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Throwback Thursday

Throwback Thursday

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My Throwback Thursday came a day early, when a high school friend called to tell me about the 70th anniversary reunion of the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra. Many years ago (not 70, though!) I played string bass in that august ensemble. I was not very good. My audition piece was “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” — and still I only squeaked in.

I was in over my head from the start — Brahms 1st has some fantastically difficult runs — but I was hooked. To be even a small, insignificant, plunking-lower-string part of this swelling sound didn’t just make my day (the day was Saturday, the time 8 a.m. to noon). It made my year (s), both junior and senior. I had found my crowd: the music people.

For two years there was rosin dust and calloused fingers. There were rehearsals and parties and the dreaded tag day, when I stood on the corner of Short and Lime and asked passersby for money. There was the time we were invited to the Soviet Union for the International Music Educators Conference. Does my mind fail me here, or would we have played Kablevsky for Kablevsky?  I think that is true.

That one didn’t work out, but there were concerts at U.K. and Transylvania, on the road in Williamsburg and Atlanta, the night when guys from the trumpet section got their hands on the French taxi horns used in “An American in Paris” and woke up half the hotel.

All these memories bubbling out because of a phone call. The parts of life we think are over never really are.

Cathedral Chorale

Cathedral Chorale

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To hear ancient music in an ancient structure amplifies its power. I’m talking about Saturday’s concert of the Cathedral Choral Society, which was held in National Cathedral. Though the church itself isn’t ancient, it was built to feel that way.

National Cathedral was erected in the 20th century, not the 12th. But the building transports you, from the first step over the transom into the crowded vestibule. This impression continues when you look up at the arched ceiling and see the sun slanting in the rose window.

And then the music starts —  “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” “Lo, How a Rose E’re Blooming” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” — and the experience is complete.

Happy Birthday, Beethoven!

Happy Birthday, Beethoven!

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Beethoven is not part of my daily musical diet. His symphonies are rich fare, and my tastes tend toward lighter chamber works these days. Which means that yesterday’s radio bounty was music to my ears. (Because my radio station celebrated Beethoven’s birthday yesterday — no doubt due to the Saturday afternoon opera and other weekend programming restrictions — I can write about his sublime music today with the benefit of recent inundation!)

I didn’t listen to a whole symphony (I’ll do that today), but the snatch of his Ninth Symphony I heard was powerful enough to keep me sitting in the car until the last triumphant notes.

Many would consider the Fifth and the Ninth symphonies — heck, maybe all Beethoven symphonies — old warhorses. But when you listen with fresh ears you realize why they became warhorses in the first place.

In Harmony

In Harmony

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Last night was my fourth Singalong Messiah, and I marveled as always at how a random crew of sopranos, altos, basses and tenors can come together in minutes to make an ensemble. 

What struck me this year was the harmony, that in this most discordant of times, we came together to make music. And that the beauty of the music came not just from melody but from polyphony, from pitches that are pleasing when heard together. 
Alone, we were warbling sopranos, plodding basses, energetic tenors and earnest altos. Together we were a choir. Obviously not the smoothest and most rehearsed but a choir just the same.
It was a good way to usher in the Christmas season. 
Are We There Yet?

Are We There Yet?

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A month ago was too early, though I’ll admit I sneaked an aural peak and listened to the last two choruses. But a few nights ago, I started from the beginning. It was November. I’d waited long enough. It was time for The Messiah.

Let others drag out their Christmas decorations a week after Halloween, let retailers stock the shelves with tinsel and ornaments and candy canes. If I’m going to rush the season, it will be for only one reason: to hear Handel’s great oratorio.

The piece is always just a playlist away on my little iPod. It’s all I can do to keep myself from listening to it all year long. But civilization has its constraints, and so I hold myself back. One can’t play a piece every single day and still love it (the scores of LaLa Land and Les Miserables being prime examples). I want more than that for The Messiah.

And so, I waited. I didn’t listen in April, and I didn’t listen in July. To my own persistent, “Are we there yet?” I said, “Not quite — but soon.” But finally I could wait no more. And so, on November 6, almost a month before Advent, I pushed play.

And there were the familiar pulsing strings, the pause, and then … the tenor: “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.” I felt the weight of 11 months roll off my shoulders, the cares and troubles of other seasons. They’re all behind me now. It’s time for The Messiah.

