Ah, Springtime!

Sunday was just such a beautiful sunny day. It’s days like that that make this my favorite time of year: cloudy, rainy, chilly, damp days like Saturday, not so much.

There have been Mays in the past where we might have 4 or 5 days with sunlight, the rest if not outright rain, then always the grim possibility of rain. April Showers bring May Showers... and still, by August, we’ll be in a drought. It happened several times back in the ‘80s, not something new with all the political buzz-words of today’s ecological scene: the effects of Global Warming did not begin just when somebody coined the term.

Unfortunately, most of the flowers I enjoy have already faded in between the April Showers. The mounds of forsythia in my back yard were brilliant yellow for about two weeks. My neighbor’s magnolia made it worth while to stand on my drive-way and take deep breaths to savor its aroma, always more striking late at night when I arrived home from work, but barely for a week. The neighbor behind me has a flowering cherry tree that was brilliantly pink for the past week, but yesterday morning much of that corner of my yard was covered with what looked like pink snow as the petals faded and dropped.

This is the time of year, too late now, I think of trees and shrubs I’d like to plant in the yards – Redbud, Mock-Orange, another pink dogwood, perhaps. I look out and see the leaves coming out on my Japanese Red Maple and wonder how much longer I’ll have it – when we planted it in 1960 or so, we were told it might live 25-30 years. This year, there are a number of seedlings that survived the mild winter here in Central Pennsylvania, so I will transplant them to a bare patch of dirt that swings around behind the parent tree and the Kousa Dogwood (a shapely oriental variety with ivory-colored flowers that come out later in the season: it’s leaves, the first to show, are just now beginning to develop) so that perhaps, when the time comes, there will be other trees there to replace them.

When I was a kid and, like any teen-ager, detested the weekly ritual of grass-mowing, I joked that, if it were my house, I would plant trees all over the place, kill the grass and turn it into a woodland setting. My mother and I seriously thought of getting something called “Meadow-in-a-Can” and spreading the seeds out across the dry, sun-baked front yard where the summer grass was green only over the septic tank. It seemed such a waste of water to refresh the dandelions and plantains that proved far hardier than grass. A can of such seeds apparently was introduced in 1982. I remember, in the early-80s, walking past a house on one of the back country roads where a friend of mine had once lived but was now apparently empty, and seeing the whole back yard ablaze with cosmos, coneflowers, milkweed and numerous other colorful wildflowers. (Here's a forum about the topic, posted by someone living in New Jersey: some interesting things to consider.)

I was delighted, last week, to discover a New York Times article about a guy who hasn't mowed his yard since the Kennedy Administration - 45 years ago! He is an advocate of moss instead of grass, and moss is something I have in a number of places around my back-porch. There are areas where I don't need it, so I'm going to take a shovel and scoop it off, then transplant it to the Great Big Bare Spot between the maple and the kousa: perhaps it will take hold, there? I do not water my grass (it needs to be seriously reseeded and fertilized, anyway) but this article says a moss lawn “needs ‘a fraction, one percent or less’ of the 10,000 gallons (beyond rainwater) that the E.P.A. estimates a suburban grass lawn drinks annually.”

Of course, the soil here is barely that – mostly shale and in dry spells, back-breaking to dig in. I planted a little garden last spring but what didn't die for lack of drainage, the rabbits mowed down - all the seedlings, the ferns pruned back to the point there was nothing higher than an inch or two. They apparently dislike bleeding heart, either the old fashioned variety which is thriving all over the place, or the pure-white variation of the standard form blooming under the maple (see photo). The pachysandra that I added where it had once flourished has held its own if not actually started spreading but I notice other patches nearby are now dying out. The new clematis, replacing one that had died after 40-some years of inattention, seems to be thriving, so far. The old one out front with its light and lacy lilac flowers is back for another year (it must be about as old) and covered with buds. The lone surviving red peony, from the original stock my grandmother had planted in her first garden in 1919, has finally sprouted but this time with no buds.

Yesterday, I put the flamingo out – Floyd, a genuine cast-iron 1955-era Florida souvenir, not your (sniff) plastic, corner supermarket variety – and now the bench is back under the tree. There hasn’t been time to go running around to the usual nurseries – some of which would involve too much gas, as fuel hits $3.59-3.64 here – and at this point I’m not sure This Old Back, still a bother, is up for a lot of digging and planting (though, as usual, a friend will be doing most of that for me again this year). Perhaps later today, if I can lug a few planters and pots around with the help of my little red wagon (a hand-me-down from my brother who got it new, like, 65 years ago), I will plant the moon glory seeds (night blooming morning-glory-like vines with brilliant white flowers 6" across) for the back porch.

One of the things on the agenda is making daily use of the treadmill, currently housed in a corner of the living room and looking out on the back yard. It’s great to put bird feed out in the planter and watch them flock to it – the bag of seed lists 10-12 different birds that would be attracted to it and I get 8 or 9 of them, though the most frequent visitors, not mentioned by the seed company, are the squirrels (not even flying squirrels). The chipmunk (or chipnun, as the case may be) has resurfaced after a long hibernation, making use of the luxurious abode created by Low Pax Louie under the one euonymous and behind the iris. Louie himself has yet to be seen, not even surfacing on February 2nd, but his handiwork was much in evidence last month after he opened up the holes I’d filled shut and soaked until the plug became hard as adobe. It’s amazing how much used cat litter you can pour down a groundhog hole...

Later this morning, then, I hope to spend a little time sitting on the bench, reading, back permitting – though the book I’m currently trying to put a dent in, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, may not be the easiest spring reading material, now past the introductory chapters (a literary schlog in the best of times) of this fictional biography of an imaginary composer and now into the section how music came to be his calling. (At the moment, there is his first music teacher, a native of Ephrata PA with its description of a musical system that evolved around the cloisters there!) This will be my third time starting the book: I'd read the whole thing when I lived in New York City in the late-'70s, and started to read James Woods’ new translation when it first came out but, due to one thing and another, put it aside more out of time than interest. We'll see what happens this time around: since it was such a major facet of Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise, it seemed appropriate to reaquaint myself with its details.

Yesterday, I also managed to catch two of the year-old kittens on the blue recliner: Baker had been firmly settled into the chair but Guy decided he liked that spot, too, since he curls up their frequently. Little brothers can be so annoying...

There are other things I need to tend to, also, vying for my time: having finished the short score draft of Evidence of Things Not Seen, I started the full score of the song cycle yesterday before I decided it was too beautiful outside to work inside: then it occurred to me, my old copying desk, a draft-table I’d bought at a Connecticut tag sale in 1975 for $5 is still in the basement. Maybe I can set it up in the sequestered portion of the back porch and work there?

Dr. Dick

The Birthday Party

Without references to Harold Pinter, I'd just like to point out the kittens, who share a birthday with William Shakespeare and Sergei Prokofiev, turned a year old on Wednesday.

The first picture I took of them, five hours after they were born, shows five little wet lumps of fur - three orange, one off-white and one black - which the mother, Frieda Farrell, was safely hiding behind the toilet in "the blue bathroom." She was a stray cat I'd been feeding for quite some time, since the summer of '06 when she and her brother Fred were not yet a year old herself. I had only caught her two days earlier, knowing she was very pregnant. How soon she would deliver was a big concern, since I'd moved out of my mid-town apartment two weeks earlier and didn't want to leave her there. She'd already had one litter (she had disappeared when she was very pregnant sometime between Labor Day '06, appropriately, then returned in early March '07), and I had no idea how they fared as street-born cats born before the onset of winter in a neighborhood with lots of dogs on the loose, not to mention cars whizzing up 2nd Street.

