Going Green: The Drilling of the Wells

Yesterday was the start of the first phase of the Geothermal Installation Project at my house. The guys from G & R Westbrook Drilling had stopped by on Tuesday to look things over one more time, figuring about where things might work, getting ready to drill the two 250'-deep wells at “the lower end” of the house (what we always called the side where the basement opens out and the otherwise one-storey ranch house becomes a two-storey house: that’s how steep the grade is from the front door to the east-side property line). They confirmed they could start the process on Thursday: Groff’s would be here on the 31st, then, to do the internal installation. Westbrook’s job was to dig the wells and get the piping into ground, dig a trench from the wells to the house and then get them inside, ready to be hooked up to the heat-transfer pump (the new “furnace”).

They arrived Thursday morning to begin the job, three vehicles pulling up across the front of the yard: a pick-up truck with bales of hay and other “incidentals,” a long flat-bed with piles of drill-pipes, an odd-looking red cement-mixer kind of thing on the back, and “the driller,” the mega-truck with its tower laid horizontal over it that, when raised, would dig (as my mother would’ve said) “half-way to China” (my back-yard pass to the Summer Olympics, perhaps).

We reconnoitered on the lawn: I pointed out where the sewer connection and the septic tank are, where in relation to all this my neighbor’s well is. New concerns were needing to get closer to the house (under the shade of an old Norway Maple) which would place the second well closer to the property line and my neighbor’s well. They said it shouldn’t cause any disturbance: my concern was the vibrations rattling not just the house but the underground aquifers. With the kind of drill they use and the kind of shale this is, Ryan and his dad assured my neighbor and me this should not be a concern.

The younger brother, Wes, was walking around with a bent metal rod in his hand that looked like nothing more than a straightened-out old-fashioned wire coat hanger. Pacing along slowly, he’d come to a spot where the wire would turn in his hand to face a different angle. He would mark the grass, then, with a can of orange spray paint: this was an underground pipe. That way, they could locate the connection to the old septic tank as well.

When he tried bringing the truck up over the lawn at the lower end, the bank (which had toppled a few of us off our riding mowers over the past 48 years) proved to be just a tad too steep: the back of the driller kept digging into the grass. So the decision was made to bring it up over the front of the yard from the other, more level end at the driveway. And given the limits around the lower end, what about drilling right in the middle of the yard? Was it too steep?

I pointed out where my well was, they found a spot further down from that and another spot the requisite 12-15 feet away toward the road, moving off to an angle, for the second well. They could dig the connecting trench up to the front of the basement wall, though I was hoping to avoid drilling through this double-thick cinder block foundation wall. He assured me this would not be an issue. I was calculating how much junk was being stored on the other side of that wall, though... Well, a project for the weekend, then.

The major inconvenience, however, was going to be to the groundhog. The holes there have been in his family for generations, however long a groundhog generation may last. I rarely saw him but there he was, popping his head out the hole looking at us as if he were saying “you talkin’ about me?!” He probably was wondering what the rumbling truck was all about... Well, so he may be evicted. There is, however, another sizeable hole in the back yard, whether he’s using that one or not, I don’t know: we had joked, years ago, that there’s a whole city of groundhogs burrowing under the basement, connecting the front and back yards with a series of dens and tunnels.

So now they were ready to go. They got the truck in place, set a bunch of blocks and boards up to level the truck on the sloping lawn – and then up went the tower.

I have no idea how tall that tower actually is – it just looked freakin’ tall standing out there in the middle of my yard, next to the “Crimson King Maple” we’d planted in the fall of 1959. And 250 feet down was freakin’ deep. I remember when my folks were having their water well drilled then, it seemed like they were never going to reach water. How long would it take them to reach water now, I wondered?

They had set up a silt fence to contain any mud that would come up, backed up with a dam made by bales of hay. (For another view of this, taken afterward from the road, see below.) Any excess water would run off down to the slope and along the road, eventually just soaking into the ground.

And so it began.

With my sensitive hearing, I was prepared for one hellacious day, but considering several of my cats were spooked during recent thunderstorms and the fireworks display from one of my neighbors across the street this past 4th of July, I was more concerned how they’d react to this constant assault that could last five or six hours. Would the house vibrate so much things inside would rattle? Would my grandmother’s delicate glassware in the one curio cabinet dance off the shelves and break? Would the cats run around and bounce off the walls until everything else would break?
It was amazing that it wasn’t that annoying after all: no shaking, no rattling. Yes, it was loud, but it wasn’t as annoying as the White Noise “Noise Masking System” many office spaces use to cut down on ambience from a room full of cubicles. Some days at work, I would have a headache in 10-15 minutes, even though it wasn’t the decibel level of the “white [sic] noise” but its frequency that irritated my hearing. And yet I didn’t need to sit in my house wearing my big blue “ear protector” headset (in fact, I was able to sit in my study and even get some composing done!) - more amazingly, the cats seemed genuinely unfazed by the noise. Several of them took turns watching out the dining room window.

In 2½ hours, the guys had finished drilling the first well. They had reached water, but nothing serious: while there was a good bit of mud, there wasn’t the stream of water I’d expected to see flowing off down the hill.

Meanwhile, the guys were getting the “pipe” ready to be inserted into the well. This would be the flexible tubing the water would be flowing through, a closed system that would circulate back and forth between these holes in the ground and the heat transfer pump in the basement. It doesn’t use water from the well: these wells are just meant to keep the tubing in the ground. These tubes, then, will be connected to more tubing that will be dug into a trench, taking it up to the side of the house (by way of the groundhog hole) and into the basement.

It was in the low-90s that afternoon. I was glad to discover I could take most of these pictures from my dining room window without having to go outside and deal with the heat and noise myself. Ryan and Wes were glad to have a little bit of shade from the two trees, something they don’t always have on their jobs. By the time they were doing the second well, moving the truck further down toward the road, the sun had shifted enough that Ryan could stand in the maple’s shade while maneuvering the drill.


These are the “pipes” coming out of the first well: Wes continued unwinding them and stretching them across the yard. The excess tubing will be cut back before being joined to the lines that will be trenched in, later.

After having taken only a 20 minute break, eating their lunch under the maple tree while talking to me about how much of this they do these days. Not many people really know about geothermal yet even though his grandfather had been digging wells for systems as far back as 1985. One of their jobs is working with a developer out along Jonestown Road who’s putting in town houses, each one having its own geothermal well connected to a heat-transfer pump rather than relying on non-renewable fossil fuels to provide both winter heating and summer cooling.

Another 20 minutes to reposition the truck, and then another 2½ hours to drill the second well and soon they were inserting the tubing down into the second well. For some reason, even though this one was only about 12-15 feet away and just a little lower than the first well, they ran into water a lot sooner than they had with the first one. There was more mud but still not the flow of water I was anticipating. Like watching a cartoon, I was half-hoping they’d strike oil – then I wouldn’t have to worry about my next job, would I?

The last phase of this part of the project was something I hadn’t been expecting. They moved the flat-bed around, Wes got up and connected a water hose to the red concrete-mixer-like thing then started opening what appeared to be 50-pound sacks of... concrete, maybe? I had no idea. Schlogging through the mud, Ryan connected a larger hose from the flat-bed – looking like something a fireman would drag up from a hydrant – and stuffed it down into the first well.

This wasn’t concrete after all, Ryan explained as he held out a glob of stuff that could only be described as badly cooked oatmeal. This was Bentonite Clay, a special kind of clay that was only mined in places like Wyoming.

When mixed with water, it actually works better as an agent to transfer the heat from the ground into the tubing, making it a more efficient way to heat or cool the water in the tubes than concrete. This stuff will not solidify but keeps this yucky-looking glompy texture, giving it a greater conductability as well as flexibility if the ground should for any reason shift around a little.

