And Schubert at the Close: Schubert's Quintet at Gretna Music

One of the benefits of Gretna Music’s new August Festival Format is, rather than having one performance a week every Sunday evening, several concerts a week mean performers can hang around to play more programs without having to stretch out their stay. So the Audubon Quartet, whose annual appearances in Mt. Gretna usually closed the summer season down around Labor Day Weekend, could come to town for three different concerts this year.

Last night, their first program featured an old favorite – Peter Schickele’s 1st String Quartet, “American Dreams” (this time with a choreographic element supplied by Ting-Yu Chen). Tomorrow afternoon’s program pairs them up with another Gretna Music regular, guitarist Allan Krantz who’ll be playing his own Quintet for Strings & Electric Guitar – that performance is at the playhouse, Friday at 2pm, by the way: the composer offers the second installment of a pre-concert preface, “The Role of the Composer in American Society” beginning at 1:00.

On Sunday evening, then, their third performance will find it a family gathering when two sons of cellist Tom Shaw – violist Jeremiah Shaw and cellist Frank Shaw – join them for performances of the Sextet from Richard Strauss’ opera “Capriccio” (written for a chamber orchestra, it’s really the opera’s prelude), the Phantasy Quintet by Ralph Vaughan Williams and one of the great works of the chamber music repertoire, the Quintet in C Major by Franz Schubert. That performance begins at 7:30. Tom will be giving the pre-concert conversation starting at 6:30.

I was thinking how appropriate it is to be playing Schubert as a family affair: Schubert himself grew up in a family with its own resident string quartet. He wrote most of his early quartets for the family band, back in the days when you made your own entertainment before listening became purely passive sitting in front of some home entertainment center or other: his older brothers Ignaz and Ferdinand played the violins, Schubert himself played the viola, their father played the cello. It’s not likely they would’ve been able to handle the challenges of the Quintet – what might be called “Late Schubert” – but it was certainly a valuable experience for the young composer to grow up in, having his own in-house laboratory.

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There are so many things that continue to amaze me no matter how many times I hear Schubert’s Quintet.

For some, there’s just the question, “why two cellos?” It was more standard to add a viola to a string quartet: that’s what Mozart did, though that may have had as much to do with his preferring to play the viola and listening to the music from his “inside-out” position, between the melody in the violins and the harmonic bass in the cello. He also like to pair off the 1st violin against the 1st viola in conversational sonorities. Along the same lines, Boccherini, a virtuoso cellist, wrote string quintets with two cellos, where the pivotal melodic roles are shared by the 1st violin and the 1st cello (in some cases, they sound more like cello concertos with the accompaniment of a string quartet, but when you write the piece, you write the rules). Even afterwards, the standard string quintet was still two violas and one cello: not even Brahms and Dvořák felt the need to change it.

Schubert, as I mentioned, played the viola in the family string quartet. Judging from his treatment of the cello in his late chamber music – like the two piano trios and especially the last string quartet – it’s not difficult to hear how he was drawn to this deeper, fuller sonority and richer texture. Almost as much of a mystery as “why two cellos” is why he wrote it at all – there was no performance in the near future and there were no other quartets with a second cellist going around likely to be looking for such a piece. Like many of the works Schubert composed, he wrote it because he wanted to. Or perhaps, needed to.

People have said there must have been a rush to complete as much music as he could before he died, not that anyone would know how much time they have left in one’s life, especially when you’re in your early-30s like Franz Schubert in the 21 months following the death of Beethoven. But that’s the way Schubert was most of his life, writing as much music as he could possible get down on paper: how else do you end up with nearly a thousand pieces in your catalogue in just 18 years?

From November, 1827, to his death a year later, Schubert wrote (if not completed) 36 works, according to Otto Deutsch’s catalogue, including
- Piano Trio in E-flat (D.929, published as Op.100) - November ‘27 (the more famous B-flat Trio had been written the month before)
- Fantasy in C for Violin & Piano (D.934) based on the song “Sei mir gegrüsst”) - December ‘27
- Four Impromptus for Piano (D.935, published as Op.142) - December ‘27
- Fantasy in F Minor for Piano Duet (D.940) - January-April ‘28
- “Auf dem Strom” (D.943), song for tenor, horn & piano - March ‘28
- Symphony in C Major “The Great” (D.944) – though it was probably composed two years earlier, there had been evidence it was begun (or more likely, revised) in March ‘28
- Three Impromptus for piano (D.946) often called more generically “Drei Klavierstücke” - May ‘28
- Mass in E-flat (D.950) - begun June ‘28
- Quintet in C for Strings (D.956) - sometime in August-September ‘28
- Fourteen Songs known as “Schwanengesang” (D.957) - finished between August & October ‘28
- Piano Sonata in C Minor (D.958) – September ‘28
- Piano Sonata in A Major (D.959) – September ‘28
- Piano Sonata in B-flat Major (D.960) – last page dated 26th September ‘28
- Der Hirt auf dem Felsen (“Shepherd on the Rock”) (D.965) October ‘28

Whether you’d consider them all “masterpieces” or not, this list of fourteen works (really 27, since you should count the songs of Schwanengesang individually as it’s not really a single work per se) does not include nine other songs (two or three written earlier that could’ve fit into the set of “Swan-Songs”), eleven part songs and short choral works (including a setting of Psalm 92 in Hebrew, written for a specific temple’s Sabbath service), four other “miscellaneous” works for piano solo or duet and - oh yes – two large-scale unfinished works, a symphony in D Major (D.936a) and an opera, The Count of Gleichen, listed as D.918 because it was begun the previous summer. And one should also include some “homework assignment” for his counterpoint lessons, which I’ll get to, later.

Look at those works written in September 1828, the three last piano sonatas, the C Major Quintet and probably several of the Swan-Songs (only the first and last are actually dated). While there are sketches that exist for material that ended up in the piano sonatas from earlier that summer, most of the work was done in a matter of three weeks.

But the original manuscript of the quintet has vanished and with it any preliminary sketches, though Schubert rarely “sketched,” his inspiration traditionally described as being “at white-heat” that even if he dropped a page on the floor (so the wive’s-tale goes) he would prefer to start over on a new page rather than waste the time to pick it up. Was the quintet a product of “white-heat?” Was it really composed, as several biographers seem to conclude, in two weeks’ time? In addition to the sonatas he was either composing or copying over in final form to send off to publishers, that is one very intense month!

And in less than eight weeks, he died ten weeks shy of his 32nd birthday.

It’s not that he knew he was dying. His health had not been good, off and on, especially after 1822 when, at the age of 25, he began showing the first symptoms of syphilis, presumably in November, not long after he finished... or rather, left unfinished the B Minor Symphony (“The Unfinished Symphony”), the score dated October 30th, 1822, and the virtuosic Fantasy in C, a piano solo known as “The Wanderer Fantasy,” also one of his most dramatic, violent and, at times, pessimistic pieces. Signs of illness may not explain the despair of the fantasy or even why he never completed the rest of the symphony (he had started the third movement but stopped after nine measures), since we normally think of works of art being unhampered by reality, but the chronology is difficult to ignore.

It was at the end of August, 1828, that Schubert, on the advice of his doctor, moved out of his friend Schober’s house in downtown Vienna to take a room in his brother’s new suburban home just outside the city, since the air – and no doubt the quieter life – would be better for his health. And then in the next few weeks he wrote the string quintet and three sonatas. Could there be some correlation between his health and his inspiration? Certainly, the quintet is one of the loftiest works anyone has ever written under any circumstances.

Today, a composer could brag he (or she) doesn’t write anything unless it’s commissioned or would at least have a performance of it already lined up. We’ve lost that romantic notion of the struggling artist writing for the sheer pleasure of creating art, the product of pure inspiration.

To say Schubert was famous may not be entirely accurate but statements about his being unknown are not exactly truthful, either. His music did not bring him a great deal of money, though his short dance pieces for piano were popular and his songs were well-known, probably circulating more in manuscript copies, the early-19th Century answer to ipods and illegal downloads. By a small group of music lovers, he was certainly respected, but he had difficulties getting his works performed, mostly because he was writing things that were not practical for Vienna in the 1820s: keep in mind, things had gotten tough enough, economically, that even Beethoven threatened to leave for new financial possibilities in Paris or London.

Ironically, the first public, largely professional concert of Schubert’s music was also his last. It took place on March 26th, 1828, the first anniversary of Beethoven’s death as it turned out, and included the E-flat Piano Trio, several songs and part-songs including “Auf dem Strom,” after opening with a movement of (presumably) the G Major String Quartet. The attendance was good, the response, since it was mostly of Schubert’s many friends and acquaintances, enthusiastic, but there was no critical mention of it in the press because all of Vienna (in fact, all of Germany, apparently) was taken up with the five concerts being given by the then-all-the-rage violinist Nicolo Paganini, performances which brought in about 5600 florins per concert. While I have no idea what a florin in 1828 might be worth today, it’s enough to mention that Schubert’s concert brought in 320 florins total, less than 6% of Paganini’s box-office take. For him, he thought he’d done fairly well – not enough as he’d’ve liked, but he was feeling flush enough to plan a couple of summer vacations. Unfortunately, these never came about.

