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Seize the Day!

Seize the Day!

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Their sound holds within it the rattle of a snake and the swish of a beaded curtain. It has more crescendoes than a brass band on a June afternoon.

The cicadas have brought us quickly to the soul of summer.  They have taken us to the brink of that shimmering, simmering time of year when everything seems more intensely alive.

Yesterday, on the Glade Trail, I moved into and out of various cicada hot zones, places where the critters congregate more plentifully, where they sing their songs with more abandon than others. 

Maybe it’s because they prefer laying their eggs on these branches (in our backyard they seem to like the crepe myrtle more than the dogwood, for instance). Or maybe it’s for some other reason buried deep in the cicada psyche.

All I know is that seeing them mate and fly, hearing them shout and sing, knowing what I do of their lifespan and life story, leaves me with one urgent message: Carpe diem, folks, seize the day. 

Writing and Music

Writing and Music

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Having a piano I can actually play means that I’ve been digging into all sorts of old music. There’s Debussy’s Arabesque with its rolling arpeggios, Handel’s Passacaglia with its variations on a theme, a Chopin polonaise with its jaunty beat and Scott Joplin’s piano rags, just because.

But the most poignant find was the book of Brahms’ Intermezzos. How I loved those pieces when I last played piano seriously, and how playing them again brought back the self that played them then: young, dreamy, all of life ahead of her. 

I wasn’t sure what kind of life I wanted to have then, but I knew I wanted it to include writing and music. And now, all these years later, it does.

Farewell to the Spinet

Farewell to the Spinet

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When the moment finally came, it was nothing at all like what I thought it would be — as moments  seldom are. I worried that my dear, sweet Wurlitzer spinet, the piano Mom and Dad had bought on the rent-to-purchase plan when I was a kid, would have to leave here in the instrument equivalent of a body bag, bound for what I’ve heard described as “that great concert hall in the sky.”

I’d been dithering over this for years — knowing that if I was to continue to play, the spinet would have to go, but being unable and unwilling to get rid of the instrument on which I plunked my first scales, practiced for hours a day in high school, and accompanied the girls when they were young musicians. 

It finally dawned on me that I was going about this the wrong way. To get rid of the spinet, I would need to fall in love with its replacement. So last Saturday I ventured out to a piano showroom in a mall not far from here, intending only to look and see what was there. 

What was there was a used Schimmel studio with a top you can prop up like a baby grand and a tone and touch that sent shivers down my spine. It was more than I was planning to spend but they were willing to take the spinet on trade! That clinched the deal, and the day before yesterday, the spinet left the house in a piano truck safely belted and blanketed, perhaps on its way to another young pianist.

Meanwhile, I can’t stop playing the new piano, which fills the house with its sonorous sound. I would say I don’t know what took me so long — but, of course, I do. 

Moonlight Sonata

Moonlight Sonata

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I learned from today’s Writer’s Almanac that Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata was published on this day in 1802. This means that for 219 years young pianists — and those who live with them — have been tortured by this piece.

Even now, I can thrum the fingerings on the desk. The first few bars of the first movement of Moonlight Sonata along with the opening of Beethoven’s Fur Elise may well be the last knowledge to leave my brain. Yes, it’s that bad. 

I wore an aqua-colored dress with a white collar at the recital where I performed Moonlight Sonata. And I think I performed it relatively mistake-free. 

My teacher was unorthodox, so recitals were mercifully few and far between. But of the handful I had, on at least one or two occasions I had to start over when mistakes derailed me. 

Moonlight Sonata was not one of those times, though … because it was then and forever will be, embedded in my brain. 

(Title page of the first edition, courtesy Wikipedia)

The Soundtrack

The Soundtrack

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With slower walks closer to home, the soundtrack of the stroll grows in importance. Because as much as I would like to say that I walk in silence, the better to hear the faint voice of inspiration, I usually do not. In fact, the music often is the inspiration. At the very least, it’s the pace-setter.

Sometimes it’s Bach or Brahms or Dvorak coursing through my brain, and my cadence flows from the tempo of the movement, speedy during the prestos, slower for the adagios.  Other times, I play jazz or folk or show tunes; the latter have a lightheartedness especially appreciated these days. The soundtrack can be seasonal, too: Irish tunes are prepped and ready for next month. 