After both wells were then filled with this heavy oatmeal... I mean, gel-like clay, it was a matter of sorting out the hoses and tubes, mounding some of the excess mud up around the well-tops (since this will sink down a bit as it settles), and doing what clean-up is possible after such a messy job. I kept wondering what it is about something like this that makes guys want to say “oh yeah, I wanna be a well-driller when I grow up.” But they did a great job with it and I feel much more reassured about the decision to “go green” with the geothermal technology.

The next phase is the trench-digging which Westbrook Drilling will do sometime next week and then, the following week, Groff’s comes in to take out the old dinosaur-devouring furnace and replace it with a smaller, more efficient and earth-friendly heat transfer pump.

People have told me how much they hated heat-transfer pumps, but this one works differently. Rather than taking it from the air outside – which is not an efficient source of heat in the winter time – it takes it from the water circulating in these tubes, kept at a fairly steady temperature of 55° winter or summer by the ground temperature. From there, it should heat my house in the winter and keep it cool in the summer with a minimum drain on the electricity. I can reduce my “carbon footprint” considerably not to mention my out-going utility bills.

I’ll report back here during the coming weeks as the process continues and let you know how August works out in terms of cool-air comfort and how my electric bill will compare with last year’s when I was trying to run the a/c as little as possible and not feeling terribly comfortable.

Meanwhile, if you have any questions about the geothermal technology, do some googling and find some contractors in your area. You can check a few of these links - here and here (a good one) - there is even a video on YouTube (I have to admit, since I have no audio on this computer, not yet having replaced the two sets of speakers the cats disabled in their quest for really tasty wires, I'm not sure about the Chinese subtitles, but pictures can still be worth a few thousand words...).

If the spectre of Global Warming and swimming polar bears doesn't impress you to do anything about it, think about your pocket book and the price of oil. If you're in the market to build a new home, consider including geothermal technology in the process now; if you're looking at the idea of replacing an existing furnace system, consider the options but don't discount geothermal without really looking into it. If the cost can equal a replacement oil furnace and a couple of years' oil, it sounds like a pretty good investment. Something to think about...

Going Green: The Geothermal Installation, Part 1

Like Kermit the Frog says, it’s not easy going green.

This was going to be the summer to replace the furnace in my house. It was installed in 1958 or early 1959 when the house was being built, so it’s basically 50-years old. For years, we’d hope it would limp along through yet another winter. It never failed but it was becoming increasingly inefficient. Getting replacement parts for it might involve looking for a museum, not a distributor. The time had come to say good-bye.

And replace it with what?

Between everybody talking about “global warming,” “reducing your carbon footprint” and the price of oil only likely to keep going up, I decided there was no time like the present to look into alternative energy sources. I was told a new oil furnace might cost $8-10,000, and since I was paying about $3200 to heat my house this past winter (and still only keeping it at a chilly 64° – it’s a big house), I thought it was time to look into something that would also reduce my dependence on fossil fuels, doing one small bit for the environment. Using a few compact fluorescent bulbs around the house is one thing but there has to be more to it than that.

On the one hand, I didn’t like the idea of putting solar panels on my roof – I’ve been through too many weeks of spring and winter here in Central Pennsylvania where we barely see the sun, anyway – but I figured if geothermal heating was going to work, you’d either have to be built over a hot spring (like Reykjavik) or you’d have to have lots of ground with a deep pond on it.

Then one evening I stumbled on an article at the New York Times about a recently renovated row home with a tiny postage stamp of a yard that was putting in state-of-the-art geothermal heating and cooling. An hour and much googling later, I realized, if it could work for a city home on a tiny patch of land, it might actually be a very applicable form of energy for me, since I’m sitting on 3/4s of a suburban acre. And I wouldn’t need to harness a geyser in my basement.

The principle is very simple: once you get beneath the surface, the ground is a constant temperature, year round – basically 55° – no matter what the air temperature is. So in the winter, it’s probably warmer than the air; and in the summer, cooler. There are several ways you can make use of this: you can dig trenches and lay out an array of closed-circuit pipes with water circulating through them; you can dig wells with pipes connected by u-bends that the water would circulate through; if you have a pond, you can run the pipes out into the water, but since I don’t have access to a pond, I didn’t spend too much time thinking about this one.

These pipes then enter your basement and connect to a heat transfer pump which takes the given temperature from that water (warmer in winter, cooler in summer) and transfers it into heat or air-conditioning that can then be distributed through your house. Since I already have “forced hot-air” and the ducts for central air-conditioning (installed in 1980), it seemed a natural, here, assuming the rest of it was feasible.

There were actually a few companies in the mid-state that installed geothermal heating and cooling systems. None in Harrisburg that I could find, but I contacted a couple, had them come up for interviews and give me estimates. I went with Groff’s Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing in Willow Street. Their sales guy explained how it would work and told me, rather than trying a series of trenches, it would be better with two 250'-deep wells but I would need to contact my own well-driller for that: then they’ll do the internal installation - we scheduled it for later this month.

Since my mother kept everything and in this case I could even put my hand on it within five minutes, I found who drilled our original well in 1958. They are, not surprisingly, no longer in business. My friend N’s father had worked for a time with Kohl Brothers as a well-driller back in the ‘40s but not surprisingly they no longer do any residential drilling. However, they did recommend a company in Boiling Springs that had been started by a guy who used to work with them – G & R Westbrook. So I gave them a call.

I talked with Mr. Westbrook’s grandson, Ryan, who said they were working on a number of projects in the Lower Paxton and Linglestown area, so he’d stop by and check out the lay of the land. This, actually, is very important to a well-driller, more crucial to him considering the size of the truck and the fact it has to be kept level. The bane of my existence when I mowed it for my folks during the early-‘80s through mid-’90s, long after I hoped to be done with yard-work (this, I said, was why I rented in the first place) this lawn has nothing that could be described as level. Two wells at the lower end of the house, by the basement entrance, would work – otherwise hemmed in by an old maple tree, the property line, the sewer line that had been installed in the ‘80s (as I recall) and the remains of the old septic tank, but relatively level.

Groff’s estimate for the internal workings was around $9700. Westbrook’s estimate for the two wells was $6000. That’s a lot of money – not to mention the fact the day after I agreed to go ahead with this, I was terminated at my job and now found myself unemployed.

But I kept thinking:

Geothermal installation = $9,700 + $6,000
New Oil Furnace installation = c.$8-10,000 + $6,000/two years’ worth of oil (at least)

So in two years’ time, basically, it would pay for itself. Right? And I have to install a new furnace now, anyway, right? So...? This IS going to work, right!?!

So far, I really hadn’t talked to anyone who’d actually installed the system in their homes. Most of what I read was either from environmentalists or were endorsements posted by companies that installed the technology.

Then Ryan told me his grandfather started installing geothermal systems in 1985 and put it in his farmhouse. It took a little tweeking then but it’s fine and he’s been very happy with it ever since – and he spends about $400 a year in heating and cooling costs. Let me repeat that – $400 a year! As opposed to the $600+ a month I was paying for fuel oil for half a year? Not to mention the spike in my electricity usage during the summer for the a/c...

Since they were going to be drilling near the property line, Ryan wanted to know where my neighbor’s well was. Now, I hadn’t actually met my neighbors yet, despite the fact I’d moved back in here in April of last year (okay, so I’m not very sociable and tend to be something of a loner – which partly explains how I survived 18 years working the evening shift on the radio). So I introduced myself and found out their well was closer to the property line than I had guessed (mine is in the front of the house; theirs was off to the one side). There was some concern that the drilling might agitate the underground water aquifers and muddy his well-water. Since he’d recently put in a new pump, this was more than just dealing with cloudy water that might take a day or two to settle. I was also concerned about the noise and how much the house might actually vibrate: my cats would probably freak out; how would his dog handle the noise?