Schubert was convinced that the path to monetary success and artistic recognition was through the operatic stage. For a composer who could write such intensely dramatic songs and telling psychological miniature portraits in his songs (you only need to point out Gretchen am Spinnrad, written when he was 17, to prove that), he couldn’t write a theatrically successful opera if, not to press the analogy, his life depended on it, but he persisted. Even at the end of his life, he continued working on The Count of Gleichen with its lame, cliché-ridden plot and badly written libretto by one of his closest friends. He filled 36 large pages and 52 smaller-sized sheets with sketches and completed sections but it didn’t seem to matter the censors had already rejected the story – shockingly, it included a benign view of a bigamous hero – so even if he might manage to finish it, it wasn’t going to be taken up by any theater in Vienna.

The unfinished D Major Symphony, usually numbered the tenth – there’s no room here for the story of why there had been no 7th Symphony for so long and why the “Great C Major” appears with various numberings – apparently was begun in October ‘28, fragments of three large-scale movements sketched in a “short score” format (like a reduction playable at the piano, but with occasional orchestrational cues written in). The 2nd movement was the “most complete” section but the 3rd movement, labeled a “scherzo” which would imply there would be a 4th movement finale, seems to have morphed into a combination scherzo-and-finale with several large patches of fugal writing, very unusual for Schubert.

Which brings me back to those “counterpoint lessons” Schubert had set up just before he died. When he was working on the Mass in E-flat earlier that year, he had been studying Handel oratorios: Messiah, he’d said, was one of his favorite works. A few months before his death, Schubert told friends about these Handel scores, realizing “Now for the first time, I see what I lack.” He arranged to take lessons with organist Simon Sechter to “make good the omission.”

What was it that Schubert, at the age of 31 and who’d been composing since he was 13, lacked?

Counterpoint.

Usually, this is assumed to mean “the writing of fugues,” something that by 1828 was pretty old-fashioned already. Composers might insert “a fugal section” to show that they know how to do something academic, that they’ve learned their craft. It might not always sound natural, given the flow of things: Beethoven aside (who at least admitted he approached it “with some license”), I often feel like we should break into The Wave whenever a 19th Century composer breaks into a “learnéd” fugue midstream (there’s one in Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony of 1885 that practically reduces me to a puddle of giggles).

When I listen to Schubert’s quintet, it amazes me that he felt so insecure that he had to go study counterpoint. I’m not familiar with his masses – at least the last two “mature” ones – and I’ve heard the Unfinished D Major Symphony (No. 10, D.936a) once or twice on the radio, enough to remember there’s a lot of fugal writing going on in that last movement (though how much of it is what Schubert sketched and how much is part of Brian Newbould’s realization of it, I couldn’t say), but fugues aside, the art of writing melodically and rhythmically independent lines that are interdependent harmonically – a broader definition of counterpoint – is not something Schubert was lacking!

All you have to do is listen to the opening of the second movement.

Long slow notes in two- and three-part harmony in the inner voices (as they’d be called, regardless of the fact they’re instruments), with rhythmic filagree-like patterns in the 1st violin that remind me of birdsong, and one cello plucking along on what sounds like the downbeat with the harmonic underpinning. These are three fully defined layers of easily identifiable ‘sound’ – the long slow notes actually turn out to be the melodic layer – that becomes clearer the second time around, about 2½ minutes later, when the “bird-calls” of the 1st violin are replaced by plucked chords answering the cello’s bass line. Then, having taken about 5 minutes to run twice through this theme – speaking of expansive – there’s a sudden change of mood: the violins now have the decidedly more dramatic theme, here, the cellos’ bass-line now more insistent, turning back over on itself, and the middle voices now playing an agitated pattern, filling in the harmony but completely separate, rhythmically, from the outer parts, a far cry from the relaxed contemplation of the first theme.

Why would anybody who could create passages like that feel that insecure about needing to study counterpoint?

Unfortunately, we’ll never know what impact those lessons with Simon Sechter would have on Schubert’s later music. He only took one lesson – on November 4th, 1828. He had already complained of feeling sick the week before but managed to walk the four or five miles to the church where his brother Ferdinand’s Requiem was being performed, not counting a three-hour walk they and the choirmaster took afterwards before walking home (no public transportation to the suburbs in those days). Complaining of feeling tired, understandably, Schubert still felt well enough to walk the mile-or-so to and from his teacher’s house for the counterpoint lesson the next day. That weekend, Schubert attended a friend’s dinner party where much wine was drunk and everybody thought he was feeling pretty good (in any number of ways). By Tuesday of that week, then, he “took to his bed,” did not make it to the next lesson - in fact, never left the house again.

Another friend showed up with a copy of his setting of Psalm 23 which needed some corrections. There was no real anxiety – he had been ill before and had recovered before – and Schubert himself complained only of feeling tired, not of any pain. A few days later, he sat up in bed to make corrections on the publisher’s proofs for the second half of the Winterreise songs – keeping in mind the final song, “Der Leiermann” (“The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”), one of the most desolate songs in the repertoire. He wrote to his friend Schober, asking if he could borrow any books by American author James Fennimore Cooper which he hadn’t read yet.

Two days later there was, as they say, “a turn for the worse,” presumably after friends came and played Beethoven’s C-sharp Minor Quartet, Op.131, for him at his request. By the end of the performance, he had become so excited and his condition had deteriorated so rapidly, they put him back in bed. His friend the librettist of The Count of Gleichen came by to visit the next day or so: Schubert had continued to work on it up until that week, and they even talked about another collaboration once he finished this one. Apparently, in these first two weeks of November, he also worked on the sketch for the slow movement of the D Major Symphony, before things got so bad, he was unable to work at all. A few more days passed: on the 18th, Ferdinand wrote later, Schubert began hallucinating, then died the following day. As his friend, the poet Grillparzer wrote for the epitaph, “The art of music here entombed a rich possession, but far fairer hopes.”

So it is impossible – for me, at least – to listen to this quintet and not dwell on things deeper than the acquisition of contrapuntal skills or on the expansion of harmonic and structural techniques to create a work that lasts between 50 and 60 minutes. Schumann, who didn’t know the quintet existed then, wrote about the “heavenly lengths” of the Great C Major Symphony which Ferdinand showed to him during a visit in 1839. The Quintet, equally heavenly, somehow didn’t surface until 1850. Like the symphony, it was just too long – for the audience but also for the players – and both were first performed in heavily cut, shortened versions.

Igor Stravinsky was never one to mince words about other composers (of Benjamin Britten, he said, “He’s an excellent accompanist”), but when someone asked him if he weren’t “sent to sleep by the prolixities of Schubert,” he replied, “What does it matter if, when I awake, it seems to me that I am in paradise?”

Celebrating a Mentor & Teacher

It’s not every day you can help a teacher celebrate a milestone. We often lose track of our teachers after graduation, maybe renewing brief contact during a reunion, perhaps. So when my piano teacher from Susquehanna University e-mailed me a little over a week ago about a “video interview” in the local paper’s website, I had to check it out.

Galen Deibler was my piano teacher through four years of undergraduate study at Susquehanna, as well as a theory teacher and the teacher of the Romantic Music literature course I took one year. Though I never became the pianist those years of study might presume – years later I joked “if practice makes perfect but perfection is unattainable, what’s the sense of practicing? so I quit” – Deibler taught me more than just about playing the piano or how chord progressions worked or what went into the making of a Brahms intermezzo. He taught also by example, not just as a pianist: I can’t say I was ever able to emulate his musicianship or his humility or compassion or sense of adventure in everything he experienced, but he was a major influence on my life and succeeded at least in instilling a love of teaching and a sense of ones own integrity that are part of me still today.

Considering my computer doesn’t have any sound – courtesy of one of the kittens who’s appointed himself the Director of Wireless Technology, having chewed through (among other things) two sets of speakers which have yet to be replaced (if I can find some with steel cables instead of those fine little gourmet wires they all seem to have) – it seemed kind of odd watching a video interview in which someone plays the piano. He’d said in the mass e-mail he’d sent out that he was particularly pleased with the Schubert Impromptu, but I had no idea what else he might be playing: curiously, having tried to play it myself years ago, I could recognize by hand positions and the speed of the notes going by he was playing the E-flat Impromptu (D.899, #2) which lies under the hand so well but is still, frankly, a bitch to play – keeping all the running notes in the right hand even while trying to keep the left hand from sound like it’s flopping around playing the harmony.

It’s especially challenging, you’d think, for hands that have been playing the piano for some 72 years, now. It seemed to fly by without a care in the world.

