A Kaboodle of Kittens: Day 6

Some years ago, a friend of mine, adopting a stray kitten that had only recently been weaned, told me she had often had cats but had never started one “from scratch.” Several of my cats over the years came to me as kittens or ‘teen-aged’ cats (and all but the first two, strays), yet even though I may have missed the exact “miracle of birth” only by minutes, I have never had the chance to watch kittens grow up from Day One. It has been amazing!

And the opportunities for catblogging on a grand scale!

This morning is “Kittens: Day 6." Of course, I’ve been taking pictures of them every day, documenting their growth even though it’s been a little difficult trying not to disturb them. Frieda, the proud and wary mother of five, is still not used to me or to being in a house. Compared to her last litter, I wonder how this one is faring: with food placed twice a day in a bowl a few feet from her, she at least doesn’t have to wander far to forage and leave the kittens unattended for very long. I also had hoped she would have moved them over to a section of the floor covered with a towel since I imagine the bathroom tiles must be chilly for little kittens, but she chose this corner (which hadn’t occurred to the resident human) just because of its security and basic inaccessibility (at least as far as the resident human is concerned).
So far, everything seems to be going well. While I was sure there had been two black ones, perhaps the darkest of the three orange tabbies looked even darker on those first two days. On the other hand, perhaps there had been two black ones and one didn’t make it. I was more concerned about not spooking the mother than counting how many furballs surrounded her that Monday morning. I certainly haven’t tried examining them – with my scent on them, it’s possible the mother may refuse to nurse them any more – so I don’t know what genders they may be.

The cream-colored tabby and the black one (which one night, in the flash light, didn’t look all that black – could it be a black tabby? I haven’t noticed that he (or she) has any white anywhere) are the ones I’ve thought about keeping (once before, I’d adopted a mother and her one surviving kitten – the kitten is now 12). If the genders are right, they could end up being named Blanche and Guy Noir.

It seems appropriate starting off life in the house (not a new house to me but a new chapter in my life in it) with an arm-load of kittens. My mother would be fascinated to observe this (at least for a while) if not mighty peeved to realize they’ve taken over her bathroom (as in “they’re so cute, but do they have to be there?”).

The other cats, filtered from them by the space of the bedroom as well, have not registered any curiosity beyond wondering why I keep disappearing behind this door with a can of food. It will be a challenge, introducing Frieda to the three cats already here, but I want to hold off on that little surprise until the kittens are old enough she won’t feel they’re quite so vulnerable: who knows how many of her kittens were killed before by other stray tomcats? It’s not an easy world out there for newborn cats on the street, all the more reason to consider spaying and neutering your pets!!

But meanwhile, there’s work to do and I must head into it. I think I’m ready, now, to start moving my stuff in – the scores and CDs, the books and OMG the piano, how I miss having that piano!

On Wednesday afternoon, seeing WITF’s nine-foot grand open in the studio, I went in and practiced – well, played through a couple of stock pieces that had been in my repertoire since college days, perhaps, but rarely practiced (I think the last time I seriously practiced was maybe a year and five months ago) – a few Scarlatti sonatas, a few pieces by Schumann (the Arabesque, the Romance in F-sharp, the last movement of the Fantasy in C), some Chopin (selected mazurkas, nocturnes and preludes), some of the Beethoven bagatelles from Op.126.

While I don’t think I’m going to be ready to be performing in public any time soon, at this rate, it was good to know the wounds on my index fingers – incurred last week while snagging a certain stray cat flying around the kitchen – didn’t keep me from getting around the keys. Oh, the scales were rough and the voicing maybe a little more uneven than usual, but at least they were still moving. With signs of arthritis developing, playing the piano more regularly will be good therapy if not for the soul at least for the hands.

And there’s a new piece working its way into my head: I need to start jotting down ideas (some of which I can do without a piano) but I also need to finish these violin and piano pieces I’d stopped working on in December. John Clare and I had talked about having them ready to perform in May but that’s not going to happen...

And tomorrow is Family Day at WITF – I can’t wait for “Take Your Kittens to Work Day”!

Dr. Dick

Photo credits: from Dr. Dick's collection -- (top) Day 4; (center) Day 5; (bottom) Day 6...

A House-Warming Present

With all the usual joys of moving, one of the things I determined would be going with me would be the Stray Cat.

Last summer, perhaps even in early June, a small orange tabby appeared on my back porch in town, clearly a feral street-born cat. Naturally, I put food out for it and after it had kept coming back every night, I decided I should probably try rescuing it except I already had three cats in a small, already cramped one-bedroom apartment. Regardless, this cat was immediately named Farrell. And they say when you start naming the strays, the next step is to adopt them.

One night the cat showed up twice, which was unusual: “but I just fed you,” I argued. Still, my cats had not eaten everything of theirs, so I put some ‘left-overs’ out thinking this cat was really really hungry.

The next night, there were TWO cats on my porch, identical, side by side like bookends! Apparently they were from the same litter. As the summer wore on, they would both appear either together or fairly close together and I realized there was a pattern here: the one would head out to the street in front of my house; the other one would always head out through my back yard and across the neighbor’s lot toward 2nd Street. Later, it turned out one was pregnant. So I named her Frieda and was wondering if Farrell was going to be Uncle Dad...

No matter how much I fed them or stayed out on the porch with them while they ate – and they always were waiting for me and ran to the door when I’d come home from work – they never allowed me to get close to them. I had to be at least four feet away from the bowl before they’d come in closer to eat. Thoughts of catching either of them were pretty slim and what was I going to do with TWO cats and a litter of kittens?

Sometime toward the end of July, the female stopped coming around. I assumed Frieda may have gone off to have her litter and she’d be back. At the end of August, she returned but now I was afraid to catch her for fear the kittens, though probably weaned, may not be ready to be on their own. It was over Labor Day weekend that she stopped coming around again: Farrell kept coming by until 10 nights later, then I saw him for the last time. Small as he was, he bushed himself up as much as he could and chased a big black bruiser of a tomcat off the porch. Once chasing him off, he turned right when the tom turned left and just kept going. Never saw him again.

All through the fall and winter, I wondered if they’d ever come back. What is the shelf-life of a city stray cat? I figured someone may have caught them, or they may have been killed by other, larger cats or perhaps the dogs that kids sometimes sic on street-cats (I rescued one stray from that fate in 1985 and had her for 15 years) - or perhaps they had become road-kill on a city street. I preferred thinking the first option.

So it was much to my surprise that a not-quite-as-small orange tabby appeared at my back-door, waiting to be fed, in early March just a week or so after my mother’s funeral. I immediately put food out for it and recognized the scar on its tail, though I couldn’t remember if that was the way I could tell which one was Farrell or which one was Frieda. She came by, often greeting me on my porch, every night when I’d get home.

Well, I figured out it was the female – she was getting a little fuller around the belly, clearly pregnant again. I hadn’t noticed she’d been in heat at any time, so I don’t know when she might have gotten “hit” but she was still the same, wary street-wise cat she’d been before. Sometimes she’d dash in to start eating if I sat beside the food bowl but I still couldn’t touch her: she’d turn and run, even run away without eating if she thought I was trying to catch her. She’d come back minutes later, waiting until I was safely inside before she’d approach the bowl.

Fair enough.

Then, when I started moving out of the apartment and into the house, now that I’d taken my own cats with me, I could try just leaving the kitchen door open in hopes she’d come inside to eat. Every night after work, I’d come into town just to feed her (and do a little sorting and packing) and finally she’d hop up on the step and eat there... then maybe inside as far as the doormat but no farther.

I had caught one stray years ago by making a bread-crumb trail of ground-beef which I’d happened to be cooking at the time, and that cat was so hungry, despite any misgivings, she followed the trail into the center of my kitchen before I shut the door behind her (I had her for 15 years, also).

Frieda, however, turned out not to like ground beef. She became warier and ran off. The next night she wouldn’t even come close to the door and even ran off before I put the food outside for her (the ‘possum got that dishful).

Which brings me to last Friday night – and I had decided (a) maybe I’m not supposed to have this cat even though I’ve now got room for her and (b) I’d wait until Sunday night because I knew with the symphony’s pre-concert talks, I’d probably be too busy with everything else to deal with settling a stray cat into a spare bathroom.

But Friday night, she decided to come in. She hadn’t eaten much the past two nights and it seems like she hardly eats anything anywhere else, for all I know. She looked longingly at the dish. I moved it in further – far enough to be able to shut the door behind her. I was able to block off the hallway out of the kitchen: once the door was closed, she’d be trapped. Then I’d grab her and put her in the carrier, already waiting for her.

It took maybe 20 minutes but she worked up enough courage to come in – first a bite, then a dash back to the porch... then another bite or two, then a retreat to the step. Then she settled down to eat. That’s when I shut the door behind her, hoping I’d be faster than she’d be and that I wouldn’t cut her in half in the process.

Slam! Bam! Gotcha, ma’am!

After she took two laps around the kitchen, during which I was afraid she might start spitting out kittens left and right, I managed to corral her. I have the bite-marks on both index fingers to prove it. Once in the carrier, she was quiet – wide-eyed but quiet, no yowling or crying. In fact, I didn’t hear a peep from her all the way out to the house (which is more than I could say for two of my long-domesticated cats). I stopped to buy some band-aids and peroxide, having already taken some time to wash out the wounds and add a little Neosporin.

