Haiti, Part 2: Hoping & Waiting - Some Good News Among the Tragic

Continued from Part 1...

When I saw an online report around 6:15 this past Tuesday that there had been a “devastating earthquake” in Haiti, my first thought was “Jeanne!”

Though I haven't seen Jeanne Pocius since the '80s, most likely, and have had only a little e-mail communication with her between then and, more recently, catching up as a friend on Facebook, I knew – according to her last Facebook status – that she was leaving for Haiti on a 5:30am flight from Boston that past Thursday, unhappy about needing to be at the airport two or three hours ahead of the flight but happy, at least, to be avoiding another weekend blizzard and cold snap: she would be in Haiti for five weeks, this time.

Where she was in Haiti, I had no idea. It's a small country and it was a huge quake: how far out did the impact of the quake strike? I knew she had been in other cities in Haiti: I prayed she was not in Port-au-Prince at the time – those pictures on the news were too horrible to imagine!

So I turned to Facebook. By the next morning, I found someone had set up a page there called “Haiti Music Schools – Earthquake Info Sharing” where people were posting questions about friends and family or reporting what they had heard and whom they'd heard news about. Meanwhile, on Jeanne's profile – she has over 2,000 friends there – questions, thoughts and prayers about her whereabouts and her well-being were being posted on what is called her "wall" one after the other.

The music school page was being organized by people in the United States who'd long been involved in these schools in Haiti – Janet Anthony at Lawrence University in Wisconsin and Steven Huang at Ohio University – but it was difficult for me sometimes, being an outsider with no ties to the people there or knowledge of the local geography, to know who was who when they would mention first names only or names that might be a church, a school or a town, for all I knew. Many of the posts were in a mix of French and Creole; slips in English could be forgiven whether it was a 2nd (or 3rd) language or not. Jeanne - who is actually Jeannemarie Gabriel Pocius - is of French-Canadian heritage, by the way, and Jeanne could be a fairly common name in Haiti. This would lead to a good deal of confusion, not just for me.

Consequently, I ended up spending a good deal of time googling this information, trying to get my cyberbearings: it turned out Jeanne was in Jacmel, a provincial capital almost due south of Port-au-Prince. As the country includes a long narrow peninsula jutting out from the main bulk of the island, the southern boundary to a central bay, the capital is in the southeast corner of this bay and Jacmel is on the southernmost coast of Haiti, facing the Caribbean but not that far south from Port-au-Prince (which I found was usually abbreviated, conveniently, as PaP) but who knew what the mountains in between were like? Would Jacmel have been far enough away to escape the brunt of the quake?

Then one map in the news showed the concentric rings emanating from the epicenter just west of Port-au-Prince. Jacmel was located on one of those rings. I found the Wikipedia entry for Jacmel announcing on January 11th, the day before the quake, Jacmel announced Comfort Inn was going to be opening a new beachfront hotel there.

The next day, all that changed.

One of the first posts I saw at the Music Schools page mentioned how someone's daughter had survived at an orphanage in Jacmel, though many of her classmates had been killed: they “watched the mountain above the orphanage split.”

In the frantic quest for information and the number of posts from people in the States and those who may have been in Haiti, I can't remember exactly, now, what order they came in or what all information may have been included.

One bit of good news: two of the names mentioned I knew from Jeanne's friend-list. Carlot Dorve, whom she listed as her son, and Mackelder Saintilus (I later found a photograph - see right - of him playing principal clarinet in the band Jeanne was conducting) were in Flint, Michigan, where I gathered, they were going to be teachers themselves. Mackelder said he had arrived about a week before the quake, Carlot and two or three others a few days later. One could say they had gotten out in the knick-of-time but now they were sitting in the Frozen North worried about the state of their family, their friends, their homes, their town, their country. While I felt happy for them for being safe, I felt great empathy for their frustration in being so far away.

Given the issues-on-the-ground with basic services like electricity, water, telephones and so on, it was not hard to imagine what the internet and cell-phone service would be like. Some people were on Twitter or sending photos and video out, shot from cell-phones. Others had no service and could not. Janet and Steven posted phone numbers they had for certain people at the schools there, hoping that someone might have the time to keep calling and hoping for a response.

Some reported no service, others that they left voice-mail.

What were the chances, under the circumstances, someone's cell-phone would be functional (would they even know where it was?), that they'd have access to a computer even if they had internet service?

Then, someone – Mackelder, I believe – reported he'd talked to Pere David and that “Jeanne was in alive” but that “Ste Trinite complex is gone. No school no cathedral.” The context implied Jeanne Pocius who I thought was in Jacmel? I took “was in alive” as a typo for “was alive” - but could it mean “was in [hospital but] alive” or “in[jured but] alive”? And was this Jeanne “Jeanne Pocius” or some other Jeanne – good news, either way, but better for me if I'd known it was my friend. I asked for a clarification: was this Jeanne, Jeanne Pocius the trumpet teacher?

It took about 43 minutes before Steven Huang responded “Yes.”

For most of those 43 minutes, I think I was hitting the refresh button every 30 seconds or so to see if anybody posted an update between reading other posts and sifting through names and locations unknown to me.

It took quite some time to realize that “Ste Trinite” (Holy Trinity) was not in Jacmel: it was in Port-au-Prince. She was at the school at Dessaix-Baptiste there and it was apparently okay, still standing. THAT was good news.

So I assumed Jeanne was okay – or at least alive, which was pretty good news considering how easy the alternative could've been the case, when they're talking about a death toll in the thousands with people unaccounted for under the rubble of collapsed buildings. I mean, if large well-built banks and even the Presidential Palace could practically collapse into rubble, what chances did the poor shanty towns on the hills in and around the capital have?

At some point during the morning, I had been contacted by Diana Fishlock, a Facebook friend who is a reporter for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, looking for people in the area with connections to Haiti. After seeing my status updates about trying to find Jeanne, she contacted me. Mostly, we connected through Facebook e-mail. By the time I had heard that Jeanne was apparently alive, even though there'd been no direct confirmation from her, I wrote up some information about it and sent it to Diana, there not being enough time for a phone call and interview: she asked me a few follow-up questions (it hadn't even occurred to me that if Jeanne was a freshman student in 1976 or so, she'd be 52 now!). I had been dancing around the house at the news Jeanne was okay but I felt guilty that others were not getting such good news or were still waiting. I returned to the computer and continued to click on this site or that update, hoping to find more information.

After all, there had been no direct confirmation from her: everything was second-hand. Was that not good enough, I wondered?

Most of the day had been spent at the computer – hours went by unnoticed even more fluidly than usual. My whole day had been spent, ironically, with Facebook and on Google – and a couple of e-mails to friends of mine on Yahoo who, believe it or not, have not actually succumbed to joining Facebook! Both had known Jeanne when we were all at UConn.

I watched the news and saw more and more coverage from Haiti, relieved that I, at least, knew my one friend there was safe. But seeing so much destruction, so much misery and death, the rest of the reality there – beyond the idea of rescue – was horrifying. How could one possibly face such a thing? Suddenly, my life's problems seemed to vanish by comparison. I sat and prayed and wept and hoped.

The next morning, I was met by seeing Diana's article from the Patriot-News posted from one of Jeanne's friends on her Facebook profile. Most of the article was about families from Haiti in the area who were trying to connect with other members of their family, still there, or with people who'd served in missionary projects there in the past. At the end was my little story, finding that Jeanne was alive, the one bit of good news in the report.

There was e-mail from one of Jeanne's sisters, Marci. I had already connected through comments with her brother Jimi – I had not known either of them, before – but Marci was asking if I'd heard anything directly from Jeanne to prove she was alive.

But... but...

It had only been second-hand: there was nothing directly confirming it from Jeanne herself. And then I saw the post from someone who implied the “Jeanne” that had been reported with Pere David was possibly someone else, Jean-Bernard. Perhaps all our hopes had been built on this one misconception. Perhaps the person who had talked to Pere David had assumed it was Jeanne Pocius and not Jean-Bernard he had been talking about?

Suddenly, I was back on the ground, starting over.

Worse came the news that, no, Jeanne was not in Jacmel that day, where the school was still standing: she was scheduled to be in Port-au-Prince, at Ste. Trinite, that afternoon, the place that no longer existed...

And no one could reach Jeanne's cell-phone or other numbers that people had supplied for her. No one could reach Pere David, either, any more.

More hours trying to confirm anything, to sort out the confusion, meant more frustration spent waiting.

Meanwhile, I googled: like the information-overload commercials for Bing, I could start spewing off all kind of facts without understanding their context – about Jacmel which had a music-festival there, about the school there and in Port-au-Prince and about Ste. Trinite Cathedral.

A reporter had posted over 50 photographs from Port-au-Prince, very few of them labeled, very few of them needing labels. The ones of dead bodies under the rubble or covered by sheets – including the city's bishop – were difficult to look at. I kept searching for Jeanne, afraid to find her at all.

But there were two pictures there labeled “Ste Trinity Cathedral.” It was in very bad shape but not leveled. One of the stateside teachers who'd been there many times said that was the “catholic cathedral,” not Ste. Trinite. Confused, I tried to find out what the difference was: I didn't even know most of these people were associated with the Episcopal mission in Haiti and that it was “Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral” in Port-au-Prince, not that it mattered all that much in terms of people's lives unless you were trying to pin point with some accuracy where somebody may have been at the time of the quake!

I found that Pere David was Pere David Cesar who was the director of the school at Ste. Trinite and was also a conductor of the orchestra there: one of the posts I found was a report from Jeanne Pocius about her performance with the Ste. Trinite orchestra which included one of the most calming pieces of music I could think in times of stress like this, “The Prayer of Saint Gregory” by Alan Hovhaness (on September 11th, 2001, my colleague Cary Burkett had selected this as the music WITF would use throughout that awful day: coincidentally, it had been the performance recorded by another student of mine, Chris Gekker, who'd been in my freshman theory class when I was a teaching assistant at Eastman!). I couldn't find a performance Jeanne had made of it so I posted one I'd found at You-Tube (with organ) on my Facebook page and hers as a prayer to send out to help calm our friends who were following the news that day.

There was a report from one of the ministers in Les Cayes, a seaport further west on that narrow peninsula across the south of Haiti. It turned out the convent at Ste. Trinite had collapsed but the sisters were alright. Then he mentioned a building I later found was in Les Cayes. I asked if there was a Ste. Trinite in Les Cayes, too, or was this the one in Port-au-Prince? Someone said “In Haiti, when you talk about 'Ste. Trinite,' it's the one in PaP.” So even though the buildings there were severely damaged, people had survived. Maybe there was still hope?