The interview was not just about playing Schubert. It was where and why he was playing it.

Galen’s been the pianist in the little country church of his hometown for fifty years, now, and Sunday, August 10th, was going to be a special service marking the anniversary. In typical Deibler fashion, the service – a “music Sunday” rather than a typical worship service with music – was not going to be about Galen Deibler, but about music and music-making. It was a kind of public performance but not a recital: he was going to be joined by several of his former students, each of whom had joined him over the past years to play in the church.

You can read the article and view the video (hopefully you have functioning audio on your computer) posted at the website for Sunbury’s Daily Item here. There’s also another article about the event posted at The News Item, another paper that serves the Shamokin area.

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I decided I wanted to go – but wanting and going were two different states of mind, especially since I’m not one to spend hours on the road. John Clare, a fellow ex-colleague, might say “let’s go to New York to hear this concert” – the world premiere of the Clarinet Quintet that Elliott Carter composed back when he was 98 – leave Harrisburg at 3:15pm, get there in time for an 8:00 concert, then turn around after it was over to be back home before 2am. If it had been up to me, I’d’ve stayed home and would still be waiting for the work to come out on a CD...

It had also been part of a busy weekend. Getting used to this state of involuntary retirement has not been difficult, but it makes any spate of activity more tiring, after spending most of my days composing or getting caught up on my reading (yesterday, I passed the 1,000 page mark of Tolstoy’s War & Peace). Meeting John at the airport when he flew in from San Antonio to do the pre-concert talk for Maria Bachmann at Gretna Music’s concert that Friday, then driving down to Mt. Gretna for the performance, then spending much of Saturday at a “music party” given by a friend (another ex-colleague, one who’d left voluntarily) in Carlisle (a loner by nature, I find such conviviality often tiring in itself), the idea of returning to the cocoon of home for a quiet Sunday was very appealing. But there are things you will never experience otherwise and opportunities you may never have again.

St. John’s Lutheran Church is located in Snydertown which, much to my surprise – since it’s always good to know where your destination is – is not located in Snyder County. Galen had often talked of his hometown in such a way, I assumed it was just outside of Selinsgrove, a few miles from the university. Instead, it’s about a dozen or so miles east of Sunbury – not that far away, really, but if I’d been going on my own natural, directionally-challenged instincts, I would’ve been driving around the backroads of Snyder County trying to locate it and missed the whole point of going there. As it was, the day offered me not one but three opportunities to get lost and I managed to live up to my own expectations quite handily.

Googling the church, it was apparently located on Main Street, when I found an address at all; the one article said it was on Snydertown Road. It’s quite possible it could be both. Checking on-line for a map of Snydertown, I discovered there were two roads in Greater Snydertown – Snydertown Road, which ran east-west, and Market Street which ran north-south. The intersection, one would assume, would be The Center of Town. How hard could it be to find a small church in a small country town?

Figuring about an hour to Selinsgrove by old habit (before the highway had been completely re-done), the directions indicated an additional half hour, so I left Harrisburg in plenty of time, following an old route long familiar though considerably changed from the late-60s when I first started traveling this road between home and college. I found my way through Sunbury, taking this street, then that street to get to 11th Street which eventually becomes Snydertown Road once it leaves the city limits. By this point, I passed the house that the Italian poet and would-be-priest Lorenzo da Ponte had built on the square in Sunbury after he had left Vienna and Mozart’s operas behind him to open a dry-goods store in Central Pennsylvania in the early years of the 19th Century (another, long over-due post, by the way).

By the time my tripometer clocked in at the number of miles the internet had told me it would take, I had reached a sign that said “Now Entering Snydertown, PA.” I also had about 30 minutes to spare before the church service would begin, a little better than the time indicated on-line, but then going the requisite number of miles over the speed-limit on Rt.11-15 to Selinsgrove and still getting passed by everybody in the process. In fact, the only thing slower than me was the dead ’possum on the side of the road north of Liverpool.


But for some reason, I was having trouble finding the TOWN of Snydertown. Yes, there was the intersection, though I couldn’t read the street-sign – Market, as the on-line map told me – and the south-bound side had a big ROAD CLOSED sign. Driving past too fast to be able to reconnoiter my bearings, I kept driving on Snydertown Road. Several miles and many minutes later, rarely seeing more than an occasional house and no one about to stop and ask, I decided to turn around, confronting another sign on the way back that said “Now Entering Snydertown.” I returned to the intersection with Market Street and, turning north (since that road was not closed) found a church – wrong one – but little else. At the top of a hill, there was a side-road (the suburbs of Snydertown?), so I turned around in time to realize once again I was “Now Entering Snydertown.” With only one road left to check, I decided to continue on what actually turned out to be marked MAIN Street, not Market Street, and found that the south-bound road is closed a few miles down because of bridge repairs. But there, there were houses and lots of cars and people, and the spire of an old country church, familiar from the video interview.

As I drove past the church, trying to figure out where I could park, I saw Galen Deibler heading inside. This must be the place: it was five minutes to go before the service was to begin.

Slipping into a side pew near the back – the church was quite full, however many of them were from the community – I looked around wondering if I would recognize anybody. Friends from 40 years ago? Other faculty members from school? How long would it have been since I’d last seen them and how much have the years changed us, if we’d recognize each other? Galen looked remarkably the same – a little grayer, a little more stooped in the shoulder, but I would never have guessed he was 77 now. In fact, he seemed younger than I am, stopping here and there to chat with a friend before the service began.

He did his own introduction which is not surprising since he also organized his own celebration. The church had wanted to surprise him but they couldn’t very well just spring it on him so eventually they decided to tell him their plans. He, then, contacted some of his former students about joining him, along with a member of the congregation and his grandson Aaron, now a student at Gettysburg College, who began the service playing the violin for the Meditation from Massanet’s Thaïs. Then he accompanied Betty Phillips in a setting of the old hymn, “How Great Thou Art.” He played the E Major Prelude and Fugue from Book 1 of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” then was joined by trumpeter Dale Orris for the Trumpet Voluntary by John Stanley (familiar to listeners as the theme of Loran Fevens’ “The Music Box” on Sunday nights). Then came a hymn, “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” prefaced by a recorder duet played by two of his daughters. Following prayers and readings for the service, baritone Nathan Troup sang two selections – the Largo (Ombra, mai fu) from Handel’s Xerxes and Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Shawn Daly, a former piano student of Galen’s, played the “Harmonious Blacksmith” from Handel’s Suite No. 5 in E Major, followed by a rather unchurch-like selection, the A-flat Major Ballade by Chopin.

Pastor John Fenton allowed members of the congregation to speak instead of offering a sermon. One of the daughters read a poem sent by her brother who could not attend the service (traveling in Germany with his family), reminiscing about Sundays at St. John’s with the picture of Jesus and the sheep “swimming in a sea of yellow” on the right wall as we all looked over at the painting, and about the old upright piano getting ready to play. The youngest daughter reminisced how she’d use every trick in the book not to have to go to church but no matter how hard she tried, the “express train for Snydertown” always left the house with time to spare, though she eventually came to love this family-time.

Several in the congregation stood up to thank Galen for his years of service or to tell stories about having been his students. I wondered what I might say if I stood up, but I’m very bad at these sorts of things and decided to let it pass.

One of them had been one of Galen’s students a few years behind me: he had also been one of my fraternity brothers (in fact, he was my “little brother” the year he joined Phi Sigma Kappa) and we had probably not seen each other since he graduated 34 years ago. Studying with Deibler even before he was in college, he often went to the house for lessons and became part of the family. His story – about the dazed cat who’d peered out over the piano’s music rack after a particularly intense C Minor Prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, having decided ill-advisedly to take a nap inside the piano that afternoon – reminded me of a time when, as a senior, I went out to the house for a lesson (mostly, they would’ve been at his studio in the music building) and tip-toed across the living room floor through wall-to-wall toys (I’m not sure how old his three children then were, but the fourth would be born the following year) and how, perhaps 12-13 years ago, I had gone back to visit him one weekend afternoon and found myself, once again, tip-toeing through a living room full of toys when a wave of serious deja-vu made me realize it’s not that they’d never cleaned up from twenty years earlier but that it was now grandchildren!

As the service resumed, Dale Orris joined Galen for another of the hymns, followed by three pieces performed by pianist Jacob Frasch – “The Sunken Cathedral” by Debussy, the Minuet from Bach’s 1st Partita (the trio kept playing through my head much of this past week), and Brahms’ A Major Intermezzo, Op.118, No. 2, which is a work I still try to play and one that Galen had taught me during my lessons, pointing out some structural things and voicings that not only helped the interpretation and showed me that it’s not just sitting down to play the notes that make the piece, but which also served as a history class and composition lesson (under the chapter, “learning ones craft”).