Of all the other cats I've had in my life, I've never known exactly when they were born. These guys arrived by 9am on 4/23/2007: when I went to check on Frieda that morning after I crawled out of bed, I heard the mewing and whimpering of tiny little voices and knew the moment had arrived.

The three orange tabbies, like their mother and otherwise indistinguishable, were named Abel, Baker and Charlie. Of the hundreds of photos I took over the next several months, I look at them wonder if they're properly labeled. Looking at some of them now, I'm thinking "No, that's not Abel, that's Charlie." And then another picture labeled Abel is really Baker... The white one turned out to be a cream tabby originally named Blanche but, upon discovering his true gender is now named Guy Noir; the black one turned out to be a tortoise-shell (the only female in the litter), so she is now named Blanche Noir.

Here they are (right) at 1 day old.

They grew up rapidly. I rather hope they're done growing, since two months ago, they surpassed the older adults in size if not weight. But then their father, I'm guessing, was the big hulking tomcat, a black bruiser who used to hang around my back yard a lot, a galoot I used to call "Mr. Big," so they may have inherited his size genes.

When I lived in New York City, a couple who lived down the hall from me invited me and my two cats - Chaumleigh and Roquefort - to their cat's birthday party, complete with gifts and party hats. Knowing how territorial Chaumleigh was, I took Roquefort who immediately turned and ran down the hall (the wrong way) so, ultimately, we declined the invitation and I just presented the birthday cat with a couple of catnip mice from his neighbor cats. It just seemed a little odd, seeing a cat with a cone-shaped hat strapped around his chin, but hey...

So we didn't have that kind of party. But then with nine cats of my own, who needed guests?

It began at 9am with an attempt to take some pictures and then distributing the gifts: a collection of catnip mice, a small catnip pillow (quickly disembowled of its stuffing), a twisted orange mouse that looks like it's made from felt, and two twine-covered balls with rattles inside which proved the most successful, complete with spidery-looking appendages that allow for easy transport. Within a half hour, these had all disappeared into various Bermuda Triangles throughout the house.

That evening, I brought home a "cat tree" (more accurately a "cat shrub") from Petsmart and they were thoroughly underwhelmed. They love their scratching post, often knocking it over when they attack it with leaps from yards away. They love the little two-story units I'd gotten. This one - eh... I've seen Charlie roosting on the top but the little tunnel (invisible in this side view) has gone largely unoccupied. In this picture, Charlie is trying to make sure it's all his. However, Uncle Max seemed quite taken with it but otherwise I would say it was a flop. Kids...

Yesterday was Take Your Sons & Daughters to Work Day at WITF. It was very tempting, but I thought there was enough havoc already in place without introducing five year-old kittens into the mix. Of course, at one year, now, they're hardly kittens anymore, are they!

So here are the obligatory kids pics.

This is Frieda with Charlie, Baker & Guy, taken when they're 3 weeks old.

Right is Charlie taking the first step outside the Blue Bathroom, getting ready to explore the big new world of the Blue Bedroom, just two days shy of 1 month. Charlie has always been the most inquisitive of the kittens, kind of the leader of the pack which didn't always sit well with Abel.

Blanche, the tortoise-shell, turns out to be difficult to photograph. Even looking at her, her markings are so dark around the face, it's hard to tell she has a nose and a mouth! She's a sweetheart and loves to curl up on my lap when I try to read. She's still the smallest of the bunch, but loves to curl up on the bed with me, usually behind the crook of my knees. The first photograph was taken when she was about 6 weeks old. The second one was taken on her birthday.

Abel is the "yellowest" of the three orange tabbies, though when he races by, depending on the lighting, it's still pretty difficult to tell him from Baker, who's a little more reddish. Their personalities sometimes are easier identifiers: Abel tends not to like being petted and Baker is just really shy. He usually was hanging out with Frieda who kept herself hidden much of the day. It took ten months before I could even pet the mother, by the way: she'd always run away from me whenever I'd approach her, even though she'll sit there and watch me play with her kittens. Now, I can pet her frequently, even give her the occasional belly rub, but I've never been able to hold her for more than a few seconds before she turns into a windmill, reminiscent of that night a year ago when I enticed her into my old apartment's kitchen and snagged her on her second orbit...

None of them have white on their paws, but Charlie's the only one who doesn't have a white patch on the chin. In order to tell Abel from Baker, I have to look at the patterns of lines and dots on the cheek: there's a wedge and Baker has two dots under the wedge - Abel's dots are inside the wedge. Try and figure that out when they're flying around... The picture of Abel on the left was taken when he was about 3 weeks old. The one of him sleeping on the pile of white and purple afghans was taken the morning of their birthday this week.

When I was trying to find a home for two of them -- I'd decided I wanted to keep Guy & Blanche from the day they were born but then Charlie was just so endearing -- the only real prospect was a stranger who sounded kind of suspicious. Friends of mine who'd been interested in one of them changed their minds -- too many cats already; not sure this is a good time to be taking in a kitten and so forth -- but I'd put a noticce up at my vets and got a call. There were just too many warning signs, going from wanting to take one kitten to volunteering to take all of my cats if I wanted to find homes for them, too. It just sounded like they were recruiting for a medical lab or something. By then, for any number of reasons, I'd decided I would keep all five of them.

Baker (seen left at 3 weeks) was originally The Shy One, so I was surprised when he was about six months old that he'd start coming up to me, begging to be petted. He finally became more sociable. He's still the quietest of the batch (which is saying a great deal) and the least trouble -- the pissing contest between Charlie and Abel was pretty intense, there, for a while, and Guy may have been the official wire chewer, but Baker was really, on his own terms, quite the love. Here he is (right), stretched out on the old Victrola at the one living room window, looking very regal on his birthday, though he certainly doesn't act like a prima donna.

Guy Noir, the cream tabby, lives up to his namesake. He is the most inquisitive, befitting a detective, though we had a few problems when he appointed himself the official Chewer of Wires. Thanks to him, I have no sound on my computer, having yet to replace the two sets of speakers he'd chewed through and disabled. I have a bag full of odds and ends of cords - an old answering machine, the cell-phone recharger, a connecting cable for a DVD player, a headset, various power packs for the old computer - and I have several cables around the house that are protected by strings of cardboard paper towel tubes or are wrapped in presumably cat-proof duct-tape. He seems to have outgrown this, finally.

He also likes to go under-cover: he's one of the few cats I've ever had who likes crawling under the bedspread. Many a night I'll feel him sneak down behind me and curl up tight against me though it's not as much fun to be awakened in the middle of the night when he decides to try out his accupuncture skills on my back.

Charlie, meanwhile, is the one with the craving for plastic bags and wrappings: I've had other cats like this, who could chew their way through the handles of a grocery bag in 3 seconds flat. He also has this annoying habit of taking the toys over to the water dishes and soaking them, then dragging them around as if he's trying to wet-mop the kitchen floor. This is rarely successful and not much fun to discover in the dark in your bare-feet. Perhaps his father, Mr. Big, was part raccoon. He is also the loudest purrer of the litter. He can curl up beside me on the bed at night and suddenly it's like having a vibrating bed. Whenever I sit down on the couch, he hops up beside me and flops up against me, smiling contentedly and sounding like an outboard motor (the photo on the left, taken when he was 6 weeks old, is labeled "Charlie_HearMePurr").

I just walked out into the vestibule and found him playing with one of the new toys from Wednesday, discovering the joys of the little tunnel - at least for a few minutes. Then he hopped down and stretched out on the flagstone and yawned.

In the past six months, we've been through their teen-aged years: according to one of the many cat books I have, 1 year old is the equivalent of a human who's 18. Pretty soon, they'll be looking into colleges: next year, at this time, they will be 25 in human years, on the sliding scale that is more complex, befitting a cat, than the idea of Dog Years since dogs only have to learn to multiply by 7. But they do grow up fast.