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In a time when so many people are focused on Haiti, so much mental energy, so many thoughts of love and prayers of hope have been sent there to help find information about family and friends, sending a little bit of money to help in something where we all feel, no doubt, powerless. Looking at the news photos from there, where does one even begin? It is easy to become numb: in fact, given the ubiquity of news coverage and disasters around the world – whether it was September 11th or the Christmas Tsunami in South Asia a few years ago or the earthquakes in China and, now, Haiti – it is easy to sigh and switch the channel, to focus more on the weekend's football game or the fate of Late Night TV shows. It's far away and remote from our experience, sitting comfortably in our homes not having to worry about food or having a bed to sleep in, so we don't want to spend too much attention to it because it's such a bummer.

And then, with all the needs our good Christian leaders urge us to remember – to love one another, to show compassion for our fellow men – there are thoughts sent out into the world by the likes of Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh whose words I find almost as unbelievable as the quake itself.

You can credit or discredit them on your own according to your beliefs, religious or political, as easily as you can change the channel to avoid the uncomfortable news you feel powerless to do anything about. That doesn't mean they no longer exist, they no longer have power to wound and destroy.

Robertson finds blame for the quake – he's always seems to be fixing blame, rather than just looking ahead to hope and to help when he says things like this, regardless of what the rest of his ministry may accomplish – in Haiti's “pact with the devil” to overthrow their French colonial rulers (“true story”). True or not (and it doesn't matter to him whether it is or isn't), he'd been saying stupid things like this long before Hurricane Katrina, finding reasons for natural disasters like this. And “smiting” is so Old-Testament, really: doesn't the New Testament talk about forgiveness of sins more than finding blame for the cause of it? Anyway, as for him and Rush Limbaugh, I can only respond by posting Keith Olbermann's response.

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By late afternoon, I had to leave for a meeting downtown. After running some errands, I came back to find I was having trouble with the computer: trying to get back into the Haiti Music Schools' page, one of the cats stepped on the keyboard and before I knew it, there were 25 tabs opening up for Firefox HELP which I could neither stop nor close down. I was even having trouble trying to close down the browser. So I shut down the computer – even that took a while – and I just walked away from it: how many hours had I spent on it the past two days, anyway? I needed a break and I needed to get dinner.

I had missed the news on TV but I sat down to watch Jeopardy and then Bones (one of my guilty pleasures) before getting back to the computer.

When I did, I found things on Jeanne's 'wall' that could have been wishful thinking -- “she apparently lost her cell phone” (well, yes, I had figured that was very likely, under the circumstances: was this a reason why we might not be hearing from her? Sure!). But then I started seeing other positive posts like these: since I was scrolling around trying to find something specific, I don't know what order these were originally in and it's a little difficult trying to distinguish whose posts I'm looking for, considering so many of us have changed our profile picture to the Haitian Flag (left) in support of the people there.

“Phillipe the trumpetist was pull out the rubble”

“Arianne is fine . Fritz the violist is fine . most of the sainte trinite musicians are in College st Pierre soccer field near the French ambassy.”

Oh??? And finally, I found:

“Jeanne Pontius is located at St Pierre . Near French Embassy”

I saw Jeanne's brother Jimi had posted a frustrated clarification for “Jeanne Pocius or Jeanne Pontious?” and the person responded “Pontious the trumpet-player.”

GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME.

Another post I had overlooked earlier: “Fabrice said that Frito Leroy ran innto Jeanne in PAP - she has lost her phone. Pierre spoke with her as did Fabrice. Don't knwo where she is staying or how to contact her.”

“Have just learned from Fabrice Lafond that Frito LeRoy spoke with Jeanne in PAP - she is fine he says”

Then, Jimi posted: “jeannie is alive and i PAP, she lost her phone, best f****n' news i've had in years!!!!!!!!”

At 9:45, I changed my formerly uneasy status to: “{{{DANCING!!!}}} Her brother said Jeanne's in Port-au-Prince - two people have talked to her and she is OKAY! She lost her phone, has no internet access... but from what I'm seeing on her profile and from other posts at the Haitian Music Schools/Earthquake page, SHE ***IS*** ALIVE! [insert performance of "Hallelujah Chorus" here!]”

There were comments to post, celebratory e-mails to send, thanks to give and – oh yes – update my yahoo friends since they're not seeing all this stuff on Facebook ;-)

Looking back at some of these posts today, though, I'm confused that some of them are time-stamped after 11pm EST: I know I had seen them between 9:15 and 9:45. Doesn't matter, all I needed to know was she was alive. I didn't know if “being alive” equated with “being okay,” but Jeanne is a strong person: even if she weren't “okay,” her primary role would be to help the people around her. That's Jeanne. I knew that thirty years ago and it was confirmed time and time again reading the thoughts and prayers posted for her on her wall.

Today, three days after the quake, the posts continue: “Just read from the status of the Quisqueya Christian School Alumni Coordinator Els Vorvloet that people are being brought out ALIVE from Holy Trinity!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Praise GOD!”

“Skander Desrosiers just called me! He said that he is ok, in Carrefour now, he was at Ste Trinite with Jeanne, Phillippe and Mejeun when it happened. It was hard to hear...” (Phillippe “the trumpetist” had been pulled from the rubble, according to an earlier post.)

Mackelder, one of the former students now in Michigan, just got word that his family is okay – his father was injured but alive – but it is not all good news: he says he heard his university had collapsed and many students and teachers are dead.

Other people continue to wait and hope.

And the rest of the world joins with them.

To be continued: Part 3 - some before/after photographs & updates...

The Power of Music, the Strength of Love: Haiti, Part 1

Two quotes immediately come to mind as I start this post: “If Music be the food of love, play on!” and “Music soothes the savage breast” (or beast, as it's usually misquoted). The first is from Shakespeare's “Twelfth Night,” the second though well known is from the relatively little known 17th Century dramatist William Congreve and his probably otherwise unknown play “The Mourning Bride.”

Music is capable of doing so many things: while for some, it is a luxury or something frivolous to be cut from budgets to save a few bucks, for others, it comes not far after the need for food, clothing and shelter.

In this post, I'm focusing on the power of music to transform lives. I'm thinking specifically of a former student of mine who has dedicated so much of her life to bringing music to the young students of Haiti, usually described (and dismissed) as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

With the earthquake there (usually described as devastating when no words exist to express the immensity of its impact on so poor a nation), survivors there have more immediate need of food, clothing and shelter – not to mention medicine – but they have music: people tweeting from the horrific scenes in Port-au-Prince, the capital, described people gathered in streets and squares singing in the night, mostly in prayer but also in comfort, singing of hope and banding together in an expression of the soul, both personal and communal.

Another favorite quote of mine, more recent than the Classics, comes from the acting teacher, Stella Adler:

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”

So I want you to listen to this video clip before you continue to read.

I had wanted to post the last movement of Haydn's Trumpet Concerto, a performance recorded on St. Cecelia's Day (the patron saint of music) this past November 22nd, 2009, at Ste. Trinite Cathedral of Port-au-Prince, a UNECO World Heritage site for its beautiful paintings of biblical scenes done in a classic Haitian primitive style (see image, left).

But it's only available on Jeanne's Facebook Profile/Videos: here is the link, if you'd have access to it.

Instead, I found this YouTube video of a rehearsal of the 1st Movement of the Haydn (better video, not as polished a performance and recorded in January, 2009, ten months before the other video) but it will still give you an idea of the importance of music in these students' lives! (Unfortunately, it cuts off about half-way through the movement...)

No, maybe it's not the most perfect performance I've ever heard but it's one of the most amazing and uplifting I've heard, when you consider everything going into it, if not just the joy these young students put into playing music by a White European composer who died 200 years ago.
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The orchestra is conducted by a former student of mine, Jeanne Pocius, a trumpet player who'd been in my freshman theory class when I taught at the University of Connecticut back in the mid-70s. Her life has not been an easy one so it comes as no surprise to me the greater part of her life has been spent bringing the joy of music if not just the music itself to young people who've also led lives that are far from easy.

She spends much of her time recently teaching in Haiti. When not in Haiti, she is traveling around the country performing and teaching in brass clinics with schools and bands – and always raising money, calling for instruments to be donated to the schools in Haiti and above all raising awareness of the needs of these students and how important music is in bringing something positive to their lives.

Take the soloist in this performance. You will notice that he has lost an arm. Now, you can still play a trumpet with one arm: my grandfather, in fact, was well known in the area as “The One-Armed Trumpet Player,” not playing on the sympathy of the accident but for overcoming an adversity (my dad used to say his father had a closet full of band uniforms for different town bands all over the area; the story goes that, one year, he subbed in the Sousa Band, though I never remember my grandfather talking much less bragging about it).

The young man's name is either Dorve Carlot or Carlot Dorve (I've seen it in both orders, but his Facebook profile lists him as Dorve Carlot). He became an orphan during one of the many periods of civil strife that continue to plague Haiti almost as often as disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes have. I don't know if Jeanne adopted him or merely took him in, but she lists him as one of her children and he lists her as his parent on their profiles.

So you can see this young man's life has not been, shall we say, an easy one.

The orchestra consists of students from the school's music program associated with the Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral (or Ste. Trinite) in Port-au-Prince.

This (right) is the exterior of the cathedral (not to be confused with the Catholic cathedral as has happened with news photos being dispatched from the scene), taken before the quake.

The whole Ste. Trinite complex – cathedral, convent and school – no longer exists beyond piles of rubble, following the quake. Who knows how many of these students are even alive?

This (below) is the image from Google Earth of what, like much of Port-au-Prince, remains of Ste Trinite.



Now, go back and listen to that clip again – it's only five minutes long – and think about it from THAT context.

To be continued: hoping, waiting for good news among the tragic...

The Other Side of Air: Rilke, Strauss & Me

Last Saturday afternoon, I listened to the Met broadcast of Richard Strauss' opera, Der Rosenkavalier, a major work for some reason I have never seen nor even listened to all the way through. In fact, it occurred to me, no matter how much I've heard the orchestral suites or that heavenly trio and final duet that concludes the opera, there was a great deal of music I had never heard before, especially the extended opening of Act III. And following it with the full score, I also was amazed how incredibly complex it really is, especially during much of the activity in Act I, something more easy to see than hear. And all this from a work that, completed 100 years ago (the final page of the score indicates it was completed on 26th September, 1910), was considered by many to be a step backward from the complexity of Modernism.

