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The Very Thirsty Piano*

The Very Thirsty Piano*

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My new piano is a joy. Most every day I sit on its comfy bench and touch its lustrous keys and think to myself … what did I do to deserve this instrument? Not only have I continued to play old pieces, but I’m even attempting to learn new ones — a sure sign of devotion.

But the piano has developed one interesting habit. It’s thirsty — very, very thirsty. It has a humidifier, you see, with a light that comes on when the water drops below a certain level. When that happens, you fill it through a tube to avoid removing the front of the instrument. Doing this keeps the piano in tune, and is good for it in general. 

When the tuner showed me how this works, I imagined we’d be filling it up once or twice a winter. But it’s been a cold January, and the piano lights up about once a week. So now I water the ferns, I water the spider plants … and I water the piano. 

(*Apologies to the late Eric Carle for riffing on his title)

Christmas Oratorio

Christmas Oratorio

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Walking to a holiday playlist the other day, I made a merry discovery: the opening chorus of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is just my speed. It’s a bouncy piece of music, and when I was striding down the W&OD trail, dodging the bicycles, it seemed just about perfect.

There’s the timpani pounding out the beat, the flutes trilling in response, the trumpets soaring above it all, and then, of course, the chorus, entering in unison before breaking into various voices throughout the movement.

I looked up the English translation later. “Shout for joy, exult, rise up, glorify the day.”  The kind of words angels might use when announcing the birth of Jesus to shepherds in the fields. 

But even before I knew the meaning, the melody and meter passed through my ears to my feet, in that way that only music can.

The Concert

The Concert

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It had been a while since I sat in a concert hall. There was Wolftrap last summer, always fun, but open-air, even when you have seats. 

Last night was the whole experience: the Kennedy Center itself, the approach and the entry, picking up the tickets, walking down the long hall, and then, in the hall, the chandeliers above and instruments tuning below. There were the black ties and tails, a hush when the lights went down. 

And then, there was this young man with a clarinet, swaying with it, bending with it, reminding me of James Galway on the flute, that same elfin charm.

The clarinetist, Lin Ma, played the Mozart Clarinet Concerto as if he was born to do it, so softly in parts of the Adagio that I felt myself lean toward the stage in order to hear it better. When he finished, the audience leapt to their feet.

Last night’s concert was not only all Mozart; it was all late-vintage Mozart, every piece written in 1791, the last year of the composer’s short life. And it ended with this: bliss. 

Immersed in Van Gogh

Immersed in Van Gogh

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“I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.”

Vincent Van Gogh

The Van Gogh immersive experience begins as soon as you walk in the door and are greeted with a wall of sunflowers, or, I should say, a larger-than-life Van Gogh-like depiction of them. A few steps away is a bust of the painter that morphs from black and gray shadows to the swirled blues and lavenders of his flowers.

You pass a re-creation of the room at Arles, complete down to the washstand and window and hat hanging from a peg on the wall. Take a photo of the room and you’ve created a masterpiece.

There are videos on the artist’s life, his hospitalization, self-mutilation and eventual suicide. And there is music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, something by Debussy, others I couldn’t place, all soaring and emotive.

But the best is saved for last, when you walk into the final gallery and find yourself a part of the paintings. You stand or sit or recline on the floor while the art comes alive around you, pages slide off easels, stars explode in the night, and a hundred sunflowers bloom against a lapis lazuli sky. 

Of Time and Art

Of Time and Art

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I don’t always explore the Google doodles, but I did today, lured on by the picture of a woman playing a grand piano in a room filled with art and light. 

The woman, I learned, is Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, born on this day in 1805. She’s the sister of Felix, a composer I’ve come to appreciate ever more as the years go on, and was herself a gifted pianist and composer. She composed over 450 pieces of music, including many lieder (songs) and piano works.  As a 14-year-old she could  play 24 Bach Preludes from memory. 

Fanny died of a stroke at the age of 41. Her brother died of the same cause six months later, after composing a quartet in her memory. 

What the musical world gained from these two talented siblings cannot be measured. But what more it would have gained had they lived 200 years later, when they could have been on high blood pressure medication. Of course, had they been born 200 years later, they probably would have been writing rap music. Such is the nature of time and art. 