- Dr. Dick

Echoes of Music Past

In the past few months, aside from not blogging a lot, I’ve had the opportunity of coming back into contact with two works that were very influential to my creative upbringing, works that I didn’t really hear for a long time, now. As if rediscovering these works, I also kept hearing things that I’d written “under their influence,” so to speak, in some cases music of mine I’d completely forgotten about.

This past weekend, I saw what is still one of my favorite operas, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, though I can’t say I’ve sat down to listen to it (much less see it) in probably a couple decades. I had discovered it through the recording at the Harrisburg Public Library when I was in high school, after my music teacher had introduced us to opera through an experience that involved first of all familiarizing yourself with the plot, listening to a recording with the score (good for a musician) and then seeing the opera, in this case in a film.

Before that, I can’t say I cared much for opera, having tried to deal with the Met Opera radio broadcasts but feeling totally lost because of the lack of the visual element and usually missing the plot synopsis given before each act by the radio host. So after being grounded a little better with my “first opera,” Puccini’s La Boheme, a bunch of us drove down to Philadelphia to see the Met on tour with Puccini’s Turandot (seeing Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli battling it out in the “Anything you can sing, I can sing higher” duet) and then Bizet’s Carmen (one of the operas I remember giving up on the year before).

I remember also reading about Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron which was actually the first opera recording I bought, the old Columbia LP conducted by Hans Rosbaud (I believe this was of a 1954 live radio broadcast performance, released in 1957 which I picked up in 1966 or so). Not familiar with Schoenberg’s language at the time, I found it a dramatic disappointment though not necessarily a musical one. It wasn’t until I started digging into Britten’s first opera that I discovered – aside from, aha! English, which I can understand – something that combined dramatic sense with appropriate music. That then allowed me to get the gist of what other composers were doing in their own languages and musical styles.

A few points struck me, while watching Peter Grimes on the big movie-screen in the Met’s HD broadcast at the local cinema:

In the first scene, the inquest investigating the death of fisherman Grimes' apprentice, the opening woodwinds clucking away personify the citizens of the Borough gossiping back and forth (as Nico Muhly described it in his essay on Grimes at the Met’s website, “like insects bothering a cow”). The questions to the witness are placed in straightforward recitative which Grimes then proceeds to answer at a slower tempo, interrupted by the lawyer continuing in his original tempo.

This musically represented the difference between Grimes’ own personality as opposed to the people of the Borough, the outsider versus his community, better than any statement that could have been sung by some character telling us “Grimes is an outsider, here: we don’t like him.” This is what writers are advised when they begin to write prose: show, don't tell.

Britten had used this device one other time to accentuate the separation between Grimes and the Borough. During the big storm, everyone has gathered at Auntie’s, the local pub, but after Grimes makes an unexpected entrance, someone tries to revive their spirits with a song, “Old Joe has gone fishing,” a round which Grimes then obliterates when he joins in, singing in a completely different key and slower tempo. On the surface, it’s as if somebody who can’t carry a tune or find a beat in a bushel basket wants to sing in the choir, but the division between protagonist and antagonist (depending on your viewpoint who is who) is musically clear.

It’s interesting that this is reversed in a climactic scene in the second act when Grimes comes to take his new apprentice out fishing on Sunday and his meeting with the schoolteacher Ellen Orford, one of two people in the Borough who wants to help Grimes, turns into a confrontation when Grimes’ temper flares: while fragments of this scene float disjointedly through Grimes’ “mad scene” in the final act, the turn-around actually comes in a sequence of lines where Ellen is asking Peter if they were wrong to, essentially, try rehabilitating him in the community’s eye: she sings long, lyrical lines, but he cuts her off with short declamatory counterattacks in a faster tempo - the reverse of the trial scene.

How many times had I used this musical trick? I thought it was my later discovery of Ives’ music and subsequently Elliott Carter’s that my interest in “contrapuntal time” evolved from, the idea of strands of music sounding as if they’re in different tempos. But perhaps it all began here, with Peter Grimes and his outsider-ness?

But this “trick” was not necessarily Britten’s own: he got it from Verdi – pick almost any ensemble in a Verdi opera where characters are defined by their independent rhythms and melodic lines – and also from Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, most obviously in the disparate worlds colliding in the opening of the third act, when the lively dance-music from inside Auntie’s pub intrudes on the slow, chilling night music of the moonlit sea interlude. Which, in turn, one could say came from Mozart’s three dance bands in Don Giovanni, each one a different dance and meter.

When I was in college, I began setting Ibsen’s drama “Ghosts” as an opera – for some reason, I had re-titled it “Through a Small Glass Darkly” until I decided I liked that title better for my next opera, and since I never got around to writing the second half of the Ibsen, it didn’t really matter. But there were several fingerprints from Peter Grimes that showed up: even though the self-righteous carpenter Engstrand is only one person, not a whole borough-ful of them, I used Britten’s nattering woodwinds and similar passages to represent the pettiness of characters like the Lawyer Swallow or the Rector Horace Adams to develop his musical characterization. In the discussion between the officious Pastor Manders and the free-thinking and strong-willed Mrs. Alving, I used differences of “perceived tempo” (keeping the actual beat the same but having it sound as if one was moving in a slower tempo, simply by expanding the pulse) to point up their differences of opinion.

Curiously, it was one of these scenes that I had copied out and actually sent to Britten in 1971 when I was thinking about emigrating to England and hoping perhaps to study with him or work for him (in much the same way he wanted to study with Alban Berg in Vienna). I got a very nice reply back from him which remains one of my treasured possessions: he was very kind in advising me how difficult it was in England to make a living as a musician though he would make every effort to meet me and offer what help he could, but “you must remember how very busy I am,” not saying “yes” but not saying “no” either. (At the time, he was perhaps already working on Death in Venice and, little did I know, the next year putting off heart surgery for fear of not being able to finish what would become his last opera: I keep the letter in my vocal score of that opera.) So here I was, fresh out of college and either going to Eastman or to England, but I wasn’t strong enough, money aside, for the unknown adventures that awaited me if I decided on England. Whatever may have happened to me there, it would be a different me sitting here now, and that game of “what if?” was something occasionally playing through my mind while watching Britten’s opera.

There was another moment that sent me into a swoon of recognition: when the men of the Borough leave to go to Grimes’ hut in Act II, Ellen Orford, Auntie and her two nieces (who usually sing as one voice just a little apart) are left behind to sing a quartet of rapturous beauty, full of freely interweaving, high arching lines with close harmonies producing delicious dissonances that resolve amazingly. The emotional impact of this music – which I had forgotten about – was something that I imitated in my Requiem: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (which was also hugely influenced by his War Requiem), in passages in another opera, The Trojan Women, and frequently in instrumental music as well, in sections of the more recent String Quartet, the Symphony and now the climax of Evidence of Things Not Seen which I’m the process of realizing from sketches, where it’s more the solo voice sliding through the instrumental harmonies and rubbing up against them before their resolution. In fact, thinking about this piece, I would describe the voice part, singing against standard triads in the orchestra, as singing practically every pitch except those in that triad, something Britten often did not only in Grimes but also in Death in Venice. And so the influence persists and this continuity from the past (in fact, following a long hiatus, connecting my present with my past) was comforting.

These cribbings might be more integrated into my own style now, more successfully than some imitations I had committed in my earlier works when, infatuated with this piece or that piece, I went less for the detail and more for the overall effect, writing something that sounded a lot like Vaughan Williams (I had fallen in love with his 5th Symphony) or Bernstein (mostly his Jeremiah Symphony and the Chichester Psalms) or, in a more short-lived sense, Stravinsky (primarily Les Noces).