We then talked about geothermal: ironically, just a week before, they had just replaced an oil furnace and air-conditioning unit. He had thought about geothermal but what he found didn’t seem practical. Like me, he assumed it wouldn’t really work. I’m sorry I hadn’t gone to talk to him about it in May when the guy from Groff’s had come up to check out my place. He might have decided to go green, too.

The well-drillers showed up Thursday morning to begin the first phase of the installation. Tomorrow, I’ll post a series of pictures about it and describe what it was like.

To Be Continued...

Pecking Away at the New Piece

It’s been several months in the gestation stage and too many weeks in the embryonic stage, but I think now, finally, the new violin and piano piece, a Chaconne, is ready to get started! After all that, I’m just getting started??

In 2006, I'd begun thinking of other pieces to go along with the Nocturne and then a set of variations and a funny little “Blues Interruptus” I was writing to perform with John Clare (formerly WITF’s afternoon music host, now in San Antonio at KPAC). The Nocturne was played (if not heard) at a volunteer brunch (but I can no longer offer you a link to those posts since my old blog there has been closed down following my departure). Originally, there would be three or four pieces, but I wanted something more substantial to end the set of pieces and thought perhaps a Chaconne would do.

Basically, a chaconne is originally an old Baroque-era dance that evolved into an abstract variation form, based on a recurring harmonic pattern. It’s closely related (and unfortunately often interchangeable with) the passacaglia, another variation form that originated as a slow, stately dance (the title comes from the Spanish words “pasar,” to walk, and “calle,” the street, though it might have more to do with the slow regal strutting of a peacock than what “street walker” means to most Americans today). In both, a repetitive pattern forms the basis for a series of continuous variations, the difference supposedly being a passacaglia uses a melodic idea in the bass and a chaconne uses a chordal pattern as its harmonic background.

Many chord progressions would have a clear bass-line anyway which make it seem melodic (or at least linear), and so that’s where the confusion begins to come in. Since it’s usually in the lower register with all the variations happening above it, these kinds of pieces are usually called “Grounds,” given that everything is grounded in the bass, and the pattern itself is often called a “ground bass.”

There are many great examples of these two approaches: perhaps the greatest are the Chaconne that concludes the 2nd Partita for Solo Violin by Bach and the Passacaglia & Fugue in C Minor for organ, also by Bach. In the 16th and 17th centuries, a chaconne was the typical conclusion of a suite of dances or a scene in an opera or a ballet, but by the time Bach died, both forms were considered old-fashioned. The Passacaglia that concludes Brahms’ 4th Symphony, considered “archaic” by his contemporaries, is at times a more of a chaconne, but who cares: it’s still some of the most magnificent music in the repertoire.

More recently, John Corigliano took an idea he’d written for the film The Red Violin and turned it into a concert work for violin and orchestra he called a chaconne (it later became part of a whole violin concerto). It was while listening to this that I thought it might make an interesting challenge for this next violin and piano piece of mine: as in “here’s an interesting problem - how do I solve this one?”

In a way, it was kind of an odd choice for me, because one thing that irritates me as a listener is the constant repetition of something – like the ground bass of Pachelbel’s Canon – that grinds away at my patience. It’s too easy just to play something over and over (and over) again and do something a little different above it: the same pitches, the same chords, the same go-nowhere structure made up of little units that, every few bars, comes to the same stop and then starts all over again, the musical equivalent of counting sheep (Ravel’s Bolero, by the way, is a different kind of animal all together but can be just as maa-aaa-aaadening).

One of the reasons the Bach D Minor Chaconne is so great is because the harmonic background remains in the background: after a while, you completely forget about it but it’s always there, holding everything together. One of the reasons I think the finale of Brahms’ 4th is so great has to do with that very confusion of passacaglia and chaconne because at times, you’re aware of the bass line and at other times you’re not, when the chords become the skeletal glue (especially in the trombone chorale and the flute solo variations), creating a variety of textures and procedures that becomes a variation of the variation process itself.

What took so long for my little chaconne to take shape was trying to figure out ways of subverting these concerns, creating some kind of variety in the procedure while not going too far afield from the basic premise. Figuring out the overall shape – based on the standard arch form I use subdivided by the Golden Section – I discovered there would be nine variations which then meant either the music was going to be too short or, if expanded to fill what I thought would be a reasonable length, the variations would be too long. Then it seemed there would be nineteen variations – nine on either side of the climactic apex of the arch – which now seemed like too many repetitions of this pattern, a pattern which hadn’t been worked out yet, by the way.

Here is the initial statement of my “harmonic pattern”:
There are three parts to this “well-ordered phrase” – the first four chords (using all 12 pitches) consists of a pair of non-triadic chords balanced by two major or minor triads a tritone apart. The middle chord (in whole notes) is another triad related by a common tone to the previous chord. The last four chords are also two non-triadic chords (but based on different intervals) followed by two major or minor triads also a tritone apart. Which chords occur in the last group is determined by the six-note set (or hexachord) available from the middle (or whole-note) chord and the first of the last four.

(You can read more about My Musical Language here and here.)

Most of this part of the process I’d described in an earlier post: it was the project for my May vacation. Now that I’m “in between jobs,” so to speak, and I have all the time in the world, it would appear the old adage “work expands to fill the available time” is in full force. Almost two months have gone by, and I still feel like the round peg at Square One.

Several times, I’ve worked over the structure, working out ways the patterns would change tonality and where they’d be placed on the overall skeletal graph of the piece. It went from strict direct repetition (boring) to obvious similarities with subtle differences which allowed it to sound like it was actually going somewhere harmonically in the larger scope of things.

Even the length of each statement was determined by the proportions of the overall form, subdivided according to the Golden Section: rather than each one being squarely 4 or 8 measures long, as it might be traditionally, many of them would be about 7 measures, but others would be more or less. The longest ones are about 12 measures each, and several are less than 5. In fact, the climactic one is only 3 measures long which means compressing or expanding the energy of this harmonic progression will create a sense of harmonic rhythm that will, in the long run, offer a different level of variety.

Then at one point, the chaconne started telling me it should be the middle of a set of five pieces, not the last of four. Now, these pieces are not interrelated the way a sonata would be, so it’s still X-Number of Pieces for Violin & Piano, not a sonata for violin and piano (ah yes, the Nada Sonata). But there’s something about my innate concern for clarity and logic of structure – so lacking in my personal life – that I felt compelled to shape these pieces into some kind of overall, well-balanced, proportional whole.

The Chaconne should be the apex of the arch, not the conclusion. In order to fit with the other three pieces, then, it would need to be longer than I’d just worked it out to be, by a whole minute. Considering how long it’s taking me to even get the thing started and that it took a year to write a 21 minutes string quartet and two years to write a half-hour long symphony, the idea of adding even a minute on to this piece and then needing to write even a short one parallel to the ‘Blues Interruptus’ was like, “Aaaaaaaugh, no!!!!” But, hey...

So I went back and completely revised the skeleton, re-laying the nineteens statements of the pattern so the climax of each one would meet up with the proportional climaxes of the whole and then worked out some other details, a lot of which involved simply staring at pages and pages of stuff and trying to figure out “this isn’t working: why?”

Each variation itself needed to fit into this Golden Section proportion but it wasn’t happening. For the ones that didn’t fit, I discovered they were in a mirror form, the unequal “halves” reversed: this could become another way of varying the forward motion, slowing it down a bit before pushing to the climax and then pulling away from it toward the end and its final resolution.