In the Open

In the Open

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A missing headphone set means that when I listen to music through my phone lately, I do it in the open — not through earbuds. This is a strange yet strangely familiar activity.

It’s strange because for years now the tunes I listen to are only for my ears. A feedback loop of one, a solitary bubble, like all the solitary bubbles around me.

But it’s familiar because I grew up pre i-Pod and pre-Walkman. When I think of summer afternoons at the pool it’s not my playlist I remember (there were no personal playlists in those days!), but Top 40 hits piped through someone else’s portable radio. You could always hold a transistor up to your ear or use those early earbuds (there was only ever one, which was just fine since these radios produced no stereophonic sound), but for the most part, music was out in the open.

In fact, it was a musical free-for-all, and you got what was got. You adjusted. I tapped my feet to soft rock, cringed at country crooners. But I came to enjoy tunes I would never have heard otherwise — and I learned that listening can be a communal experience.

Now when I walk past a neighbor I quickly mute my Bach or Rachmaninoff. I don’t want to impose my choices on them. For all I know they wouldn’t mind. But it’s different now. Dogs don’t run free and neither does music. These are small changes, true, but put enough of them together and you have another world.

Sky Bridge

Sky Bridge

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A late walk last night, strolling through sunset into nightfall. Crickets were chirping, bats were swooping and down at the corner the second-bloom honeysuckle was wafting its delicious scent over the distinctive odor of the manure fertilizer some homeowner had just spread.

We aren’t used to barnyard scents here in the suburbs. A few miles down the road is a little farm park where I used to take the children when they were young. There are plenty of pungent odors there.
But here it’s a sanitized suburban aroma.

But I was soon past it and on my way back. The day was darkening, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off the sky. Maybe because it was the lightest thing to look at — or maybe because I was listening to Chabrier on my iPod and thinking about Dad playing the same music decades ago.

What a link music becomes, a bridge between the living and the dead.

Ascending Descenders

Ascending Descenders

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The late musicologist Karl Haas, who I still remember fondly from his radio show “Adventures in Good Music,” once had a program about “ascending descenders” or something of the sort. He may not have used that term, but his point was to celebrate the impact wrought from notes that descend in pitch but elevate in intensity.

I see the same process at work in the foliage of south Florida. Yes, palm fronds arch up and over in graceful arcs. Though their new growth shoots ever heavenward, they have an earthbound quality, too. Same with the long stringy stems (botanists would know what to call these things) that are perhaps the beginnings of a new branch.

In thinking about the foliage and the music I see a common theme: a celebration of life as it is, the ups, the downs, the beginnings and the ends. Recognizing the nobility in all of it.

Musical Time

Musical Time

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Last night Suzanne and I saw a Broadway touring company production of “The King and I” at the Kennedy Center. I had forgotten how many wonderful songs come from that musical. “Whistle a Happy Tune,” “Getting to Know You,” “March of the Siamese Children,” “I Have Dreamed,” “Hello, Young Lovers” and “Something Wonderful.”

The experience left me humming and tapping my feet, and now, the next day, has me on a Rogers and Hammerstein kick. “June is Busting Out All Over” and “If I Loved You” are playing as I write this post.

What can I say? These musicals capture the innocence and optimism of an age. They’re what I grew up, and I made sure my kids grew up with them too, along with the requisite Disney fare. It’s not a bad way to start. There will be time for angst and cynicism later on!

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Summer Serenade

Summer Serenade

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Thunderstorms cleared the air late yesterday and made way for … a frog chorus.  The little guys chirped and sang and puffed their throats out in that way they do. They’re looking for love, of course. Aren’t we all?

But instead of hitting the clubs and trying some corny lines, these guys were serenading their ladies in style. Bright sounds in the big night. A crooning, haunting symphony of sound — the voice of summer, perfect accompaniment to the glimmer of fireflies. They were singing to their own, but their cries soothed the soul of this suburbanite.

Because when I heard them call from creeks and puddles and the undersides of leaves, I felt part of a much larger, elemental world. That these creatures — just tadpoles a few weeks ago, little more than eggs with legs — could now be filling the night with their song seemed more than a little miraculous. It was a perfect way to end the day — with a summer serenade.

(Wikipedia)