Sitting at the Kimmel Center for a concert by to the Philadelphia Orchestra – I had gone to hear Jennifer Higdon’s “The Singing Rooms” – I confronted another one of these past voices while listening to them play Bernstein’s first symphony, his “Jeremiah Symphony.” This is a work I also had not heard much in the past 20 years, maybe once or twice but not really “listened” to the way one sits in a concert to actively involve yourself in the music. Though I can’t recall too many specific moments where it cropped up in my own music – beyond, at least, the Requiem – I recalled several unfinished works or projects where I borrowed this bit or patterned something after that bit. I think mostly what I was recalling was how much I was listening to this piece then, back when I was in high school and college. But the elements I cribbed or that inspired me to write certain passages in the Requiem, oddly enough, where those more exotic details that define Bernstein’s sound as a Jewish composer – scales and turns of phrase borrowed from Jewish cantillation, the liturgical chant of the Temple, and dance rhythms (especially in the middle movement, “Profanation”) that prove Bernstein was Jewish and Saint-Saens, in his Bachannal from Samson & Delilah, was not. Not being Jewish myself, I had to laugh a little at this borrowing which has nothing to do with my own heritage, wondering how this made my own music sound.

Listening the other day to an interview with Elliott Carter in which he talked about his early influences from – surprisingly, I think, for most listeners – jazz, I suddenly realized I can hear this translation that continues to resonate in the music he’s writing now, getting ready for his 100th Birthday this December. And I wonder if a composer ever escapes these early influences or how he (or she) transforms them (or not) into what becomes an original voice?

Evidence the Piece Is Done

There’s a kind of exhilaration when a composer finishes a new piece, mixed with a sense of farewell laced with the realization of course the piece is never really done. In my case, the song cycle “Evidence of Things Not Seen” has only reached the conclusion of the First Step: the sketches are done. There’s still a lot more to go and the next process needs to be started immediately before it gets side-tracked: realizing the sketches into a more final form that gets it closer to the possibility of being performed.

Thinking back over the months it took to gestate, then the five months and eleven days it took to compose it, it’s not easy realizing how much time it’s taken to create about fifteen minutes of music. When I think there were times when I didn’t feel the urge to write or got bogged down in the mechanics of a passage that was taking forever to figure out as well as quite a few times I just couldn’t write even if I wanted to (my work schedule, getting hit by a flu-bug), I still have more time to compose than some of my friends do. Talking with a former-fellow-student from my Eastman days, now teaching at a major American music school, I mentioned “I can only write a few hours every day” rather than really concentrate on it for five or six hours like one might for a ‘real job.’ He paused and said with a kind of awe in his voice, “You write every day?” Then I realized, of course, he can’t. Because he’s teaching, sitting on committees, dealing with departmental business and academic bureaucracies, the only time he might have to concentrate on composition is during the summer. Suddenly I felt much better...

There is nothing like reality, though, to bring one back to the land of the living. Having put the pen down after saying “that’s it,” I realized – sniff sniff – the time was well overdue to clean the cats’ litterboxes. And so we continue.

Some of the mechanics of the process this time were slightly different: I did not put “the double bar at the end of piece,” thereby proving the work is now complete. I did that on September 13th, 2007, when I started it. After working out some pre-compositional details (before I realized it would become part of a piece, much less this piece), I wrote the ending first. So I knew where it was going which then gave me the courage to start from the beginning.

It’s designed as seven biblical texts laid into an on-going set of what I initially thought might become variations. This particular aspect of it didn’t materialize quite so directly, but the “variation process” is still there in the way the work unfolds. But the mirror element of the structure was implicit in that beginning and ending (or vice-versa) so I found myself, rather than starting at the opening and working my way to the end, going back and forth to wrote the parallel segments of the mirror: after the closing epilogue or postlude and the opening prologue or prelude, I went from the second text to the sixth text, the third text to the fifth text, the interlude between the third and the fourth texts to the parallel interlude between the fourth and the fifth texts before writing the central panel of this arch-form (the keystone, if you want), the fourth text.

While it’s all parallel in that sense, it’s not exactly perfectly symmetrical like a “well-rounded” archway because my dividing point is based on the Golden Section. That means the climax of the piece, which happens in the fourth song, is not quite two-thirds of the way through, not half-way through. It would make for a lop-sided arch but it’s not a visual arch that I’m going for. The proportions may not exactly be obvious to a listener. It’s only in hindsight you might be conscious of the passing of time and how you’d react to its various structural divisions along the way.

The process, then, was working from both ends toward the ‘middle.’ The goal had been to finish this fourth text – setting the lines beginning “Let not your heart be troubled” – on February 23rd. This was neither arbitrary nor having anything to do with deadlines or impending performances. Since it was setting some of my mother’s favorite Bible verses and the work came together, starting to take its final shape, on what would’ve been my mother’s 88th birthday, I wanted to finish it on the first anniversary of her death.

When I finished the one interlude (between texts 3 and 4), I should’ve gone immediately on to finish the parallel interlude (the one between texts 4 and 5). I had sketched out everything except these “cascading tissues of sound” that are part of the background texture when I thought, considering how time-consuming it can be to come up with hundreds of notes in 30 seconds’ time, if I can’t finish this element of it, I should move directly to the central text. I can finish that before returning to the purely mechanical process left to go in the interlude.

Technically, then, the real creative work was done as of February 18th when I completed the passage “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” The remaining five days could be spent on this background layer: if I didn’t reach the goal, it would be less of a deal. It was understood this could still be one of those things that can be “filled in” in the process of realizing the sketches which doesn’t seem to be as much rationalization as you’d think.

Of course, I knew what would happen. I either needed long hours of schlogging to work my way through this passage or several days with fewer hours so as not to become so mentally fatigued from working on 145 pitches distributed among three voices over a span of about eight measures! Things bogged down and the concentration would not hold. By the time Saturday the 23rd rolled around, I needed just another hour or two to finish the last few notes, less than a second of music. But it was all down on paper by noon on the 24th: not too bad, considering.

The problem is, now that I’ve finished writing a piece, I’ve started thinking about “the next piece.” I don’t want to start concentrating on anything else now except realizing these sketches into a final full score. But the three violin-and-piano pieces need to be finished, left hanging since December of 2006, and I’ve been toying with a series of shorter piano pieces, like a set of preludes or something. Back in January, I got some ideas for a work for string sextet but nothing that couldn’t wait till later: I may take a few days, jot down some ideas and a few plans to put aside, something I could come back to in a couple years, for all that matters. There are also ideas for another symphony but I need to hold off on that since it’s too unrealistic right now, especially given the one I finished two years ago is still sitting on my shelf: again, jot down some thoughts and maybe it’ll gestate on its own till I have time or reason to come back to it. (And did I mention that novel I still want to write?? Sheesh...)

It is kind of exciting, needless to say, to have ideas in my head at all, considering how many years of my life there was nothing, a span of perhaps sixteen years where I wrote nothing and had no plans. So it does make me feel a little better, maybe even a little more secure about being a composer: self-confidence is a delicate commodity, amidst all the issues that one has to deal with.

But for the moment, after a busy week at work (101 hours over a two-week pay-period and that includes a day off!), there are other things that I need to get caught up on. One of which – sniff sniff – has to be done before company walks through my door... but then, that’s an on-going chore when you share a house with lots of cats.

- Dr. Dick

The Elusive Right Note & the F-sharp

Over the years, I’ve frequently told how, in my lessons with Samuel Adler, my teacher at Eastman, he’d play through something I’d brought in and say basically “good, that’s good – that should be an F-sharp, though,” pointing to one note somewhere in the harmony or maybe in the melodic line. I’d play back through it with an F-sharp there and, damn, it really did sound better! I’d look at him and ask “why?” and he’d shrug his shoulders and smile.

It was always an F-sharp.