Then, during the offering, Galen played the Schubert Impromptu I’d mentioned earlier, phrasing it with that same sense of technical understanding, fingers wafting effortlessly over the keys – difficult enough to keep smooth even when you are practicing – and being thoroughly stylistic and aesthetically exquisite, or in the middle section, passionate and dramatic in the process. Even though there was the distraction of passing the offering plates, it was easily the best – or at least most meaningful – performance of the piece I’d ever heard.

After the Lord’s Prayer, Nathan Troup and Dale Orris returned for “The Trumpet Shall Sound,” from Handel’s Messiah. It’s not likely this little church gets its rafters dusted by music-making like this that often. Dale is currently teaching in Lewisburg (and at Bucknell University) and, being close by, plays often at the church with Galen. Nathan, however, won the long-distance award, driving down from Boston to join in the celebration. In fact, Shawn Daly came in from Ohio and Jacob Frasch came up Baltimore. One friend drove in from Washington DC and another from New Jersey – my little 90-mile trek seemed like nothing, by comparison – but that is the sense of dedication, here.

The service ended with “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and echoes of Psalm 100 (“Be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands; serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with a song”), along with memories of Galen’s seemingly effortless Schubert, as well as Shawn’s Chopin, Jake’s Brahms, and the rousing “Trumpet Shall Sound” with Nathan and Dale, personal highlights of a performance that was, from beginning to end, like highlights from a life.

During the service, Pastor Fenton told, among other things, how Galen and his wife, Deanna, had initiated having the box placed by the door where the congregation could drop off food items that can then be given to the local food bank, or how they had argued, when a small church is struggling to survive, their role in the community is just as important. There was the time some Romanian immigrants, escaping from Communist Eastern Europe, had been imprisoned nearby and the Deiblers went to meet them, organizing support for them in the communities and helping with legal aid when they were here with very little understanding of the language, much less the system. When they were moved to a prison outside Philadelphia, the Deiblers continued driving down to work with them. When they were released, some of them came back and lived with the Deiblers until they were able to get their feet on the ground and be on their own.

Afterward, there was a community picnic behind the church during which several graduating high school students were presented with scholarships. I’m not sure whether it was from the town or from a committee of the church, or whether the amount had recently been increased to $100 or $150 each, but even though this may not put much of a dent in a student’s college expenses these days, when you consider there were five of these given out, that’s a good bit of money from a small town of about 350 people and a church that is always struggling to survive.

During the various announcements in between selections played over the sound system – the theme was “The ‘50s” with appropriate music – we sat eating home-made food that most baby-boomers these days would consider “comfort food,” while people in the community were recognized for years of service and dedication, kids got up to sing (one, able to count her age in single digits, going through a repertoire of nursery rhymes with the Alphabet Song like a 13-part Rondo, reminded me that Beverly Sills probably got her start like this), and I realized what magic still exists in what we city folks think of as life in Small-Town America.

At one point, the MC of the event said, “I don’t know how many of you attended the church service this morning and heard all that... [pause] wonderful music,” (several people nodded), “but now we’re going to return to the music we love – the music of the ‘50s.” (Hmmm... I was reminded of my one college roommate who’d been a student-teacher in a town like this where the high school music teacher had defined classical music “as the kind of music nobody likes”...) And back came the CDs. Very loud.

Galen invited me to join them out at the house, giving me quick directions to refresh what passes for memory considering I hadn’t been there more than four or five times in the past 38 years, only once under my own driving and that four years ago. True to form, I got to the one demarking intersection and couldn’t remember “Do I turn here or is it at the next stop-sign after this one...?” A mile down the road, I realized I’d missed the turn, retraced my wheels and found myself shortly in front of the very recognizable house, a minor detour.

Conversation in the living room primarily focused on “shop talk” with four pianists in the room comparing the finer points of Steinway pianos and newer models from Mason & Hamlin – complete with model numbers – that was completely beyond me, until Galen came back into the room, changing the topic to be more inclusive after seeing to his wife and daughters’ preparations in the kitchen ready to be taken out onto the deck. There was food (included something wicked with curry, an Indian dish Deanna had learned to make when she was living in India as a nurse’s aide in one of the country’s poorer areas) , champagne, much conversation and many reminiscences, trying in some cases to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in 34 years. Comments were made by those who’d followed my now-terminated radio career with questions about the future – yeah, well, “stay tuned” – and one of Galen’s daughters told me about renovations they’d been doing at their really old house in Connecticut, built 50 years ago, as I’m telling others about the house I’m living in now which I grew up in, built, uhm... 50 years ago. Perception is everything.

And then there was knowing the next generation continues: grandson Aaron, who played the violin at the start of the service, will be going off to Argentina for the spring semester. Whether music will be his life or not is not important at this point, but it all adds up to a part of the whole, as I sat there and talked with another friend whom I’d met when he was in Pre-Med and is now a doctor who still finds time to do more than just play the piano.

And Galen told me that he wanted to work on my piano piece, “Poetries,” again “and this time get it right,” though I thought there was nothing wrong with the way he played it in 2004, the second pianist to ever play it since I wrote it in New York in 1979. It amazed me he’d wanted to play it al all, then, considering he doesn’t generally play much 20th Century music, and my style is not one he’d be familiar with. This didn’t stop him: he wanted to do it because it was written by a student of his and he liked the adventure of the challenge. He was telling me that, after his eye surgery these next few weeks, he wanted to work on it again: he doesn’t spend as much time practicing since performing is not the major part of his life, now, and there are many things he still wants to do, but he’s hoping to get back into “Poetries” and play it again.

It’s amazing what something like that can do for one’s sense of self-esteem. He was still being the same sensitive, caring, inspiring person he’d been as my teacher forty years ago, and meaning it sincerely.

Having picked up my old copy of Samuel Beckett’s novels – “Molloy,” “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable” – which ends with the line “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” it’s days like this (in fact, that whole weekend) that make me realize “I’ll go on.”

So when it was time to head back to Harrisburg, I forgot to ask for directions how to get out of there... and so I managed to get lost for the third time that day. Not wanting to drive back the way I came in and end up north of Selinsgrove, I thought if I follow this route, it should come out south of Selinsrgove along Rt.11-15. Of course, I realized there are no road maps in my car and naturally I wouldn’t have GPS, given the little bit of traveling I do, so off I wandered, unwittingly going deeper and deeper into the hinterlands until I realized the towns I was approaching were familiar to me but only from their names on road-signs along the familiar highway – 10 miles, 15 miles thattaway. In Middleburg – where my roommate had the teacher who said “classical music is the kind of music nobody likes” – I stopped at a gas station, thinking it was probably not wise to ask what kind of music she likes, only to discover if I take the other road at this intersection “over the mountain,” it’ll take me to Harrisburg – well, back to the road that will take me back to Harrisburg. So I wasn’t all that lost.

It was a beautiful day for a drive through the country – and real country with rolling hills, woods and farmland, not suburban developments, malls, gas-stations and the increasingly ubiquitous nail salons. I reconnected with the familiar route north of Liverpool (waving at the still dead ‘possum on the other side of the road) and still managed to get home an hour after having left Selinsgrove (checking a map, I realized the road whose turn I missed the first time through was the one I should’ve followed, since it would take me directly to Selinsrgove past the university and deep into more familiar territory). But who cares? I made it home and felt great for having made the effort, after all, getting a chance to visit with friends and pay a small tribute to a mentor still mentoring.

Not Sunday at Mt. Gretna: Music to Sink Your Mind Into

Thursday evening is another in the series of “Serenades” at Gretna Music – soprano Patricia Porterfield returns with a program of songs ranging from Monteverdi and Purcell to Debussy and Mahler. The performance is at 8:00 – the pre-concert conversation will be held by the founder of Mt. Gretna’s summer music festival, Carl Ellenberger at 7pm. Next week, he’ll be joining with the Audubon Quartet on Wednesday, August 20th, for the Theme & Variations by Amy Beach. This will be the second of three performances next week by the quartet – Wednesday’s concert also includes Ting-Yu Chen’s original choreography for Peter Schickele’s 1st String Quartet, “American Dreams;” Friday afternoon’s will feature Allen Krantz joining them for a work of his own on a concert that begins at 2:00; and on Sunday the 24th, the quartet will be joined by cellist Tom Shaw’s two sons playing viola and cello for works by Vaughan Williams and Richard Strauss plus Schubert’s String Quintet. The first two of the Audubon’s pre-concert talks will be presented by guitarist and composer Allen Krantz, talking about the role of the composer in society; Sunday’s will be given by Tom Shaw. Again, all the pre-concert conversations are held an hour before each performance.

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Getting ready to head down to Mt. Gretna for Maria Bachmann’s recital this past Friday, it occurred to me, “Wait! It’s not Sunday!” I realized too late I had not counted on Not-Sunday Traffic, especially going to pick John Clare up at his hotel in downtown Harrisburg during Afternoon Rush (which has nothing to do with a certain talk-show program though it’s just as annoying).