You’d think, as the composer, everything was consciously done by me, but that’s not always the case. Another cool thing I discovered was this: with nineteen statements of the pattern – nine of them occurring at major structural points along the skeletal framework and all but one of those having some pitch in common with the central tonality’s D Major or D Minor chord – only one out of the 12 available sets of pitches (analogous to keys) had gone unused. Obviously, with 19 statements and 12 available transpositions, there were some that would be used more than once, so I looked at some of those duplicates and realized this one had another inconsistency that needed to be fixed (not really corrected). Suddenly, by changing one note in one chord, the other notes of the other chords that would balance it turned out to be in the missing transposition!

I also discovered, quite fortuitously, the similarity of the last two statements:

The fact the resolution to the middle (whole-note) chord goes up a half-step (with D-naturals in that chord) rather than by common-tone as the previous eighteen statements had done, gives it a sound like a Piccardy cadence in traditional tonality, where an expected resolution to, say, a G minor chord moves instead to a G major one. But the G chord doesn’t sound like a real resolution: it’s more like a second-inversion IV-chord that still needs to resolve to a tonic D Major chord (double suspension and all that) which, ultimately it does. As it turns out, the final segment of this resolution uses the same exact pitches as the ones that ended the next-to-last statement which ended on the “dominant” A-flat of the central D “tonic.” Only here, the chords within each pair are reversed, giving it finally a more stable resolution.

But that’s only the harmonic frame-work: there will be other notes, other chords, other material of some fashion that will work in and around these basic chords, avoiding the monotony of constant repetition. But I’ll get into that, later.

Despite all the mumbo-jumbinous geek-speak, trying to explain sounds in terms of text and process, it really does sound better than it reads... but that is, from the technical standpoint, how it works. THAT it works is the only real requirement: analysis of music is like understanding how your car’s engine works - you don’t need to know that to drive it, but it comes in handy if you’re going to try building one yourself.

So now I’ve worked out the new piece’s skeleton and finally I have the harmonic material which is like the muscles that make it function. Now I’m ready for the skin, stretching it out over the harmonic muscles to create something, hopefully, you may get a chance to hear, some day.

Now it’s time to get back to the piano, after I clean the cats’ litter boxes...

- Dr. Dick

Creativity on the Edge of Despair

At times when I should be concentrating on composing (assuming I’m not distracted by other things like reality in general), I’m might be unpacking boxes of books and papers (still) or picking up a book I’d like to read. An old notebook fell open to a quote I’d written down years ago from one of May Sarton’s journals. She’s a poet and novelist who wrote numerous journals about her creative life – I’ve read all of them but her Journal of a Solitude is one of my favorite books, period, and something I highly recommend to any reader interested in how a creative mind lives and works – and so I wondered what, in particular, this excerpt might have for me, thinking of it as a kind of timely fortune cookie I’ve just opened up:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
“... [I] no longer have distant hopes, anything ahead to look forward to with a leap of the heart. What I have lost this past year is the sense of destiny, the belief that what I have to offer... is worthy. ...In naked terms, I simply feel a failure. Too old to hope that things will ever get better. I have been ‘put down’ in such brutal ways that recovery is only possible by dogged self-discipline. And it is not true recovery, it is simply not committing suicide...”
— May Sarton, “Recovering,” a journal entry for January 5th, 1979
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Whoa. That hits quite uncomfortably close to home.

While I have not exactly been thrown into an emotional maelstrom after having been “terminated” at work, it’s impossible at my age and with today’s economic reality not to feel raw and vulnerable. Sarton had written this after a year in which an important relationship ended and a new novel she’d worked very hard on and felt quite hopeful about was savaged in the New York Times Book Review.

When so much of your life work has been abruptly trashed (for that is what it seems like despite the kindness of friends and fans), it is easy to feel like a failure. I’m not sure – at least at this point – that’s how I would describe my current state. It’s true, I’m not sure how things might get better, looking for a new career and not interested in pursuing one I cared little for, in the long run (the one saving grace).

It’s not likely I’m going to realize old cherished dreams – like becoming recognized as a composer – over night when I never worked at them for the past 20 years or so. But I do wonder, looking back on some of the music I’ve composed in these last few years of renewed creativity, if there’s anything there worthwhile, much less (as Sarton puts it) worthy.

I have written several pieces solely for my own gratification, simply to prove that I could do so, as if taking it any further is not really necessary. Is it good enough to be of interest to anyone else? Do I really care if it isn’t, if it at least meets the standards of my own integrity?

In the past few months, I have felt more comfortable with my own convictions, especially after hearing a couple of concerts this year of works by one of my favorite composers, Elliott Carter, who turns 100 this December. Rather than writing for the widest possible audience, he composes works that admittedly appeal to a very small percentage of that already small percentage of music lovers who like contemporary classical music, a small percentage of those who claim to love classical music (at least as one judges the buying of CDs and concert tickets) which we are constantly told is a very small percentage of those people who like any kind of music today at all. It’s not that he doesn’t care what audiences think because the whole purpose of art is to make some kind of connection with someone, but that is not what drives his (or my) need to create.

If I wanted to reach a wider, more popular audience, I would be writing a very different style of music than the kind I feel compelled to, as difficult as it is to explain that to someone else without seeming arrogant about it. It is was I write naturally, not a conscious decision to create in this style or that style – the conscious decisions come in trying to figure out how to get everything down on paper to be the best realization of those ideas that come to me. If that’s not how other people compose, it’s how I do.

And the process is susceptible to constant insecurities. It is how a bad review can send a published writer like May Sarton beyond the edge of despair, though frankly even a bad day working over a poem that is not going well could send her into a tailspin of smaller proportions.

So as I’m working on this new violin and piano piece – a chaconne (I’ll get into more detail later) – and making several trips back to the drawing board, refining the structural plans, working and re-working the individual phrases, their various components and their greater context in the stream of creativity, I was reminded of another quote, one I wanted to track down, something by Samuel Beckett, not a favorite author of mine (I read Molloy years ago and was so depressed afterward, I doubted I could endure the next two novels in the cycle, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) but one who, like Joyce, tempts me once in a while with the beauty and power of his language. This was actually something I’d read in a book about Beckett, though - ah, there it is, in the next box to be unpacked, how lucky!

It’s taken from an uncredited interview used as an epigraph to Michael Robinson’s 1969 study of Beckett, The Long Sonata of the Dead:

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B. – The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a certain order on the plane of the feasible.
D. – What other plane can there be for the maker?
B. – Logically, none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary roar.
D. – And preferring what?
B. – The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.
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And I’ve always loved that resonant line Robinson used as a title, “The Long Sonata of the Dead.” I had thought of using it for the title of an opera, back in the late-70s, though it had no relation to Beckett’s works, not sure it even had any relevance to the three contiguous stories that were the basis of its plot. It comes from the first of those three novels I’d mentioned, Molloy:

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“All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.”
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Medium Translations: The Latest Buzz

Over 400 pages into Tolstoy’s War & Peace, I’ve finally come to the first scene that Prokofiev used in his equally epic opera based on one of the largest, if not one of the greatest novels of all time. 400 pages! And I’m only a third of the way through the book!

Despite all the great battle scenes or the dazzling social whirl of Imperial Petersburg, Prokofiev chose to open his vast musical canvas with one of the most intimate scenes in the whole novel. Left for dead on the battlefield of Austerlitz only to return home just in time to witness his wife’s death in childbirth, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky has spent the last few years withdrawn from society, from his military calling, even to a large extent from his family. Jaded and feeling old at the ripe age of 31, he leaves his country estate at the beginning of springtime on business, stopping to visit Count Ilya Rostov, whose family has been one of the chief focal points of the previous 400 pages. Andrei is unable to sleep and looks out into the moonlight garden just as the Count’s teenage daughter, Natasha and her cousin Sonya, sitting in the window of the room above, also look out and are captivated by the beauty and enchantment of spring. It is the beginning of his own rejuvenation.