There was never a passage where he’d say “That should be a D-natural” or “try a G-sharp there.” (Pat Long, who also studied with Adler and is now teaching composition at Susquehanna University, said his note was a B-flat. Always a B-flat.)

For the next ten years or so, whenever a new piece would start, the opening pitch would often be an F-sharp. Many of my pieces began with a single note spun out over several measures, usually changing instrumental colors until it would unfold or spring out into some gesture that would then become the material for the piece. But they always started and then usually came back to end on an F-sharp. I didn’t know why. It’s like, that was my pitch.

I figured Scriabin had his favorite key – F-sharp Major – which for him had various mystical properties: this was perhaps my way of tapping into the same emotional potential.

Then, for some reason, with the string quartet and the symphony, both written in the last five years, that pitch became an A. When I began “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” the pitches I started playing with as potential musical gestures - motives or whatever you’d care to call them – also started pointing to A as a focal pitch.

When I started work on the string quartet almost a year to the day after September 11th, 2001, it was several days till that “opening shape” came into focus. The first two notes had now become an A and a B – in my musical shorthand, using numbers on a blank page instead of pitch-notation on a sheet of manuscript paper, that became a 9 and an 11, the kind of symbol for 9-11 that no one would hear but which resonated with me as the quartet began taking shape as an emotional response to the terrorist attacks on that day. But after I’d found the first four notes that seemed right, writing the answering four notes took some time to figure out. I had settled on an F just so I could move forward, but it didn’t feel right. Then I thought I’ll substitute an F-sharp for that F and suddenly I could see Sam Adler smiling over my shoulder: that was the right pitch!

Last summer, when I was thinking about writing a piece in my mother’s memory, I tried turning her name into a musical phrase. Some letters, of course, corresponded to musical pitches automatically: G and A, for instance. For some pitches, you can use another language’s equivalent, the way Bach could spell his name because H in German was really a B-natural (and to make it confusing for us, B is really a B-flat) and S, as in Shostakovich, is in German E-flat. Then you could also substitute D for R because in Italian, D = Re. I is easier, because you have Mi (E) or Ti (B), and with three I’s in my mother’s name, I manipulated it to use both of them so as not be repeating the same pitch so often. In Russian, the letter that looks like B is pronounced V, so I used B to replace the V in Virginia, but I was also using B for one of the I’s... so I arbitrarily chose the German B (really, B-flat) instead.

This left N. What pitch could correspond to N?

For other letters, composers who play these name games find different solutions. By taking notes that are otherwise unassigned, you can spin them out until you find something that could correspond to the letter in question. Some composers simply leave them out. But I had created such an alphabet back in the ‘70s when I was writing my piano piece Poetries, and though I couldn’t find it in my piles of archived sketches, I followed the same process and came up with a C-sharp. So N was now assigned to C-sharp.

Thus my mother’s name, Virginia, became B-flat / E / D / G // E / C-sharp / B / A. For symmetrical purposes, I broke it into two four-note fragments.

It was months before work on the actual songs began: before that, I was thinking more in terms of a choral piece. But on what would’ve been her 88th birthday, the songs took shape and I began working on the opening and, since it was planned to be a mirror of the opening, the closing as well, setting two short parallel texts as a prelude and postlude to the songs. Ultimately, it became a single movement piece rather than seven individual songs, but the seven different texts are laid into the orchestral continuity so as to create both an interrelated cycle and a continuous piece rather than seven songs in seven separate movement, pausing between each one.

Since I write using 6-note sets as my musical building blocks – very loosely, compared to the so-called serial or 12-note style associated with Schoenberg – I looked at these 8 pitches trying to find 6 notes that create a “set”. After working on a number of possibilities, some of which seemed to have less potential than others, I chose two that offered me what I thought would sound best and be different from ones I had used in the very intense string quartet and symphony of the past few years.

This Name-Motive was not intended to be used verbatim constantly. In a way, I thought of the piece unfolding as a set of variations on that motive, but it quickly became more imbedded than obvious in the whole context of the piece’s unfolding. But at points where I wanted it to surface, I started realizing in the past month or so that that “N” was giving me a problem: the harmonies that were working did not work well with the C-sharp of the motive.

Playing several of these instances together – from different parts of the work – I realized that a better pitch instead of the C-sharp would be... uh oh...

F-sharp!

Fortunately, I had not been so strict with the Name-Motive and the pitch-sets I wanted to use because by changing it now I would have to go back and start the piece over again using the new pitch-class set! And I am so very close to the end of the piece, now!

This problem was not something that would have surfaced in September when I was playing with all the various possibilities. But by going back and changing just a few spots where the Name-Motive was in the foreground, it could still work out. In fact, in each situation I went back to, the F-sharp sounded like an improvement.

There are lots of intangibles in creativity. It all works differently for each different person. How to explain to someone else why we choose what we choose is not that easy. You can analyze it to the smallest degree, but there is still no easy way to explain what makes it “right.” What sounds right to my ear might not sound any better to someone else than the other notes I’d tried. But there comes a point when, for whatever reason, you try three or four (or forty) possibilities and that one sounds right, not just okay, you begin to think about a lot of things differently.

- Dr. Dick

More Evidence the Piece Is Almost Done

It seems like forever since I last blogged about composing, but then it seems like almost forever since I’ve been able to really concentrate on composing: today was the first time in months I’ve been able to put more than a few hours a day on this song cycle, Evidence of Things Not Seen, which I’d started back in September. These days, I’m resigned to the idea of being a “slow, methodical” composer, but it’s more rewarding to spend the time finding “the right note” rather than just settling for the first choice. Unfortunately, I can spend a whole day on one beat of music only to come back the next day and scratch out the whole thing. This is known as decomposing...

These are the songs for mezzo-soprano and orchestra based on some of my mother’s favorite biblical verses, a work that should be about 16 minutes long, despite the fact I’ve been working on them almost five months, now, not counting several months of gestation before the idea even began taking any kind of practical shape. It’s an “arch-form” and my approach has been basically to compose a song on one side of the arch, then writing the mirror song on the other side, rather than starting at the beginning and working my way chronologically through to the end.

So I started the third song, a setting of Psalm 23 on November 2nd, finishing it on December 17th. This is mirrored by the famous passage from Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season,” the fifth song which I started almost immediately and then finished on January 6th. By that time, I was coming down with the flu and just didn’t feel like doing much of anything , though I managed to sketch out the two interludes that surround the “keystone” song, lines from John 14 (“Let not your heart be troubled”).

Each song’s orchestral part is really a kind of variation in an on-going process, rather than seven individual songs. In some respects, it’s as if the orchestra exists on one plane while the vocal part is another that nests within it. These two interludes I’d been working on since early January, though, were tricky: the first of them is really an extension of Psalm 23's underlying accelerando (a background harmonic layer that gradually speeds up) that overlaps with what becomes the different harmonic approach that will become the next song. In the psalm setting, this layer needed to be worked out very carefully, moving slowly enough to have its own harmonic direction. By the time the interlude begins and the beat-pulse has gone from three pulses in a bar (four beats) to three pulses in a beat (triplet eighth-notes), by the time this layer dissolves into thin air, it’s moving at 12 “pulses” per beat or a wash of sound that needn’t be quite so detailed. Still, just plopping notes down on the page often yielded some pretty “un-right” notes, so I went back to systematize it, using the six-note group that is the basic building-block of the piece as a scale rather than a source for chords.