But Frieda was now mine. I’m not sure either of us were really ready for this.

I figured I couldn’t put this off any longer because I didn’t know when she’d have the kittens: after they’d be born, I would be long gone from the apartment if she should return. I would never see her again.

I put her in a spare bathroom at the back of the house, out of the way from general traffic and isolated from the other cats. Once out of the carrier, she immediately flew up the wall and hung (by one claw) from the curtains. Then she settled down on the counter-top. She sat in front of the mirror (see picture, left), finding some comfort, apparently, in this other cat. Did she think it was Farrell? She actually allowed me to pet her and I spent a few minutes nuzzling her behind her ears and down her neck, under the chin, down over the back but not too close to the mound of kittens deep inside her. She eventually curled up in the sink (see picture, below). After sitting with her for a while, it was now past 3am and I decided to get some sleep.


When I checked her in the morning, she settled into a corner under the counter. She would not let me pet her – and I have claw-marks to prove it – and I figured, okay, she’s pregnant and she’s very defensive, so I’d just let her alone. It might take a week for her to adapt. Okay, I could handle that.

On Sunday, she’d moved over to a different corner, even more inaccessible: behind the toilet.

The plan was to try catching her again to take her out to the vets, have her checked out, get her what shots she could have, given her condition, and see how the kittens are progressing.

Monday morning, when I woke up around 8:45, I discovered she had no intention of going to the vets. She had just given birth to what will be her last litter of kittens.

She was still licking one off. They were all soaking wet, looked more like hairballs with rat-tails except they were squirming and mewing. I wasn’t sure but I think there were four or five. I decided she needed to be left alone: the more I check in on her, she might feel threatened and destroy them.

About an hour later, I cleaned the litter box (so relieved to discover she actually was using it) and put down fresh water, trying to be quiet and non-aggressive. She was now on her other side and the kittens were out-of-view behind her. There was a pile of dark something-or-other about six inches from her which I took to mean one of them didn’t make it but I wasn’t about to reach back and try taking it away.

Meanwhile, I had called the vets, asked “OMG WHAT NOW?!” and they said basically just let her raise them, I don’t need to do anything except make sure she has lots of food and water and to clean the litter box a couple times a day. And then wait until they're weaned – uhm, maybe 4-6 weeks.

If this had happened at the old apartment, she would’ve been in the only bathroom I have which would be a real disaster trying to accommodate her. Fortunately, I’d gotten her out to the house in time where it won’t be anywhere near the inconvenience. But still...

Out of cat food, I made a quick dash to the store, then just put a can of food down for her, the kittens mewing and crawling around. They were now dried-off and looking more like cats than drowned mice. Earlier, I thought there were two dark ones, one orange tabby like her and another one kind of nondescript but partly hidden. But now I could see three orange tabbies and one so pale it looked like a white kitten with pale orange tabby markings (I decided, okay, if everything works out, I’m keeping that one). And the one I thought was dead may be the dark one I now see nursing from her. By the time I got the camera, I could now see only three (or maybe four) of them.

So there you have it – Frieda Plus Four, Maybe Five. The excitement continues to build!

Dr. Dick

The Past as a Present

Since this was intended as a "creativity" blog and I haven't been very creative recently, following my mother's death, there hasn't been anything to write about except I am very agitated about not being able to compose right now which I guess is a good sign. In the past, going a few months without feeling like writing made me question whether I was a composer or not.

Back in December, nearly finished with three of the pieces for violin and piano I'd been working on, I decided to take a break and write something else. Since it was Christmastime, a Christmas piece seemed logical, but that came to a halt on January 16th (and that after three days of inactivity) because of numerous distractions mostly related to the apartment and the constantly barking doberneighborman. I had decided it was time to move -- a hateful occupation of time that is sure to destroy the creative impulse as everything else falls before it.

The question was where? It would be a spring-time project.

In the past, most of my moves came toward the end of summer: in fact, the last move took place over the hottest week of the summer of 2001 and I refuse to get stuck with that again.

And not in winter: a former co-worker told me stories of moving into Central PA during the Blizzards of January 1996 -- she moved the weekend of the Flood, however, the one with the ice jam that took out the Walnut Street Bridge -- and I didn't want to risk scheduling movers only to tempt Mother Nature into coming up with something equally memorable in this otherwise unmemorable winter.

Since my mother's death in February, much of the time has been spent dealing with the grief and the changes one senses, even at my age, in losing one's mother. It has not been a weepy, mournful grief (trying to avoid those who've been weepy and mournful has helped) but a quiet, contemplative one that at times is sad and wistful, at others joyful and humorous, mostly depending on the memory of the moment or something I may have found as we clean through the stuff-congested house with its accumulation of not only my parents' lifetime but their parents as well.

A few weeks ago, a friend showed me a book he had just gotten back after loaning it out and I said I had to read it: it was called "When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!" by Teller, the shorter, quiet half of the master magicians Penn & Teller, a portrait of his dad (primarily) and the memories he discovered going through some of their stuff while, fortunately, both his parents were alive to tell him its significance. Through this "stuff" the son discovers aspects of his parents' lives he was unaware of before.

The cover shows a very wary Teller sitting in the midst of his dad's shop, a dusty broken victrola on his lap, his father emphatically expounding on the importance of some rusted contraption he's handing him. They're surrounded by tools, mops, jars full of nails, a porcelain pitcher, what looks like a stuffed raven but also paintings and what may be the cartoons Joe Teller had drawn in 1939 which become the focus of the book: these cartoons are The Discovery, something the son never even knew existed, and this leads to letters and reminiscences about the years his dad had gone tramping across the country (quite literally) before becoming an artist, meeting his future wife at an art school, then getting married just before World War II. After the war, Joe Teller settled into the world of commercial art, primarily as a "letter man" doing the wording for ads in the Philadelphia newspapers.

So far, I have not found a box of cartoons, but I did just find a box of india inks and paints, brushes and pen-nibs my dad used when he'd do the lettering for the ads he designed for "The Boston Store," one of the Greenberg stores in Harrisburg where he'd worked since graduating from high school (or perhaps even before) and had long been the manager. I found a card he had made for my mom's 60th birthday in which he wrote about how they met:

"It was the summer of '38 at Hershey Park when I saw 'Ginny' Hartman for the first time. I didn't know then that God had a plan for everyone's life from beginning to end, so on this special day I didn't know I was looking at the girl God had chosen for my life!

A few days later, in Pomeroy's Department Store, I saw the most beautiful, wholesome-looking girl I had ever seen. It was Ginny Hartman!! My heart 'pounded with excitement' on June 17, 1938 when I asked her for a date and she accepted. And on March 17, 1940, her name became Ginny Strawser."

As I remember the story, my dad, two years out of Hummelstown High School, was working at Greenberg's clothing store at 5th & Market in downtown Harrisburg. My mother, a '37 graduate of John Harris High School, was working at Pomeroy's at 4th & Market. The story goes that dad went back to Greenberg's, told a co-worker named Duke about the girl he'd just seen and wanted him to go back and find out her name: "she's wearing a white blouse and black skirt." When Duke got there, it turned out ALL the sales clerks wore white blouses and black skirts. It must've worked out okay, though: Duke's in the wedding photo as Best Man.

My dad was a natural-born musician, teaching himself to play the piano and eventually the Hammond organ. He couldn't read music but had perfect pitch and could play a thousand songs if you could hum a few bars. I found dozens of reel-to-reel tapes made in 1954 when my dad had a 15-minute radio show once a week, broadcast live from the Blue Mountain Hotel (now Felicita). I was 5 years old and thought everybody's dad had a radio show. Funny how I've just passed my 17th anniversary working at WITF-FM...

But I also knew somewhere there was a record. We have many recordings -- 45s, 78s and then the long-playing 33s. But this one was different: my dad made this recording and it was a song he wrote and sang while he was in San Diego during the War and sent to Mom back home. It was one of those things where servicemen could go to this studio and record greetings their loved ones back home could listen to -- think about it: they were on the verge of being shipped off to the Pacific Front -- but my dad wrote a song and performed it himself.

Last night, I found the record.

It was unmarked, just a blank label in a blank sleeve but I just knew it had to be that song. I haven't listened to it yet because I'm afraid one time may be the last time it would play or I'd break it. I want to wait till I can transfer it onto a CD just to make sure I can hear it again. It may not have been a box of cartoons, but it was a discovery all the same.

There was a story my mother told me shortly after Dad died in 1985. When he was in San Diego, he and a bunch of his Navy buddies were on a train that had an old piano on it. If there was a piano in a room, my dad wanted to play it, so he and his friends went over to the piano and he played while they all sang along to the popular songs of the day.

One of the passengers in that car was the wife of actor Raymond Massey who went up and complimented him, introducing herself and saying she had some "connections" (some guy named Crosby, I believe) if he'd be interested in playing in a band for Hollywood.

My dad, a Hollywood studio musician!

I wonder how different things would've been if he'd followed up on that. The war was over not long after that and the first thought in his mind was getting home to his family -- not just his wife but also his 4-year-old son, my older brother. He remembered the problems his parents had had, his father a trumpet player in numerous bands in the area and as family legend has it subbed in the Sousa band for part of a year. This became a bone of contention with my grandmother who didn't want to be stuck home with the kids while he travelled around playing music all over the place, so he gave it up.