Of course, most of the people in Prokofiev’s original audience would have known Tolstoy’s novel quite well, familiar with the back-story and all the other details – vast amounts of detail – that had to be left out. It might be more difficult for American audiences, not so familiar with it, to keep track of a cast pared down to a mere 65 characters, especially when you consider some of them (major players in the original) are reduced to cartoon-like walk-ons.

I’ve always been interested in the translation of works from one medium into another, sometimes reading a book before going to see a movie based on it but sometimes deciding reading it had been sufficient. How much discussion there had been when Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was converted to the big screen: what would be left out, how would certain characters be depicted, what would some of the fantastic creatures of Middle Earth even look like?

So I wonder what it would be like following a movie’s translation to the operatic stage? Not a story that became a movie that is set to become an opera over the next few years – Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain being turned into an opera by Charles Wuorinen which I included in an earlier post. In this particular instance – a love story with a different sense of rejuvenation – the film-that-becomes-an-opera is The Fly.

Yes. Be afraid – be very afraid.

Or not.

The operatic version of The Fly is directed by David Cronenberg, based on his 1986 film, and set to music by Howard Shore who did the original filmscore, in addition to since writing the filmscore for The Lord of the Rings. Only here, now, the music must carry the whole drama, not just emotional high points or serve eerily in the background, setting the mood.

As the director of the opera, Cronenberg’s intent was to create something new from the material, not just re-create the film on stage, easily done by using film montages projected on a backdrop. Of course, the gorier close-ups of the transformation of man-into-fly could not be equaled but then the time-frame of operatic theater (or even theater, period) was something that could’ve been deadly in a movie.

You can read an article posted on-line through Yahoo here, with reviews from England’s The Guardian here and from the New York Times here.

After its premiere in Paris this past week, it will arrive in Los Angeles in September, conducted by Placido Domingo, the tenor who not only also conducts but who also runs the Los Angeles Opera, which appropriately commissioned the piece in the first place. What could be more logical in L.A. than to bring into creation a new opera based on a Hollywood film?

I never saw the 1986 film. The New York Times at least mentions it was a remake of the 1958 film – this one I had seen as a nine-year-old, later buzzing around the house crying “help me! help me!” in a little tiny fly-like voice from the final scene where the camera closes in on a fly that has the scientist’s head – which in turn is based on a short story by George Langelaan.

So it does, on several levels, follow in the great traditions of theatrical translations, from the written word to the visual to the musical. Most of Shakespeare’s plays, after all, had their origins in historical tales or fictional stories merely borrowed by the Bard – but what a translation! – made visible on the stage in days before films and television became another story-telling medium. Taking into consideration the conventions of each medium is the challenge of making such transformations a success. Two examples would be to compare the original Shakespeare with the librettos that Verdi used for his last two operas, Otello and Falstaff.

How did it work in this case? The audience seemed to be appreciative, to a point, and the critics, while not being overwhelmingly supportive (nothing new there: just ask Wagner or Verdi), at least didn’t swat it down. It remains to be seen if The Fly will have wings in the opera world.

So ironically, today I read a review of a much older play that takes it cue from the myths of ancient Greece, a story that still fascinates me as an operatic subject. Greek drama already has a large amount of music and dance involved in it: in fact, opera itself grew from the concept of turning away from the excesses of the stage and the complexities of the musical style of the day to return to the purity and simplicity of Greek drama, at least as it was understood in 1600. And while stories about Greek gods and their all-too-human foibles littered the stages of opera houses during its first two centuries, one that probably was never turned into an opera (then, at least) was Euripides’ The Bacchae.

The National Theatre of Scotland’s production is now playing at New York City’s Lincoln Center Festival with Scottish actor and film star Alan Cumming, in androgynous make-up and a gold-lamé kilt, as Dionysus, the Original Party Boi. It turns the Greek Chorus (followers of Dionysus) into R&B groupies with a lot of humor and finger-snapping tunes, at least until the entrance of Agave in the final scene, believing she has killed and dismembered a lion with her bare hands only gradually to realize it was her son instead, a final scene that puts a sudden stop to all the partying.

I suppose the problem the New York Times critic Charles Isherwood had with this production rests in the lack of cohesion between the party scenes and the horror of its ending (not helped by the fact a great chunk of the original text has been missing for millennia). The story progresses in a steady theatrical rhythm pushing everything toward the climax, inevitable or not (to the Greek audiences, knowing the story, inevitably inevitable). Perhaps it’s that sense of rhythm, ironically, that is lost in this performance?

But still, it’s amazing to see a play like The Bacchae being staged at all, and to discover that something 2400 years old can still have relevance today, however you care to interpret it.

Dad's Roses

It sounds odd, calling them “Dad’s Roses,” considering my father had little to no interest in the yard and probably hated mowing the grass almost as much as I did when I was a kid. It was my maternal grandmother who grew roses – one, I remember especially, climbing over a trellis, a beautiful Peace Rose.

These roses, though, came from a bush N’s mother planted 23 years ago, taking a cut rose from the casket spray when my father was buried in July, 1985. Never mind that the rose sat forgotten on the back seat of the car for most of a broiling summer day after the funeral, but given her over-achieving green thumb, she stuck it in the ground anyway and put a jar over it. The next year, there were three blossoms on it on the first anniversary of Dad’s death. The bush has never done really well, and sometimes the deer, chomping their way through the back yard, managed to eat all the buds.

This year, however, there were three blossoms and two buds which barely survived a pretty nasty rainstorm last week.

I was thinking of taking them over to the cemetery but thought I’d like to enjoy them here. I’m not a great believer in graveside visits, anyway – they’re not really there: they’re wherever I am, in my heart, and certainly here, all over this house.

So for the past week, the roses have been kept in the only safe, cat-proof place I have – the refrigerator. They were a little past their prime even when they arrived, but that’s not what counts, for me. Having them is another memory, a connection with the past.

When they fall apart and the petals have dropped, I will dry them, then place them in a bowl, scattering some of them over the grave.

N’s mother died four years ago this month herself, so she wasn’t here to rescue a rose from my mother’s casket spray. I think we tried ourselves, but none of them made it. The one connection like that I have with my mom is the red peony by the back door, grown from a stalk she’d gotten from her folks when they moved into their first house in 1946, divisions from the plants my mother grew up with in the backyard of what was her mother’s first house. That means they were planted probably around 1919 or so. This year, barely hanging in there, the peony didn’t produce a single bud: maybe next year when the original plant might be celebrating its 90th birthday.

One Big Step for Dr. Dick, One Small Step for Radio

Since it’s now in the Patriot-News today and on pennlive.com yesterday, it’s time to post about it here at Thoughts on a Train.

When people asked me what I did for a living, I used to say “I stand in a small room with carpeting on the walls and talk to myself all night.” At least until we moved into the new fishbowl of a control room at WITF’s new building with all its glass.

It was only supposed to be a temporary gig, when I became the evening announcer at WITF-FM 18 years ago. After leaving the Harrisburg Symphony where I was assistant conductor, orchestra (and personnel) manager, presenter of pre-concert talks and, among other things, the voice for the symphony’s preview interviews on WITF-FM in the mid-80s, I worked at B.Dalton’s, the bookstore in Strawberry Square, for five months until WITF’s station manager Wick Woodford walked by one afternoon, surprised to see me, and talked to me about an opening they had for an evening announcer. I said, “sure, I’ll come out for an interview.” I knew nothing about radio and less about the technology but I knew my classical music pretty well and figured I could manage that for a while.