But to avoid all the weaknesses we used to be on the look-out for when writing traditional harmony and counterpoint in 18th- and 19th-Century tonality (a.k.a. “Common Practice” as we like to call it), I had to go back over this very carefully, making sure it worked – and that means working theoretically as well as aurally. Sometimes I couldn’t find the best pitches in what was “permissible” theoretically, so I went with something that sounded better and usually found if it wasn’t the exact same grouping, it was one very close to it and so it still had some kind of logic to it. Very often, I found this laborious process more successful than just sitting down plunking out notes that I thought should sound okay: very often, with a little extra effort, I found pitches that (at least to my ear) sounded better. It’s like a poet who might trim and prune a line, trying to find the right rhythm (if not rhyme) with the right word that didn’t end up being trite or confusing (bonus points if it now had some inner logic you hadn’t noticed before). These are all things the casual reader or listener may not even notice, but to me, it’s the difference between getting it done and getting it right.

Of course, whether anyone else thinks they’re the right pitches is another matter. We’re all wired differently and I can’t account for what one person out of all those who might listen to it would agree or disagree. Stravinsky joked that while he was pounding out the “Rite of Spring” in his Swiss apartment, trying to find just the right note for a chord or a passage, his neighbors were probably convinced they were all the wrong notes. But it is my creative integrity I need to satisfy, first – not that I don’t care about the listener. I figure if I write something that I feel is the best I could manage (rather than just filling in the space on the page with whatever came to mind), then I hope that it goes directly to the listener as an emotional response, making sense on the one hand, however we might perceive that, but also making direct contact with the soul on the other.

This was something that struck me very strongly after listening to all five of the string quartets of Elliott Carter recently in New York City: here’s a composer – one of the most significant composers in my creative thinking the past 30 years (since I last heard all of the Carter quartets in one sitting, when there were only three) – whose music is considered the most complex, cerebral music in what is hardly the mainstream of today. He could be much more popular and much more frequently performed if he wrote in a more accessible, populist style as he’d started out. Even at 99, he is still composing in an uncompromising style – but there are people out there (more than just me) who love it, so he’s being successful if he manages to complete this creator-performer-listener continuum with champions like the Pacifica Quartet who can convince listeners to take this music on face value as music, not as a mathematical puzzle.

Coming back to my songs after having listened to a great deal of Carter’s music before and after this concert, then, has only strengthened my decision to keep working at it till I’m satisfied with it without giving in to those doubts and inner demons one constantly hears imbedded in the white noise of life (you think anyone's going to be able to play that? why don't you write something people might actually like!).

And so yesterday I finished the first of these two interludes I’d been working on the past month (in all, a little over two minutes of music). Before I began this gradually accelerating “scalar layer,” I sketched out the main aspects (the foreground) of the companion, mirror interlude which continues the keystone song, the climax of the piece, overlapping with what will become the fifth song, the setting of Ecclesiastes, with its background layer that gradually decreases in apparent tempo (the foreground is a steady tempo while the background seems to slow down over time). Since I spent 17 days writing about 811 notes that go by in less than a minute, it seems odd to consider this a “mechanical” aspect of writing, but it’s like, I suppose, Georges Seurat painting hundreds of little red dots mixed in with hundreds of little blue dots to create a purple hat on one of his characters in “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Jatte” – the concept is there, the end result is basically in place all except for the exact notes. It’s just a matter of working them out.

While it was coincidental these songs took shape on what would’ve been my mother’s 88th birthday, I’d long hoped I would be able to finish them on (if not before) the first anniversary of her death. That is only two weeks away and at the rate I’ve been going, it seems an unlikely prospect, having been slowed down by innumerable flu germs as well as a herd of 800 dots.

Next, if I kept to the regimen I’d established early in the process, I should resume work on the background of the second of these two interludes, the transition from the keystone song back to the Ecclesiastes setting. But if that’s really “mechanical work,” I’d rather finish the creative work at least by February 23rd, so I’ve decided to plunge right into the longest of the individual songs, a setting of the lines that begin “Let not your heart be troubled.” The harmonic element here will be simpler than the surrounding interludes, and the vocal line not so involved, either. I’m not making any bets about completion, but at least by the end-of-day today, and seven hours of largely uninterrupted work, I had the complete text “distributed” rhythmically over the span of about 54 measures (maybe 3½ minutes of music). I know where the harmonies will change even if I don’t know what most of them will be, yet. The climax is already worked out and a little different now than initially planned after I realized the word that occurs at that point has a bad vowel to be singing on a high note (since it’s King James, it’s a little difficult to say “oh, I’ll just change the text a little”). A few words earlier, a high note would make sense on a vowel that would be much more reasonable on a High-A, but the real climax is in the harmonic and tonal resolution, not how high or how loud the voice-part gets. So yes, I think that will work out well. We’ll just have to see if I can finish it in two weeks.

Then, even if it’s past the 23rd, I can always go back to complete the “filling in” of the next interlude's missing background layer. After all, it’s still a sketch – all I have are pages and pages of a very rough draft. I’m just hoping it’s marked clearly enough that I can make sense out of it to start putting notes down in score format!

(This reminds me of Bartok’s comment about his viola concerto, the piece he was working on when he died. It was basically complete, just a mechanical matter of realizing the sketches. But when Tibor Serly took the manuscript to start work on it after Bartok’s death, it was difficult to figure out the continuity of the sketches or even the orchestration! To this day, no one could actually prove this is or is not anywhere close to what Bartok had in mind, even though they’re all supposedly his pitches!)

Onward!

-Dr. Dick

Sleepless in Suburbia: The Rooms Are Singing

It has been over a month since I last posted here, busy with the station blogs and trying hard to avoid that year-end assessment post, the holiday post (“What I Did on my Christmas Break”) and the New Years Resolutions post. Part of the time at home (since this is essentially my “home blog”) has been spent not composing while dealing with the Flu That Would Not Die. Every time I try to get back into composing again, another round of congestion and never-ending headaches kicks in.

Reading in general has been useless except for the lighter, mindless variety where, in one eye and out the other, little retention is required and less accomplished. I managed to finish Ian McEwans’ “Atonement” on a night my sundry aches went into a brief remission last weekend, during which I was also able to write and present a pre-concert talk for the Harrisburg Symphony’s concerts – primarily about Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (you can read “BarTalk” here). I managed a few days of near-normalcy and was allowed to fit in a concert in Philadelphia for the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s amazing new violin concerto with chorus and orchestra called “The Singing Rooms” – then writing a review you can read here. The premise behind the poems of this part concerto/part choral work reflects a walk through a house, standing in the different rooms and how they speak (or sing) to you of distant memories before returning to the first room at a different time of day and seeing it in a different light. But I spent this weekend dealing once again with the redux of symptoms, thereby cancelling plans for concerts with the Wednesday Club and Market Square Concerts.

Dozing off during a day dreary and cold enough to match my mood wreaks havoc with the normal sleep patterns and so I find myself typing this at 6:30am, a rather ungodly hour for yours truly. I awoke about 45 minutes ago thinking I was sleeping in a vibrating bed only to discover mounds of cats wrapped tightly against my fetal form. In the crook of my knees were three of the kittens, though big if not old enough to no longer be called kittens, a few days shy of nine months, now: Blanche, Guy Noir and Charlie all bundled together in a heap, purring in polyrhythms as loud as an outboard motor that needs work. Against my chest was Max, 12 pounds of white fur with gray patches, himself purring contentedly for reasons known only to a cat. Perhaps contentedness is contagious? Perhaps this is how the room sings to them?

Minutes later, in the John Cage Silence of the Night, I heard the familiar sound of another cat scratching in the litter box, located on the other side of my bedroom wall. This was probably Murphy who manages to spend five minutes scratching robustly around the litter pan but focusing mainly on the floor and the wall and the pipe under the sink without ever actually touching the offending mound in the middle of the box which by now I have gotten a serious whiff of.