My dad didn't "give it up," though. He stayed here in Harrisburg and became a well-known musician "on the side," maintaining his day job (one newspaper article about him when he was active in the Uptown Business Men's Association, described him as "shoe salesman to the poor") earning a kind of fame. True, it was not without its issues: if my folks went out on their anniversary, it was always a St. Patrick's Day party where Dad was playing the organ and Mom would sit there and listen to him. New Years Eve, she was always alone with the kids, ushering in the new year with a toast of homemade egg nog.

My parents built this house and we moved into it in March of 1960, around the time of their 20th wedding anniversary.

Now 47 years later, I will be moving into it myself. It's not a "new" place because I grew up here, though now it's "my" place even if it is still (and will always be to an extent) "their" place. It is not perfect -- there are aspects of "deferred maintenance" to contend with -- but it is a far cry from the cramped little apartments I have been renting all my life.

Once the piano is back in my old childhood bedroom, I can compose again. I won't have to worry about the sleeping (or fighting) schedules of upstairs neighbors, the noise of boom-boxes from the street, the loud music pounding through the walls from next door, the doberneighborman barking all day long as I'm trying to write. I can play the piano when I want and compose whenever I feel like it.

And I already have some pieces in mind to work on. But more of that, later.

Dr. Dick

Loss & Remembrance

We are creatures of habit, building up a routine over the years of what is comfortable and anticipated. And though we might adapt as schedules and expectations evolve, for some reason of presumed invincibility we think things will never change, or perhaps hope they never will, even when change is inevitable. Because we expect people to always be there for us – with us – things go unsaid (but hopefully understood) and plans are put off because there’s always another day. Until we realize that, however it happened, there are no more days to procrastinate with. Now, instead, we look back to find consolation in memories.

In the week since my mother’s death, I have found boxes of pictures that I knew she had been sorting through and sometimes labeling, scanning pictures to e-mail to my brother and I or her sister on the computer we’d gotten her when she turned 80, including lots of photos from the 1920s to the 1940s as well as her parents’ wedding picture from 1911 and family photographs of her mother taken before they left England.

There were some with vague historical details that I only remember from what she had told me, then: a heavily bearded gentleman was her grandfather whom no one in the family seemed to know much about. All the known pictures of her grandmother show her in “widow’s black” which leads us to believe he died when she was not yet middle-aged. By association, she must be the young woman with her hand leaning demurely on her older husband’s shoulder in a carefully choreographed family portrait taken after his own father’s death, his mother (my great-great-grandmother) seated amidst her children looking very much like Queen Victoria who spent much of her own life wearing widow’s black. Looking at it, I’m not sure I can explain why I dated this picture to the 1870s, now, but it’s the start of a long line of family photographs – using this old technology – that ends with a photograph taken a year or so ago of my mother, then in her mid-80s, with her great-granddaughter. I will scan many of these onto a CD and hope that, when she grows up, my great-niece will have the technology available to view a CD-Rom, if looking at the sadness on the face of her great-great-great-great grandmother (whose name I do not even know) will connect her with a past she never knew existed.

But I also found other boxes that I had never seen before and which maybe Mother had forgotten she’d placed on a top shelf in a closet. Many of them were recognizable – this aunt, that uncle, though taken before I was born – and others may not really matter as long as I can tell they are part of her father’s large collection of friends and siblings.

In an album that had only a few pages of mounted photographs which my father had generously captioned – followed by several pages with fistfuls of unsorted, usually uncaptioned photos intended for later inclusion – I saw a series taken on a mild December day in 1940 with my Uncle Marlin who had died later in World War II. There was my mother, not quite 10 months a bride, standing with my uncle who looked proud and spiffy in his army uniform. Then I saw my dad in his army uniform and thought, “wait, he wasn’t in the army” before I realized he – and then my Uncle Bob too – were all having their pictures taken wearing Uncle Marlin’s jacket!

Some lack dates which might be helpful, others lack clues if you don’t know what to look for (one couple’s wedding photo she helpfully labeled “not a clue”).

It was good to find pictures of her that erase the pain of seeing her those final days. It was amazing to read through old calendars, some stored in boxes in her office (on a desk that her father had bought when he graduated from high school in 1905) that were kind of like journals where I could fill in the details, knowing an anecdote from the family history or discovering a day in June marked “1st Anniv of 1st Date” with my dad and pictures taken on her grandfather’s farm (see photo at left) in upper Dauphin County.

One anecdote I knew from early in my childhood: how Dad got his first Hammond organ. Well, not really his... He had played the piano since he was in grade school – he had perfect pitch but never took lessons from anyone, just figuring everything out by ear – and he learned how to play the organ much the same way during The War, sneaking into the base’s chapel though he was primarily playing the popular songs of the day to entertain his friends and anyone who’d listen. After the war, a friend of his, Jack, was building his own house and the Hammond organ he’d ordered was going to be delivered before the house was ready: would my folks mind if he’d have it delivered to their place in Paxtang so he wouldn’t lose the option on it (it would go to the next person on the list and he’d be bumped to the bottom, otherwise). Well, sure! Paging through a 1947-1948 ‘engagement’ book, my mother wrote down the day Jack’s Hammond was delivered (see photo at right). Later that summer, my dad made his debut at the Pueblo, a night-spot in Harrisburg, as a “cocktail organist” (the second night, she noted, went better than the first; a few days later, she also mentions his first tip, $1.00). Throughout the book were annotations of “Jack over for dinner” or “dinner at Jack’s” and frequent games of pinochle with Jack and other friends. On March 17th, 1948, she writes “Our 8th Wedding Anniversary.”

There was a box of her father’s early record-keeping, too: rent receipts he’d paid for apartments before they bought their first house the year my mother was born ($15/month rent – not bad) or lists of furniture they’d bought (including a piano for $420), lists of books he’d read, lists of facts he thought were important to remember, and a string of medallions he wore as a member of the Philadelphia branch of the Knights of Malta in 1918. Ironically, I realized, last Friday sitting there amidst these boxes of papers and pictures we were sorting through on the floor, looking up at the desk I often looked up at when I was a child, that that Friday was my grandfather’s birthday and so we went out for dinner to celebrate the past.

My mother had become a keeper of lists herself: the gene is apparently inherited from her father. There are ledger books with every book she read since 1985 when my father died and piles of books that she’d not yet logged but which had post-it notes on them indicating when she’d finished reading them. There’s a ledger itemizing every piece of clothing she bought between 1984 and 1994. There are bundles of notes listing every visitor and phone call she received and made since 1993 (and I suspect I will find previous years tucked away somewhere else). Her more recent calendars, while devoid of highlights like she noted in 1947, may have contained less interesting information – the high and low temperatures for every day or when the Lawn Guy mowed the grass (highlighted in green). She was, if anything, a meticulously organized packrat. I have inherited the packrat gene but unfortunately not her organizational skills: my laissez-faire approach to clutter is something I inherited from my dad.

There are bundles of letters still to be sorted and read, though fewer than I would’ve thought. But that is for another day. In this age of e-mail and instant messaging – and yes, I found print-outs my mother had made of several of the chat sessions we’d had when she first got her computer – what will be left for families to reminisce over in the future? I can hold a 130-year-old photograph in my hand and feel the connection with my family’s distant English roots, but what of all those jpg’s locked in some already out-dated computer software program or storage format? What about all those reel-to-reel audio tapes she’d made from the radio broadcasts when my dad had a weekly 15-minute show, live from the Blue Mountain Hotel in the mid-1950s? We had often talked about trying to resurrect them so she could hear them again before she died, but it kept getting put off, too involved a process, perhaps, and even at 87½ we still felt there was time.

One of my rituals these past 15 years or so was to call my mother, however often I may have talked to her the rest of the week, Sunday nights following the 11:00 news. Even though she was expecting it, she said it always made her jump when the phone rang and she would worry if I was a few minutes late. We would talk, maybe, for an hour or more, both of us night-owls (I was born, according to my baby calendar in which she annotated every event and illness that first year, at 2:58 a.m.). But tonight was the first Sunday night since the funeral that I know she’s not there for me to call on the phone.

Years ago, I had found a quote – mentioned in one of May Sarton’s journals – attributed to St. John Chrysostom:

He whom we have loved and lost
Is no longer where he once was.
He is now wherever we are.

And I also know that, after 21 years, my mother and my father are together again. And these two understandings help me considerably in dealing with her loss.

-- Dr. Dick

Photo credits: all from family collections - (1) Mother in a black dress taken by my dad in early-1940s; (2) Mom & Dad on the Hartman Farm in Williamstown PA, 1939, the year before they married; (3) My dad, Norm Strawser, playing Jack's Hammond organ in the living room of our house in Paxtang (two years before I was born); (4) Mom & Dad in 1944, a photograph I found in her wallet the day she died, February 23rd, 2007.

WLVB Looks For an Evening Announcer

And now for something a little lighter, placing composers in surreal plot situations like a Classical Music Radio Station that would be staffed by the composers themselves? Though WLVB is actually a country music station in Vermont, it seemed the logical place where the station manager would be a guy named Beethoven.