I was also amused how one of my cats, unused to hearing music in the house (since I rarely listen to music during times I'm composing), would walk around crying until I noticed that nothing really seemed to be bothering him: it was just as if he were singing along for his own enjoyment of it (perhaps like this ass's response to a passing trumpet player).

But Strauss's music has been on my mind – and in my mind's ear – a lot the past two weeks.

Granted, the only resolutions I've been dealing with during this time concern the harmonic direction of chords in the latest song I've been composing, my setting of Rilke's “To Music” which I began on New Year's Eve (you can read more about starting the process here).

Perhaps the big news, though, is this song cycle, rather than being called “Seven Songs About Inspiration and Creativity for Mezzo-Soprano and Piano,” now has a title. The other day, working on the final segment of the song, it occurred to me I still didn't have a functioning name for this piece when I looked down at my sketches and saw the word “air” which was supposed to coincide with a resolution to a shimmering D Major chord:

“Holiest farewell: / where the innermost surrounds us,
like the most practiced distance, / the other side of air.”

Arching an eyebrow in surprise, I realized that would make a great title.

And so now the song cycle is entitled “The Other Side of Air.”

The Rilke is the last of the songs to be composed though it's the fourth out of seven songs, the climactic mid-point (or keystone) of the cycle (or arch). It felt kind of weird, then, putting the double bar at the end of this final song yesterday, knowing not only is it not the last song (that was completed in October), but that I still have to write the first two-thirds of it (and, I should mention, realize the sketches for most of the other songs, too).

In writing most of the other songs, I rarely started working on them at the beginning: after making some kind of graph of the over-all structure, I usually started at the end and worked backwards, more or less, since I needed to know where things would be going rather than starting off and finding myself headed if not in the wrong direction, not in the best one (painting myself into a musical corner). Sometimes I wrote the piano accompaniment first or at least its harmonic structure before going back and overlaying the rest of it, working from the bottom up. A couple of them were written with the “lower” part backwards, phrase by phrase, and then the “top” part forwards.

But this one I knew was going to be a little unusual and for some reason, I began in the middle.

First of all, it started out as a “pastiche,” meaning something in imitation of something else. As I've mentioned before, from the very beginning I knew this song would be “like” the Composer's Aria in the prologue of Richard Strauss' opera Ariadne auf Naxos, his next project after Der Rosenkavalier. Not that I wanted it to sound like Strauss but I wanted it to do, for me, what many of the emotional things Strauss' ecstatic prayer to the power of music does for me. It's like saying, “I like that: how can I do it my way?”

The more I looked at the score – you can hear the aria here and download the vocal score here – the more I realized why not be a little more obvious in my imitation? If I'm using triads prolonged over several beats or measures – something I don't normally do in my typical style – why not use the same kind of accompanimental patterns Strauss (and other composers like Schubert) had used for generations?

The curious thing about Strauss' music – at least at this time in his career – is the chromatic flexibility of his lines even though the overall sound is far more “classical” than the operas he'd written before (notably Salome and Elektra, two scores in the vanguard of 20th Century dissonance and the dissolution of traditional tonality). But that classicism is often more in its texture and its dissonance is usually subsumed in the way his chords fluidly move from one to another.

After deleting over 850 words of technical detail for this post, I'll just say I saw more similarities between Strauss' sound and my own than I would have expected. And yet anyone listening to, say, the Violin Sonata I finished last year, or the rest of these songs I've been working on since then, would not likely think there's any similarity between what I'm writing now and what Richard Strauss had written a hundred years ago.

The biggest laugh of recognition – whether a “eureka” moment or LOL – happened when I discovered the first phrase of a flexible melodic line I'd improvised over a pulsating F major triad (what was to become the actual ending of the song) was made out of the same set of seven notes Strauss used at the beginning of the Composer's Aria which happened to include, as a subset, the same 6-notes that is my standard harmonic and melodic source. Not the same pitches (a different transposition), not in the same order and not even in the same relationship to Strauss' pulsating C Major triad: but the fact I had quite arbitrarily come up with something that close to Strauss – and in something that some people would say was an “atonal” context (the F Major triad aside) – just tickled the hell out of me!

Now, Strauss' aria is not quite three minutes of powerful, ecstatic singing. My song, with its longer text and structural proportions within the whole cycle, ends up being a little more than twice that long, so I didn't want to try running this musical homage full bore from beginning to end (considering the singer's as well as the listener's stamina).

The climax of the song (which also happens to be the climax of the entire song cycle) happens before the line “Holiest Farewell,” very similar to Strauss' line “Music is a holy art,” a moment of spiritual revelation. After experimenting with the ending, I decided to start at this climax whether my “hommage to Strauss' aria” would begin there or not: frankly, if I couldn't get this to work, there was no sense starting at the beginning, then reaching this point only to realize, “oh, snap! (scratch scratch scratch)”...

Since the tonal scheme of the whole song cycle – regardless of its chordal and harmonic structures – begins in D Minor and ends in D Major, the climax would be in A-flat (instead of tonic/dominant chords in traditional tonality, my triads tend to move either by whole steps or tritones: if one chord is tonic, its “dominant” is a tritone away; stepwise motion is reserved for half-cadences and the subdominant). While the other songs are “closed” in their tonality (beginning and ending in the same tonal area like most traditionally tonal works), this one, I'd decided, would be “progressive,” much the way Mahler or Nielsen had been doing with (or “to”) tonality in the late 19th Century, beginning in one key and ending in another. Subsidiary tonalities (like subdominant or mediant relations in 19th Century Romanticism or relative major or minor ones in the 18th Century) would be related by thirds: so my tonal scheme, over all, is d - F - A-flat - b - D (instead of D-G-A-D with maybe a side-step to b minor) – anyway, here I go again with the technical mumbo-jumbo. So I begin this song in B Minor, climax it in A-flat Major and end it in F Major (a tritone relation to the opening). In between, two important cadences are on D major and minor chords, so the whole scheme in this one song is b - d - A-flat - D - F which, in addition to being a smaller version of the whole cycle, is also a progression from “dark” to “light,” a tonal trick going back long before Mozart and Haydn.

So now I'm done with the song's ending but still have the first two-thirds of it to sort out: the ending gives me material I can use in the opening sections and chord progressions I can replicate leading toward the climax knowing it works, pushing it onward to the end. It's like having half the effort already done for me: just go back and fill it in (which, granted, is a very simplistic way of looking at it, but it saves me time sitting there, thinking, “oh, what would be nice, here?”).

It's interesting that each of the seven songs also “sounds” different – not so much in style but on its surface, the Rilke setting being the emotional high point of the cycle that begins with a fairly abstract Shakespeare sonnet (which is, really, a chaconne – how old-fashioned is that?) and ends with a rush of almost non-harmonic energy and urgency in Rumi's “Say 'Yes' Quickly!” The “Lazy Poet” is a barcarolle with its triadic arpeggios in the accompaniment but the call to Inspiration by Li-Po is crunchy, dissonant and almost completely non-triadic, an extreme contrast after the lushly emotional Rilke “To Music.” And yet the basic language behind it all is exactly the same – the same 6-note basis just used in different ways. Which is not very different, when you think about it, from how composers worked in the past two or three centuries to create a great deal of variety out of very similar material.

But meanwhile, the cats have begun chasing each other from one end of the house to the other, so perhaps in the midst of this chaos – if the news from the outside world isn't unnerving enough – I can find a little bit of peace to contemplate “the breathing of statues.”

Dr. Dick

On the 7th Day of Christmas: Starting a New Song

The other day, I completed a song that will open a song cycle setting seven different poems about creativity and inspiration (five of the other songs had already been completed). Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 100 is a frustrated poet's address to a long-absent muse. The cycle ends with Rumi's “Say 'Yes' Quickly,” a rush of inspiration rising to a flash of creative insight. At the midpoint of this as yet unnamed cycle is this poem by Rilke. Ever since I decided what this cycle's “theme” should be, I knew this would be the climax of the songs.

While other posts have been about choosing and translating the poems, this post is about my thoughts as I look at the poem one more time before sitting down to begin composing it. It will be the last of the seven songs to be completed.

“To Music”
by Rainer Maire Rilke

Music. The breathing of statues. Perhaps:
The silence of paintings. You – Language
where Languages end. You – Time
standing upright from the direction
of vanishing hearts.

Feelings, for whom? O you transformation
of feelings – into what? Into audible landscape.
You stranger: Music. You, grown out of us,
Heart-space. Our innermost self,
Transcending, driven outward.
Holiest farewell:
Where the innermost surrounds us
like the most practiced distance,
the other side of air:
pure,
immense
no longer habitable.

(translation by R. A. Strawser)
- - - - - - - -

How to turn this into music?! It already IS music!

But first, how to turn this into musical structure, as a place to begin? Where the Shakespeare sonnet (even the Lazy Poet's sonnet) was a strict form, Rilke's is purely rhapsodic (or at least the translation is – I see no discernible structure in the original German, either). What creates structure in this poem (which can be reflected in the music)?

On the surface, there are 17 lines: the Golden Section occurs, therefore, at Line 10½ which occurs between “Transcending” and “driven outward” - or, to round it out to the complete line, between Line 10 and Line 11 which means the words “Holiest farewell” would occur after the Golden Section. (However, mathematically, 17 x .617 = 10.489 so rounding it officially would be to 10, not 11, right? sigh...)

There are two “parts” - the first consists of 5 lines, the second of 12 – unfortunately almost but not quite a “mirrored” Golden Ratio (that would be the 2nd line of Part 2)... However, the proportions are comparable: I could still have the first part fit in the 1st segment (antecedent) of the song; the second part into the 2nd segment (consequent) after the “mirrored” Golden Section point. Considering the beauty of the line “Holiest farewell,” that could still occur at the “positive” Golden Section Point which, incidentally, should be the climactic Golden Section Point of the entire song cycle, considering the carefully planned proportions of all seven songs.

In the first (antecedent) segment, Music is apostrophized as “you” five times. The 2nd person pronoun does not appear in the second (consequent) segment at all.

