ago to the day, on a snowy February 12, 1924, Gershwin played the piece at Aeolian Hall in New York City in a concert billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music.” Paul Whiteman had commissioned Gershwin to write the piece, and Gershwin had done it in just a few weeks, roughing out the original idea on a train trip from New York to Boston. “I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness,” Gershwin said.

He had created a masterpiece. Though no one knows exactly how the piece sounded that day (it wasn’t recorded and Gershwin improvised parts of it), a recording made a few months later is thought to be a close replica. The piece was an immediate success, with multiple recordings, and Paul Whiteman made the Rhapsody the theme song for his radio show. Gershwin had created an anthem for the Jazz Age. 

Later versions of the Rhapsody give it a more lush orchestral sound, but the original performance brought out the jazzy brightness of the piece in all its syncopated glory. Even hopscotching through the music as I was last night, cherry-picking the easier sections, I felt its magic in my bones. 

(Thanks to Wikipedia and The Syncopated Times for info and art, and to Hot Jazz Saturday Night for the inspiration.) 

Time and Memories

Time and Memories

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I’m reminded this morning that it’s been 60 years to the day since President Kennedy was shot. The act that defined our country for many years, until the other tragedies came along. 

Now there are young adults who were born after 9/11, who have no direct or televised experience of the smoldering ruins or the silent skies. 

Time marches on; memories do not. They stay locked in place — in amber, perhaps, or something far less valuable. They define us, as a generation and as a people. 

How do we honor them and move on? Only by understanding them, I guess, by realizing the many ways they hold us in their thrall. 

Good Words

Good Words

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Today is the birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt, mother, teacher, writer, wife, first lady and activist, whose 2020 biography was unputdownable. 

One of Eleanor’s many noteworthy traits was her capacity for growth. She was not afraid to plunge in, assess, take action, and, when necessary, reverse course. She was ahead of her time. 

Perhaps this quotation helps explain some of her courage: “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you,” she said, “if you realized how seldom they do.”

Good words to take into the day. 

(Writing about Eleanor gives me an excuse to feature a Washington, D.C. photo.)

Neolithic Orkney

Neolithic Orkney

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Today we traveled in time as well as space, touring sites which Orkadians five millennia ago would have known.

Places like Skara Brae, a Neolithic village uncovered less than 200 years ago and older than Stonehenge or the pyramids in Egypt. The Stones of Stenness rising up from the treeless plain. And the Ring of Brodnar with its 27 menhirs decked out in heather.  

What I took from this jam-packed day is that we have much in common with our Stone Age ancestors, that they, like us, sought shelter from the cold, a good meal, and something beyond creature comforts, a carving on a mace handle, a decorated saucer. 

They too, wanted to say we were here. And today, I saw that they were. 

He Died Walking

He Died Walking

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I don’t read the newspaper obituaries everyday, but on Sunday one particular one caught my eye: it was about Esteban Volkov, who died at the age of 97 in Mexico. He was the grandson of Leon Trotsky.  

A mini history lesson, this article describes how Trotsky fled Russia after a power struggle with Stalin following Lenin’s death. Volkov’s father, a political supporter, was imprisoned and killed, and Volkov’s mother, Trotsky’s daughter, committed suicide. Volkov eventually ended up in Mexico City, living with his exiled grandfather. 

Volkov returned from school one day to find his grandfather dying in the arms of his wife and a security guard. After escaping assassins other times, Trotsky was killed with an icepick by a man who pretended to be his admirer. Young Volkov wasn’t safe, either, once hiding under his bed as a gunman fired shot after shot into his mattress. 

Volkov promised his grandfather he’d never go into politics, becoming an engineer instead. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, Volkov, by then retired, opened a museum about Trotsky in Mexico City. It now hosts 50,000 visitors a year. 

The obituary has a noteworthy conclusion, as Volkov’s daughter describes her father’s many positive traits: “He liked nature, mountains, the ocean and loved music, with Shostakovich and Stravinsky his favorites. He never stopped walking and even died while walking, outside his nursing home.” He died while walking, three years shy of his 100th birthday. That’s something to aspire to.