Then I hear the equally familiar sounds of a pen shuffling off my desk into the oblivion of some Bermuda Triangle. For the next several minutes I can trace its progress across the room to the opposite corner, a slim space between an old end table and the outside wall of my bedroom, virtually inaccessible to a cat no longer a kitten and totally inaccessible to a human dealing with a pulled muscle aggravated by a week of sneezing and coughing. Fortunately I keep packs of pens handy since it’s easier to replace them than crawl around peering under furniture or behind the piano trying to rescue the old ones.

By now, the other cats have decided to investigate, leaving me free to extricate myself from the warmth of my bed to shuffle out to the bathroom where I discover something in the middle of the hallway, an odd bent-shaped bit of brown plastic that I recognize at one point would have had leaves and a flower on it, three inches of a small twig, once a silk rose that I had recently found and kept on the top shelf of my grandfather’s desk, the one that had been his graduation present, Class of 1905. I have no idea where the missing leaves and the peach-colored rosebud itself might be, padding back to the study to check that the rose indeed was missing. It’s not important but I had kept it because it reminded me of the beautiful old Peace Rose my grandmother had growing over a huge trellis in her backyard when I was a child, sitting on a small bench beneath it in the warmth of a summer day. I sat down now on the piano stool – which once belonged to my grandmother’s upright piano, purchased when they moved into their first house in 1919 – the remnant of a rose in my hand and was reminded of a poem I had once set to music as a college student that concluded something like:

Take this rose I give you now
And tear the leaves and petals off it one by one.
Trample them under your feet
As you have trampled on my love.
And when you have nothing left but the bare thorny stem,
Shove it up your ass.

And so my day has begun.

The Beethoven's Birthday Storm

It was not much of a snow-event and not, certainly, as bad as some areas had been hit in other parts of the country, but here at Chez Dr. Dick, it was bad enough. The forecast as usual had been iffy, changing back and forth from snow to ice and sleet back to snow to rain and/or freezing rain to the usual grab-all "wintry mix" (or as I once said on-air, "fleet and sleezing rain"). Given that I'm not much of a fan of winter weather -- or for that matter, weather in general (or come to think of it, much of anything) - it was not going to be a pleasant weekend.

It began on Saturday as a Big Delay. Scheduled (as much as one can schedule the weather in Outlook) to begin sometime Saturday morning, by late afternoon it was still a no-show. And the forecast was still vague, no doubt not to panic holiday shoppers. Still, when I stopped at the store after work on Friday night, it was clear lots of people were planning to feast on bread and milk regardless.

So a friend and I went out to engage in a bit of what turned out to be non-shopping, finding stores that were pleasantly not bursting at the seams, then grabbed a bit of dinner before heading over to the Harrisburg Borders. When we left, the sleet had begun and it was a quick trip home before things deteriorated any further.

When I went to bed, the forecast was leaning more in favor of a rain event. Fine.

I woke up to the sound of the cracking of wood. After realizing we had momentarily lost power overnight - only for a split second, perhaps - I looked out the window to see nothing but ice. Ice coating the branches of the maple tree outside my bedroom and study windows, ice coating the branches of the Japanese maple and kousa dogwood in the back yard (see photo), the front lawn coated in what looked like crystal shards, the large crimson king maple out front looking like it had a six-inch buckskin-like fringe of icicles hanging off the lower branches.

On the back porch were several birds - juncos, titmice, chickadees and a female cardinal - so I quickly rushed some fresh birdseed out into the feeder with more scattered across the floor of the porch.

The cracking of wood that I heard might have been branches from the oldest batch of silver maples, trees I've never been happy with, but they were saplings on the lot when my parents began building the house in the late-50s, since then spawning other batches in various parts of the yard. It looked like there was a new trunk but it turned out to be a sizeable branch standing kind of parallel to the trunk but upside down (see photo, below).
There was more sleet, there was more freezing rain, then there was a downpour of just plain rain which apparently was freezing on contact and, once in a while, a snow flurry.

The lights kept flickering, the power going out just for a second but enough that I got tired of seeing the computer reboot before my eyes or having to reset the alarm clock and the microwave every hour or so. Then there was another fierce crack of wood, louder than the others I was hearing all morning and afternoon.

I was most concerned about the maple tree on the east side of the house. It had been a puny three-leaved seedling, a freebie when we bought the ginko, when we planted it and by now if it wasn't too close to the house, it was overhanging too many of the wires running the edge of the property. But that loudest crack was actually half of one of the other silver maples, this one on the western side by the old woodpile, which now stretched out across the yard, lying in front of the mound of forsythia. Smaller branches littered the lawn and fairly sizeable ones will need to be pulled out of the forsythia, though nothing, it seems, will ever harm the forsythia (in time, unchecked, I'm sure there would be no back yard, just one mound of forsythia working its way toward the house).

Eventually, the squirrels showed up at the feeder, later than usual. There are three of them, apparently one family since any more than those get chased off with a great deal of chattering and tail-fluffing. Squirrel Ives easily fills the feeder while the younger one, Hoover, works over the porch-floor. A white-footed one, Nureyev, is capable of making amazing leaps into the Japanese maple.

Though not today. Making it to one of the thicker branches in the middle of the tree, he barely managed to hang on -- looking like the kitten in the famous '70s "hang in there" posters -- and with considerably less grace than usual, pulled himself up onto the branch and worked his way cautiously to a spot he could jump more easily onto the ground. He left without further comment.

Once the freezing rain had apparently stopped (and the sun shone perversely for a few fleeting moments making everything sparkle brilliantly enough to almost take your mind off the potentially treacherous situation), it was a matter of waiting for the high winds - gusts up to 40-50mph in the follow-up forecast. Would the power stay on?

Thousands of people in the area were without power - 46,000 still, the day after the storm - with the prospect of it not being restored till Tuesday or Wednesday night. (Update - as of Wednesday morning, 12-19-07, 2300 in the Harrisburg area were still without power.) One friend told me about the number of trees damaged or ruined by the storm at his place, much worse than mine. The clean-up and its cost were things you tried not to think about: it was enough to be waiting for what else could happen before it was officially over.

At one point, a parade of township firetrucks, ambulances and something called a "Mask Unit" drove through my neighborhood, apparently looking for any tree damage that would need to be reported to PPL or the road crews, prepared to take anyone to the hospital in an emergency, ready to report damage to anyone's house from falling trees. Fortunately, on my short street, they were able to just keep on truckin'...

Another casualty for me was the Christmas Concert by the Susquehanna Chorale which I had planned on attending that afternoon. Though a member of the chorale told me the roads "were wet, not all that bad," I chose to stay in, reading too much on-line about falling trees and branches, then watching chunks of ice (some several feet long) cascade off the wires and branches, shattering onto the roadway. I didn't feel I wanted to try dodging stuff like that with my car, so I got some soup and hot chocolate before settling down on the couch to listen to a late Beethoven quartet (Op. 131 with Guarneri).

For me, in the new old house, it was my first major storm and I will remember it, no doubt, like the first major storm after I had moved into Harrisburg to my first midtown apartment in the early-80s, when the forecast called for flurries and we had something like 24 inches of flurries on Lincoln's Birthday. This one will be the Beethoven's Birthday Ice Storm of 2007.

And winter doesn't even begin until this weekend! Bah humbug, indeed!

- Dr. Dick

Togetherness

While there are times I wonder if it was wise bringing in a pregnant stray cat (and there have been times, kittens being kittens, that I was convinced it wasn't -- with nodding assent from the Big 3), there were times in the past weeks where there was never any question. Here are three pictures of Kittens at Rest, a rather unusual state and enoyable on all accounts.

At the top is the mother of all kittens, Frieda Farrell, on the right with her son Baker in profile. Though she's no longer officially "feral," she's not exactly the most acclimated of cats: she still won't let me near her (since mid-August, I have only touched her once and that was the second time since I brought her in in April), but she loves to curl up on the one chair, stretch out on a rug, even play around the scratching post. She's not really the Greta Garbo of Cats, either, but at least she's not spitting and hissing at me any more, like she was up until she was spayed.