In the first segment, Music is 'compared' to other artistic formats (for lack of a better term) – sculpture, painting, language. Then, from these 'disciplines' (keeping in mind the ancient Greek idea of art as 'technos'), we move to “vanishing hearts” and “feelings,” from the intellectual to the emotional inner-world and, with “audible landscape,” to nature.

In this second part of the poem, Music (the last “you”) is probably the product of creativity, the work-of-art, “grown out of... our innermost self” which transcends the artist (now “us” and “our”) as it is “driven outward” from us (toward others?) with a sense of a farewell.

The real climax of the poem, emotionally if not structurally, then, occurs between the last “you” and the first “us” – where creativity has converted our innermost feelings and thoughts into something that is created: a work of art. It hadn't occurred to me before, but this is probably why I sensed this poem, of all the ones I'd found and considered setting, needed to be placed as the central keystone of my arch of poems in this song cycle about creativity and inspiration.

If one considers another overlaid structural proportion, the halfway point of 17 lines would be 8.5 which places it at the midpoint of the line “You stranger: Music. || You, grown out of us,” where "you" (art) converts to "us" (artist). Rilke could just as easily have divided the lines with the break there. It is, perhaps, another example of superimposed simultaneities, a type of poetic counterpoint.

The music I hear in my head as I contemplate these lines is vague: I don't hear a specific melody though I know, given the emotional intensity of the text, it must be the most lyrical of the songs, the most dramatic. I don't recall the first time I'd read the poem: perhaps when I was teaching at UConn about 34 years ago. I know I didn't dwell on it to this extent but just remembered the beauty of it and its spiritual impact on me at the time. But ever since the spring when I started looking for song texts, the music I heard in the background was not the logical assumption – Schubert's “An die Musik” – but the “Composer's Aria” from the prologue of Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos. This “aural background” is more like what a movie director might put into his rough cut before the composer would provide the eventual filmscore: a 'place-holder' to give the best indication of what he was after.

Speaking of integrity, it was this aria I'd heard Joyce DiDonato sing as an encore to her recital in Philadelphia when John Clare and a friend drove down to hear her. As if the whole recital wasn't wonderful enough, the exhilaration I felt after the Strauss was like having discovered the Artist's National Anthem – as the young composer asks, “What, then, is Music?” and responds that “Music is a holy art.”

(This question is raised at 1:16 into this brief 2:22 video clip. Since the composer is a young man, he has become a 'trouser role,' sung by a woman-in-pants to approximate a youthful voice. Here is mezzo-soprano Tatyana Troyanos singing the aria from a Metropolitan TV Broadcast in 1988. An excerpt from the full production, the aria does not stop when it ends but immediately continues, unfortunately lopped off here).


This passionate outburst is the result of the news the young composer's new opera (an opera seria, at that, very old-fashioned even in the 18th Century time Strauss' opera is set and terribly highbrow), instead of just being performed on the same evening as a local comedy troupe's extremely lowbrow performance, must now be, somehow, combined with clowns: Zerbinetta, the saucy actress who leads the actors' troupe, has suggested that the composer's tragic heroine just needs a new boyfriend and all will be well.

First performed in 1912 – at a time when so many things were changing in the world of music: Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Debussy's Jeux, and when Strauss himself, a trailblazer with Salome and Elektra, has gone in the opposite direction, writing historical pastiches of Mozart and Handel – Strauss is exploring the collision between what we might call “highbrow” and “lowbrow.” How do we judge the quality of art – by its popularity? How do we define what “Art” is and what “Entertainment” is and must they be mutually exclusive?

It is not a new argument, friends of mine who rail against American Idol's process for determining success may be surprised to discover (if for no other reason, I am gratified to see Susan Boyle go on to become one of the most successful performers of 2009 despite the fact she lost the TV reality contest, “Britain's Got Talent”). This argument was being written about by Tinctoris around 1500, a Flemish composer and theorist who was trying to find ways of combining the two into a “middle ground,” a form of synthesis existing even before the 19th Century philosopher Hegel came up with the concept of the Dialectic.

(You can read more about it at this blog I've just happened upon this morning, The Taruskin Challenge: two grad students take on Richard Taruskin's immense six volume Oxford History of Western Music, summarizing it ten pages by ten pages with, kindly enough, weekly summaries that are well worth reading if you're looking for some comprehensive and comprehendible immersion. One could argue that, while comprehensive, Taruskin may not always generally be comprehendible, thus setting up its own argument between highbrow and lowbrow and the art of trying to find the middle).

So one of the issues I must deal with, getting back to Rilke's poem, is to find music of comparable intensity (if not beauty) to Strauss' Composer to match Rilke's words.

As a new decade begins, I must sit down and come to terms with all this – this poem's structure as well as its essence – to begin composing a song about creativity and integrity. The trick will be not to let my “inner editor/demon” (for most creative types, these are one-and-the-same) take control of this daunting challenge.

Wish me luck!

And, by the way - Happy New Decade!

Dr. Dick

Creativity & the Responsibility of Ones Integrity

A few days ago, I was about to chuck everything I'd written on the Shakespeare Sonnet, the song that opens my 'new' song-cycle. I wasn't sure why but it just seemed to be getting too complex. It wasn't that I didn't like it beyond what adjusting a few pitches could accomplish to make it sound better (if not “right”): it just seemed to be more complicated than... than what, I wasn't sure. Necessary?

But this is very close to what I was hearing in my head. Part of the process in writing it down is trying to figure out how to approximate what it was I was hearing internally. The fact that my piano technique and my performance experience are both highly limited makes this a difficult challenge with the considerable danger that the end result will be more limited by my limitations rather than a replication of what I wanted to get down on paper. If that were the case, borrowing a phrase from a pianistically challenged teacher of mine in college, everything I'd be writing these days would be about as interesting as “Jesus Loves Me” in whole notes.

After several hours battering against this particular wall – dealing with the Inner Editor (or Demon, which is usually just as applicable) – I stepped away from my desk and decided to ignore the argument. Instead, I curled up on the couch with a lapful of cats and thought – and, for a change, listened to some music, something I usually don't like doing when I'm composing.

When I showed one piece to a friend of mine, hoping for some constructive criticism about the technical demands, all he said was, “It's very difficult.” Yes, that I knew – I tend not to write easy stuff. It's difficult because, for one thing, it's not a familiar style for most of the performers I know around here. In many respects, it's also unrealistic because it would take more time to learn (being unfamiliar) and in the case of my orchestral work – like the Symphony – that involves rehearsal time which is economically prohibitive (considering a half-hour work will probably only get 45 minutes of rehearsal before its premiere).

So I write difficult music. I don't do this on purpose: that's what I hear.

As Elliott Carter said in any of several interviews I'd heard during the year before his 100th Birthday last year, “I don't put complexity into my music.” That's what he's hearing: the fact it's not the result of theoretical calculations that requires a slide-rule (as they said back in the days when slide-rules were forbidding aspects of a mathematical life) to appreciate (since most people thinking like this would not be able to say 'to enjoy'), is something most people who don't “get” his music can't understand. What he's hearing in his head is already complicated: trying to figure out how to make that sound palpable so other people can play and then hear it is something else. Because it's not easy to play or to comprehend is what makes it “complex.”

And it IS a matter of familiarity: I find myself frequently listening to his recent Cello Concerto, the Violin Concerto of 1990, the “Boston Concerto” (a concerto for orchestra written, obviously, for the Boston Symphony), all written since he'd turned 80, or the earlier “Variations for Orchestra” from the 1950s as well as the 3rd String Quartet (probably the gnarliest of his more gnarly compositions) and finding if I'm not exactly humming them later on, I can hear great swatches of them in my head and, when listening to them, anticipate what's going to happen next just the way I can listen to a well-known Beethoven symphony or late string quartet and know what's coming. I rather doubt somebody who might be unfamiliar with Beethoven's late quartets would be able to react much the same way during a first hearing.

The last time I was listening to Wagner's “Ring” with the score – courtesy of my collection of the Dover editions – it struck me how challenging this music must have been for singers dealing with the first performance. It was totally unlike anything they were familiar with and I'm not talking in terms of sheer stamina, the ability to stand there and bellow like a bull for four hours (as another teacher of mine once put it). This music is highly chromatic compared to the more conservative, largely diatonic style that was the going norm of the day, and most of the vocal lines (except for the really big moments) were not exactly what you'd call melodic or tuneful which is what most singers and audiences would be waiting for. No wonder they'd gone through a hundred and some rehearsals trying to get Tristan und Isolde ready for a performance and still had to cancel it!

Then something else occurred to me in thinking back to Wagner's “Ring” music: it's not exactly foursquare in its rhythms and meters, either: compared to The Rite of Spring of 1913 perhaps, but not compared to what most people were singing and listening to in the 1860s, before Brahms had finished his 1st Symphony which he would complete the same year Wagner finished the “Ring.”

People had the same sort of reactions to much of Beethoven's late music: too esoteric on the one hand, but too difficult to comprehend both as performers and listeners on the other. Technical challenges aside (given Beethoven's famous retort to the violinist complaining about his part in one of the late quartets, “What do I care for you and your damned fiddle?”), there are things going on in these works that are totally unlike anything anybody else was writing in the 1820s.

Most critics would excuse this by saying “well, he was deaf, you know,” as if that had any bearing on what he was hearing INSIDE his head. Beethoven could read music well enough so it's not like he couldn't figure out what the stuff sounded like he was writing down on paper. People who can't read music (by which I mean “see it on the page and hear it internally” the way people can read a book and hear someone inside their heads reading it aloud to them) find this difficult to imagine. I rather doubt Beethoven was throwing random pitches down on paper just to say “look, I've written a string quartet!”

My question, as far as being a composer is concerned, is “what am I hearing in my head?”

In most cases, I'm hearing – at least to start with – an “idea.” It's fairly abstract: I've decided to write a song cycle which means I need to find texts that will work with what I want to compose. Joyce Kilmer's “Trees” may be lovely to some people, but it's hardly appropriate for the music I want to write. Then I hear more specific details of what those words imply, musically – the constant slow spinning of the spider's web in Whitman's “Noiseless Patient Spider” or the incendiary rush of Rumi's “Say 'Yes' Quickly!”

What I 'hear' first is often more like an artist's sketch – a whoosh of the brush that suggests a shape that, only later, takes on something we might recognize. This especially became part of the process when I was composing music to lines of Li Po: I came up with musical gestures that reflected words like “shake,” “shout,” “ecstatic” or the last line, “I'll bend the river!” It was as if a germ had come to life, shaking and trembling the way an egg cell, once fertilized, turns into an embryo.

