In the past few months, aside from not blogging a lot, I’ve had the opportunity of coming back into contact with two works that were very influential to my creative upbringing, works that I didn’t really hear for a long time, now. As if rediscovering these works, I also kept hearing things that I’d written “under their influence,” so to speak, in some cases music of mine I’d completely forgotten about.
This past weekend, I saw what is still one of my favorite operas, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, though I can’t say I’ve sat down to listen to it (much less see it) in probably a couple decades. I had discovered it through the recording at the Harrisburg Public Library when I was in high school, after my music teacher had introduced us to opera through an experience that involved first of all familiarizing yourself with the plot, listening to a recording with the score (good for a musician) and then seeing the opera, in this case in a film.
Before that, I can’t say I cared much for opera, having tried to deal with the Met Opera radio broadcasts but feeling totally lost because of the lack of the visual element and usually missing the plot synopsis given before each act by the radio host. So after being grounded a little better with my “first opera,” Puccini’s La Boheme, a bunch of us drove down to Philadelphia to see the Met on tour with Puccini’s Turandot (seeing Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli battling it out in the “Anything you can sing, I can sing higher” duet) and then Bizet’s Carmen (one of the operas I remember giving up on the year before).
I remember also reading about Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron which was actually the first opera recording I bought, the old Columbia LP conducted by Hans Rosbaud (I believe this was of a 1954 live radio broadcast performance, released in 1957 which I picked up in 1966 or so). Not familiar with Schoenberg’s language at the time, I found it a dramatic disappointment though not necessarily a musical one. It wasn’t until I started digging into Britten’s first opera that I discovered – aside from, aha! English, which I can understand – something that combined dramatic sense with appropriate music. That then allowed me to get the gist of what other composers were doing in their own languages and musical styles.
A few points struck me, while watching Peter Grimes on the big movie-screen in the Met’s HD broadcast at the local cinema:
In the first scene, the inquest investigating the death of fisherman Grimes' apprentice, the opening woodwinds clucking away personify the citizens of the Borough gossiping back and forth (as Nico Muhly described it in his essay on Grimes at the Met’s website, “like insects bothering a cow”). The questions to the witness are placed in straightforward recitative which Grimes then proceeds to answer at a slower tempo, interrupted by the lawyer continuing in his original tempo.
This musically represented the difference between Grimes’ own personality as opposed to the people of the Borough, the outsider versus his community, better than any statement that could have been sung by some character telling us “Grimes is an outsider, here: we don’t like him.” This is what writers are advised when they begin to write prose: show, don't tell.
Britten had used this device one other time to accentuate the separation between Grimes and the Borough. During the big storm, everyone has gathered at Auntie’s, the local pub, but after Grimes makes an unexpected entrance, someone tries to revive their spirits with a song, “Old Joe has gone fishing,” a round which Grimes then obliterates when he joins in, singing in a completely different key and slower tempo. On the surface, it’s as if somebody who can’t carry a tune or find a beat in a bushel basket wants to sing in the choir, but the division between protagonist and antagonist (depending on your viewpoint who is who) is musically clear.
It’s interesting that this is reversed in a climactic scene in the second act when Grimes comes to take his new apprentice out fishing on Sunday and his meeting with the schoolteacher Ellen Orford, one of two people in the Borough who wants to help Grimes, turns into a confrontation when Grimes’ temper flares: while fragments of this scene float disjointedly through Grimes’ “mad scene” in the final act, the turn-around actually comes in a sequence of lines where Ellen is asking Peter if they were wrong to, essentially, try rehabilitating him in the community’s eye: she sings long, lyrical lines, but he cuts her off with short declamatory counterattacks in a faster tempo - the reverse of the trial scene.
How many times had I used this musical trick? I thought it was my later discovery of Ives’ music and subsequently Elliott Carter’s that my interest in “contrapuntal time” evolved from, the idea of strands of music sounding as if they’re in different tempos. But perhaps it all began here, with Peter Grimes and his outsider-ness?
