A Walker in the Suburbs

His birthday was yesterday but I’m thinking about him today. Remembering the Beethoven extravaganza on the radio: the measured cadences of the Seventh Symphony’s second movement (the one popularized in the film “The King’s Speech”), the off-stage trumpet of the Leonore Overture No. 3, the slow movement of the Third Piano Concerto. 

Years ago, on a shoestring student trip to Europe, I drug my friend Nancy into at least a half-dozen decrepit Viennese apartment buildings, each one of them places the composer was believed to have  lived. They were not pretty or in a nice part of town. They were often up a flight or two of poorly lit stairs. They made clear that Beethoven’s personal life was unsettled and on the edge.

But yesterday these places were the furthest thing from my mind. What remains of Beethoven, of course, is the music — timeless, placeless, soaring above it all.

I heard the piano before I walked into the room. A dozen folks were already there, handing out music, warming up voices, renewing friendships. It was an anniversary gathering of the Georgetown Gilbert and Sullivan Society — and it was my reunion “duty.”

But for once it wasn’t a duty. To hang out for an hour or two with people who found time to practice songs from “HMS Pinafore” while also studying torts and contracts is not a hardship.

So I listened, took notes and photos. I thought about the plays I was in as a kid, how in love I once was with that world. I thought about theater people, how alive they are. Breathing all that music in and out.

The last number was “He Is an Englishman.“

I couldn’t stop myself. I had to sing.

In honor of Bach’s birthday, a meditation on counterpoint, on two voices (or three, or four!) that sing alone — and together.

Two independent melodies, touching so lightly and so infrequently that they seem to be strangers — meandering up and down the scale alone, breaking into random song, complete enough to threaten each other, yet never doing so. Seemingly independent.

But they know each other, oh yes they do. And though they have their own motives and pace, when the end comes and they have made their own way through the measures, they pause, settle down happily and embrace.

I’m not a musician anymore. I play the piano every few weeks. But I’m an avid listener, and sometimes when I hear a piece I knew from long ago, I can imagine the string bass part or I can see the piano music, the key signature, the caesuras, the repeats.

I always liked the latter. The vertical bars, one thick and one thin. The two dots. The permission it gave. Try it again, this time softer or louder or more legato.

Playing the same section twice had its challenges at times, especially if it was a difficult passage. But it also gave me, never the most confident of musicians, two chances to get it right.

Not a bad idea, in music or in life.

Word came yesterday that the great pianist Van Cliburn died on Wednesday. Though his career did not fulfill its early promise, there was a time when his name was on everyone’s lips. He was the man who so wowed  the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow in 1958 that judges were forced to ask Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev if they could give him the medal. “Is he the best? Then give him the prize,” Khruschev is supposed to have said.

Van Cliburn took not just the classical music world by storm. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine, given a New York City ticker tape parade. When I told my kids this last night, they said, “What’s a ticker tape parade?”

I heard Van Cliburn play when I was a child, a young piano student. Not yet in love with classical music, I stared up at the ceiling of the concert hall, counting the beams or the light fixtures or something. Bored by the Chopin or the Rachmaninoff or whatever dazzling piece he was playing. Bored by my own lack of understanding.

Could I have that concert back now, please?

Watching a colleague’s fine film about a musician’s comeback from MS makes me think about music, how important it was to me growing up, how it has slipped out of my life, how I might bring it back.

Consider the offstage trumpet. Many composers have used it — Mahler, Respighi, Verdi — but the piece I remember it in most is Beethoven’s Leonore Overture Number 3. I was buried in the string bass section, still learning to play the instrument, while Jim Reed, first-chair trumpet of the Central Kentucky Youth Symphony Orchestra, stood in the wings of Memorial Hall blaring the call.

But it could be any orchestra anywhere, the trumpet in the distance, like the call to hunt or the approach of a royal entourage. It’s the acoustic equivalent of painterly perspective, a tonal shading, extending the orchestra beyond the stage.

Hearing it played (from minutes 9:17 to 10:12 of this recording) makes me think something important is about to happen. Not here, of course, but somewhere else. It is, therefore, a reminder to pay attention to the faraway and forgotten, to what’s offstage as well as on.