More often, at first it's more vague, more subtle and sometimes completely inscrutable.

In John Tusa's collection of interviews with artists about their creativity – On Creativity (Methuen 2004) – he asks Elliott Carter, “Does the word 'inspiration' figure in your work or is it something which is not a useful idea to describe what goes on when you compose?”

Carter replies, “If there is inspiration, it's not something that comes at the beginning of the piece. It comes in the course of writing it. The more I get into the piece the more the inspiration – well, I don't know exactly what inspiration means – but I would see more clearly and with more excitement and more interest new things... Once I've gotten focused on this thing, let's say the excitement of writing, it becomes more and more important as I write the piece. I think this is the way we would normally behave under other circumstances. If you were writing a letter or a novel, the more you get into the novel, the more clearly you see what you're trying to do and so forth.”

When I read that a few months ago, I realized how many years I had wasted waiting for inspiration to strike, coming to tell me what I should be writing and how it should be written. I sat and waited for inspiration and it never came. What I SHOULD have been doing was trying to figure out what I wanted to compose, then get it started even if I had no idea what was going to happen, knowing that, in the process of letting it settle in, it would (hopefully) come to me. It may not have worked or it may not have been what I was hoping for, but it would have been SOMEthing, rather than the silence I endured for over 15 years.

So, the Shakespeare Sonnet began with a few scribbled-down fanfare-like patterns. Even though it was the first song in the cycle, I also knew it was going to be one of the harder ones to compose (the legacy of Shakespeare aside): that's why I started with the easier ones, rather than getting hung up on details that might make me want to give up on it before it's even begun.

By the time I finally got around to the Shakespeare, then, the original scribblings had no bearing on what I now had in mind. First of all, I tried to focus on one layer of sonority at a time: the whole song is driven by its harmonic structure – the chaconne I'd written about the other day – so I needed to come up with that first. If that succeeded in doing what I wanted it to do, then I could overlay the vocal line on that. That is far easier than writing a melody and coming back to harmonize it (what if the implied harmony now doesn't have any logic within the song's structure?). I had a sense of how I wanted the vocal line to go – brush-strokes like “floating” and “stretched-out” as the poet waits to hear from his muse, then “pushing forward” as the text became more dramatic (especially considering the last line involves Time's “scythe and crooked knife”).

There were purely theoretical details to work out, similar to figuring out what chords I'd want to use if it were a traditionally tonal style. Then this had to be filtered through the purely emotional details: did it suit the nature of the words, the mood they were setting, the way the emotions of the text increased in tension or resolved?

(A friend on Facebook had just written "it's all about the brain." A friend commented that she felt "it's all about the heart." I added "one doesn't work without the other.")

One of the things I enjoy most about Elliott Carter's music is his “temporal counterpoint.” Rather than having musical lines moving independently against each other the way Bach might write a fugue, Carter often pits one tempo against another, writing it out in some kind of common denominator that allows performers to relate these independent strands of time.

It is the “perceived” tempo rather than the actual written tempo indicated by a metronome marking or the expression “allegro con molto.” One layer could seem to be very slow and sustained while another would be very fast and fitful. If you could isolate the one part, you might hear a certain number of fairly regular beats per minute, just as the other part may also have a certain number of fairly regular beats per minute. But putting the two together, it turns out they are not moving with the same fairly regular beats per minute. It's as if two people, playing two entirely different pieces, are being heard simultaneously. Writing that DOWN is what makes it look complex.

If Bach does it with quarter notes and 16th notes, we think nothing of it. If Carter does it with 5 dotted eighths against 7 quarter notes, we think “Whoa! How can you play that?!” He also shifts the real tempo which may turn one of those five dotted eights into the new quarter note pulse which gives it a new metronome marking of something like ♩= 87.5 and musicians throw up their hands and say “how can you HEAR such a thing!?” The trick is, if you're playing it at what seems to be a reasonable tempo to begin with and you follow the music accordingly, you're going to play it at ♩= 87.5 without having to think “now, how fast is ♩= 87.5?”

What prompted my Inner Editor/Demon to pop up into Full Destructive Mode the other day was realizing that, since my music moves along without any visceral relation to the foursquare meter of 4/4 at ♩= 60, I began to question how comfortable a singer would be who would have to be singing complex-looking rhythms that didn't have a DOWNbeat every four beats to hang on to. How comfortable would a pianist be to be playing a similar kind of line in one hand with a completely different and often conflicting kind of line in the other, without having a DOWNbeat every four beats to hang on to?

Was there a way I could simplify the music to make it easier?

I tried doing that and decided “that's not my music.” And while people could argue I should be writing what the audience wants to hear or what would be easier for the performers to play, I realized it was not the music I wanted to write. And if I couldn't take the responsibility of holding on to my own integrity, then I shouldn't be trying to compose music in the first place.

And once I got myself through that conundrum, the piece was finished a couple of days later, the way I wanted to.

- Dr. Dick

On the 3rd Day of Christmas

Most of Christmas Day had been spent working – not in the sense of being 'gainfully employed' in the days since I've found myself retired, but composing.

Since springtime, I've been working on a set of seven songs for mezzo and piano, setting poems about inspiration and creativity. There are two left to finish – the opening setting of Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 100 and Rilke's “To Music” which forms the centerpiece of the cycle. The other songs have been finished if not finalized over the intervening eight months (composing, for me, is a slow process).

After about ten days' work outlining the song, work on the Shakespeare setting had been put aside November 1st when I took a month off to write 64,000+ words of a novel for “National Novel Writing Month,” my musical parody of Dan Brown's “The Lost Symbol.” While I didn't finish “The Lost Chord,” the further adventures of Dr. Dick attempting to unlock the mysteries of the severed ear found by the fountain at Lincoln Center, once the goal of 50,000 words by the end of 30 days had been met, I decided to get back to work on the interrupted song. Further delays happened when I spent a week writing “Beethoven's Christmas Carol,” another parody (this one based on Charles Dickens' holiday classic): at least I managed to finish it, posting it between Beethoven's Birthday and Christmas Eve.

But on Christmas Day, I managed to “finish” what I call the “first pass at the rough draft.” Notes are in place for the whole song but not yet finalized: there are some minor details to settle and the whole thing must be 'checked' before I can feel it's complete. This aspect of it is a matter of time and concentration but I also want to wait a bit to let it sink in and till I feel it would be a good day: a bad day would be merely wasted time and might do more damage than good, especially if the “inner editor” gains control and scuttles the whole process. Compared to the months it took to write some of the other songs, it's taken only about four weeks to sketch this one, about six minutes' worth of music – but it would only take a few seconds to destroy it.

The song had quickly turned into something more complex that just setting words to music. The idea of a sonnet – especially given the legacy of Shakespeare's language – required something structurally comparable in its music. Since the text is about a poet petitioning an errant muse to come inspire him again (the story, in general, of my life), the idea of a chaconne seemed appropriate: the repetition of a basic harmonic pattern with variations over and around it mirrors the poet's obsession with his errant muse.

I had done something like this last year, spending months working on a chaconne that became the central movement of the Violin Sonata I'd been toying at over the period of a few years. I've never liked the idea of the old-fashioned chaconnes – think Pachelbel's Canon, for better or worse – where the sameness becomes boring in its regularity and repetition if the challenge is not met by the genius of someone like Bach or Purcell. Plus, in writing in a style that is neither entirely tonal nor entirely atonal (despite its use of all twelve notes which does not make it 'twelve-tone' music nor atonal in the strictest sense), the idea of repeating the same chord progressions over and over again – even for a song under six minutes long – was of no interest to me. My harmonic idea – the same basic pattern I'd used in the Violin Sonata's chaconne – would modulate through various “tonalities” before returning to the opening tonality at the end: it thus becomes a “progressive” chaconne rather than a static one.

Without getting into the theoretical details (meaning I just cut 423 words of technical jargon which still hadn't gotten through explaining them), let's say I had planned on three sonic layers.

The first was this harmonic structure on an over-all scope, within which I placed the sixteen statements of this basic chordal pattern, each one cadencing on a different chord (and tonal level) to avoid the sameness of repetition (then, too, some of the chord progressions vary from statement to statement so not every one is exactly the same, like a sequence of one set of chords repeated over and over again spiraling around on different pitch levels).

The second was the vocal line, setting Shakespeare's text of three quatrains and a final couplet (one of the standard sonnet structures). I placed this over the harmonic layer in such a way that the four different “text units” overlap the sixteen harmonic units, creating a greater sense of continuity: ultimately, this makes the music sound less choppy, subdivided by the frequent restatements of the basic chord progression.

The third, though, was going to be tricky. Thinking of the chord progression as basic “left-hand territory,” the “right-hand melody” in the piano would need to be counterpoint to the vocal line and a bit more in the background except at those points where the voice takes a breather.

Now, I'd taken the first layer and superimposed it on a structural grid divided by the Golden Section so rather than moving in the standard operating procedure of parallel phrase lengths – usually 8 measures answered by 8 measures ad infinitem – the phrases (determined by the placement of the chords) seems to move in constantly changing patterns of long beats and short beats, since the Golden Section divides a line or space not in half but according to the fibonacci series, the climax occurring at .617 rather than at the halfway point or the ¾ point or whatever. This gives the impression that the “tempo” of each statement is slightly different: the first one is the longest and they gradually become shorter, so it sounds like, over time, the tempo is accelerating.

When applied to the lines of text, this makes it sound like each quatrain starts out with longer, floating notes that, as the tension increases, become shorter and more dramatic, also giving it a sense that each verse is constantly getting faster (thus, building tension). But it moves at a slightly different rate of speed than the piano's chords move which also creates a kind of tension before the different phrases resolve together. The melody does not move, chunk by chunk, overtop neatly placed chords: both layers are then completely fluid.

So this third layer needed to be somewhere in between and yet still be fluid. This is what counterpoint is all about – the art of writing flowing lines that work independently of each other and are recognizable as complete on their own yet, when combined, operate as a harmonic unit within the larger scope of things. This is the way Bach worked – in fact, it's the way most Renaissance composers worked, too: only the surface language has changed over the centuries.

Just focusing on the piano part, since my “harmonic layer” consisted of triads (three-note chords), the other layer would be more easily differentiated if it's just a single note. That way, you would know which line is which.