But this “trick” was not necessarily Britten’s own: he got it from Verdi – pick almost any ensemble in a Verdi opera where characters are defined by their independent rhythms and melodic lines – and also from Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, most obviously in the disparate worlds colliding in the opening of the third act, when the lively dance-music from inside Auntie’s pub intrudes on the slow, chilling night music of the moonlit sea interlude. Which, in turn, one could say came from Mozart’s three dance bands in Don Giovanni, each one a different dance and meter.
When I was in college, I began setting Ibsen’s drama “Ghosts” as an opera – for some reason, I had re-titled it “Through a Small Glass Darkly” until I decided I liked that title better for my next opera, and since I never got around to writing the second half of the Ibsen, it didn’t really matter. But there were several fingerprints from Peter Grimes that showed up: even though the self-righteous carpenter Engstrand is only one person, not a whole borough-ful of them, I used Britten’s nattering woodwinds and similar passages to represent the pettiness of characters like the Lawyer Swallow or the Rector Horace Adams to develop his musical characterization. In the discussion between the officious Pastor Manders and the free-thinking and strong-willed Mrs. Alving, I used differences of “perceived tempo” (keeping the actual beat the same but having it sound as if one was moving in a slower tempo, simply by expanding the pulse) to point up their differences of opinion.
Curiously, it was one of these scenes that I had copied out and actually sent to Britten in 1971 when I was thinking about emigrating to England and hoping perhaps to study with him or work for him (in much the same way he wanted to study with Alban Berg in Vienna). I got a very nice reply back from him which remains one of my treasured possessions: he was very kind in advising me how difficult it was in England to make a living as a musician though he would make every effort to meet me and offer what help he could, but “you must remember how very busy I am,” not saying “yes” but not saying “no” either. (At the time, he was perhaps already working on Death in Venice and, little did I know, the next year putting off heart surgery for fear of not being able to finish what would become his last opera: I keep the letter in my vocal score of that opera.) So here I was, fresh out of college and either going to Eastman or to England, but I wasn’t strong enough, money aside, for the unknown adventures that awaited me if I decided on England. Whatever may have happened to me there, it would be a different me sitting here now, and that game of “what if?” was something occasionally playing through my mind while watching Britten’s opera.
There was another moment that sent me into a swoon of recognition: when the men of the Borough leave to go to Grimes’ hut in Act II, Ellen Orford, Auntie and her two nieces (who usually sing as one voice just a little apart) are left behind to sing a quartet of rapturous beauty, full of freely interweaving, high arching lines with close harmonies producing delicious dissonances that resolve amazingly. The emotional impact of this music – which I had forgotten about – was something that I imitated in my Requiem: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (which was also hugely influenced by his War Requiem), in passages in another opera, The Trojan Women, and frequently in instrumental music as well, in sections of the more recent String Quartet, the Symphony and now the climax of Evidence of Things Not Seen which I’m the process of realizing from sketches, where it’s more the solo voice sliding through the instrumental harmonies and rubbing up against them before their resolution. In fact, thinking about this piece, I would describe the voice part, singing against standard triads in the orchestra, as singing practically every pitch except those in that triad, something Britten often did not only in Grimes but also in Death in Venice. And so the influence persists and this continuity from the past (in fact, following a long hiatus, connecting my present with my past) was comforting.
These cribbings might be more integrated into my own style now, more successfully than some imitations I had committed in my earlier works when, infatuated with this piece or that piece, I went less for the detail and more for the overall effect, writing something that sounded a lot like Vaughan Williams (I had fallen in love with his 5th Symphony) or Bernstein (mostly his Jeremiah Symphony and the Chichester Psalms) or, in a more short-lived sense, Stravinsky (primarily Les Noces).