That was in 1990. A few years later, I started thinking it was time to move on: I’d been shot down for a couple of teaching jobs because I already had my doctorate and was probably too expensive for these colleges – not that they asked: they both hired younger composers just finishing up their Masters degrees. The department secretary at one of them even told me, “unless you have a letter in your file from Aaron Copland, they’re probably not even going to consider you,” so I said “well, I know George Crumb, is he big enough for you?” Huh...

Then Wick told me he was making me the Music Director for FM. I didn’t want the job. I wanted to get back to teaching and mostly to composing. But it was too easy to stay and the other teaching jobs turned out to be farther and farther away. I was born and raised here and didn’t want to leave my mother alone as she got older: she was settled in her house, the one I grew up in (and the one I’m now living in) and was not eager to follow me anywhere or to move to Rochester to be closer to my brother. Over the next few years, weeks became months became years and suddenly I’d been at WITF 10 years. Then 15 years.

Changes were made, there were issues to deal with, personal contretemps that fired up into nasty office politics, people came and went, often unceremoniously. There were several times I felt I had to get out of there for one reason or another, often just to keep soul in line with body. During the ‘90s, the easiest way for corporations to balance the budget seemed to be by firing people before the fiscal year ended: to this day, many of us regard June 30th with a sense of dread.

But I enjoyed bringing good quality classical music to listeners in Central Pennsylvania, talking to them while taking their requests on Wednesday nights, tracking down a recording of something they’d heard and wanted to add to their own library, running into them out in public. Judging from many of the comments I’d gotten from people, what they liked most was learning a little something about the music, what was going on in the composers’ lives at the time they wrote it, realizing they were not just marble busts but real people, too.

For a while, we did an on-air “module” called Concertos to Kazoos, a kind of “Ask Dr. Dick” where originally listeners could send in questions about classical music that devolved into funny shticks with no real educational value but sometimes could still be fun. That was how “Dr. Dick” came to WITF-FM – we needed a radio-persona style nickname for me and Cary Burkett suggested this one – which I said was fine with me: students of mine at UConn called me that back in the ‘70s. I think one of my Eastman students called me that even before the Dr. became official..

Then came the blog, starting in December of 2004. 364 posts later, it’s now closed and the links on the WITF website have been removed. You can still find it by googling it, but I’m sure it will soon disappear into the Limbo of Dead Blogs. I plan on continuing some of the threads here – especially information about up-coming performances or maybe writing ‘reviews’ [sic] about ones I attend. So if you’ve found Thoughts on a Train, please spread the word around to your friends and link to me on your blog!

It was always important to me to get listeners out to hear live music, and it was great to be able to program an evening’s music on the radio where every piece would have some tie-in to an up-coming performance in the region, whether it was one of the area’s orchestras, a program at Gretna Music or Market Square Concerts or a recital at a college or church: “here’s music you can hear live in the area” was one way I could tie the classical music in with life as we know it here at home. The News Guys can do that easily: they’re reporting the news, after all, but classical music is usually just seen as this lump of old stuff that people put on so they can sit back and watch their fish tanks. I liked having it a little more integrated into the community, reflecting the many (if not always varied) experiences that can enrich our lives and also support our local arts groups.

As it became less important to the radio business in general, it became more difficult to make it work for me, personally. It’s happening around the country: what’s been going on here is just part of the problem classical music on the radio has nationwide, in fact part of the problem the Arts in general are having nationwide. Usually, I’m not one to say “Classical Music Is Dying” because, first of all, they were crying about that when I was a kid. But as educational programs in the schools diminish or disappear, the future audiences for these groups diminishes with them.

It doesn’t take much, though, for a single experience, one simple unexpected encounter, to change something for one individual.

There was a recital by the Harrisburg Players Collective at the Fredericksen Library in Camp Hill one afternoon, and I remember seeing a mother with her young son – maybe 5 or 6? – walking around behind the two musicians who were playing at the time. The boy hung back, his mother reached back to take his hand and lead him out to the circulation desk, ready to check out an arm-load of books. But he still hung back and so she put the books down, sat down on a chair and held him on her knee so he could see better. You often see looks on children’s faces of such intensity and awe, and this was one of those moments I wish I had a camera. That was probably five or six years ago and I wonder if that boy is taking violin lessons now, inspired by that chance encounter because his mom took him to the library (a good sign to begin with) at just that moment. Not that he has to become a musician – whether he does or not is not the point. His life may be enriched by the discovery of this whole world of music whether he pursues it as a career or not. After all, musicians – and radio stations – need audiences.

When I was told at a staff meeting earlier this year that, as the industry continues to evolve and WITF with it, “perhaps you won’t be on-air anymore, maybe you’ll be working on educational projects,” I said, “okay, let’s talk.” After 18 years, I was up for a change and going out to schools and various public groups to talk about the music I love seemed a good fit, perhaps offering some music appreciation courses for students and adults at the Public Media Center, continuing as I had done with “Opera Outreach” in years past, talking to kids about how you turn stories into operas.

Talking about this with some of the musicians in the community, there was a good deal of excitement about the possibilities. But the interest at WITF was not forthcoming – a simple exploratory meeting could not be scheduled over a period of three months because the other two were so busy – and so the predictable finally came to pass.

On Thursday, June 19th, five weeks after I’d started getting “the drift” – you know how you can sense these things – my employment with the company was terminated.

By that time, the only thing left to clear out of my desk was my own CD player/radio and my personal special backless chair which I needed for my back trouble: most everything else had been taken home or tossed out in a slow spring cleaning that began even before mid-May (when my friend and colleague John Clare left to take his current job in San Antonio). When I mentioned that that day, someone said to someone else, “and you thought he was just being tidy.” (Dr. Dick is never “tidy.”)

I’m not sorry it happened. I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to say good-bye to my listeners, to my readers at Dr. Dick’s Blog or to the colleagues I’d worked with during those 18 years.

Friends and people I don’t know have told me they’ll stop contributing to WITF as a result. I can’t say that’s a good idea: if you still listen, I still feel you should support the station to the level that you value it. If donations are withheld, it only increases the risk classical music will be lessened or even replaced with something less to your liking (they tell me that’s not the case: “WITF remains committed to classical music”). If you choose to no longer listen to the station, you’re missing reports from the great FM News Team and their perspectives on life in Central PA. But everybody has to make that decision for themselves.

As the quote from Henri Bergson at the top of this blog states – “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly” – change happens to everyone and every thing. Change can go in different directions, for better or worse, but we all have to deal with it. Like aging, the alternative is often not so good.

For me, right now, I’ve got a job to find, but in the meantime, I want to settle in on this new violin and piano piece. It’s just what I happen to be writing now, nothing momentous, just something more realistic than a symphony or an opera. But it’s a good time to concentrate on it. I’ll be blogging about that as I have before.

So check back.

Dr. Dick, a.k.a. Dick Strawser

An Inconvenient Truth: Thinking Outside the Vox

It’s been a busy and, in some ways, exciting but not unexpected week. Now that I have some free time to myself, I’m very much looking forward to getting some serious work done on the new violin and piano piece (a.k.a. Chaconne). It will be nice not to have to deal with workplace White Noise any more and even though I may have to look at the calendar to figure out which day it is, that is not a bad trade-off. I’m looking forward to a more leisurely and creative summer, job-hunting aside.

In the meantime, I plan to maintain this as it always has been, my personal blog which I started almost two years ago. For those of you who found me through my former company blog, I will continue here with many of the same topics – including what’s going on in the area (and perhaps reviews-after-a-fashion of some that I get to attend – now that I have more time to do so) mixed in with posts about creativity in general or works I’m composing specifically – maybe even do an on-line short-story or two.