Then, around the time of his 101st birthday, I was listening to one of Elliott Carter's piano pieces, the first of Two Diversions (written when he was 90) which consists of one layer of two notes (diads) moving along at a constant rate of speed while the other line (single notes) changes speed constantly.

(You can watch a studio read-through of the piece here: the pianist, Marc Hannaford, sets a metronome for the beat-pulse of the diad, not the written beats you'd see in the score which is constantly changing tempo and meter: check the 'more info' link to see how these notes are grouped together metrically even though the music sounds like it's regular half-notes!)

Anyway, this gave me an idea, though one far simpler to realize than Carter's Diversion.

Without differentiating the registers they'd be played in and calling the harmonic material “left-hand” and the linear material “right-hand” (regardless of which hand will actually end up playing them), I started thinking of this new layer as one starting out very fast and gradually becoming slower toward the end, contrasting with the harmonic layer which starts out very slow and gradually becomes faster.

So now, all layers are mapped out from beginning to end: the next step in the process is going back to make sure how well they interrelate, to fix rhythms, determine the registers for many of the passages (again, to avoid boredom, I don't want all of the harmonic layer to be limited to the “left-hand” register so at some points they'll cross and exchange locations). I also need to determine textures and articulations so they're not all the same with just block chords in the harmony or steady ticking quarter-note-like pulses (regardless of the actual rhythmic values) in the linear layer.

That's something to start working on as soon as I'm done posting this...

Dr. Dick

On the 2nd Day of Christmas

There were two doves sitting in the Japanese Maple waiting for me to put seed out in the bird-feeder this morning. It is pouring-down rain right now – better than most of what has been saturating much of the country the past few days – and in the low-40s: most of the snow is gone now, though yesterday it was at least a white Christmas if not a pretty one. The ice-storm everyone had dreaded didn't seem to materialize but with the temperatures hovering just above freezing, I was not one to venture out onto the roads, traffic or no traffic. It was a very quiet day spent with the cats who enjoyed playing with their new catnip toys; in the spirit of the holiday, three of them gave me furballs in return...

Not one to watch much TV – though too much in the evenings, lately – I decided to watch two movies: a version of Babes in Toyland with Laurel and Hardy (I decided to pass on the one scheduled for later in the day with Drew Barrymore and Keanu Reeves) and “The Bishop's Wife” with Cary Grant as an angel answering the prayers of a bemused bishop, David Niven. I found myself identifying with the old professor played by Monty Woolley. For more modern fare, I had listened to David Sedaris' “Santaland Diaries” the day before. But otherwise, not much.

And so, now that the pre-holiday orgy of consumerism is over, I can retire my “Bah! Humbug” scarf for another year. It is has been something I've worn every year since a friend gave it to me back in the early-'80s. Usually, I get it out for Black Friday but with the desperation involved in this year's pre-Thanksgiving Day Christmas sales, I was wearing it about a week earlier than usual.

It's not Christmas that bothers me: it's the way it is celebrated. There are two Christmases: the religious holiday and its spirit of “Peace on Earth” and the secular holiday which is all about the Accumulation of Stuff and, beyond the idea that three kings once brought presents to a baby in Bethlehem, has very little to do with the other.I find it ironic that, as a not very religious person, the materialism of the holiday as its observed offends me.

While some Christians would complain that saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is the secularists' attempt to destroy Christmas, I rarely see anything religious in all the advertising for all the sales that dominates the life-style of many Americans for at least one month out of the year, beyond wishing people a “Merry Christmas” as they urge them to come spend their money in these difficult times in order to keep the economy afloat.

As a sign of these desperate times, a snowstorm the weekend before Christmas could be accused of nearly destroying the American Economy's delicate recovery because people couldn't get out to do their shopping. Late on Christmas Eve, I was still getting e-mail urging me to shop on-line even as midnight was approaching: didn't it matter it wouldn't be there for anyone to open on Christmas Morning?

Bah! Humbug...

After getting back from having dinner with some friends on Christmas Eve, I was just about to drop off to sleep around 2am when I heard this great roar and the house shook with a clanging that lasted a few seconds. The Ghost of Christmas Past, the first of my visitors this night? No, it was the water softener going into its monthly cycling, a little louder than usual in the stillness of the night.

For me, it is music that gets me in the holiday spirit, whether it's the old popular Christmas songs that all seem to be from the '40s and '50s but still dominate (if not saturate) the atmosphere today, or those classical settings of sacred texts pertaining to the actual Christmas holiday.

It had only begun with the Susquehanna Chorale's concert which I attended at Market Square Church on the 18th – especially with the Fantasia on Christmas Carols by Ralph Vaughan Williams, based on British carols not as familiar to us today (which is why they were favorites of RVW's) and the 'signature piece' which ends each of their Christmas concerts, Malcolm Sargent's arrangement of “Silent Night” (you can listen to another performance of it here, beginning about 1:07 into the clip). In between, it would hardly matter what they sang because I knew it would be sung well even if the idea of me participating in the audience sing-along carols reminded me of Saturday Night Live's “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” sung by Kermit the Frog and Robert de Niro.

On Christmas Eve, while making an ill-timed run to the bank and the grocery store and then out to some friends for dinner, I listened to the Waverly Consort's medieval Christmas pageant which I'd seen twice and have listened to often.

Since I'd spent much of Christmas Day composing (more on that, later), I didn't want to settle down to listen to any more music until after I was finished for the day, so it was late evening by the time I got around to it, listening to only two pieces.

The first was one I hadn't really listened to before: Danish composer Poul Ruder's “Christmas Gospel,” a 1994 textless orchestral work, may not have been suitable for playing on the radio because it sounds more like the soundtrack for a science fiction film rather than a short silent film of the Christmas Story. It's only 10 minutes long and the program book marks the timing cues where each aspect of the story begins: some of them are only a few seconds long and they do little more than set a cinematographic mood whether it's the arrival of Mary and Joseph at the stable, the labor contractions (oddly, one of the longer sections of the score) which become more dissonant until resolving in a radiant major chord with the birth of Christ, or the part that is often overlooked in modern-day tellings, Herod's Massacre of the Innocents.

And while it doesn't sound very "Christmassy" and did in fact sound more like a science-fiction filmscore, I figured to some the story of the Virgin Birth surrounded by angels may indeed seem like science-fiction: which could explain why someone as rational and logical as Thomas Jefferson would edit the Mysteries out of his copy of the Bible including the magic of the nativity with its angels, focusing on the humanistic elements of the story – this from one of this country's  founding fathers whose viewpoint is often overlooked when today's religious discussions argue about returning to the faith on which this country was founded.

The major work for my evening's playlist was going to be Ralph Vaughan Williams' telling of the same story but with Biblical texts interspersed with poetic meditations (much like Bach would have done in his cantatas, actually). Entitled “Hodie” (from the text, “Hodie Christus natus est,” This Day Christ Is Born), it's a vital hour-long work he completed it in 1954 when he was 81 (you can read more about it, here; you can also listen to clips of a recent Naxos recording here.)

For me, this is as much a holiday tradition for me as Handel's “Messiah” is for others, not that one's likely to hear a live performance of it around here.

Before going to bed, another tradition: listening to Dylan Thomas reading his “A Child's Christmas in Wales.”

And then I slept.

Beethoven's Christmas Carol: The Last Installment

In this fourth and final installment of "Beethoven's Christmas Carol," a parody of Charles Dickens' holiday classic (which began here), Beethoven receives more than just a visit from the third spirit that Schindler's Ghost had told him he would receive.

CHAPTER FOUR: GHOST the THIRD

He had hardly found himself back in bed before the bells began to chime again and the room became even chillier than it had been when the other spirits approached. It was not so much that something approached him this time as the walls of his room dissolved only to be replaced by a blackness so intense, there seemed to be no substance anywhere about him, the absence of matter, only void.

And then, something - he could barely tell what - began to form at the foot of the bed.

“Spirit that I can barely see, you swirl of misty, fading light, you are the spirit of Christmas Future?” He felt he should raise his arms as if to protect himself but from what, he had no idea.

After a pause with no response, Beethoven felt himself rising out of his bed. “Where are you taking me? Where are we going?”

This third spirit had not materialized into any recognizable shape but appeared to be merely light – not a bright light, really, but a swirling essence of pale, adumbrated light, gesticulating slowly and moving as if not moving at all, suspended in place as well as time, yet expanding and contracting like breath itself on a wintry day. But still, they seemed to be wafting through space, the infinite darkness of unimaginable emptiness combined with an unbearable lightness of merely being.

“Spirit, you take me where? If your fellow spirits have shown me the past and the present, are you, whatever you are, taking me into the future?”

The light swelled and glowed briefly in response. Then came a voice, a disembodied distant voice echoing down from the heavens beyond. Barely audible, more sensed than heard, it unwound slowly, as if after centuries of disuse it has found it difficult to speak.

“Yes, Ludwig.”

They traveled slowly, silently for several minutes – longer, it seemed – wrapped in coruscating mists.

Ahead, Beethoven saw a faint glow. They were headed indirectly toward it, now from the right, then from the left but as they approached, coming in closer, they took a more centerly route. The city – a once large city, judging from the expanse of it – was largely in ruins. Only the churches showed any sign of past prosperity.

There was snow on the ground, not much: perhaps a recent storm had left behind only a few inches, enough to coat the ground and fill the streets and sidewalks. The people he could see on the streets were not rushing about as he was used to seeing. They moved precisely as if regimented yet kept in step without appearing so.

“They all seem to be headed in one direction,” Beethoven noted.

But as they floated over the city, he saw people coming gradually out of the darkened, run-down buildings, all of them headed toward a central point. That point was the only welcoming looking building in the vicinity.

The streets, though snowy, were dark. There were no lights, certainly no Christmas decorations, at least not as he had become used to them. Perhaps it was early morning before the stores opened, but then he saw there were no stores – or rather, few stores: the ones he noticed were not ostentatious, simply designed with simple signs and clear-cut names, offering practical wares and necessities.

And he heard music – familiar Christmas music quietly wafting from the brightly welcoming building, simple arrangements of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night” but also others, less interesting and not at all familiar. Above all, he noticed in them a single quality – consistency.

“Where are we, Spirit?” Beethoven was almost afraid to ask.

Slowly the pale, diffuse, long-strained voice unfolded the story.

“This,” it began, “is what is left of New York City after the Revolution.”

“But,” Beethoven protested, “the Revolution was hundreds of years ago: I remember reading about it when I was a young man just getting started in Vienna!”