But as Gretna Music’s executive director Michael Murray pointed out introducing the concert, the music would probably sound just as good on a Friday night as it would on a Sunday night. And it did.

Since it was also fairly cool for the Dog Days of August (though not as cool as yesterday!), it also didn’t seem like a Gretna Music weekend: while there have been many balmy nights there in the past, you tend to remember the ones when it’s sweltering... How odd to see people bringing jackets to the concert – and then needing them!

It was not exactly a toe-tapping crowd-pleaser program – three mostly unknown pieces on the first half, one of them by a composer audacious enough to still be alive, with Brahms’ 3rd Sonata on the second half, not exactly “light summer fare” for either the audience or the performers. The nice thing is, not all summer concerts need to be “kick back, put your feet up and sip a cool drink” kind of programs. This was a good one to sink your mind into and enjoy some great music making. What were the alternatives on a Friday night - other than watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics on TV?

The Ravel Violin Sonata in G Major is one of the great (and fun) works of the repertoire. But the work she opened with was not that Ravel Sonata. Before I looked last week at her program on-line, I hadn’t known there was another one, referred to as “Sonata posthume” which came to light in 1975 in some dusty library collection. He wrote it when he was a student at the Paris Conservatoire – actually, for the second time: his grades had not been good the first time, so he left the school, returning a couple semesters later with “renewed determination” to study composition with Gabriele Fauré. It would be easy to dismiss this piece as a “student work” and a curiosity in search of a composer’s identity – and frankly for me, the longer it went on, the less interesting it became – when compared to the mature sonata he’d finish 25 years later, but it was written around the time of some of his first published works, the Menuet Antique the year before and the Pavane for a Dead Princess a year or so later. Those works, in retrospect, sound like the Ravel we know – but this sonata, for the most part, doesn’t. Those works are also miniatures and here he was trying to overcome the obstacles that longer-form pieces present. Small wonder he would imitate his teacher’s voice or sound like he’d been playing one of the more famous sonatas of the day (most likely the one by Cesar Franck) – young composers have always done this and continue today, mixing the old-fashioned favorites they’re familiar with or inspired by, using them as models, cribbing from here or there, while mixing in a few ideas of their own. It may stymie a listener in a “name-that-composer” quiz, but it’s an important step in the early development of the more familiar voice.

One can also imagine the 22-year-old Ravel playing through these earlier sonatas with a fellow student recently arrived in Paris, the Romanian violinist (and later, composer) Georges Enescu who was about 16 at the time. Enescu’s 3rd Sonata, “after the popular Romanian character” as its subtitle translates literally and written almost 30 years later, closed the first half of the program. This is a very different work, one that could only have been written by a virtuoso violinist who seemed to be using every trick in his arsenal to the greatest effect. It’s a dynamite piano part as well and music that is so over-the-top that it has to be played just as over-the-top to make it work. Fortunately, Maria Bachmann and her pianist, Natalie Zhu, went all out. While I didn’t think there was much beyond the surface brilliance – and all the special effects imitating gypsy fiddlers and Eastern European folk styles (written, incidentally, around the same time Bartok was integrating similar effects into his own style) – they played it with the commitment as if it’s one of the great sonatas. And maybe it is: one thing, at least, is the question “why isn’t it heard more often?” Not because it’s not a great sonata but maybe because it’s so freakin’ hard to bring off with the right pizzazz?

For people who love Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsodies (at least the first one gets played a lot), it’s not a big step to this piece except for the lack of big memorable tunes. I think the impact of the piece is more significant than whether you can hum the tunes. The second movement is full of those “night music” sounds familiar to listeners of Bartok – the repeated single notes in the piano not unlike the sounds of tree frogs and cicadas going on outside the Gretna Playhouse, the kaleidoscopic wisps of phrases in the violin here and there, not to mention all the different colorings created by bowing techniques, harmonics, bending the pitches by quarter-tones or playing with the mute – create a canvas of beauty beyond the merely hummable.

Though the tune is certainly hummable, the Chaconne John Corigliano wrote based on music for the award-winning film, “The Red Violin,” is a work also accessible on many different levels, a dazzling virtuoso showcase that’s also a dramatic, emotional statement held together by this series of ominous chords (a pattern that defines it as a chaconne). It was originally written as a concert piece for violin and orchestra which has received many performances and recordings. In addition to the film score, the chaconne served as the basis for a complete violin concerto which Corigliano adapted from other material written for the movie, turning it into a four-movement concerto in the grand manner. There is, apparently, also a “Suite” for violin and orchestra that is somewhere between just the chaconne and the full-blown concerto.

It’s more than just a question of mileage or recycling: composers in the 19th Century did this all the time with opera themes, one way or another, though very often it was done by other performers, not the original composer. Very often, in the 20th Century, it was done to salvage music that wasn’t getting performed, otherwise: Hindemith’s excerpts from his opera, “Mathis der Maler,” becoming a “symphony,” or Prokofiev converting “The Fiery Angel,” an opera deemed unperformable, into his 3rd Symphony, or his ballet, “The Prodigal Son,” which also didn’t look like it was going to make it to the stage, into his 4th Symphony. But often it was just to translate successful music from one medium into another: all those fantasies on themes from Bizet’s Carmen, for instance, or the suite from the incidental music Mendelssohn wrote for Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” which he tacked on to the concert overture he’d written 17 years earlier.

So it’s understandable that violinist Maria Bachmann would want to convince the composer to rework the original Chaconne into a version for violin and piano which she’d recorded with pianist and Trio Solisti colleague Jon Klibonoff on her Endeavor Classics disc called, not surprisingly, The Red Violin, released last year.

In this performance with pianist Natalie Zhu, played between the Ravel and the Enescu, I confess my focus was more on how the pianist (no accompanist in anything on this program, by the way) handled the composer’s “orchestral reduction,” recreating wide ranges of colors, those dense textures, pounding chords and spiraling wisps. She makes a great orchestra, managing to claim it all for the piano as if it were completely natural to be playing all those notes on a keyboard.

My only association with Ms. Zhu’s playing before was her wonderful recording of Mozart sonatas with violinist Hilary Hahn where they are so wonderfully on the same stylistic frequency. This may be an entirely different style of playing but the chemistry is still very effective between her and Ms. Bachmann who has never been less than astounding in the performances and recordings of hers I’ve heard. Sitting in the Gretna Playhouse instead of watching the Olympics’ opening ceremonies at home, I couldn’t help thinking they made a great team, going for the gold... (and that’s the extent of my sports analogies, sorry).

The third of Brahms’ violin sonatas, written when he was in his mid-50s and close to “retirement,” is the most dramatic of these sonatas and certainly the most symphonic. It was sketched in the same summer, following the premiere of his 4th Symphony (which pro-Brahmsian critic Hanslick called “a dark well”), he composed his 2nd Violin Sonata (bright, sunny and song-like), the 2nd Cello Sonata and the C Minor Piano Trio, all, basically, positive works (as one friend said of the trio, “better than any photograph, for it shows your real self”). The following year, he composed the Double Concerto which many saw as a reactionary work and never warmed to (curiously, it was this year a young French composer introduced himself to Brahms, named Claude Debussy).

The next year, when Brahms had turned thoroughly gray, suddenly aging, he sent the now-finished 3rd Violin Sonata to Clara Schumann, herself troubled with problems of age and illness, compounded by one family tragedy after another. She liked especially the third movement, the modest little scherzo, which she wrote was “like a beautiful girl sweetly frolicking with her lover – then suddenly in the middle of it all, a flash of deep passion, only to make way for sweet dalliance once more.”

Brahms responded that, going over the score at his desk and thinking of the “sonata flowing gently and dreamily beneath your fingers,” “in my thoughts [I] wandered gently with you through the maze of organ-points [in the first movement], with you still beside me, and I know no greater pleasure than this, to sit at your side or, as now, to walk beside you.” While they played piano duets frequently during their long friendship, perhaps there was something of a “sweet dalliance” that they both, in their increasing age, remembered fondly? For the past year, they had been negotiating the return of their letters to each other: Brahms sent his off without rereading them but Clara, reading them again, was unable to bring herself to part with them.

Whether or not the “organ-point” he mentioned – the long passages built on the repeated bass notes – reflect a similar passage in his German Requiem (the end of the 3rd movement, “Lord, make me to know the end and measure of my days”), Brahms was keen on quotational allusions in his music – for instance, incorporating Joachim’s “F-A-E” Motive in the violin part of the Double Concerto, written as a way of renewing their strained friendship – and around the time he composed this sonata, he left an unsigned note at Hans von Bülow’s hotel, after they’d had a falling out, with a few notes from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, knowing he would recognize the implied text (“dear one, shall I see you no more?”) as an invitation to a reunion. Brahms dedicated the D Minor Sonata to von Bülow, the last official dedication Brahms would make with any of his works: two years later, he announced his “retirement” from composing, though meeting a talented clarinetist made it only a temporary one.