(Incidentally, any resemblance to characters in the story and my former colleagues at WITF 89.5 is purely accidental, and the fact they're looking for an evening announcer had no bearing that I was aware of at the time concerning WITF's former evening announcer.)

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

The phone rang, the little blinking light barely catching his attention. He picked up the receiver and snapped, “Ja, Beethoven here,” and soon slammed it back down. “Another hang-up!”

He had gotten a letter the other day from somebody in Hollywood wanting to know if he could recommend someone to compose music for the studio’s next big hit, “American Pie VIII,” but he tossed it in the trash. “What do I know about music for dumplings and pies,” he muttered. He thought maybe it was them calling him, now. The last time he had tried writing for Hollywood, these idiots kept trying to change everything: “Keep it simple,” they told him, “don’t ramble.” Infuriating!

He returned to the e-mail he was almost ready to send his program director, Richard Wagner, about the latest ratings book. Things were not going well at WLVB lately, the classical music station where he had long been the station manager. But then, classical music on the radio was always a problem in this country. “People these days prefer American Idol,” he sniffed, “but then it wasn’t much different in Vienna, either.”

The morning guy, Bach, was always complaining about what it had been like battling the Philistines in Leipzig. Brahms, in between cigars, would say how much he loved a good Strauss waltz but now and then, something a little serious was good for the soul yet a lot of listeners kept complaining about all the old-fashioned music he was playing in the afternoon. “This is America in the 21st Century,” they’d grouse, but turning to Beethoven, he’d say “Have you heard any of this so-called music they’re writing today?” Beethoven just looked at him and Brahms went back to his cigar.

Beethoven sighed as he looked out the window of his office before he remembered it was only a photograph of a window looking out onto the Vienna Woods which he missed so much. He had gone against Wagner’s objections about bringing in a woman to host the weekend’s Old & New Age show, but Hildegard of Bingen had proven to be a wise choice on his part. If nothing else, her numbers were very good and she didn’t hang out at the station much except on Fridays for a little while.

Now Wagner was complaining about the guy they recently hired to host the opera program. Verdi certainly had his credentials, but he rarely ever did any German operas and how could you have an opera program without good German opera? “No wonder the ratings were in trouble,” he argued!

The problem, Wagner said, whatever he might have been hinting at in his obtuse e-mails about the Direction of Art and the Role of the Artist in Society, had nothing to do with ratings but with the purity of the message. “Spare me the philosophy, Herr Wagner,” Beethoven grumbled as he hit the Send key. Or thought he hit the Send key: it disappeared from his screen so fast, he was sure he must have hit the wrong key instead and deleted it.

Clara, his new secretary, brought in another cup of coffee for him. He just knew she was going to start in about hiring her husband Robert Schumann for that development position that always seemed to be open. The other day he noticed her and Brahms hanging around the coffee machine a little longer than necessary, like he needed that kind of trouble on his staff anyway. He found it difficult making small talk with her, asking about the kids and all. “Ja, ja, thank you,” waving his hand in her general direction, pretending to be lost in another article about the competition with satellite radio.

She put the afternoon mail on his desk, mostly applications for the evening position. Since Wagner had finally succeeded in switching Mendelssohn to the overnight spot, they needed someone in a hurry, but nobody was quite right. This guy Schubert was too quiet; Mahler was too loud. Tchaikovsky was just too depressing and Mozart, you could tell, was always going to be asking for time off because it would interfere with his social life. We could use somebody French, he thought, but Wagner was pushing for this friend of his named Bruckner. Paging through the latest edition of the classical radio trade journal, The Courant, Beethoven wondered if there was a composer out there like this Howard Stern: maybe that was what they needed, someone who could shake things up a bit – and play the violin, as well.

Bach had given up explaining he must be thinking of Isaac Stern. Brahms just chuckled into his beer.

At the last staff meeting, Bach thought maybe Handel would be a worthwhile candidate – at least his hair was neater than Stern’s. Brahms thought surely Johann Strauss – the younger one, that is, who had great hair – would get all the young listeners dancing.

Wagner just rolled his eyes. He knew all about the Music of the Future, and Johann Strauss, he assured them, was not it.

“What about Schoenberg, then,” Beethoven had asked, looking from one to the other. “Or maybe Stravinsky?” No one responded. He thought maybe they were all suddenly deaf.

That was when Mendelssohn, bleary-eyed from his late-night shift, suggested Berlioz. He’d met him in Rome and though he didn’t care for his music much, himself, it was certainly consistent with the personality and spoke directly to a younger generation: maybe that was what WLVB needed in the evening?

Bach sneered at him. “We need a drug bust? To hell with Berlioz,” waving his hand in disgust.

Ravel, one of the new guys in sales, slapped his fist down on the table, wincing at the sudden pain. “That’s it,” he shouted, “that’s exactly it! ‘To Hell with Berlioz,’ the new evening show at WLVB!”

“Hmmm,” Beethoven thought, looking over the scrap of paper Mendelssohn had passed his way, “I like it. Clara, give him a call and see if he’s available to come in for an interview, ja?”

She took the scrap of paper warily between her fingers as if it were crawling with cooties and left the room.

There had also been a letter asking about the possibility of an internship from a student named Juan Chrisostomo Arriaga, so Beethoven dutifully passed his resume around for their inspection. Some felt he was too young or too inexperienced, sounded too much like Mozart but Beethoven just glowered at them. “It’s an internship,” he grimaced. “Dummkopfs,” he muttered not quite under his breath.

They were also talking about some kind of gimmick that could help the next ratings book. Bach thought a marathon of great pianists playing his Goldberg Variations back to back would do the trick, but Wagner just started to snore.

“If you wanted a Marathon, I’ve already written the ultimate Marathon,” Wagner tossed out into the conversation but just thinking about it, Brahms began to snore.

Mendelssohn, who enjoyed cooking, was wondering about a take-off on “The Iron Chef” but with symphonists instead. Brahms was wary of the quality of anything that could be composed that quickly: “you couldn’t improvise a symphony,” he grumbled.

Wagner thought he could get Liszt to arrange another series of “Dueling Pianists” but Beethoven liked the idea of a grudge match between two soccer teams, pitting the Russian Five against the French Six. Ravel said it would be too expensive to pull off and wasn’t really suited to radio, for that matter. True, hadn’t they learned their lesson with “Celebrity Bowling with Mozart” which didn’t even last three weeks?

Beethoven sat at his desk, sipping his coffee when he saw the light blinking on the phone again. Once more, he picked it up with a sigh but as usual no one was there. “What good is all this technology if it doesn’t work, ja?” he stormed, slamming it down, then thought about writing another e-mail to his Immortal Beloved.

- - - - - - -
Dr. Dick
© 2007

The Care & Feeding of the Creative Spirit: Part 2

Continuing from Part 1:

When I was in school, I had weekly lessons in composition and occasionally we’d talk about “the teaching of composition.” But nowhere was there any kind of “creative psychology,” preparing students for changes to their creativity as we mature, if we would have even listened (the “I’ll never change, that won’t happen to me” argument) other than the occasional wink-wink about any impending mid-life crisis.

When I was a composition student, I could sit in a practice room at school surrounded by other students who’d be practicing or running up and down the hall like a bunch of idiots: nothing really seemed to bother me. Now, listening to the soft rock beat of my neighbor’s stereo through my walls (thump thump thump) or the barking doberman next door sends me into a tailspin: how can I possibly write with all this racket?!

Then there’s that new voice you may have just discovered, one inside yourself that’s louder than all your neighbor’s stereos and dogs put together, the one that keeps saying “Who cares what you write? You think someone’s going to like that shit? What orchestra do you think is going to have the rehearsal time to learn to play this? You think you’re Beethoven or something?”

It’s the kind of voice that, when you look in the mirror and think “I look nice,” is saying to you, “Are you kidding? You look fat!”

This is what some writers call “The Inner Critic.”

Kill him!

In the old cartoons, they used to depict this voice as the little devil sitting on your shoulder, urging you to do things you knew were wrong, before the little angel would pop up on your other shoulder, the voice of your conscience, telling you you shouldn’t do that. The only problem with the Inner Critic is there’s no little angel around to talk you out of it. Pretty soon, you begin to believe that voice and if you’re not able to kill him off or at least drown him out (I know – white noise!!), it can kill your creativity faster than anything else in the world.

For the typical student – high school or college – long-range planning is generally “how do I make it through to the weekend?” When you become a senior, then there are either plans for grad school or career choices that need to be made. If that wasn’t a big enough change, there’s getting married and the even bigger change and responsibilities that take precedence with children.

From a creative (and selfish) standpoint, there are distractions and new responsibilities that reorganize your life, change your priorities. As the Bible says, “When I was a child, I spake as a child” and so on... “But now that I am a man” (it would be too complicated to diversify this quote politically correctly: but now that I am a man or a woman? Well, these days, anything is possible) “I have put away these childish things...” Okay, maybe “now that I am an adult”...

Art is a form of play. You let your imagination play. At one point, you have the freedom of youth to play anything you feel like playing – you experiment with possibilities, you take risks and it doesn’t matter: you can always try again – there’s plenty of time!