“Not... that... Revolution.” The spirit proceeded to summarize the years since enough people, afraid of how quickly their world began to change, seized control of government and society to pass laws imposing their views on their fellow citizens. It was all done legally just as, in the past, a new President would be elected in a reaction against the last and then set about dismantling everything that had been changed.

“Yes,” Beethoven nodded, the constant yo-yo effect between the Right and the Left or now as it was trendily described, the Red and the Blue. “It was so tiring, listening to all the bickering: made me long for the days of my deafness...” He sighed. “But that is all part of – what do they call it, 'evolution'? Surely, there must be some way of finding a more balancing consensus!”

“Ah, fortunately the authorities below are unable to hear you, Ludwig, for you have just said one of the Banned Words. You could be arrested for merely speaking it, now.”

“What, 'evolution'?”

“No – 'consensus.'” That other word he'd mentioned no longer existed: like many other words, no one understood it any more since it had no meaning.

Beethoven was silent for a while. They floated over a dilapidated court house with its nativity scene on the front steps. They floated past Carnegie Hall, dark and ruined with great holes in its roof. Lincoln Center had been gutted by numerous fires and bombs where weeds and scruffy saplings grew around the long-silenced fountain, struggling through the blocks of pavement like a wasted field through which the winds of change now whistled ominously. People had been, for many years now, piling their trash there. The place stank.

“The great concert halls, desecrated! A shambles! An outrage!” He felt himself trembling, whether from the cold or the realization, he could not be sure.

“Do not exercise your spirit too much, Ludwig. It will do you no good. They cannot hear you, these people below. And if they could, they would ignore you – or, worse, report you to the authorities. Dissent is not allowed.” The voice sounded sinister in tone despite its seemingly disembodied state.

“That's absurd! What did they fight the French Revolution for, or their own American Revolution or even the Bolshevik Revolution before it went wrong?”

“One person's wrong is another person's right, Ludwig. And it depends on what is left, how well things should survive.”

“One thing I have learned in this world is that all things are temporary: Emperors and dictators fell in the past. Styles change only to come back again in some other guise. It may take time.”

“Perhaps, Ludwig. Perhaps...”

In the generation after the Palin Presidency, things had indeed changed, certainly, but it seemed a very long time to expect any change to revert back to the past he knew. Here, the freedoms they had fought for had gradually been redefined. They had, now, the spirit explained, the fundamental freedom of religion on which, it was often said, this country had been founded, the freedom to worship the one true God but only in the way the government allowed, the freedom from having to deal with dissenting opinions.

It was not just in religion that this great new freedom was being exercised. It manifest itself in all realms of society, of life in general. Here, among the ruins of a once excessive society, people today lived in apparent contentedness knowing their souls were well looked after by a God-fearing government who instilled that fear in their citizens to abide the laws. There were no longer divisions in the churches between Catholic or Protestant – these and their petty disagreements have all been subsumed (the spirit chewed over this word with a mixture of fear and delight) into the O.T.C. – the One True Church – and its political party, the S.O.M.

“The S.O.M.?”

“Yes, similar to Eve, created out of a bone, an ulna from the right wing of the G.O.P.”

“Does it... stand for anything in particular?” Beethoven was always leery of trendy acronyms and internet-speak with its fatuous abbreviations drove him to distraction when he read his e-mails, especially from people who should know better.

“Yes, it does: it stood originally for the Sanctity of Marriage party. Later, it became more inclusive of other issues to become 'Save Our Morality.' Those people who once joked that it meant 'Serve One Master' no longer exist.”

“Exist? What do you mean...?”

“I mean,” the spirit replied laconically, “they no longer EXIST. You can do the math.”

“But where did they go? What did they do with them?”

“By 'they,' do you mean 'They' who govern or 'they' who are governed? Your questioning will only get you in trouble, Ludwig. By law, you can use an indefinite number of exclamation points, but question marks must be used sparingly. It fosters an attitude with which the government is uncomfortable.”

“Ach! This music is terrible,” Beethoven blurted out, covering his ears. It pervaded everything, wafting over the streets in its innocuous blandness.

“It is not a question of music – or art – being terrible but serving its function. Art, such as it is these days, has a pre-determined role in society. Where as before it had been reduced to being merely entertainment, now it was meant to calm the emotions, to foster a sense of serenity – in short, to control peoples' behavior.”

“Soviet socialist realism! Bah, hogwash!”

“No, Ludwig, it's not the Soviet Union reborn. It is its own.”

Beethoven felt himself shiver.

“I don't even hear anything from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker! I thought that would never lose its popularity!”

“Given its consumerist frivolity, the ballet of which you speak no longer exists. In fact, none of your friend's music does. It has all been banned.”

“Banned!? What the hell for? I mean – sorry – whatever for?”

“Because Tchaikovsky was, they say, a... homosexual.” The spirit whispered this last word in a conspiratorial tone. Apparently it was not a banned word but one said in only a certain tone of voice which, Beethoven thought, the spirit must have captured just right for the implications were most chilling.

“But what does that have to with whether his music is good or not?” Beethoven was beginning to wonder about his quotient of question marks and was trying to think how he could word them so as not to deplete his meager allowance.

The spirit made a deep sigh and seemed to consume itself inwards before expanding again with his cautiously worded reply.

“You see, Ludwig, after the S.O.M. defeated laws and amendments in all those states that tried to promote what was known as 'Same-Sex Marriage,' their followers continued to elect their cohorts to state and local governments and finally took over the Congress and the Presidency. And soon they managed to institute other laws to protect the sanctity of marriage.”

“How could they... uhm, and they did this by... er...” Beethoven could not find the proper wording to make it a declarative statement, so he left his thought unfinished.

First, the spirit began to explain, after building the case on the biblical definition of 'marriage,' the newly reconstituted Congress with its now partisan majority began to pass other faith-based laws, initially with the support of many of the churches who had been so opposed to the Same-Sex Marriage bills and referendums. Once the abortion laws were repealed, there was the new law that made divorce illegal. There was a good deal of contention about this initially but the moderate American public no longer had the support of liberals who had been trounced in the elections and the gay population who saw no reason to stand up against something that didn't concern them: if you couldn't marry, what was the sense of exerting yourself over something else you couldn't do? They chose to repay disinterest in kind.

“The S.O.M.'s motto was 'We Tell You the Truth.'” The spirit veered sharply off to the right and Beethoven found himself scrambling to keep up with it.

“Truth? Whose truth!” Beethoven was incensed. Had he not written a great symphony to a hero only to destroy the dedication to a single man who became a tyrant fortified – deluded, even – by his sense of power? Didn't that single non-musical act turn it into a work of universal understanding about the spirit of the hero that lives within us all?

Eventually, the spirit dolefully continued, the S.O.M., supported by a population expanded by the Quiverfull Movement's success, eliminated the opposition. People who once considered themselves mildly conservative now found themselves branded as liberals by comparison.

“As for the real liberals, well...” the spirit explained, its already weak voice trailing off into the ether. Most of them were reduced to voices crying in the wilderness, the spirit explained, where they escaped to avoid persecution, those that couldn't escape to Canada or Australia or who managed to find some room in the crowded corners of Europe's numerous refugee camps.

Pointing to a barricaded entrance to a subway, the spirit added, “in New York, most of those who stayed went underground. In time, they will all die out completely – if they haven't already.” It shrugged its metaphorical shoulders, two soft undulations of light as if to say “but what could be done about it?”

Soon, the spirit continued to explain, laws were passed to make adultery a criminal offense, sending most of the politicians and many of the preachers to languish in prison along with thousands of fine, otherwise upstanding citizens and public figures. The prisons were too small and too few to hold them all, so they converted the department stores that now stood empty in the shopping malls – the ones that had gone out of business after the economy finally collapsed – or the old libraries which stood empty after most of the books had been burned. “There, these suffering souls are guarded by unmarried menopausal women wearing black robes and hoods who make the memory of those stern, ruler-wielding nuns in Catholic schools across America seem as benign as the Welcome Wagon from days of yore.”

Men who ran the government – since women were now barred from teaching and preaching much less running for public office – enacted more laws concerning virginity and marriage. Seat Belt laws were soon replaced by Chastity Belt laws. Public stoning was brought back as the execution of choice for crimes against morality.

But these were only part of a program to return society to its old moral foundations. Laws against eating lobster and shrimp, for example, may have ruined the fishing industry but, the spirit mentioned under its faint breath, “there was still a healthy underground business in some locations, especially in the remoter parts of Maine, where you could go to a 'speakeasy' to get a good lobster dinner, if you knew the right password – and had enough money.”

“But so many artists, so many musicians and composers are gay. How could art survive in America without them?”

A sweep of a pale, thin arm – a single ray of dessicated light – over the scene below them was his only answer. For a long time, government support for the arts had become a luxury, not a necessity. Who cared if children grew up never hearing an orchestra or acting in a play, painting a picture or singing in a choir? Or even reading the great novels of the past, much less writing one? Now, art has almost ceased unless it had a religious function.

“But, certainly, my music is still played and loved, here,” Beethoven said hoarsely, barely confident that he had now found a declarative statement he could feel fairly sure of.

There was a pause and the swirl of light faded as they descended closer to the ground, passing effortlessly through the roof of a large church. A large group of people, all dressed rather shabbily and similarly, sat there during Morning Prayers on their way to work, the first of three services they were required to attend each day.

Beethoven turned up his hearing aid so he could understand what they were singing. The tune sounded familiar enough.

Faithful, faithful, we surround Thee,
God who gives us everything;
Saving us from Hell's damnation,
God protects the wedding ring.
Banish sin from our surroundings,
Help us understand You well.
Take the evil unbelievers,
Let them burn and rot in Hell.

Beethoven hummed along, proud to know his tune had been chosen as the National Anthem for the European Union. But soon he broke off in utter confusion. “Why,” he declared in amazement, “that's my 'Ode to Joy,' but how could they sing such words to music inspired by love and universal brotherhood?”

“Your music is 'out-of-fashion,' now, Ludwig.” The spirit did not sound terribly concerned about this, despite the look of shock on his guest's face. “Too emotional, too grand, too demanding of the intellect without any true religious merit. Too... controversial!”

Beethoven stood there with his mouth agape.

“And your friend, Mr. Tchaikovsky,” the spirit asked simply: “where do you think he is, now?”