There is nothing “autumnal” about this sonata, an adjective usually attached to these last years’ works, and there was nothing autumnal about the Gretna performance, either. The middle movements were perhaps the most appealing but I missed some of the drama in the first movement (especially those “organ-points”) perhaps more by comparison with the over-the-top drama on the first half from Corigliano and Enescu. The last movement, however, made up for that, especially in the last measures when Brahms builds and builds, then holds back suddenly before the final, dramatic plunge.

The playhouse at Mt. Gretna may not be the ideal acoustic – not that many outdoor theaters could hope to be – between the cicadas, people passing by talking obliviously on their cell-phones or the occasional motorcycle in the area. Usually, I sit toward the back where, for me, the balance is better than it is up front where the blend isn’t as good. Thinking my hearing is doing a lot better now without the daily annoyance of work-place white noise, I was surprised when the person sitting next to me complained how the pianist was drowning out the violinist. Sounded fine to me, but I didn’t mean it the way Brahms supposedly did when, rehearsing one of his cello sonatas with a less than adequate musician, the struggling cellist stopped to mention cautiously he thought he was working too hard to be heard: Brahms replied “Yes, and I can still hear you!”

For anyone who missed this performance, the good news – aside from the fact WITF recorded the concert for later broadcast on Sunday evening’s “WITF Presents...” – is Bachmann and Zhu will return to the mid-state for a Market Square Concerts performance in late February with more music from the Red Violin album including Corigliano’s Chaconne as well as other works by Paul Moravec, Aaron Copland and Ravel. Something else to look forward to!

Going Green: The Geothermal Installation, Complete

This past week, there have been so many things I wanted to sit down and blog about, not that I was so busy (or so successfully busy) composing or, for that matter, doing much of anything. In addition to some progress on the new violin and piano piece which almost seems to be writing itself if it weren’t that I’m spending so much time working on it, I’m also closing in on the last quarter of Tolstoy’s War & Peace, having read the chapters on the Battle of Boródino a couple nights ago. The 196th Anniversary of that decisive battle is coming up a month from now (18 days, by the Old Calendar): I wonder if the town will be besieged by re-enactors – actually, the do have Boródino Re-enactors!.

Tonight, it’s off to Mt. Gretna for an 8:00 recital by violinist Maria Bachmann and pianist Natalie Zhu which will include the dramatic 3rd Violin Sonata by Brahms and the violin-and-piano version of the Chaconne John Corigliano composed out of material he used in the film score for The Red Violin, originally for violin and orchestra. John Clare, friend and fellow WITF Castaway, is flying in from San Antonio to give the 7:00 pre-concert talk!

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A week ago, it became official: the geothermal system installation is now complete!

The guys from G. & R. Westbrook came back the week before and dug the trench connecting the wells they’d dug the previous week – you can read that post, here – to the house.

The path they’d chosen would go across the front yard to the lower end of the basement in an open space long vacated by some shrubs my folks had planted 49 years ago. Not long after we had moved in, a groundhog decided this would be a good spot for a burrow. After several summers of us filling it in and him digging it out again, the groundhog (or some descendant) finally won. There’s an equally cavernous hole off the back porch with a similar history, leading us to assume that, underneath our basement floor, there was a vast warren of groundhog dens and burrows complete with front and back entrances into which, somehow, the entire house might one day sink.

The day Westbrook came to dig the wells, we were standing out front, reconnoitering the location when someone noticed a groundhog sticking his head out of the hole wondering, no doubt, what all the noise was as they brought the well-drilling machinery up onto the lawn. Curiously, in the past year I have seen a groundhog out back only three times and one out front for the first time only the day before, so I’m assuming this hole had not exactly been in the same family for whatever passes for however many groundhog generations.

They pointed directly at the curious groundhog and said “Well, I guess we’ll be taking the trench right through that groundhog hole, if you don’t mind.” It may seem like an expensive way of getting rid of a groundhog, but hey...

So on the second Thursday, they began digging the trench out front, starting at the groundhog hole, and then drilling holes from the inside of my basement wall to the outside: if you look carefully at the photo, it may look like just two round holes in a wall, but that’s light and dirt on the outside, there. (These will, no doubt, not qualify for that exciting new TV game show, “Hole in the Wall,” where, to quote an article from the New York Times, “contestants contort themselves into awkward positions to squeeze through a wall that approaches them on a conveyor belt.” Mmmm, now doesn’t that sound riveting?)

The rest of the trench digging was fairly unadventuresome, unlike the well-drilling itself with its various stages and different visuals. This was, after all, just digging a four-foot deep trench from Point A to Point B, laying in the tubing (since they’re flexible, “pipes” doesn’t seem to be the right word) and taking them through the wall into the basement where they’ll later be connected to what will, the following week, replace the old furnace.

By late afternoon, the guys had filled in the trench and leveled off the yard (as level as my yard is, in the first place), the only visible indication something had been done becoming a large brown patch of dirt in the middle of my otherwise green but not entirely grass lawn. Of course, August will not be the best time of year to be planting grass seed, so I apologize to my neighbors who will have to look at this scar for several more weeks.

Any day now, I expect the groundhog to return and reclaim his burrow.

Incidentally, the owner’s son Wes told me about one way to get rid of a groundhog. (There is even one way? It seemed nothing ever works – even if you cage them and transport them to some new habitat miles and miles away, there will always be new groundhogs in the market for new places to build.) You take an onion and throw it in the hole.

And then...?

Well, it seems they hate onions and so they’ll just abandon the hole.

That’s it? As luck would have it, I happened to have two over-ripe onions waiting to be disposed of in my fridge – where things were going “green” long before it became ecologically fashionable – and so I tossed them, bomb-like, down the two entrances off the back porch. Since I’d only seen a groundhog there a few times earlier in the spring, who knows how successful it is or when the effect of the onion will have worn off, but anyway, I “composted” the onions and presumably used nothing as lethal or longer lasting as a chemical spray or “varmint bomb.” Or a rifle...

Now we were ready for the last phase of the installation: the removal of the old technology and the installation of the new.

This had been scheduled for the last day of July and the first day of August (continuing, if necessary, the next Monday). During this time, I was not looking forward to a day or two without air conditioning. Considering I was only going to have the furnace for a few more months, I opted not to take the annual maintenance package ($200 for the furnace and $100 for the a/c, btw, an additional saving considering several people, now, have told me once they’ve converted to geothermal, instead of spending thousands on oil and on additional electricity for a/c, they’re spending maybe $400-500 for their heating and cooling all year).

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

On Saturday morning, wouldn’t you know, as it approached 90 outside, the motor that runs the central fan for the furnace and air-conditioning conked out. It wasn’t until later that I figured it was probably just a fan-belt but probably not worth a couple hundred dollars for a weekend emergency house call. Fortunately for me (and the cats), my friend N was able to figure out it was, in fact, not just a fan belt but a pulley on the motor that had come loose. While it was too late to find the right-sized fan belt that evening, I managed to track one down Sunday morning (cost: $11.99) which N was able to replace, tighten the pulley and restore the old furnace to its usual air-conditioning capabilities. And just in time for us to leave for SummerMusic at the Glen Allen Mill to hear Mozart and Beethoven!

It occurred to me, then, that not only was the furnace going to be 49 or 50 years old this fall (I can't recall when it was actually installed: the house was ready to move into in the Fall of 1959 but the roof was on by the previous fall, so...), the central air system had been installed in August of 1980. What are the odds a 28-year-old a/c compressor would soon need to be replaced, too?

Then Thursday, the 31st, arrived and with it the guys from Groff’s. I was told they’d arrive between 7:30 and 8:00 – this is a.m., a time of day previously unknown to Dr. Dick except on sleepless nights but now, having gotten used to this retirement thing, finds it completely comfortable, after going to bed when he feels tired and waking up when he feels like it. I am occasionally at the piano, now, by 7am! It is just one of many things, if you'd told me a few months ago, I would not have believed...

But I noticed this white, unmarked panel truck parked across the street from me at 7:15. With a dog in the truck’s cab. Wondering if they’d gotten here way early and what they were going to do with the dog during this process, I walked down to see what was going on. This, it turned out, was the guy who was delivering “the unit” (as it would be called, in place of “furnace” or “heat pump”) who had not one but two dogs navigating for him. He was just waiting for the installer-guys who were, apparently, running late. Well, later than he was. He had two more deliveries to make for installations further to the east.

By 8:00, apologizing for having gotten stuck in traffic, the two installer-guys arrived and wheeled the new “unit” down over my back yard (less hilly) to the lower end where the basement opens out onto the side yard. There, it was discovered the skid it was on was too wide to get through the door. Well, a chain saw and a few slices later, the skid was now reformatted to make it with 1/4" to spare...