What happens when you turn 21, other than being able to vote and drink (legally)? Everyone expects you to act “like an adult.” (Let’s leave the immature adult who’s acting like a child out of the equation for the moment.)

Creativity is Play but now you have to Work. You get a job, hopefully earn a living, support yourself, have a family – these all take time from the creative play and sometimes sap the energy from it. And you find you don’t have plenty of time any more. If you’re a mother trying to hold down a job and raise a family, you have NO time.

Your employer isn’t going to be too concerned about your plans for the Great American Novel or Symphony. “You do that on your own time.” And that’s if you have a job that doesn’t require more than an 8-hour day. Who would have time, if you’re like Toru Takemitsu, to sit down and play through the St. Matthew Passion just to get inspired?

Play is for children – that’s the image. Now that you’re an adult, it’s time to put the toys away.

Don’t.

At least not in some remote corner of the brain where you allow society to throw away the key.

How do you keep play in your life so your creativity can be nurtured by it? Well, there ARE weekends, but if you own a home, play is not exactly mowing the grass or cleaning the garage. If you have children, play can suddenly open up the whole world of your own childhood again like a kind of magic. If artists have been inspired by romance, may have been inspired by the birth of a child, though there are different responsibilities, from diapers and beyond.

Creativity is the work of play, the imagination free of the Everyday. Give your creativity something to keep the everyday reality out for a while.

When I was in my early-30s, I spent a month at a writer’s colony called Yaddo (the MacDowell Colony is another one and there are several in other parts of the country as well). There was a routine: breakfast was served at before 9am and lunch was handed to you in a box – then between 9 and 5, you stayed in your room and wrote. No one could go into anyone else’s room without prior arrangement and bother them. You could escape to eat your lunch downstairs or on the patio or you could stay in your room and eat while you’re working. The TV set in the parlor could only be on after 5pm (they made an exception: I was there the day President Reagan was shot). Dinner was served at 5. The rest of the evening was yours – you could socialize or continue to work, but no one was supposed to bother you in your room. One thing that helped was the recognition that creativity was the equal of work – not that it was “work,” because any artist knows how hard creative work is, but because it was being equated with that 9-to-5 sense of work.

Around the houses and cabins that comprise this colony in the woods were 50-60 acres with several different paths. Some of us would take brisk walks along the shorter path, a kind of inner circle around the mansion; other times maybe you wanted to spend more time and take the longer, outer circle. Rather than a brisk walk, perhaps it was a day to linger and look at the new spring growth (I was there in mid-March) or watch the birds. You could take as long as you liked or needed, but once you were back in your room, it was now time to work.

These walks were a double form of exercise: more than just cardiovascular, it got the blood flowing through the brain. And it eliminated the build-up of stress, sweeping out the day’s reality and allowing your creativity to stop and smell the roses.

It doesn’t have to be a full workout at the gym: all you need is a little just to dust off the brain and give it a little fuel so you’re good to go for the rest of the day.

So if you feel you have trouble, suddenly, being creative – take a walk. And tell that Inner Critic to take a hike! Go somewhere that relaxes you or energizes you, whatever works for you. You may have to drive somewhere, but the drive is not enough. In the winter if it’s too cold to get out and walk, maybe it’s time to turn that coatrack back into a stationary bike...

For some writers, reading other people’s words can inhibit the flow of your own. For others, it may inspire them or give them something to “take off” from. For composers, it’s not just a matter of not listening to someone else’s music. For instance, I have music spilling through my head all the time. I work at a radio station and play classical music in the evening, but there can be music all around you, not just from the radio but everywhere else you turn – the ubiquitous Muzak. And nothing is worse than getting some inane phrase stuck in your head you can’t get rid of, something that just repeats over and over again. They call these “ear worms” (kill them, too).

One thing that several writers about creativity have suggested is keeping a journal. Unfortunately mine becomes more a report on what happened rather than what I’m thinking about. Sometimes, it’s therapeutic to get issues off your mind (“off your chest” is the standard expression) – problems at work, trouble with a relationship. Julia Cameron, in her popular book “The Artist’s Way,” suggests you write first thing after you wake up: it’s not WHAT you write but THAT you write, and this works whether you’re a writer or a painter or a composer. You clear the stuff out of your brain, maybe writing about a dream or just nonsense just to get the mind moving. Eventually this will lead to ideas or something that can lead to ideas, something that could be the creative light-bulb you need to get the real creative work started.

Occasionally, I find myself just simply asking “Why am I stuck?” I might get into a question why I like one composer over another and maybe discover something that piques my creative curiosity (or leads me down the Red Herring Road). Maybe I’ll start hearing sound-images in my head – not necessarily themes but maybe musical shapes (or “gestures”), instrumental colors or kinds of texture which I then try to describe in prose or drawings. It is my dialogue with my self. It helps to activate my inner self, freeing it up for... PLAY!

After several years of not having composed anything (nor even trying to), I heard the concertmaster of the Harrisburg Symphony play Ernest Chausson’s “Poeme.” It’s a piece I’ve never really cared for. But at the end of the piece, in the very last measures, there’s a chain of very high trills over a long sustained chord before everything resolves. Even though I’ve heard this piece many times and often found this passage unsettling because it’s so hard to play in tune, this time I sat up like I’d never heard it before. I’m not sure it was just the performance (which was very good) but I found this, now, very mysterious and before long (actually, I think, days later) a very mysterious piece started forming in my head. Now keep in mind, I had not completed a single piece of music in something like over 12 years, so this was definitely unexpected.

Some years before, I had read the opening of Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” where the world is sung into existence by a chief deity and a committee of sub-deities. It’s one of the most beautiful creation stories I’ve read, everything willed into being through a kind of astral music. One of these “sub-deities” brings in a note of discord, introducing evil into the world – and this theatrical aspect is what set the piece in my mind in motion. What exactly this had to do with the trills at the end of Chausson’s “Poeme,” I have no idea, but there it was.

It evolved into a piece for violin and orchestra about 12 minutes long which took 6 months to write but (several years later) still doesn’t have a title. I didn’t want it to become the Silmarillion Piece. But it worked for me and became the first piece I’d completed in about 16 years or so. Later, I began to see it as a conflict between my creativity (the solo violin) with the introduction of evil from my own Inner Critic.

In the process of working on this, it occurred to me it was taking soooo long getting back into the swing of composing again. It had been years, of course, and it wasn’t quite like “getting back on the bicycle” (a cliche I hate because, truthfully, I never learned to ride a bicycle in the first place) There were whole new things to learn, it seemed, things I hadn’t been doing for 16 years. Discipline was a big thing to have to learn, the idea of “showing up at the page,” the equivalent of going to work and working regardless of productivity or success. It was difficult not to be discouraged by how long this was taking. That “Inner Critic” was constantly reminding me that I once wrote a very complex 9-minute choral work basically in one day.

Perhaps you remember the claymation film that came out in 2000 (around the time I was working on this piece) called “Chicken Run”? One night, I happened to catch one of those “Making Of...” TV shows, how they put this stop-action animated film together. They take little figures made out of clay... set it up, take a shot, then move an arm a smidge, adjust the facial expression a bit, take another shot and so on – a very tedious process. They realize that with computers today it would be so much easier to make an animated film but they were committed to the look and feel of their claymation process. It didn’t bother them that, at the end of a very long working day, usually 8 or 9 strenuous hours on the set (which was basically the size of a kid’s Christmas train platform) they had... 3½ seconds of film footage. Let me say that again – 8 or 9 hours of work, 3½ seconds of film!

So I sat down to figure out how much music I was basically averaging in the process of composing, keeping track of the number of hours and then timing what I’d actually composed in that period of time. Though I could never manage 8 or 9 hours of composing time in a day (too fatiguing, mentally) even though much of that could be spent staring at what I’d written the day before, it still averaged out to about 3½ minutes of music for every 8 hours of clock-time spent working. So I figured if they couldn’t be discouraged at “Chicken Run” with that kind of progress, why should I? It’s a matter of having a vision and believing in it. It was a kind of revelation – like “poultry in motion” – that helped kill (for a time) that nasty little inner voice.

Several composers have told me, in one way or another, “the piece you finish is never the piece you started.” It takes on a life of its own, in most cases, and becomes something else from that initial idea. Sometimes this is a problem; sometimes it becomes a better piece. But life is like that, too.

We all have distractions: you have a job, now, and maybe a family to support and raise. Many people can’t always manage to get up an hour earlier to write that novel, but some can figure out what things to do to accommodate that dream: set up a special room in a quiet part of the house (if there is such a thing), a place you won’t be disturbed while the door is shut. Maybe ask the spouse to take the kids out for an hour – turn off the phone. Spend an hour concentrating on what you’re writing, composing, painting, practicing. One hour. You’d be surprised how much, once you get used to it, you can accomplish in an hour.

Of course it takes me sometimes almost that much time before I even realize where I need to start, figuring out where things were going when I left off the last time, but now my hour is up and I need to leave for work. So I started looking for other ways of prepping my time: before I stop, jot down some ideas where I need to begin. Spend as much time, when inspiration strikes, getting something down on paper that will jog the memory the next time, even if it’s drawings or squiggles or descriptive words. If you just think “yeah, I’ll remember that tomorrow,” chances are you won’t.