“Probably back at Stravinsky's Tavern sitting at the back end of the bar, I would imagine,” Beethoven grumpled indignantly. “At least, that's where he was earlier tonight, gloating over attending yet another performance of that blasted ballet of his...” Then he thought better of his smugness and shrugged his shoulders. “No, I guess he wouldn't be, then, would he? Not any more...”

“No, Ludwig. There are no bars and night clubs any more in all of America,” the spirit hissed. “They've all been rooted out with all the other Palaces of Sinful Excess.”

Beethoven could feel a rising dislike for this spirit but perhaps it was only for what he was telling him. Even though he could no longer feel the brutal intensity of the cold, he wished this visitation would soon end so he could return to the warmth and comfort of his old familiar rooms.

“And the children with their looks of joy and wonder, dancing to his music, Ludwig: what became of them, now?” The spirit took him away, rising slowly through the brightly lit church windows into the dim streets beyond. “Or to those who'd listened to your own music, whether struggling to play the Moonlight Sonata or listening to your Ninth Symphony...? What's become of them, now?”

“Now?” He thought back on the serious, single-minded faces of those he'd seen singing his melody without expression. “There is no joy in it. They have forgotten.” Suddenly, he felt very sad, his anger changed to dejection. “They have forgotten what art can do.”

A tear formed on his cheek and quickly froze. He wanted to bury his face in his hands out of shame, out of pity.

“Tell me, spirit, if you can speak of this,” Ludwig wanted to know. “These visions you have shown me this cold winter night: are they destined to become fact or may things still be changed?”

The light began to twist slowly and fade off into the distance with a soft moan barely audible over the wind that swirled around them.

“No, don't go, don't leave me here, spirit, alone in this inhospitable world!” Beethoven cried out in fear, clicking his heels together. He closed his eyes and began to chant, “There's no place like home! There's no place like home!”

CHAPTER FIVE: HOW IT ENDS

When he opened his eyes, he was practically fettered by the giant tangles he had made of his bedspread. It was a bright sunny morning and the snow outside his windows sparkled as he looked out on the familiar sight. Craning his neck to the far left side of the bedroom window, with great relief he could see the sign that pointed out his favorite haunt.

“Yes, it's still there. I can still read it! Stravinsky's Tavern hasn't been closed down!”

Jumping for joy in an odd little dance, Beethoven then turned on the television set and heard yet another car commercial with the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy tinkling away in the background. Usually, this would have just enraged him and he would have promptly taken out his hearing aids in disgust.

Instead, he thought “what a magical sonority Old Peter has created here – how delicious to have found an instrument that could make such wonderful sounds as that! Oh, to be alive today to be able to hear it!”

He ran to the now empty living room and threw open the window, seeing a young boy building an awkward snowman on the sidewalk below. Knowing the geezer-stooge who lived there was a cantankerous old man, the boy immediately dove for protection behind his snowman.

“You there, young man!” He recognized him as one of the neighbor's sons.

The boy looked around to see whom he was addressing.

“Yes, you, I mean. What day is it? Is it Christmas Day?”

Dumbfounded, the boy nodded that it was.

“Wait there, will you?” And Beethoven shut the window and sat down at his little writing desk beside his old piano. He scribbled out a quick note, stuffed it in a hastily addressed envelope and returned to the window, throwing it down toward the boy.

“Could you deliver this invitation to Tchaikovsky's house over on Floribunda Lane? Hah, I forgot to ask you, 'Please.' It's not far – oh, and wait...” He reached into the wallet he kept in the desk drawer and pulled out some crisp fresh twenties he'd gotten from the MAC-machine last week, and threw them down, too.

“Go to Da Ponte's Market down on the Square and reserve that great roast goose they'd had in their window yesterday. And have them deliver it here this afternoon, along with a plate of stuffing and vegetables – and some cookies – oh, and some gingerbread men,too (hah hah)... And, let's see.... a tray full of sugar plums and... ah!” He pulled out another twenty and threw it down to the gape-mouthed boy. “A plate of oysters, if you please – make sure they're fresh, will you? Would you do that for me, please? I would so appreciate it – and keep the change... no wait,” he stopped to calculate and threw another twenty after the last one, “that should be enough to leave some change for you. Merry... Merry...” His lips struggled to form the word. “Merry Chrillfimm... Merry...”

The boy looked up at him, holding the money in one mittened hand and the envelope in the other. “Merry Christmas, you mean, sir?”

“Yes, yes, that's it. Ha! Merry Christmas! Yes, indeed - that is exactly what I mean: Merry Christmas! Ha ha!”

And as the boy ran off in great amazement, Beethoven pulled the window snuggly shut and began to prepare the shabby little table for his impending guests. He knew there wasn't much space – not even chairs – so he would make it a buffet where people could stand around and talk. He threw a faded old oriental rug over the piano in case he needed any extra space for platters or dishes – at least for the oysters!

He went on-line and e-mailed additional invitations for his afternoon reception, apologizing for the spontaneity of it all. “Let's see,” he said clicking through his address book, “the Mendelssohns (both Felix and Fanny), there's Handel, Brahms... there's Mozart, Stravinsky and... well, he'd said they already signed it, but I'll include the Schumanns, of course, and the Mahlers and the Wagners, too... oh, and Bruckner, he'll do anything Wagner does... and Chopin: certainly he must sign even if he can't bring Georges Sand with him today... Who else...? Ah, I wonder if Britten is in town this weekend? I imagine Old Bach will be far too busy with all of his family, but... well, ask them, anyway.” And when he was done, he clicked on send, then began to search for a small Pennsylvania college he had remembered the second spirit mentioning what seemed like only moments ago.

Meanwhile, across town, there was even more amazement in the wake of the boy's hurried dash, stopping first at Da Ponte's where old Lorenzo smiled not only at his request but at the money he had offered him; then, moments later, at Tchaikovsky's house on the East End of town.

Bob Davidov thanked the boy and took the envelope, its address barely legible, out to the kitchen where his uncle and their friend Ravel were wrestling with the Christmas turkey, arguing about whether the stuffing should be cooked inside the bird or in a separate bowl, entendrés aside.

“Uncle Peter, this just arrived.” He handed it to him with a quizzical expression. “I've no idea who it's from.”

“Why, with ink stains like that, it can only be from one person. Old Beethoven himself! I wonder what is so important he sends a note around on Christmas morning?” He dried his hands off on a dishtowel and carefully opened the seal. Ravel watched as if he half expected it to explode in confetti. The handwriting was difficult enough to read, as it was:

“MY DEAR PYOTR ILICH,

WOULD YOU, YOUR NEPHEW AND ALL YOUR GUESTS TODAY STOP BY AFTER DINNER FOR A RECEPTION AT MY PLACE?

AND PLEASE BRING YOUR PETITION WITH YOU AS I WISH TO SIGN IT AND CONVINCE OTHER FRIENDS TO DO SO, TOO.

MERRY CHRISTMAS,
L. van BEETHOVEN”

“As I almost live and barely breathe,” Tchaikovsky said, stunned, handing the note to Ravel who promptly brushed his hands off on his apron before receiving the unexpected letter.

Nephew Bob laughed the loudest as Ravel joined in with them.

“I never expected a Christmas present like this,” Tchaikovsky said. And they danced around the kitchen, humming the “Ode to Joy.”

All across town, as people checked their e-mail, there was great surprise to be receiving something from the one they all called Maestro.

The Mendelssohns, the Schumanns and Brahms had all made plans to get together for some chamber music after dinner but they quickly changed them, agreeing it could wait until after Beethoven's reception.

Chopin opened his mail and immediately forwarded it to Georges with the heading, “You must join me! Please? I could never face him alone!”

Bruckner crossed himself and quickly sent a reply, “I would be most honored to attend.”

Britten was also surprised and with an arched eyebrow, called out to the kitchen, “Peter, come look at this!”

That's when Beethoven found what he was looking for. There, in the college's list of students was a junior composition major named Timothy... and only one piano major named Benjamin. “It must be them,” he said to the empty room. He knew they would not be able to open any e-mails from him since mortals beyond the town of Coalton were not able to see or hear these great composers anymore in human form, but he knew the message could be delivered in other ways, by a technology far more ancient than anything the internet had ever dreamed of – inspiration!

So he wrote to him anyway, to Tim, and told him to persevere when reality got him down: if he had doubts, to remember the anguish other composers have had to deal with and overcome. Oh, he knew it sounded all very trite and predictable, the musical equivalent of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, but didn't young musicians everywhere find inspiration in Beethoven's struggles to create his music? If he could only touch this young man, now, and give him some extra courage to face his demons – he was sure a man of 20 with a father like that would have demons, after all. But if he could find inspiration with the one he loved, with this pianist named Ben, who was he to deny him the courage to create what he knew in his brain and felt in his heart?

He sent the e-mail.

And as he did so, Beethoven heard a little ding: he knew, every time you hear a bell, an angel gets his wings.

Later that day, in another small Pennsylvania town, when he stood up from the table after his father had started yelling at him again, Tim walked into his room, slammed the door and looked for his iPod. He chose to listen to his favorite piece – his mother had often said to him “if sound files could wear out like my old LPs did, you'd wear that one out, for sure” – and settled back to find not escape but strength to go on, in the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

When he got to the variation with the solo quartet, he hummed along with the words he knew by heart in German:

Wem der große Wurf gelungen,
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein;
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!

(Whoever has had the great fortune
To be a friend's friend,
Whoever has won a devoted wife,
Join in our jubilation!
Indeed, whoever can call even one soul
His own on this earth!)

That was when the idea came to him. It had nothing to do with Beethoven or his Ode to Joy: it just came to him out of the blue, mid-phrase, one of those unexpected epiphanies. Tim quickly jotted it down and knew right away it was something he could use for that piano concerto he wanted to compose for Ben. “Yes!” he said to himself, pumping his arm: “it's begun!”

As the men from Da Ponte's arrived with boxes of steaming food – Da Ponte himself carried the oysters – Beethoven felt a warmth he had not felt for well over a century. He put out plates and glasses, silverware and things like this he hadn't used for even longer, humming some of his own music, set to some of Schiller's words,

Join in our jubilation!
Indeed, whoever can call even one soul
His own on this earth!

The doorbell rang and Beethoven went down to greet his first guests. “Merry Christmas,” he practiced on the steps, “Merry Christmas! God bless us, every one!”

*** THE END ***

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Dr. Dick
© 2009