(Photo: Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s music room in her home in Berlin, courtesy Wikipedia)

Beethoven’s Seventh

Beethoven’s Seventh

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An open door, a world of light — and a piano. Scarcely a day passes that I don’t play it, or wish I had. To touch the keys and realize, I own this thing, I can walk over here and pound out a Brahms Intermezzo or a Bach Prelude whenever I want — well it’s been months since I bought this piano but it still thrills me. 

Writing about the playing is something else entirely, though. That’s because music is the other, the part that can’t be pinned down by precision. It flows where the words won’t go. 

A few nights ago, I found a book of music I’d forgotten I had, transcriptions of orchestral works, including the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which I took out and played. 

This was a piece popularized by an impressive scene from “The King’s Speech,” but whenever I hear it I will always remember the University of Kentucky’s Piano Institute the summer before my junior year of high school. There was a young assistant professor there who taught music theory, and for one class he had us sit in a dingy room in basement of the Performing Arts building with big clunky earphones on our ears and our heads down on our arms listening to this music. 

I can’t remember now what lesson we were to take away from that experience. All I know is that in the darkness and with the earphones, the soft dirge of the opening chords built slowly to the crescendo at the piece’s midpoint in a way that made my heart fill near to bursting. And somehow, the other night, I was able to capture a bit of that feeling again … on the new piano. 

The Art of Listening

The Art of Listening

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I read in this week’s Brain Pickings newsletter that the composer Aaron Copland, in his book Music and Imagination, says listening to music is an art, just as playing it is. 

If that’s the case, then I practice the art every time I walk. 

This morning, fresh from reading about Copland, the “Overture to Die Meistersinger” in my ears, I thought about how I listen. It’s mostly with the ear of an amateur, someone whose love for music greatly exceeds her knowledge of it. 

But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it; perhaps I enjoy it more. 

“There are few pleasures in art greater than the secure sense that one
can recognize beauty when one comes upon it… ” Copland writes. “Recognizing the beautiful
in an abstract art like music partakes somewhat of a minor miracle.”

Streaming

Streaming

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Today I walked to Gabrieli, yesterday to Vivaldi, and the day before, Joni Mitchell. All of this from the music streaming service that began as a free six-month trial but I decided was worth paying for. 

Though old news for many, the idea that I can call up most any piece of music struck me like a thunderclap. It was out there waiting but I had to be ready for it, ready to see music as something to rent and not to own.

Which is not to say I have entirely given up that concept. I still have stacks of CDs and LPs, still have my trusty iPod, tiny and ancient, with playlists that have embedded themselves in my brain. 

But now I also have my phone, gateway to the streaming app — and a musical freedom I am only beginning to plumb. 

The Lark Ascending

The Lark Ascending

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I was lucky to find early in my life the twin passions that drive it still. One is words, the other is music. I’ve made my living from the first and kept the second for pleasure. For that reason, music has been the great unexplored ocean — restless, deep and ever-changing. 

This morning for some reason I hankered to hear the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Thanks to the streaming service I had free for six months and decided I must keep, his pieces were at my fingertips. 

My walk began with Overture to the Wasps, which after a buzzing start, settles into a brisk march and then a shimmering serenade. 

I listened to The English Folk Song Suite, Fantasia on Greensleeves, and then… The Lark Ascending. It’s this last one that I can’t get out of my mind, so much so that I came home and started playing it on my computer. The comments on the YouTube page — more than four thousand of them — speak to the power of this special piece and of music in general.

People write about emerging from depression after listening to The Lark, of saying goodbye to dying loved ones with this soaring melody. The piece harkens back to a simpler time, said many. One man wrote that it reminds him of his parents peddling through the English countryside during World War II, his father on leave from the RAF, the couple picnicking one golden afternoon. Life amidst the madness, ending somehow on a high note, despite it all.

Empty Tables

Empty Tables

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There’s a mournful tune from the musical Les Miserables, “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables,” that describes the way I’m feeling about our bird feeder today, closed at the request of numerous local authorities in response to reports of sick and dying birds in the area.

Birds flock to feeders and spread the disease as they eat. Removing the feeders removes at least one source of contagion.

But it also removes the pushing and the preening, the darting and the chirping. It takes away the front row seat we have on avian life and the chaotic, swooping joy of it.

A downy woodpecker just landed, hopped on the deck railing, then flew away. A few minutes later, a confused chickadee perched on the bird feeder pole, gave a forlorn chirp, then zoomed off to a nearby azalea bush.

I know it’s for their own good,  but I miss the critters … and I like to think they’re missing us.