Take stock of yourself. I am not a morning person but I can’t work late at night after I get home from my second shift job: the neighbors are asleep, my brain is fried. I am also basically a lazy person. I spent years writing spontaneously with a facility that allowed me to sit down and write a 30-minute chamber opera over Thanksgiving vacation. If inspiration isn’t popping up any more on its own, prepare yourself with back-up – other things to work on, perhaps abstract things that might be the equivalent of a cross-word puzzle but could jog the mind into creating something.

Following some of the advice from Julia Cameron's “Artist’s Way,” I would do my “morning pages” and take those “Artist Dates,” things you do for yourself by yourself. I tried to avoid those “crazy-makers,” as she called them, the friends who would come by and complain about their problems until you’re just as miserable as they are (it’s not legal to kill them, but you get the idea).

There are some distractions you can’t get away from: children need you when they need you. Your spouse may understand but there are limits. Being an artist in a relationship means trying to find the balance between love and selfishness, in a way. Perhaps somebody is ill – illness is never anything you expect. These are often the most difficult to accommodate because they require immediate attention and can be the most spiritually draining.

Basically, you learn what you have to do – I have to make money, I have to do this job – also, I have to be with my family because there are also things you need to do – I need to be with my family just as I need to compose. I don't need this and could do with a little less of that. You learn to compensate but you also learn to put the different aspects of your life into some kind of perspective. You find some time when you can sit down and say to your inner child, “can you come out and play?”

If you don’t find these adjustments between your life as a student and as you grow older, you will find yourself stuck in Middle Age with a job you may or may not like but chances are “may not like.” Perhaps the kids are now grown and off to college or on their own and maybe your focus has shifted from taking care of your kids to taking care of your parents. At some point, you will realize you are the age your parents were when YOU were a kid going off to college and you thought they were so old. You couldn’t imagine it before, but there may come a time when you might actually prefer to stay home and read a book rather than go out and party.

The worst thing about Middle Age, life changes that make puberty look like child’s-play, is “The Rut.” The same stuff at work, the same stuff for dinner, the same problems at home, the same stuff on TV. You find yourself in a rut that gets deeper and deeper until you can no longer see up out over the top of it and you find it impossible to climb out of. It doesn’t mean running off and having an affair, buying a snazzy red sports car to reclaim your youth (cars that can be regarded as penis extenders) or dying your hair so you won’t look 50 but more like a 30-something who’s led a hard life. If you didn’t have the discipline to exercise before, chances are you won’t discover that discipline trying to work off the extra pounds when you start feeling stiff in the joints or when those 6-pack abs you always dreamed of have turned into a keg...

There are lots of ways to stave this off or turn things around before it’s too late, or before you run headlong into a wall – like a heart attack – where you have to change everything, or else! Eating right and living right all help your being happy, being engaged in your life, and vice versa. You need to recognize there is a problem and then figure out how to solve it. Big problems are easier to solve if you break them down into smaller issues that can be addressed with greater potential for success. It’s too easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of everything that’s happening (or not happening) to you!

This is a Left Brain thing, looking at the details and working at it bit by bit. If you’re too Right Brained about it, you’ll see the Big Picture but react emotionally – and that emotion could be fear.

The dreams and goals you have today – and you should have them, no matter where you are in life – are just as important to someone who’s a student now as they will be 35 years from now. If career choices and circumstances beyond your control take you in other directions, don’t think of yourself as a failure. Look at what you’re doing, think about what you’d like to do and figure out some way of keeping that involved in your life.

Maybe I won’t write the Great American Symphony. Just because a pianist never quite made it to Carnegie Hall doesn’t mean she’s not a good pianist. There are ways your creativity can help you find some meaning in your life and enrich your family and community.

Without dreams and goals, life has no direction. Figure out where you want to go and what you need to do to get there. Can you always reach that destination? Maybe not – there are lots of twists and turns on those paths and you have to be prepared to react to them, maybe retrace your steps and find a different one. You need to be able to adapt, you need to be able to accept change, not be paralyzed by it. And this something can happen in your home-life, in your work-life as well as in your creative-life.

Everything you do is a risk: it’s the only way you move forward. If you don’t, you’re stuck. Don’t be afraid to take risks – but don’t be depressed if this one didn’t work. Maybe the next one will.

In a relationship, they tell you to “communicate.” You have problem? Talk them out. It’s the same thing with your inner-self, your creativity: you have problems? I’m not saying “talk to yourself” in that way (though with people on cell phones all the time, there’s less stigma attached to it), but yes, you need to communicate with your Self and listen to what the good inner voice is trying to tell you.

- Dr. Dick

The Care & Feeding of the Creative Spirit: Part 1

You may feel “a lot of this has nothing to do with me.”

If you are under-30, chances are you feel things are not going to change that much: “What’s getting older got to do with me?” You look at your parents and cannot understand why they’re different from you, and usually not in a positive way: “I’m not going to let that happen to me!”

Aside from the obvious fact it beats the alternative, we all age – and this is not about getting older but about dealing with changes as we age. If you are over-30, you may feel I’m speaking directly to you, that you’re still trying to figure how that change happened to you. If you are now retired, you may find yourself nodding wistfully and agreeing with me: there may be nothing new here for you, but there may be some ideas you would agree with even if you hadn’t thought of them before – “been there/didn’t do that.”

Basically, my topic is creativity – which is not just being a composer. Or writer, painter, poet or anyone else in the arts. We’re all creative to some degree or another. If it’s not part of our “job,” it’s part of what keeps the “job” interesting. If it’s not, that may be the problem.

While I’m primarily dealing with music here – and largely from my own perspective as a composer (or perhaps “would-be composer”) – in many ways, you can “insert your art” here, or your situation: teacher, business person, perhaps other situations on more everyday, non-artistic levels that still require creativity that may not necessarily result in something others would call “Art” (after all, much of what artists create is often not considered “Art” by a lot of people, anyway) but which engages a sense of creative play. Part of the problem, as people age, is that “sense of creative play” becomes not only more difficult to engage but often loses its sense of play.

In music, performers are generally “re-creative,” not just recreating the music someone else wrote long ago, but in needing to come up with creative solutions to interpretive questions. Sometimes understanding creativity helps to figure out why a composer wrote something this way and not that way.

Teachers had better be creative if you expect to engage your continually changing students and expect to grow along with them.

One of the most important things you need to discover is how to teach yourself when there’s no one there to turn to to ask the questions you used to ask. Once you’ve absorbed everything you’ve been taught, you assimilate it into your own personality and pass it on to the next round: your students, your audience.

Music is not an exact science. In fact, we’re discovering that even science is not an exact science. How could all those amazing discoveries have been made if it weren’t for the unpredictable imagination? True, a lot of that happens “by accident,” but it’s the imagination that allows us to discover that we DID discover something by accident.

To those who consider themselves “non-creative,” the ability to compose music or write a novel is a big mystery. It’s not rational, we can’t explain it – we call it a “God-given Talent.” Frankly, people who understand computer programs or excel in sports are a mystery to me. Whatever it is, if you’re creative, to you this is normal; what somebody else does that you can’t is therefore a mystery.

In the United States today, everything has to be explained. Answers are True/False, Yes/No, Black/White with little tolerance for Gray (I’m speaking metaphorically, here), or at least maybe multiple choice. Everything has to be neatly pigeon-holed.

And succinct. When you fill out your income tax forms, there’s a tiny little space for your occupation – I’m a music director at a public radio station: how do I write all that in something that’s barely an inch long? One time, I just wrote in “radio” but that looked very weird – I’m a radio? There was barely room to write in “Communications” since neither Media or Entertainment seemed any more accurate. I couldn’t put “Composer” because they want to know how I earn my money and everybody knows most people don’t make any money as a composer.

So how does creativity work? Honestly, if I knew the answer to that, I wouldn’t be working at a radio station: I would be making my money as a composer and I’d be one of the most sought-after teachers in the world! The problem for many people is “so what do you do when creativity no longer works?” If it’s a God-Given Talent, then can’t God take it away? We often find ourselves worrying about this: will it be there tomorrow? Next year? I just had a big success – will there be another one? What do I do if I can’t repeat that success? Now I have a reputation: people expect great things from me now. And creativity takes on a whole new dimension.

Nobody can really teach you to be creative. Teachers can give you hints and suggestions along the way, coaching you to develop the talent you may already have, but chances are if you don’t have the talent, they’re not going to turn you into a composer just by sheer force of will. It takes time to develop this talent – and it takes time for the public to accept the fruits of that talent as “Art.” It’s not the same as mastering a skill to perform a job but in the long-range scheme of things, that’s still the basic idea. Kind of.

Whittling it down, there are two approaches to Art – you can learn the craft, learning how to put it together by rules and logic, more abstract skills that you develop before you really begin creating; or you do it “naturally” and by repetition figure out what works, replacing craft with intuition.

It amuses me, wandering through those summer “Arts & Craft” shows, looking at some of the booths to see who’s an artist and who’s a craftsman. Here’s a pot – it does everything a pot needs to do to be a pot. There are those who make very practical pots and there are those who make pots that are very appealing to the eye. One may not be very pretty, the other may not be very useful. Perhaps they’re there for different purposes. Perhaps the one potter doesn’t have the imagination to create the beautiful pot; perhaps the other one doesn’t want to make just practical pots because other potters can do that. One isn’t better than the other though we can all be snobs about pots, if we wanted to, since we can be snobs about anything else.