Sitting at the Kimmel Center for a concert by to the Philadelphia Orchestra – I had gone to hear Jennifer Higdon’s “The Singing Rooms” – I confronted another one of these past voices while listening to them play Bernstein’s first symphony, his “Jeremiah Symphony.” This is a work I also had not heard much in the past 20 years, maybe once or twice but not really “listened” to the way one sits in a concert to actively involve yourself in the music. Though I can’t recall too many specific moments where it cropped up in my own music – beyond, at least, the Requiem – I recalled several unfinished works or projects where I borrowed this bit or patterned something after that bit. I think mostly what I was recalling was how much I was listening to this piece then, back when I was in high school and college. But the elements I cribbed or that inspired me to write certain passages in the Requiem, oddly enough, where those more exotic details that define Bernstein’s sound as a Jewish composer – scales and turns of phrase borrowed from Jewish cantillation, the liturgical chant of the Temple, and dance rhythms (especially in the middle movement, “Profanation”) that prove Bernstein was Jewish and Saint-Saens, in his Bachannal from Samson & Delilah, was not. Not being Jewish myself, I had to laugh a little at this borrowing which has nothing to do with my own heritage, wondering how this made my own music sound.
Listening the other day to an interview with Elliott Carter in which he talked about his early influences from – surprisingly, I think, for most listeners – jazz, I suddenly realized I can hear this translation that continues to resonate in the music he’s writing now, getting ready for his 100th Birthday this December. And I wonder if a composer ever escapes these early influences or how he (or she) transforms them (or not) into what becomes an original voice?
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Evidence the Piece Is Done
There’s a kind of exhilaration when a composer finishes a new piece, mixed with a sense of farewell laced with the realization of course the piece is never really done. In my case, the song cycle “Evidence of Things Not Seen” has only reached the conclusion of the First Step: the sketches are done. There’s still a lot more to go and the next process needs to be started immediately before it gets side-tracked: realizing the sketches into a more final form that gets it closer to the possibility of being performed.
Thinking back over the months it took to gestate, then the five months and eleven days it took to compose it, it’s not easy realizing how much time it’s taken to create about fifteen minutes of music. When I think there were times when I didn’t feel the urge to write or got bogged down in the mechanics of a passage that was taking forever to figure out as well as quite a few times I just couldn’t write even if I wanted to (my work schedule, getting hit by a flu-bug), I still have more time to compose than some of my friends do. Talking with a former-fellow-student from my Eastman days, now teaching at a major American music school, I mentioned “I can only write a few hours every day” rather than really concentrate on it for five or six hours like one might for a ‘real job.’ He paused and said with a kind of awe in his voice, “You write every day?” Then I realized, of course, he can’t. Because he’s teaching, sitting on committees, dealing with departmental business and academic bureaucracies, the only time he might have to concentrate on composition is during the summer. Suddenly I felt much better...
There is nothing like reality, though, to bring one back to the land of the living. Having put the pen down after saying “that’s it,” I realized – sniff sniff – the time was well overdue to clean the cats’ litterboxes. And so we continue.
Some of the mechanics of the process this time were slightly different: I did not put “the double bar at the end of piece,” thereby proving the work is now complete. I did that on September 13th, 2007, when I started it. After working out some pre-compositional details (before I realized it would become part of a piece, much less this piece), I wrote the ending first. So I knew where it was going which then gave me the courage to start from the beginning.
It’s designed as seven biblical texts laid into an on-going set of what I initially thought might become variations. This particular aspect of it didn’t materialize quite so directly, but the “variation process” is still there in the way the work unfolds. But the mirror element of the structure was implicit in that beginning and ending (or vice-versa) so I found myself, rather than starting at the opening and working my way to the end, going back and forth to wrote the parallel segments of the mirror: after the closing epilogue or postlude and the opening prologue or prelude, I went from the second text to the sixth text, the third text to the fifth text, the interlude between the third and the fourth texts to the parallel interlude between the fourth and the fifth texts before writing the central panel of this arch-form (the keystone, if you want), the fourth text.
While it’s all parallel in that sense, it’s not exactly perfectly symmetrical like a “well-rounded” archway because my dividing point is based on the Golden Section. That means the climax of the piece, which happens in the fourth song, is not quite two-thirds of the way through, not half-way through. It would make for a lop-sided arch but it’s not a visual arch that I’m going for. The proportions may not exactly be obvious to a listener. It’s only in hindsight you might be conscious of the passing of time and how you’d react to its various structural divisions along the way.