(Volkov, lower right, with his grandparents. Photo courtesy Wikirouge.)

 

How the West Was Young

How the West Was Young

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I write this post from the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle, south of downtown and (from the sound of it) on the flight path to Seatac.

The hosts of this Airbnb have thoughtfully provided a local history book on Rainier Valley, so I’ve been learning about the history of this place, from early pioneer Isaac Ebey in the 1850s, through waves of settlement, Italians to Africans and more, to the opening of the light rail line in 2009. 

What strikes me about all of this is how recent it is. Not that I exactly live in the midst of antiquities, but compared with the East, the West is … young. 

(Lake Washington waders in 1905)

23,000

23,000

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23,000. The number flares, it burns a hole in the mind. The pain it represents. The terrible loss of life from earthquakes in Turkey and Syria and the human misery left in their wake.

The earthquake that struck Lisbon on November 1, 1755, occurred before there were ways to measure temblors, but it’s estimated to have been as high as 8.0 on the Richter scale. Estimated loss of life: 30,000 to 50,000. 

The event widened an already wide rift in European intellectual life as philosophers like Voltaire challenged optimism and belief in a loving and engaged God.  

Natural events ripple through history. How, I wonder, will this current one ripple through time? 

(An engraving of the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami that followed. Courtesy Wikipedia. Four days after I posted this,  the death toll in Syria and Turkey reached 41,000.)

Taps

Taps

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Over the weekend I had a chance to do something I’ve meant to do for years, to be part of an 8th Air Force Historical Society event, thanks to a friend who’s a member. My dad flew in the 95th bomb group of the 8th Air Force and was active in both the 95th Bomb Group and 8th Air Force organizations. I cheered him on through the years but never had time to join him.

Now, of course, I wish I had. Because as much as I enjoyed meeting a couple of the WWII veterans present, all up in their 90s, of course, I only missed Dad more.

There was the familiar 8th Air Force insignia, the talk of where stationed, at some village or another in Britain’s East Anglia. There were the facts and figures, amazing to recount. In 1942 the 8th Air Force had a dozen members. Two years later, there were 300,000. 

And now they’re contracting again, have been for some time, at least when it comes to those who served in WWII. In a crowd of 400-plus … only seven were veterans of the Second World War. 

Gutenberg’s Bible

Gutenberg’s Bible

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The Writer’s Almanac informs me that on this day in the year 1452 Johannes Gutenberg finished printing the first section of his revolutionary bible.  More than a decade earlier, he had begun isolating the elements of each letter and punctuation mark (300 shapes in all) to create movable type. 

It’s a technology that had begun in China centuries earlier, using porcelain. Gutenberg’s type pieces were made of an alloy of lead, tin and antimony — a compound that remained in use for the next 550 years. 

Gutenberg printed around 180 bibles of which less than 50 remain, only 21 of them complete. But his printing press forever changed our technology and our culture. 

“What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg,” Mark Twain wrote in 1900. Perhaps a little less true today, but still a statement you can hang your hat on. 

(Illustration and facts from Wikipedia, additional material from The Writer’s Almanac)

The Iron Curtain

The Iron Curtain

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I grew up with the Iron Curtain, the dividing line between the Soviet Union and the West. A strange image, “iron curtain.” Not iron wall, though the Berlin Wall was part of it. Not iron fence, though barbed wire and guard towers were part of it, too. But iron — hard and unbendable — combined with curtain — soft and pliable.

It was Winston Churchill’s phrase, part of a March, 1946, address where he said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended upon the land.” I didn’t know he used these exact words until I looked them up just now.

But I did know that something was terribly wrong with the world, that adults were afraid of the division, that it posed harm. The Iron Curtain was not just a dividing line; it was a feeling. It was rigid and gray and hopeless, life drained of color. The Cold War. Nuclear stand-offs.

My children were born as the Berlin Wall was falling. They grew up with a far different Europe than I did. To them, Russian’s invasion of Ukraine must seem preposterous. To me, it seems all too familiar.

(Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, a city I never dreamed I’d see. In the old days, it was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.)