Music is a mood enhancer, amplifying good thoughts, soothing anxious ones. Often I come back in the house from an amble and keep the buds in my ears, finishing a movement or a song, prolonging the escape just a little longer. The soundtrack of the walk throws long shadows on the rest of the day.  

A Dog, a Pig and the Music

A Dog, a Pig and the Music

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It’s barely discernible but significant to me that at 5 p.m. there’s now enough light to play with Copper in the backyard. He enjoys it when I bounce on the trampoline, and one of the best ways I can think of to wind down the day is to close the computer, run outside and urge him to come with me so that I can watch him trot down the slight rise in the yard: his sturdy little legs, his mouth open with joy — or perhaps because he wants to bite me. 

Last evening I bounced to the last movement of the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, which I came to love after seeing the movie “Babe.” (The final theme of the symphony is the tune that rallies the little pig.) 

How lovely it is to bounce to that grand sound, looking up at the house, the windows dark in the room where I was just writing, so different from moving through the air, the glorious release of it all. And yet knowing that the experience of bouncing will come most alive for me when I try to get it down on the page. And that involves (you guessed it) … heading right back into that dark room.

(Photo: Universal Studios/Photofest and the Hollywood Reporter)

 

The Walking Listener

The Walking Listener

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For the last year I’ve been ambling not always silently and not always with music in my ears but sometimes with words in there too.  Thanks to the gift of Audible, I’ve walked to novels and meditations and nonfiction explications of our current economic woes. 

One day a neighbor stopped me on the street. I took out my ear buds to hear what she was saying. “You must be listening to a book,” she said. 

I wondered how she could tell. Did I have a furrowed brow of concentration? 

She could tell because she does, too. There must be some sort of aura we walking listeners give off that only other walking listeners can see. 

We chatted for a moment before going on our separate ways, at which point I put my ear buds back in and discovered that since I’d forgotten to push pause, the narrator was now several “pages” ahead of where I’d stopped. Just a small problem for the walking listener. 

The Ninth

The Ninth

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I hadn’t heard it in a while, and I caught only fragments on my drive to and from the post office last week. But there it was, the syncopated rhythm of the second movement on the way there and, on the way back, the first strains of the fourth movement.

Today is the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, and he will be well-represented on the radio —just as he would have been thundering through the concert halls, if those were open. If I’m lucky, I’ll find a way to hear his Ninth Symphony today, too.

But I doubt it will compare with last week’s performance. After arriving home, I rushed out for a walk, headphones in, classical station blaring, so that I could move through space as that sublime music moved through my brain. 

There was the first “Freude!” “Joy!” The soloists’ voices entwined and melodious, the pulsing timpani and the chorus filling my head with sound. And in that way, the ordinary walk became a celebration of life.

Tick Tock Tick…

Tick Tock Tick…

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I write to the sound of one clock ticking. That would be a lot of ticks in some houses, but in this house, it means we’re down by two clocks. It’s the cuckoo clock this time, the cuckoo I mourned in an essay long ago.

A year ago, when I was home alone for a couple weeks, I remember writing in my journal about the sound of three clocks ticking. It was like jumping rope double-Dutch or playing all three contrapuntal parts of a Bach fugue, the satisfying finger-twisting struggle of it all. 

It isn’t difficult to vibrate to one chord, to rock to one beat. I like to think that having multiple ticks and tocks keeps me limber, aurally speaking.

Time for the cuckoo clock repair shop.

Musical Chores

Musical Chores

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I’m always listening to music while walking with my iPod, but until recently I’d lost the ability to blare symphonies or musicals or folk tunes at home. But now, a jerry-rigged system is once again filling the house with sound. 

On Saturday morning, while putting away the groceries, it was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Old Friends.” “Bye-bye Love”  is a surprisingly apt tune for wiping down packages of peppers and strawberries and finding a place for them in the fridge. The “bye-bye” part is good for jettisoning leftovers.

Later in the day, I listened to Benny Goodman while chopping vegetables for potato-leek soup. “Sing, sing, sing” mimicked “Chop, chop, chop,” the driving bass beat perfect for making quick work with the potato peeler. Dad must have been behind the scenes for this pick, loving both food and Big Band.

And finally, while making pot roast in the crockpot, I matched the cool, foggy weather outside with the Hernon Brothers’ “Across the Sound,” an album picked up two summers ago on the isle of  Inishmore. 

Chores fly when they have a musical accompaniment.