The process, then, was working from both ends toward the ‘middle.’ The goal had been to finish this fourth text – setting the lines beginning “Let not your heart be troubled” – on February 23rd. This was neither arbitrary nor having anything to do with deadlines or impending performances. Since it was setting some of my mother’s favorite Bible verses and the work came together, starting to take its final shape, on what would’ve been my mother’s 88th birthday, I wanted to finish it on the first anniversary of her death.
When I finished the one interlude (between texts 3 and 4), I should’ve gone immediately on to finish the parallel interlude (the one between texts 4 and 5). I had sketched out everything except these “cascading tissues of sound” that are part of the background texture when I thought, considering how time-consuming it can be to come up with hundreds of notes in 30 seconds’ time, if I can’t finish this element of it, I should move directly to the central text. I can finish that before returning to the purely mechanical process left to go in the interlude.
Technically, then, the real creative work was done as of February 18th when I completed the passage “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” The remaining five days could be spent on this background layer: if I didn’t reach the goal, it would be less of a deal. It was understood this could still be one of those things that can be “filled in” in the process of realizing the sketches which doesn’t seem to be as much rationalization as you’d think.
Of course, I knew what would happen. I either needed long hours of schlogging to work my way through this passage or several days with fewer hours so as not to become so mentally fatigued from working on 145 pitches distributed among three voices over a span of about eight measures! Things bogged down and the concentration would not hold. By the time Saturday the 23rd rolled around, I needed just another hour or two to finish the last few notes, less than a second of music. But it was all down on paper by noon on the 24th: not too bad, considering.
The problem is, now that I’ve finished writing a piece, I’ve started thinking about “the next piece.” I don’t want to start concentrating on anything else now except realizing these sketches into a final full score. But the three violin-and-piano pieces need to be finished, left hanging since December of 2006, and I’ve been toying with a series of shorter piano pieces, like a set of preludes or something. Back in January, I got some ideas for a work for string sextet but nothing that couldn’t wait till later: I may take a few days, jot down some ideas and a few plans to put aside, something I could come back to in a couple years, for all that matters. There are also ideas for another symphony but I need to hold off on that since it’s too unrealistic right now, especially given the one I finished two years ago is still sitting on my shelf: again, jot down some thoughts and maybe it’ll gestate on its own till I have time or reason to come back to it. (And did I mention that novel I still want to write?? Sheesh...)
It is kind of exciting, needless to say, to have ideas in my head at all, considering how many years of my life there was nothing, a span of perhaps sixteen years where I wrote nothing and had no plans. So it does make me feel a little better, maybe even a little more secure about being a composer: self-confidence is a delicate commodity, amidst all the issues that one has to deal with.
But for the moment, after a busy week at work (101 hours over a two-week pay-period and that includes a day off!), there are other things that I need to get caught up on. One of which – sniff sniff – has to be done before company walks through my door... but then, that’s an on-going chore when you share a house with lots of cats.
- Dr. Dick
Thinking back over the months it took to gestate, then the five months and eleven days it took to compose it, it’s not easy realizing how much time it’s taken to create about fifteen minutes of music. When I think there were times when I didn’t feel the urge to write or got bogged down in the mechanics of a passage that was taking forever to figure out as well as quite a few times I just couldn’t write even if I wanted to (my work schedule, getting hit by a flu-bug), I still have more time to compose than some of my friends do. Talking with a former-fellow-student from my Eastman days, now teaching at a major American music school, I mentioned “I can only write a few hours every day” rather than really concentrate on it for five or six hours like one might for a ‘real job.’ He paused and said with a kind of awe in his voice, “You write every day?” Then I realized, of course, he can’t. Because he’s teaching, sitting on committees, dealing with departmental business and academic bureaucracies, the only time he might have to concentrate on composition is during the summer. Suddenly I felt much better...