Of course, the first thing they had to do was dismantle the air-conditioner. Of course. Now, I had run the thing, sort of like offering it a last meal, all night long, something I never do because it’s just too expensive. The object of this extravagance was to build up as much cool air inside the house as possible: if they weren’t finished until Monday, it was going to be a long, hot weekend.

Then the furnace went. Odd, when I was taking these “before” pictures that morning, I felt sad as if I’m losing an old friend who’s done nothing worse than becoming outdated by new technology. He’d worked hard and well all those decades, keeping my folks’ house warm or cool, but there was no reason to wait until he could retire gracefully before bringing in a replacement.

As they unceremoniously escorted him from the building – oh wait, maybe I don’t want to continue this analogy... hmm...

As they took out the old unit, I snapped some photographs for the scrap-book (scrap-folder?) while they complained how heavy and cumbersome it was to remove (they apparently don’t build furnaces like they used to). Perhaps they’d originally built the house around it? Could be... And maybe they had more than two guys dragging it off their truck? It took an immense effort to roll it end-over-end, clanking and banging all the way, to get it onto the trailer behind their truck.

I was able also to get a shot of the “new” fan-belt as the motor hung gracelessly out through the opening like a disemboweled liver. Since the belt was only four days old, it occurred to me maybe I should retrieve it, then wondered what I would ever need a 44" fan-belt for again?

The rest of the day was fairly routine: into the now empty corner, they began setting up the New Unit and by early afternoon they were finished for the day, coming back Friday to, hopefully, finish the job. I was concerned but also knew there was nothing that could be done about it if they couldn’t finish up by Monday.

They returned at 7:30 the next morning and resumed work in the basement. By 10:30, they were working on replacing the thermostat which took a while longer because, it turned out, the unit was supposed to be pre-programmed at the shop before they sent it out but this turned out not to be the case. Time-consuming more than anything else, by noon, they had various cables, wires, vents and tubing all connected and ready to go. Within minutes, cool air was wafting up through the air vents.

It worked!

Now, as the one guy explained to me how it works, we set the thermostat for 74 just to get it cooled down: it may take a while, he warned, since it had gotten up to 80 (it had been 84 the weekend of the fan belt).

By 12:45, they were done and cleaned up, driving the truck away.

The air was already feeling cooler than what 80° should feel like. I went down to take pictures of the New Unit which occupied maybe 2/3s of the furnace’s space. Tubing from the former holes-in-the-wall now snaked up and across the rafters, over the old ductwork, and down into the unit itself. The water in these tubes, kept at a moderate 55° by the earth’s steady temperature, will then interact with the pump mechanism in the unit (since it’s not really a ‘furnace’ by definition) to either heat or cool the air circulated through the house. This is much more efficient than transferring it from the air, as most people imagine when they hear the term “heat pump” – if it’s freezing outside, there’s not a lot of heat in the air to transfer, meaning it either works extra hard to keep you warm or it just doesn’t work at all. Likewise if you’re in the midst of a 100° heat-wave: it’s not going to cool you off very well. Unlike dealing with solar panels and lots of cloudy days, the ground temperature is steady and the water-flow is constant for this enclosed indoor unit. It just seems like such a logical choice.

Obviously, if you’re going to spend about $16,000 on it, you may not want to replace an oil or gas furnace just to put in newer, greener technology. If you’re building a new home or, like me, having to replace an old furnace with something, this is a good time to look into the possibility.

For me, the real proof, financially, will come when I get the next electric bill which could be $75-100 higher than a standard non-a/c bill (depending on the number of heat waves) and, of course, comparing next summer’s bills to the past two years’.

But the important thing is, I am no longer dependent on “foreign oil” or on a disappearing fuel that is depleting the planet’s natural resources. I am using my own dirt to heat and cool my house!

Now if I could use that to run my car...

Speaking of which, it’s time to run down to the airport to pick up John Clare! Looking forward to his talk tonight, and to catching up with him since he moved to KPAC in San Antonio – and then to some great music making! I’ll be blogging about that, later!

Gretna Music: The Summer Season (finally) Begins!

With the advent of August and the start of Dog Days – and let me tell you, my cats are not pleased about that one, either – it is also time for more summer concerts.

For those of you who’d gone into Summer Concert withdrawal, you can now gear up for a whirlwind of programs at Gretna Music where this year everything is concentrated into one month. It’s not just Sunday evenings, now - there are lots of concerts throughout the month, on different days of the week, even different times of the day: check the calendar carefully so you don’t miss out!

The first classical concert takes place this weekend - Sunday at 7:30 – when the Wister Quartet, players from the Philadelphia Orchestra and regular inhabitants of the Gretna Music summer roster, will be joined by pianist Natalie Zhu for the Schumann Piano Quintet. Speaking of which, I did a post on the Schumann Quintet just a few weeks ago for another summer performance – it’s part of my “Up Close & Personal” series, continuing them from my former, now defunct Dr. Dick's Blog – so don’t forget to check that out, too.

The Quartet will be playing Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet and a quartet that came about because a soprano was sick and a composer was bored: while waiting for rehearsals to resume for Aida. Giuseppe Verdi, since he didn’t have the internet to help him waste his time, decided to do something constructive and write a string quartet instead (we should all be so productive in our down time...). It’s full of beautiful melodies which is what you’d expect from the greatest Italian opera composer – and at the peak of his career, too – but since he hardly ever wrote anything other than operas, it’s a real blessing to have at least this one instrumental work.

If you’re not familiar with the name, Natalie Zhu, do you remember that really dynamite recording of Mozart Violin Sonatas that Hilary Hahn released a couple years ago? Well, Natalie Zhu was the pianist she collaborated with on that CD. I loved that recording not just because they chose some wonderful sonatas to play, but because they made such an amazing team together, violinist and pianist on the same wavelength (something that, admittedly, doesn’t always happen). You can listen to a movement of the E Minor Sonata from their recording in this YouTube post (audio but still publicity photos, not a video from a live performance).

Anyway, you’re in for a treat because Natalie Zhu’s going to be here for the next concert in the series, too, with violinist Maria Bachmann. That program, on Friday night at 8:00, will include Brahms’ Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor along with sonatas by Enescu and Ravel (the earlier posthumous one, not the famous one in G Major) as well as John Corigliano’s “Red Chaconne,” based on material he used in the film score for “The Red Violin” and initially turned into a work for violin and orchestra that eventually became the first movement of a whole violin concerto: this is a reworking of the Chaconne for violin and piano.

In addition to the great music and music-making you’re used to in Mt. Gretna, don’t forget to check out the pre-concert conversations or whatever they call them (pre-concert ‘talks’ sounds so lecturey - pre-concert preface?) but whatever they’re called, they’re a great way for you to find out a little bit more about the music you’re going to be hearing, maybe find some information and insight about the composers or the performers that will enhance the concert for you. And they’re always an hour before the concert.

To begin the series this Sunday evening, Davyd Booth, the Wister Quartet’s 2nd Violinist, will be telling you about their performance.

While I’ll be doing the last one on August 31st with the Lark Chamber Players and pianist Anna Polonsky, my fellow ex-colleague from WITF-FM, John Clare, will be coming back from his new digs in San Antonio to talk before Maria Bachmann’s program on Friday night, August 8th. John and Maria are friends from way back and in addition he’s also interviewed composer John Corigliano in the past, so he’ll be able to give you some good behind-the-scenes insights.

So I hope you'll be able to include the Mt. Gretna Playhouse in your concert-going excursions this month. If you go and you enjoy yourself, tell your friends about it -- word-of-mouth is really a great way to interest new people in attending live music events! Enjoy!

SummerMusic: A Super Sunday at the Mill

The weather turned out to be about as good as you’re likely to get for late-July, warm but not unbearably humid rather than the usual pre-Dog Days heat wave, and the threat of thunderstorms, at least over our little corner of the world, evaporated in the sunlight glinting off the babbling brook of the Yellow Breeches, doing its best to stand in for the second movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

I had taken my camera along but couldn’t find an angle that didn’t have a little too much sunlight in it; nor did I want to disrupt the performance, even during the bows, with a flash going off. It seemed odd to get a picture of the empty stage other than to prove that, yes, they did get a real grand piano into the mill. By the time I was able to find a reasonably good shot of the quartet, after the performance standing in front of the mill, we were already in the car and on the road home. It wouldn’t have mattered much, I suppose, to stop for a quick drive-by photo-shooting. When I got home, I discovered that somehow the cover on my old-fashioned digital camera had pushed back so that the batteries were long gone. Fortunately, the performance went much better than that.

July in the Harrisburg classical music scene has come to mean SummerMusic [Insert Year Here] which Market Square Concerts has been presenting for several years now with a Wednesday night concert at Market Square Church and then two more concerts on the weekend at the Glen Allen Mill along the Yellow Breeches. It started with the Ying Quartet for a few years and then, when they could no longer return, the Fry Street String Quartet started spending some time with us – if I’m not mistaken, this is their 3rd or 4th year (maybe, like Super Bowl Games, they should start listing them as SummerMusic IX or whatever, now that it seems to be a fixed tradition).