When I was in graduate school, earning two degrees in composition, I didn’t learn a lot of craft, turning out exercises in counterpoint, for example, which might be to music what cross-word puzzles are to novels. I had some kind of “innate” talent that worked on a mostly intuitive level: I wrote what I felt like. My teacher, Sam Adler, didn’t try to force me into the Craft Corner – probably because he knew I’d rebel – though he’d give me some assignment that was meant to solve some kind of creative issue. We’d go through the piece I brought in for my lesson and he’d say “that note – it should be an F-sharp” (it always seemed to be an F-sharp) and I would play it with the F-sharp and, yeah, it sounded better. Why does it sound better? He’d just shrug his shoulders. I would continue composing, trying to find “the right note” by “what sounded right.”

There’s a lot of discussion in the past decade or so about the Two Personality Types – are you Type A or Type B? Scientists also talk about Right Brain and Left Brain – not just as sides of the brain and how they function but how these functions reflect the personality of the... uhm, Brain-Holder. (Let’s not get into the No-Brainer.)

This is not entirely a recent discovery: through the history of Art, we have classified the style of the era as either Classical or Romantic – in music, the second half of the 18th Century is the Classical Era and the 19th Century is the Romantic Era. Basically that means “classical” is dominated by concepts of form and craft but “romantic” is ruled by emotions.

These two seemingly opposite poles have been described in terms of Greek stereotypes, which may have been the way the Greeks explained the difference between certain kinds of people (since a culture creates a mythology in order to explain itself and make sense of the world around it). Among the many facets of his job description, in addition to being in charge of the sun, Apollo was the god of order. Dionysos (or Dionysus in the Latinized form), also known as Bacchus, gave us wine and may not be as impressive as Apollo on the deity scale, but wine, an important feature of everyday life, was a means to achieving freedom from the rigidity of order.

On Apollo’s side, there is order, design, form – logic. Things can be analyzed rationally, objectively. You can look at different parts to come up with the whole. Ritual in the sense of a routine exists to inspire order. You respond to it intellectually.

On Dionysos’ side, by comparison, there is – well, chaos. Thing are random, non-sequential, intuitive and subjective. You usually respond to the whole experience before looking at its components. Ritual is something that inspires you, opens you to the choice of possibilities. You respond to it emotionally.

Apollo is your Left Brain and Dionysos is your Right Brain. Curiously we each have a brain that is divided into a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere, each one in control of certain functions that make us humans (or, in another sense, human). Some people may be dominated by the Right Brain more than the Left; others, by the Left Brain more than the Right – some, more of a mix dominated by one or the other. So curiously, with all this talk of gray matter, it’s not entirely black or white after all.

Greeks worshiped in temples of Apollonian symmetry (the most famous example being the Parthenon). Greek dramas, a mix of poetry and drama as well as choral singing and dancing, grew out of religious festivals dedicated to Dionysos.

The Greeks had muses – one for each of what they considered the arts (and some of that seems open to interpretation these days) – divine spirits (daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne or Memory) who would come down from Olympus (or the Heavens) to inspire the artist. If the artist wasn’t feeling particularly inspired, there was a ritual to encourage a visit from your particular muse: libations and prayers.

In today’s scientific world, this may seem silly, though dozens of the “self-help” books on creativity issues that I’ve read or paged through contain, in one way or another, prayers directly to God and think nothing of it. (We think nothing of children putting out milk and cookies for Santa Claus either, for that matter...)

Many of these books also suggest certain kinds of rituals, preparing your mind for creativity by first of all removing anything too mundane that distracts or ruins your focus. If you’ve set aside a private space and time in your schedule so you can write that novel, even if it’s only an hour a day, you’re not going to be receptive to fresh ideas if you’re still concentrating on what you have to make for dinner, how you’re going to present that business contract to the boss or how terrible the news is from the Middle East. You need to cleanse the mind (or the soul), and these rituals help sweep away the surface level intrusions so you can function better at a deeper level of consciousness (or allow the subconscious to percolate to the surface).

Igor Stravinsky is a good example of a Left Brain Apollo (he even composed a ballet about Apollo and the Muses) – at least from the 1920s on. In the middle of his career, after changing creative gears following “The Rite of Spring” which is almost pure Dionysos, he went back to earlier eras, finding models in the 18th Century that inspired him with their clean lines, neat textures and if not exactly unemotional, less messy emotions. When Stravinsky would sit down at his desk to compose, he would carefully sharpen his pencils, put all his pens in another place, lined up according to colors (late in life, he tended to use colored pens to write), clean paper handy – a well-ordered space that wasn’t ready for him to compose until it was all in order.

Toru Takemitsu may not be the best example of a Right-Brain Dionysian composer – his music is inspired by a Japanese sense of order and design, after all – but his ritual was to sit down at the piano and play through Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. When he was done, THEN he would begin work on a new piece. He was responding emotionally to a piece of music totally foreign in outward style and concept to the music he would be composing himself as well as to his own national culture, cleansing the mind with spiritual and timeless beauty before his spirit, like a slate swept clean, was ready to compose something new.

Artists sitting around waiting for inspiration might be “musing.”

And muse is also the root word for Music, even though all nine muses covered a variety of often overlapping art forms that would be less specific pigeon-holes than we might think useful today.

May Sarton, poet, novelist and a writer of deeply insightful journals, wrote how she might begin her day listening to music, finding Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet a particularly inspiring piece. I wonder if she would have written something different if she would have preferred Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique?

I’ve heard from several listeners who tell me they were painting or writing poetry while listening to something I was playing on the radio that night, and how it inspired them to some creative solution they may not have been thinking of when they sat down to create (not so much “to work” but “to play”).

The word “muse” is often transferred to a person, usually someone the artist is in love with but who may be unobtainable, who becomes either a direct inspiration or someone to whom only the best creative efforts would be worthy of their dedications.

An Apollonian composer might be inspired by a form – whether it’s Haydn returning to the symphonic form to write 104 of them or Brahms writing “only” four, finding different solution for each one of them. A Dionysian composer with inspiration generating from an emotional response might be inspired by an event – like Shostakovich writing his 10th Symphony following the death of Stalin.

But what causes Creativity to change? What do you do when you find yourself abandoned by your muse?

– To Be Continued...




Picture credit: Baldassare Peruzzi’s “Muses Dancing with Apollo”

Noise

Did you ever have one of those assignments – mine was in a junior high school health class, I think – where you were supposed to pick a handicap and act out for a day what it would be like dealing with that in your daily life? As I recall, the teacher jokingly expressed it as “pick your favorite handicap” or at least that’s what it seemed like to me.

I refused. I didn’t want to “pretend” I was blind or deaf or crippled (someone in the class threw out “or retarded” as another option – everyone laughed). I didn’t want to play-act to experience what it might be like, living that way, whether it was because I felt it was making fun of those who already were or simply out of fear: what do mothers around the world say when kids make faces, “keep doing that and your face will stay that way”? Someone later would put it as “Don’t tempt God.”

Noise has always been a particular problem for me. When I was a kid, someone at a family reunion set off a firecracker under my seat because I was just sitting there reading and not having any fun. They thought it just scared me, but my heart was pounding and I could barely catch my breath for what seemed like hours. In college, I was walking along the street when a car backfired (it sounded like a gunshot to me) and I kind of passed out, going into a state of semi-conscious shock that lasted for several hours. It was later discovered I had a slight heart murmur which might explain those reactions, but I don't ever remember being treated for it.

I have never been comfortable around factory and machine noise: it’s physically painful to me. It is not the volume – I can enjoy listening to Mahler full-blast, let’s say, and not have a problem – but the steady exposure. While Mahler might be beautiful and exciting, there is nothing aesthetically redeeming about listening to the constant shriek of a vacuum cleaner.

This past couple of months, things suddenly have been changing and I’ve become terrified of damaging my hearing. As a would-be musician and composer, losing my hearing is my biggest fear. Not that the problems indicate “sudden deafness,” more like “continued exposure to annoying noises may result in hearing damage,” and in the past month or so, I’ve become more conscious of background noises and noticing that foreground sounds are “compromised.” I now suddenly find myself having to turn the radio or stereo up more than before. I get frequent headaches after a few hours’ exposure to the steady hum of the “noise-masking system” at work and in fact find it becoming painful even after a few minutes (they’ve toned it down a bit, I’m told, but it’s still annoying: I can rarely go five or ten minutes before needing to put in ear-plugs). It’s like listening to someone vacuuming in the next cubicle only they’re there for hours at a time, not even moving, the machine just running (“you’ll get used to it”). This past week, there were industrial strength fans roaring in the atrium, drying out the carpeting after a sprinkler malfunctioned over the weekend: walking past them was like having someone holding a high-speed drill to my head.

I’ve always been aware I had a “keen” sense of hearing – it comes in handy for a musician. For me, this is what normal is. But I’d never really been aware how “sensitive” it was. However, it had been 20 years since I last had a hearing examination, so I made an appointment with a hearing specialist – for this past Thursday.