There is nothing like reality, though, to bring one back to the land of the living. Having put the pen down after saying “that’s it,” I realized – sniff sniff – the time was well overdue to clean the cats’ litterboxes. And so we continue.
Some of the mechanics of the process this time were slightly different: I did not put “the double bar at the end of piece,” thereby proving the work is now complete. I did that on September 13th, 2007, when I started it. After working out some pre-compositional details (before I realized it would become part of a piece, much less this piece), I wrote the ending first. So I knew where it was going which then gave me the courage to start from the beginning.
It’s designed as seven biblical texts laid into an on-going set of what I initially thought might become variations. This particular aspect of it didn’t materialize quite so directly, but the “variation process” is still there in the way the work unfolds. But the mirror element of the structure was implicit in that beginning and ending (or vice-versa) so I found myself, rather than starting at the opening and working my way to the end, going back and forth to wrote the parallel segments of the mirror: after the closing epilogue or postlude and the opening prologue or prelude, I went from the second text to the sixth text, the third text to the fifth text, the interlude between the third and the fourth texts to the parallel interlude between the fourth and the fifth texts before writing the central panel of this arch-form (the keystone, if you want), the fourth text.
While it’s all parallel in that sense, it’s not exactly perfectly symmetrical like a “well-rounded” archway because my dividing point is based on the Golden Section. That means the climax of the piece, which happens in the fourth song, is not quite two-thirds of the way through, not half-way through. It would make for a lop-sided arch but it’s not a visual arch that I’m going for. The proportions may not exactly be obvious to a listener. It’s only in hindsight you might be conscious of the passing of time and how you’d react to its various structural divisions along the way.
The process, then, was working from both ends toward the ‘middle.’ The goal had been to finish this fourth text – setting the lines beginning “Let not your heart be troubled” – on February 23rd. This was neither arbitrary nor having anything to do with deadlines or impending performances. Since it was setting some of my mother’s favorite Bible verses and the work came together, starting to take its final shape, on what would’ve been my mother’s 88th birthday, I wanted to finish it on the first anniversary of her death.
When I finished the one interlude (between texts 3 and 4), I should’ve gone immediately on to finish the parallel interlude (the one between texts 4 and 5). I had sketched out everything except these “cascading tissues of sound” that are part of the background texture when I thought, considering how time-consuming it can be to come up with hundreds of notes in 30 seconds’ time, if I can’t finish this element of it, I should move directly to the central text. I can finish that before returning to the purely mechanical process left to go in the interlude.
Technically, then, the real creative work was done as of February 18th when I completed the passage “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” The remaining five days could be spent on this background layer: if I didn’t reach the goal, it would be less of a deal. It was understood this could still be one of those things that can be “filled in” in the process of realizing the sketches which doesn’t seem to be as much rationalization as you’d think.
Of course, I knew what would happen. I either needed long hours of schlogging to work my way through this passage or several days with fewer hours so as not to become so mentally fatigued from working on 145 pitches distributed among three voices over a span of about eight measures! Things bogged down and the concentration would not hold. By the time Saturday the 23rd rolled around, I needed just another hour or two to finish the last few notes, less than a second of music. But it was all down on paper by noon on the 24th: not too bad, considering.
The problem is, now that I’ve finished writing a piece, I’ve started thinking about “the next piece.” I don’t want to start concentrating on anything else now except realizing these sketches into a final full score. But the three violin-and-piano pieces need to be finished, left hanging since December of 2006, and I’ve been toying with a series of shorter piano pieces, like a set of preludes or something. Back in January, I got some ideas for a work for string sextet but nothing that couldn’t wait till later: I may take a few days, jot down some ideas and a few plans to put aside, something I could come back to in a couple years, for all that matters. There are also ideas for another symphony but I need to hold off on that since it’s too unrealistic right now, especially given the one I finished two years ago is still sitting on my shelf: again, jot down some thoughts and maybe it’ll gestate on its own till I have time or reason to come back to it. (And did I mention that novel I still want to write?? Sheesh...)