There have been some sweltering weekends at the Mill in those years and others that were downright pleasant, but this year the mill is marketed as “air-conditioned.” In this case, window units in several key windows work diligently before the concert, people are kept out until the last minute so they can keep the door closed and the cool air inside. And it actually works. Of course, you have to turn them off during the performance so you can hear the music but still, it’s pretty successful: while programs usually get pressed into service doubling as fans, there were fewer people on Sunday waving them.

After the opening concert Wednesday night, the weekend programs included four Beethoven quartets along with a Haydn Piano Trio and a Mozart Violin Sonata, joined by pianist Stuart Malina. It was surprising they were able to get - much less fit - a piano in the mill, a low-ceilinged space that certainly was not designed for anything close to chamber music concerts. Moving it in and then out of that space might make an amusing video to post on-line - or perhaps not, depending on how squeamish you get about things like that (I can never watch Laurel & Hardy as the piano movers without breaking into an anxious sweat).

The program opened with one of the great violin sonatas Mozart composed during the height of his fame in Vienna, the one in B-flat Major, K.454. It must have been a fairly happy time for him, creatively, since a month earlier he had just composed something he considered one the best things he ever wrote – the Quintet for Piano & Winds.

This violin sonata, though, creates a problem for the “historically informed” period instrument performer – at least for the piano-player. Since this is the sonata made famous in the anecdote about Mozart not having had time to finish it before the performance (before the Emperor, no less) and he just wrote out the violin part and left the piano part blank, playing it from “memory,” should a pianist today do the same thing? Later, Mozart filled it in, which we can tell since it’s a different colored ink in the manuscript and some passages are squeezed in to fit the already existing violin part, but still, yeah...

Since they’re officially “Sonatas for Piano & Violin” as they were styled in Mozart’s and Beethoven’s days, Stuart was joined by the rather tall first violinist of the Fry Street Quartet, William Fedkenheuer – I was afraid when they bounded up on stage, the violinist would knock himself out on one of the rafters if he hadn’t ducked in time – for a performance that, once you acclimated to the sound in the room, was stylish and compelling, especially in the beautiful slow movement. Clean strings of parallel 3rds in the pianist’s right hand and a shared clarity of texture and phrasing were highlights of the first movement. Balance in Mozart is always tricky, especially during those passages where the violin plays more pianistic arpeggiated patterns and is actually accompanying the melody in the piano, but the give-and-take between them was usually so keen, there was never any sense anyone was not an equal partner here.

After the piano lid was closed and the chairs and music stands put in place by the gracious stage crew, the Fry Street Quartet came out to play the first of the Beethoven quartets, at least as it’s numbered – it’s actually the second one completed but Beethoven chose it to open the set because it just makes such an incredible statement. The whole point of writing these quartets – on the heels of his teacher Haydn’s success in the medium – was to announce to the world, “Here I am,” so Beethoven took his time and spent two years working on all six of them before they were ready to be performed. One thing Beethoven was not was the fast-food equivalent of art.

Nor was the Fry Street’s performance. Though I missed Saturday night’s performance of Op. 18/6 and Op. 132, their grasp of these works should be a very positive indication for their future. Every quartet, as I mentioned, has to come to grips with Beethoven, one way or another, if you’re going to play the standard repertoire. The great thing about great art, of course, is that the first time you learn it is does not mean you will play it that way every time. There are always new things to discover and explore, just as Beethoven did with each quartet he composed. Each one approaches the idea of what a string quartet can be from a different perspective which in turn affects how you might approach the others: in Op. 18, one is symphonic, one is a mini-concerto, another is lyrical, still another is the dramatic one; after the chaos of Op. 130, the B-flat with its immense fugal ending, comes the tautly controlled Op. 131 which is in turn followed by a return to an almost classical scope in Op. 135 (just as Wagner pushed tonality to the extreme in Tristan, he pulled back afterwards to write the much less adventuresome Meistersinger). That the Fry Street Quartet has grown in their approach to these works honestly helps them bring us a little closer to Beethoven’s private universe.

It was interesting to compare these two specific works back-to-back, written 25 years apart. The C-sharp minor Quartet on the second half of the program is essentially his last major work and, in order of composition, the next-to-last quartet, essentially the apex and summation of his career just as the first quartet heralded its start.

Beethoven was primarily an “organic” composer, usually building a piece out of musical cells or building blocks rather than themes: think the opening of the 5th Symphony which builds on that famous four-note motive and how that rhythm – da-da-da daaaah – permeates the whole movement, even the whole symphony (since it appears in the 3rd and 4th movements as well).

The first quartet (Op. 18/1) opens with a short cell that basically consists of a turn around the first note – this is imbedded throughout the movement 104 times (down from 130 times in an earlier draft). In the Op. 131 quartet, it’s not so much the opening’s cell as its shape and its bare essentials that subtly permeates other movements, especially the relentless finale, unifying the whole piece.

The form of Op. 131 always fascinates me, too: a lot is made of its being in seven movements (as in, “wow, seven movements, imagine that!”), even though they’re not quite in the right places to be an “Arch Form” in the 20th Century way, each movement corresponding around a central “keystone” movement. Still, the elements are there and it flows from beginning to end in much the same way, a hundred years before Bartok is given credit for introducing it. Two of these are quite brief and really only serve as introductions (or structural up-beats) to the movements that follow them.

The first not-quite-a-real-movement consists of a few gestures, typical operatic patterns you might hear in any recitative as if all four instruments are conversing about what comes next (in an opera, next would come an aria or an ensemble of some kind but something grand, no doubt, and lyrical), going directly into the core of the quartet, a long set of variations which turns out not to be the expected slow movement. With all its changes of mood and tempo, rather than being one long string of variations on a theme, it seems more like a collection of sub-movements, six variations in all complete with a restatement of the recitative-like “introduction” before an incomplete seventh variation (and how many movements in the quartet?) is interrupted by a scherzo (though he doesn’t call it that). Here, there is a lot of quick back-and-forth between the instruments, fragments of gestures, pizzicato (plucked) notes ricocheting over the music stands, colors changing suddenly to the glassy sound of sul ponticello (playing near the bridge). As fractious as the 2nd movement was gentle, following the slow sad fugue that began the quartet, this 5th movement is essentially parallel and at the same time the opposite to the 2nd movement. Then an impassioned interruption that sounds like it might actually become a slow movement suddenly erupts violently as the stormy finale takes off, driving everything to the conclusion.

Then an odd thing happens, after it climbs and climbs to a peak: Beethoven suddenly cuts back and brings everything to a near-grinding halt with a wistful look back on the opening motive (again, traded almost recitative-like between the instruments) before a somewhat peremptory final cadence, especially considering everything that had been building up over the past 40 minutes or so.

The first violinist, the group’s spokesman, took us on a tour of Op. 131 before they began playing it, explaining some details here, playing excerpts there, sign-posts to listen for, background information and a raft of quotable quotes to keep in mind. His lightness also helped keep things from becoming too serious (trust me, it is very easy to get too reverential about The Late Quartets), but I loved his mock-serious comments about the role of the first violinist in the piece, especially when he said how the theme of the variations movement is NOT in the first violin part “where it belongs” but shared with the second violin “as if there were actually other players to be considered.”

This of course makes fun of the old traditional approach to the quartet in Beethoven’s day: a violin “accompanied” by three other players. Ludwig Spohr, one of the great violinists then and an even more popular composer at the time, wrote in his autobiography about how his group was attempting to perform one of Beethoven’s late quartets. During the rehearsals, he noticed “my accompanists were having great difficulties making sense of their parts” (or something to that effect) so instead he substituted one of his own quartets which proved to be much more successful all around. It would be too easy to ask, by comparison, how many of you have ever heard a Spohr quartet played live...?

Watching the interplay of the performers during Op. 131, it reminded me, rather than the traditional allotment of the parts – melody in the first violin, bass line in the cello, and the harmonies filled out by the second violin and viola – how independent and equal all four voices are, like people sitting around having a conversation, arguing a point or agreeing on another, making side comments and perhaps changing the topic. This isn’t very different from Elliott Carter’s approach to his string quartets where (borrowing from Charles Ives’ 2nd Quartet) each instrument takes on specific identities as they interact with each other.

This in turn reminded me of the comment some critic made back in the '70s, describing some work by Carter or Babbitt, I’ve forgotten who, by saying “This must be what Late Beethoven Quartets sound like to a dog.”

When I was teaching in Connecticut, I got a postcard from a fellow composer who was attending the contemporary music festival at Tanglewood that summer. On the front was a photograph of a stately collie sitting upright on the grass with a pipe in his mouth. On the back he’d written,

“Listening to Late Beethoven Quartets.”