Meanwhile, on another chair, this one with the red background, are Charlie and, in the foreground, Guy Noir.

On the gray background, an office desk kind of chair they love because it swivles and rolls around easily, are Abel and Blanche.

With four male tabbies, three of them orange, it's difficult to tell them apart, given the lighting and their positioning.

Guy is the cream tabby (hardly 'noir') who at times is known as Guy Noodge for his incessant kittenish brand of curiosity, usually at times when I am most hoping for the chance to concentrate on composing or reading.

Abel, Baker and Charlie, so named at birth because there was no way of telling them apart then, have developed into distinct personalities. Curiously, I find myself going back to the early pictures and wondering if I had labeled them correctly.

Baker is just a bit more reddish than Abel but 95% of the time, I can't tell them apart without looking at their faces. Each has a V-shaped wedge on each cheek, opening toward the mouth (this would seem to be a standard tabby marking) and Abel has two darker spots inside this wedge. Baker's dots are underneath the wedge. When they're running past you and you want to know who just knocked over the wastebasket, it's tough getting them to sit still long enough so you can check the wedge...

Generally, Baker has the quieter and sometimes sweeter personality. Abel is more out-going and, frankly, more likely to get into mischief. Charlie, the largest of the five, has no white on him (Abel and Baker have white chins), the pinkest nose and lips and a tail on the verge of being fluffy (he also has his mother's curious tail-marking that almost looks like a wound, a zig-shaped Harry-Potteresque configuration, wherein, probably, lies a tale). He's also got the sweetest disposition of the kittens, too, and purrs like an outboard motor. He would make a great dog in the way he always wants to be right next to you: judging from the size of his paws, I'm wondering if he might not be a Lab in disguise...

At the left, helping me blog, are Guy Noir and Charlie.

Blanche (originally as in Guy & Blanche Noir), the smallest of the litter, can be a combination of all the others' personalities. Her expression is usually quizzical, since (being a tortoise-shell and basically a black cat with peeks of orange seeping through and small patches of white on her chest and belly) it's hard to see she actually has a nose and a mouth, just big round eyes.

She also went into heat for the first time the weekend after Thanksgiving, something no one in this household was thankful for. Confining her to the bathroom where she was born, I called the vets and made "the arrangements," setting up the requisit shots-and-bloodwork visit followed by, ten days later, the surgery. She will not be going into heat again.

Naturally, now, it is the turn for her four horny brothers, but we'll save that (and them) for another day...

After the move, which finally occured in mid-November (the official unpacking has yet to begin), an old box-spring found its way into the bedroom which the kittens had, before they were left loose in the house, called home. This of course gave them every right to check out everything. Not only does it give them a great vantage point to watch the nests of white-capped sparrows and tufted titmice under the bedroom window, they can also oversee everything else that goes on in their room.
Small wonder I often find myself, walking around the house or sitting at the piano trying to compose, feeling I'm being watched.

The other night, off sick from work, I had curled up on the couch hoping to read a few more pages of Ian McEwan's Atonement (before I probably decide not to see the movie after all), and soon found myself surrounded: Max had draped himself over my left arm, Blanche was in her usual fuzzy bandolier stretched across my chest, making reading impossible, and Guy, Abel and Charlie had heaped themselves next to my right hip, all of us taking up barely a third of the full length of the couch. There was no one who could take the picture for me and no sense in getting up to find the camera.

Oh well, another day and back to work, after I check out what that noise was in the living room....

-- Dr. Dick

Toward a More Fugue-Efficient Car

Johann Sebastian Bach, in addition to the time he spent composing every day, always enjoyed tinkering in his workshop, whether he was trying to figure out ways of improving the clavichord, a kind of lap-top harpsichord, or working on a new book, “The Idiot’s Guide to Writing Cantatas for Every Sunday in the Church Year.” It was usually late at night, after the city of Leipzig had gone to sleep and the various Bach children had all been put to bed, that he loved most to sneak down to the basement.

His latest project was designing a more fugue-efficient car which he figured would be a major contribution to society, given the cost of supporting the arts these days. But he knew it was becoming hopeless because the younger generation had lost the knack for fugues: a simple melody with simple harmony was all they needed to make it run smoothly if not very far.

Those huge vans took whole symphonies, though, and proved to be time-consuming for the average motorist but yet everybody had to have one until they realized how difficult it was to write a symphony every couple of days. Even Haydn had given his van up for a smaller car that ran on variations.

And then Bach heard that Philip Glass was working on a new kind of engine system that could get several more miles out of just a single chord progression and didn’t even need a melody!

What did it matter to people like that, having something designed to run on the finest intellectual principles?

He had just recently perfected the fugue-injector engine with its dashboard application allowing you to insert the written-out fugue which is then transferred to the fugue tank where it is converted into fuel. This he found to be a big improvement over the original harpsicarburator engine which had a keyboard attached to the steering column but he found it distracting to be improvising fugues while driving (especially when Anna Magdalena would call him on his cell phone).

After he had started on the design, he quickly discovered that simple two-voice fugues, nothing terribly adventurous but suitable for beginning drivers, didn’t get you very far and were basically only good for quick trips to the store and back. For the daily commute, he needed at least a three-voice fugue with two good modulations in it. If the middle entries employed a good statement by inversion, then he added a little stretto before the final statement, he might be able to run a few errands on the way home, too.

Originally, he wanted to call it the Well-Tempered Car. Unfortunately, the engine frequently needed to be tuned which caused most of the fugues to burn slower than usual. Several times he found himself on the side of the road with his pitch-pipe trying to crank the engine back to A-440. Frustrated, he wondered “why bother,” watching everybody whizzing by in their Scarlatti Sonatas and Mendelssohn Cars Without Words.

But then he came up with another idea and that night he was back in the workshop.

Just the other week, he’d developed the compact version which he allowed the boys to drive around the neighborhood: this was the Clavicar which was capable of running on basic canons and two-part inventions, good for beginners.

Once when he was in a hurry, he let little C.P.E. write a fugue for him but the boy, who was usually as bored by fugal exercise as he was by aerobic exercise, had made too many mistakes – a botched tonal answer and a deceptive modulation that contained hidden parallel fifths – which just spun the engine off to the curb and poor Bach had to sit there and write out a whole new fugue just to make it to his rehearsal on time.

He found that you can’t just quickly dash off the same old/same old, either. Even though a fugue is a fugue, it has to be well-constructed with good material to really get some mileage out of it: too much “free counterpoint,” as they call it - he always thought it was just “filler,” watering your craft down with empty additives - and the car starts stalling at intersections or making rude gastrointestinal noises when it reached quarter-note = 120.

So each night, before going to bed, he would write a couple of fugues to get him through the next day. With any luck, he might go a whole day on a good double fugue - that would be great but it didn’t always happen, especially if he was behind on the weekly cantata. Invertible counterpoint was always effective but sometimes when you’re rushed you can make some miscalculations which could gum up the works and Bach, even though it would never happen to him, knew that his sons, for instance, would never have the discipline to manage one of those every day: maybe for a holiday trip, but not your daily commute.

There had been a fine five-voice fugue with two counter-subjects that he was able to drive around on for almost a week. And there was that whole series of fugues he’d written on a theme submitted by Frederick the Great’s Energy Secretary which got him all the way to Berlin and back, even though they laughed at his ideas...

Maybe one day, ja, like their father, C.P.E. and Wilhelm Friedemann and all of their generation will be able to master the fugue in all its many possibilities. His dream was to finish a collection he called “The Art of Fuel,” containing only the finest of those fugues with which he’d gotten the best mileage. It’s a dream that keeps him going.

- Dr. Dick

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© 2007