Not that I expected them to find anything because they had nothing to compare their results to. According to the examination and the tests, my hearing is “perfect.” If anything, I have an increased level of hearing and there seemed to be some wonder why I would even be concerned about that. I couldn’t seem to impress on the doctor that it was at the expense of other, more important sounds. Music, for example. Yes, I could still hear an audiologist saying certain words against the pumped-in backdrop of a steady hum of noise, but it may have been easier to do that a few months ago, before these problems manifested themselves. That’s not a very productive way to listen to and appreciate music if there’s the steady hum of a vacuum cleaner, say, in the midst of the cello section.

So now I wait until April to return for a comparison follow-up.

The question, then, is do I spend the next three months not trying to protect my hearing just to see if it WILL do any damage or do I continue wearing my “ear-protectors”? That’s an earphone-looking thing that blocks out loud frequencies but still lets me know someone is talking to me (or trying to). It turns the roar of the noise-masking noise into a bearable drone.

Working in a radio station, most of my co-workers assume I’m wearing some cool radio receiver unit. “What are you listening to,” one of them asked me yesterday.

“Silence!” I said.

So if I don’t wear it (them?), I wonder am I possibly allowing my hearing to be damaged just to prove a point? If I do wear them, there’s almost no point in going back for the follow-up because I would expect if it’s working, protecting my hearing from potential harm, the test results should still indicate my hearing is “perfect” – or perhaps “good enough” by other people’s normal standards.

Meanwhile, I sit down at my writing table by the piano, look at the music I’m trying to compose and wonder: Can I continue being a composer? Why am I a composer? Why bother trying to compose? What’s the point? Who am I if I can’t compose, even if nobody else hears my music?

As if the sense of fear about my hearing weren’t enough, now I’m sent into a creative tailspin by the “inner critic” who has turned these fears into a panic. I know Beethoven managed to compose despite his deafness. I know Smetana did not. I also know I am no Beethoven, nor even a Smetana.

No one will notice if I stop composing. (Actually, probably very few people would notice if 90% of our composers today would stop composing, but that’s another issue.) It’s not like I have a “reputation” to maintain: I’d spent maybe 15 miserable years not composing before. I have no career as a composer. But it IS how I identify my self and it’s important to me, despite other people saying things that are the equivalent of “deal with it.”

Because I know I have to but I don’t know if I can accept that loss of identity again. I am learning to accept the pain in my back (yeah, that’s another issue: also awaiting test results to see if it’s anything more than “just” arthritis) and taking measures to compensate for it (like not sitting in chairs that feel uncomfortable no matter how ergonomically perfect they’re supposed to be). But my hearing is different, a more vital part of me – and it’s not like I have a choice, or at least an easy one.

New Years Resolutions

Happy New Year to everybody with best wishes for a healthy, happy, prosperous and hopefully sane year in 2007. It's a time for making New Year's Resolutions, something I don't often do, but this year was different and I thought I'd share some of them with you.

If you've ever studied music, you know that a scale - let's use the white-rat garden-variety key of C Major - is a collection of available pitches out of which you can construct a melody (the linear element of music) or chords (the vertical element of music.) Putting chords together creates harmony, which is mostly about how chords move from one to another. A cadence is a series of chords that act as punctuation for a musical phrase.

As an example, here's a C Major scale and the different chords you can create out of that scale:

Now, if I take a different collection of pitches – a group of six notes – I can create a “set of available pitches” that can act basically the same way. Theorist Allen Forte labels this particular set or “hexachord” 6-30. If you take the other six notes of the 12 available pitches, its mirror, you come up with its complement, a hexachord that is, in this case, the inversion of 6-30 which I write as 6-30'.
Like a C Major scale, I could use these pitches in any order I want to create a melody and I can create different kinds of chords from them, too. If I take the first three notes and turn it into a chord (I don’t want to call it a “triad” because that implies it’s built on thirds rather than is a chord consisting of three notes, so we tend to call it a “trichord”), then the second three notes and so on, I get this progression of chords built on major and minor seconds.
So now I have four chords created out of all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale. It’s also not terribly interesting because everything is moving in parallel directions, sort of like playing those major and minor triads from a C Major scale exactly as I wrote them in my little example above.

If you notice that the first two chords consist of a major 7th with a major 2nd above the lower note and that the second two chords consist of a major 7th with a major 2nd below the top note, you could also switch around some of the pitches to create chords that would have a minor 3rd above or below the outer notes.
The all-parallel motion is still pretty boring, basically just a “succession” of chords. But if you start changing the direction of some of these voices within the chords, you could get something like this:
An “open” chord moving to a chord in a tighter or “close” position now gives you a sense of a chord progression – there’s a feeling of increased tension and, by reversing that order for the end of these four chords, of the release of that tension. This basically creates a kind of cadence, one that may be open-ended or one that may sound more-or-less resolved.
These two are really my first two resolutions. Ex.5 may sound more open-ended, like the tension still needs to resolve, because of the compact nature of the final dissonance with its Major and Minor 2nds. To listeners used to chords built on Major and Minor 3rds – a C Major or D minor triad, say – a chord like any of these will sound “dissonant,” but dissonance only means there’s unresolved tension. In a collection of non-traditional non-tonal chords, dissonance becomes fairly relative.

But looking at the set of notes in 6-30, you can also group them to create chords built on 3rds that have a look of familiarity about them. If I spelled the F-sharp as a G-flat, that would legally be a C Diminished triad, but I wanted to get the idea of the upward half-step motion to the G-natural in the next chord. It resolves to what would function in the key of D Major as Dominant 7th Chord and because of our familiarity with that sound we sense the way it could (or maybe “ought to”) resolve.

In the second hexachord, these could resolve any number of ways, including chords that sound like they could be “augmented 6th” chords (German 6ths and French 6ths, without getting into a whole raft of discussion from Sophomore Theory class) resolving to Dominant 7th chords. The point is, while they “sound” like those chords, they don’t “act” like those chords, resolving in the same expected ways.
That may be interesting but I find it sounding too close to traditional harmony to be too useful in my own style. It could be used at some half-way point before a full-blown, more final resolution, though, so I’ll keep it in mind as a possibility.

But what is the point of all this? For centuries, composers have built their harmonic structure on a series of chords perceived as “consonant.” Yet a Dominant 7th, a diminished triad or an augmented 6th chord are all dissonant because they imply forward and, as yet, incomplete motion needing resolution. The art of creating a satisfying harmonic progression (or forward motion) is the result of blending the right amount of consonance with the right amount of dissonance.

If it’s all consonant, it will sound very bland (“it doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere”). If it’s all dissonant, it will sound too chaotic and unsettled (“it still doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere, just sits there churning”).

So in a more-or-less dissonant style, you still want to mix in aspects of consonance and dissonance. You can do that by resolving to chords that are “less dissonant” and therefor by comparison “consonant.” Or you can use old-fashioned “consonant” harmonies like C Major or D Minor triads.

In Ex.7, you can see the pitches of 6-30 will create two minor triads – C Minor and F-sharp minor. Its complement, 6-30', will create two major triads – E Major and B-flat Major. But play them together, they don’t sound like a “tonal consonant progression” because they’re a tritone apart, that augmented 4th interval that for centuries was called “the devil in music” because it sounded so unsettling. The more chromatic music became – following the progression from Bach and late-Mozart to Wagner to Schoenberg and so on into the 20th Century – the impact of a tritone has lessened until it’s just another interval.

And with the right kind of intervallic motion in the outer voices, it lessens the tritone’s impact if the bass line, for instance, isn’t jumping a tritone. Ex.7 sounds very smooth, actually. Here’s another example with the same triads but I reverse the order of the last two: in some context, the motion from B-flat to E might sound better than E to B-flat.
Now, if I want to use a “consonant” motion resolving to a “dissonant” motion, I could mix the two by using standard triads in an un-standard way resolving to non-tonal, non-traditional trichords creating a sense of tension that leaves this phrase “open-ended.”
It could be more open-ended if I reversed the last two chords to end on the chord in “close” position. Or I could switch the two hexachords, then opening with dissonant motion resolving to consonant motion (and I’m speaking simplistically, here), cadencing on the F-sharp minor triad.
Or I could use the hexachords in their original order and come up with this possibility:
I find this a very satisfying resolution, personally. I also notice that the top-line of each chord scrambles the letters in the name BACH (using the Old German Notation where B=B-flat and H=B-natural). So if I wanted to, I could "partition" these chords in such a way, I could come up with something slightly different. By taking the two middle chords for my first pair and the two outer chords for my second pair, I now have a different progression of chords, harmonizing Bach's Name!

Each pair of chords now consists of one major triad and a trichord built on seconds. These create a different hexachord, which is the inversion of the hexachord Forte labels as 6-14: the complementary hexachord (its mirror) is just another transposition - a tritone away - of the same set, so both of them are inversions.

However, I didn't care as much for the E-Major cadence, so I thought if I switched out the G-sharp for the last chord with the G-natural in the second, I don't really change the structure of the chords but I get a subtle variation that also gives me a less-final-sounding resolution to E Minor. That could come in handy, perhaps. These chords, then, form the hexachord 6-15 and its complement. And it becomes a way of “modulating” between one hexachord and another.
So, basically, with a mix of consonant and dissonant chords, it all comes back to Bach...