My last post at my other blog was going to be an up-date to the one about turning books into operas since I had overlooked a very unlikely such translation – Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” being commissioned as an opera for La Scala – but unfortunately, my employment there was terminated before I could start it. So I will post it here.

Basically, my thoughts had been generated by reading two blog posts about “books into operas.” Well, one was a short story into an opera and the other the reaction of former co-workers to a tell-all book who, following the clearly official line, could certainly supply at least a scene for vocal treatment if not a complete opera.

The first, over at Decidedly Simple, concerned the slenderness of Annie Proulx’s short story, Brokeback Mountain, which had been turned into a much talked about, award winning and very popular movie and which has now been commissioned, by New York City Opera, to be turned into an opera by Charles Wuorinen. The question here, despite all the cyber-ink wafted around about it, is not why they commissioned Wuorinen, a composer not well known in the annals of the Standard American Way of Writing Accessible Populist Operas, in the first place, but how a story of bare essentials barely filling 30 pages in my edition (the concluding selection in Close Range: Wyoming Stories) is going to be turned into something that fills an operatic stage.

Alex Ross’s pointing out the speech patterns in the Talking Points Memo video, based on the official White House Reaction to Scott McClellan’s insider book, “What Happened,” could be instructive to a composer looking to set it to music. As Janacek had done, turning the speech patterns of his friends and neighbors in Moravia into musical patterns that he used when writing the opera Jenufa or the hard-to-describe song cycle, The Diary of One Who Vanished, one could take the repetition of certain words here (“puzzled” or “disappointed”) and, as I’d suggest, turn it into a minimalist ensemble as several characters get together to comment on the plot of McClellan’s book like a Greek Chorus. One could, in fact, call it “The Spinning Quintet” or some such thing.

What I had overlooked in mentioning these in a previous post was the news that came out of Italy late in May, that composer Giorgio Battistelli (a name unknown to me) had been commissioned to write an operatic setting of Al Gore’s book about Global Warming, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Now, I haven’t seen the movie based on it – a documentary to some, “science fiction” to others, depending on which side of the bird you’re on – but its material could certainly support a musical setting as a “cantata” or “oratorio” much in the way Michael Tippett turned some of his concerns into a riveting musical work for chorus, orchestra and soloists written for the Boston Symphony called “The Mask of Time” (alas, the recording seems once again to be out-of-print). But an opera? Something staged? With a plot?

After having resumed reading James Joyce’s Ulysses this past Bloomsday, I had questioned how something like this could be made into an opera, but of course no sooner having said that, the problem turned itself into a challenge and I began seeing how it could, in fact, and perhaps very successfully. It would not be a typical plot-centered traditional opera but then since it’s not a plot-centered traditional novel, why would it not work in the opera house, with a little imagination? Alas, copyright issues aside, I have neither the time nor the luxury of doing it myself, but that’s another matter.

It was amusing to find John Tierney’s hysterical article at the International Herald Tribune website, imagining a letter from composer Battistelli responding to Al Gore’s comments about this project for “An Inconvenient Truth.” Of course, the idea is to create a traditional, old-fashioned (even Baroque) plot with allegorical figures (oh, did I mean that as a pun? sorry...), representing different aspects of the subject matter personified (Petroleo and Carbonia, for instance). But that is, of course, what opera WAS, not necessarily what it can be – hence the idea of “thinking outside the vox.” If you had a chance to see (or hear) Philip Glass’s Satyagraha at the Met, you can see how incredible something more abstract like the life and thoughts of Gandhi could be crafted into a moving work of art.

Rather than turning Gore’s collected tables and statistics into sung text, it can still form the basis for a dramatic as well as musical argument. After all, the play “A Walk in the Woods” is not a setting of some government White Paper but a fictionalized account of what might have occurred between two diplomats during the Cold War.

Clearly, one is only limited by one’s imagination – or lack of it.


- Dr. Dick

Bloomsday

Yesterday was Bloomsday, the day on which James Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place.

All day long, I kept thinking “today’s some day, some anniversary, some...” and I went through birthdays and anniversaries of friends and family, of things that may have happened in my own life on June 16th, but couldn’t associate anything with it. Then, when I was clicking through a few of the blogs I check regularly (if not daily), I landed on Soho the Dog’s picture of Critic-at-Large Moe on the beach with a description of a dog running on the beach. I went from thinking “wow, Matthew’s really changed his literary style” to “this style is too much like James Joyce,” something I thought I’ve read before. And then at the end, he attributes the quote to Joyce, from Ulysses. Aha, then it dawned on me.

When I was teaching at UConn, I spent part of a summer reading James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and actually made it past page 200 before thinking, “ya know...?” and put it aside. I had read some of Dubliners, most of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and had started Ulysses several times, each time getting a little further into it. The problem is, usually I’m in more of a Henry James mood than a James Joyce mood and the two do not mix very well. In fact, during a round of would-be-novel writing back in the ‘80s, I’d come up with a character (a would-be novelist) named Henry James Joyce, who found it difficult to write because of all these conflicting emotions and aesthetic ideals, unable to find some natural sense of voice and rhythm. But I digress...

Living in New York City back in the late-70s, I spent many a fine spring afternoon, an old tattered paperback copy of Ulysses in hand, lounging in Central Park or Riverside, either on a park bench or stretched out on the grass, floating along on page after page of Joyce's unfurling mesmerizations. On one of those Bloomsdays, there was a marathon reading at a bookstore on Broadway called Bloomsday Books which was also broadcast live on (I think) WQXR. Richard Thomas had told me he would be reading one installment but I missed catching him either live or on the radio. The whole thing probably took 36 hours. Some of the day I spent at the store, some of it at home listening on the radio, some of it following along in the book. As a result, I found it easier to focus if I read out loud, then, something not always recommended even in Central Park (though today, it probably wouldn’t even gaurantee me a seat on the subway).

This spring, I’d begun Tolstoy’s War & Peace for the third time with the new Pevear / Volokhonsky translation. I’m not enjoying it much – mostly because the numerous paragraphs of French (and some German) are translated only in the footnotes, not in the actual text (because Tolstoy included these passages or expressions in their original languages himself). I find myself thinking I may switch over to Anthony Briggs translation instead. I am now over 200 pages into it and gearing up for the Battle of Austerlitz...

Without a lot of time for leisurely reading (or, when it is too leisurely late at night, staying awake), I’ve found if I read while using the treadmill, the one stone/two birds approach can be quite productive: I tend to read for longer stretches without interruption and I tend to walk more without getting bored. The book nests comfortably on the handles and a clip-on lamp allows for good lighting regardless of the time of day. One would assume, reading War & Peace on a treadmill, I should easily lose 15 pounds long before the war is over, but it doesn’t work quite that simply. Even as it is, I do aonly about 30 minutes, rarely 40-45, a day, but still, both exercises are good for me, much better than just putting on something to listen to, passively.

Walking was always something I enjoyed, especially on the back roads where I live now, or on the many trails through the woods around UConn. This was a great time to free the mind for creative work, eliminate the daily stress and the destructive influences of everyday reality. But I can’t stop on the treadmill to watch a bluebird or a butterfly (even though, looking out my windows, I can watch the chipmunks and the mourning doves on my porch without needing to stop) much less to jot down an idea or a phrase or some kind of reminder so that when I would get back to my piano I could pick up where my mind left off. The hope has been, after a good walk-think, I could sit down at the piano, my brain refreshed, and let everything pour forth.

Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Timing, first of all, is usually not on my side. With my afternoon work-shift, I don’t have the five hours of creative time I used to manage, going in later in the day. Quite frankly, the brain has been creatively comatose at the end of the day: even for the more mundane busy-work that is often an important part of composing, writing in the evening after dinner has been marked by a lack of focus. The next morning, I find I had made too many miscalculations or simple errors in judgment or just came up with something so really awful it was unusable.

So last night, I thought I would get out my copy of Ulysses – one I’d bought ten years ago and, this last time, made it to page 399 – wondering, even if I read just 15 pages every Bloomsday, “how old would I be if I lived to finish it?” Hmmm, June 16, 2034... Within minutes of settling into my favorite reading chair, I was surrounded by cats who, presumably, wanted to go along for the ride, but before I had managed to turn two pages, I was sound asleep, not even muttering, as had Molly Bloom on the final page,

"...yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."


- Dr. Dick

Ghosts

A couple of weeks ago, while unpacking some papers, I found something I had only glanced at in decades. It was always there on a shelf in my study but I just never bothered with it, a notebook that contained an unfinished work I’d started composing when I was in college. The music was one thing, the recollection of the time in which it was composed was, more importantly, another.

It was not my first opera. I had started one when I was still in high school and finished it during my freshman year in college. It never got performed but at least I completed it and wrote out the full score. This second one, not only incomplete, never got beyond the vocal score (more a rough draft “short score” written on two staves whether playable at the piano or not, with indications for subsequent orchestration). It’s a setting of Henrik Ibsen’s play, Ghosts, though as often happens in adaptations the title had been changed, why I’m not sure: instead of “Ghosts,” the past coming to haunt the present, I felt something more direct was needed, involving the main character.

The play is basically the story of Mrs. Alving, a well-to-do widow in a conservative Norwegian town who has discovered her son, a would-be artist (with all the pretensions accorded thereto) visiting home from Paris, exhibits many of the same personality traits she despised in her late husband. These ghosts, however, turn out to be more involved: the son has fallen in love, superficially at least, with the maid who, it turns out, is really the result of his father’s affair with a maid who’d worked for them shortly after his parents were married. The end of Act One, where I’d stopped composing, is her confrontation with the realization it’s happening again, catching her son and the young maid in the same situation (with the same dialogue) she had years before caught her husband in with the girl’s mother. But she hid it, kept it to herself, just distanced herself from her husband, maintaining the public veneer of a happily married couple. By the end of Act Two, Mrs. Alving is confronting something more than a ghost: her son (however suddenly) now exhibits symptoms of advanced syphilis, presumably something else he inherited from his father.

While the moral is often described as “the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons,” I felt the focus was really on Mrs. Alving’s confrontation, what the impact her past inaction had on not only her present but now her future: having lived with her husband and kept this a secret (as her pastor advised her), she now must face living with her son who has now been destroyed by that same secret (not that her actions, had she had the courage to change them, have had any effect on his growing up with an inherited disease, but the disease, really, is more symbolic than crucial to the plot, I guess).

Anyway, that’s why I chose to change the title to something I felt had more “punch” to it – at least from the late-60s’ standpoint. So I called it Through a Small Glass Darkly after the biblical expression in 1 Corinthians: we live with an imperfect perception of reality, but as we age (the preceding verse, “when I was a child, I spake as a child,” ends “but now that I am a man, I have put aside these childish things”) we discover things, looking in the mirror of our lives, and see them now differently than we saw them before. This seemed a suitable description of what was going on in Mrs. Alving’s soul – the “small glass” being one individual rather than the collective biblical one.

The irony, of course, is at 20 I could hardly have the accumulated wisdom or experience to understand the various implications of this story and saw merely an operatic story with an ironic twist at the end. Looking at it almost 40 years later was a rather startling experience.

In this mirror, as I sat there hearing this in my head probably for the first time since I stopped working on it, I heard reflected more of Berg’s Wozzeck and Britten’s Peter Grimes than I would care to – two operas that were then (and still are) among my favorite works. Aside from the dramatic musical gesture of a crashing chord spotlighting every exclamation point as if swatting at flies with heavy artillery, an aria for Pastor Manders, where he reminds Mrs. Alving of her past actions when she chose to leave her husband (“what right have we to happiness”) and how he guided her back to her path of duty as a wife, is set to an accompaniment of triads in contrary motion, moving through various dissonances to resolve hymn-like at the cadence, straight out of Ellen Orford’s scene in Act One of Peter Grimes, another biblical image beginning “Let her among you without fault / cast the first stone,” a parallel that I no doubt thought clever, considering how Manders had passed judgment on her as an erring wife and forced her back into society’s straight-jacket.

Here and there, sound-bytes imitating the town gossip in the opening scene of Grimes underscored the dialogue with the village carpenter who was passed off as the father of Captain Alving’s illegitimate daughter. But these ghosts I could dismiss as the learning experience of a young budding composer: it is rarely easy for an aging composer (having budded or not) to face youthful indiscretions, even successful ones.

Curiously, when I decided not to finish this – and why, I don’t really know – I ended up recycling the title, at least, for my next opera which was another examination of the biblical “I” facing reality, in this case what I called a “plotless life-cycle opera” as if someone were confronting their entire life and seeing it in a flash just before the moment of death (momento mori as opposed to memento mori), a collection of quotable quotes in a series of disconnected episodes. This one, however, did get staged when another composer on the faculty and I wrote chamber operas to inaugurate the University of Connecticut’s first opera workshop during the 1976 Bicentennial.

I suppose I should mark the earlier score and change the title back to Ibsen’s original, rather than have two works in my “catalogue” with the same title, as if there would be anyone who’d bother to be confused by that.

But sitting there with this score, then, I began thinking who I was at 20 compared to who I am now and what dreams I had then and what, if any, dreams were left. Ever since I was 5 or 6 years old, I wanted to be a musician and soon after that, realizing I wanted to be a composer, too. Having a composition performed by the Harrisburg Symphony when I was still in middle school and writing an opera before I graduated from high school, the dream of having an opera premiered at The Met, no less, by the time I was 50 was not unreasonable, then. However unrealistic it may have been is one thing, but it’s not a dream one can keep alive, especially now that 50 has long gone and I spent so many years not composing at all.

Redefining ones dreams, then, is a necessary part of life, adapting to the realities one sees in that mirror, darkly or otherwise (and don’t even get me started on aging). As a result, I went back to reading Harold Kushner’s “Overcoming Life’s Disappointments” which helped supply a certain amount of perspective – something always necessary for an individual who sometimes has trouble dealing with day-to-day reality. Granted, the book is primarily concerned with people facing divorce (like Mrs. Alving) or the death of a spouse, but a lot of it applies easily to people who have felt failure in this world that says “you didn’t win the silver, you lost the gold.” There is much to be said for the mid-life crisis – the real culprit, I would imagine, behind my 16-year writer’s block – and ones sense of self-confidence and accomplishment which can turn momentary setbacks into destructive lifetime failures. The process of even finding your bootstraps is difficult enough, but the risk of redefining yourself and getting beyond those setbacks is not much different than those faced by a habitual couch potato who decides to lose weight and start exercising.

This, I tell myself, is why I have been doggedly composing for the past few years, now, working at it as close to every day as possible: it is important to my soul, to defining who I am, but what I realized in the process of facing this 40-year-old piece, what I’m doing now is just composing, not really dreaming. And I need to have a dream, otherwise I’ll continue to do what I’ve done so often in my life: finish something, then put it away and start something else. For years, this has been enough.

But now I realize I must give myself time to dream – something more realistic than an opera at the Met, certainly – to give myself permission to dream and to not feel like a failure if it doesn’t happen.

Dr. Dick