It is kind of exciting, needless to say, to have ideas in my head at all, considering how many years of my life there was nothing, a span of perhaps sixteen years where I wrote nothing and had no plans. So it does make me feel a little better, maybe even a little more secure about being a composer: self-confidence is a delicate commodity, amidst all the issues that one has to deal with.
But for the moment, after a busy week at work (101 hours over a two-week pay-period and that includes a day off!), there are other things that I need to get caught up on. One of which – sniff sniff – has to be done before company walks through my door... but then, that’s an on-going chore when you share a house with lots of cats.
- Dr. Dick
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Elusive Right Note & the F-sharp
Over the years, I’ve frequently told how, in my lessons with Samuel Adler, my teacher at Eastman, he’d play through something I’d brought in and say basically “good, that’s good – that should be an F-sharp, though,” pointing to one note somewhere in the harmony or maybe in the melodic line. I’d play back through it with an F-sharp there and, damn, it really did sound better! I’d look at him and ask “why?” and he’d shrug his shoulders and smile.
It was always an F-sharp.
There was never a passage where he’d say “That should be a D-natural” or “try a G-sharp there.” (Pat Long, who also studied with Adler and is now teaching composition at Susquehanna University, said his note was a B-flat. Always a B-flat.)
For the next ten years or so, whenever a new piece would start, the opening pitch would often be an F-sharp. Many of my pieces began with a single note spun out over several measures, usually changing instrumental colors until it would unfold or spring out into some gesture that would then become the material for the piece. But they always started and then usually came back to end on an F-sharp. I didn’t know why. It’s like, that was my pitch.
I figured Scriabin had his favorite key – F-sharp Major – which for him had various mystical properties: this was perhaps my way of tapping into the same emotional potential.
Then, for some reason, with the string quartet and the symphony, both written in the last five years, that pitch became an A. When I began “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” the pitches I started playing with as potential musical gestures - motives or whatever you’d care to call them – also started pointing to A as a focal pitch.
When I started work on the string quartet almost a year to the day after September 11th, 2001, it was several days till that “opening shape” came into focus. The first two notes had now become an A and a B – in my musical shorthand, using numbers on a blank page instead of pitch-notation on a sheet of manuscript paper, that became a 9 and an 11, the kind of symbol for 9-11 that no one would hear but which resonated with me as the quartet began taking shape as an emotional response to the terrorist attacks on that day. But after I’d found the first four notes that seemed right, writing the answering four notes took some time to figure out. I had settled on an F just so I could move forward, but it didn’t feel right. Then I thought I’ll substitute an F-sharp for that F and suddenly I could see Sam Adler smiling over my shoulder: that was the right pitch!
Last summer, when I was thinking about writing a piece in my mother’s memory, I tried turning her name into a musical phrase. Some letters, of course, corresponded to musical pitches automatically: G and A, for instance. For some pitches, you can use another language’s equivalent, the way Bach could spell his name because H in German was really a B-natural (and to make it confusing for us, B is really a B-flat) and S, as in Shostakovich, is in German E-flat. Then you could also substitute D for R because in Italian, D = Re. I is easier, because you have Mi (E) or Ti (B), and with three I’s in my mother’s name, I manipulated it to use both of them so as not be repeating the same pitch so often. In Russian, the letter that looks like B is pronounced V, so I used B to replace the V in Virginia, but I was also using B for one of the I’s... so I arbitrarily chose the German B (really, B-flat) instead.
This left N. What pitch could correspond to N?
For other letters, composers who play these name games find different solutions. By taking notes that are otherwise unassigned, you can spin them out until you find something that could correspond to the letter in question. Some composers simply leave them out. But I had created such an alphabet back in the ‘70s when I was writing my piano piece Poetries, and though I couldn’t find it in my piles of archived sketches, I followed the same process and came up with a C-sharp. So N was now assigned to C-sharp.
Thus my mother’s name, Virginia, became B-flat / E / D / G // E / C-sharp / B / A. For symmetrical purposes, I broke it into two four-note fragments.
It was months before work on the actual songs began: before that, I was thinking more in terms of a choral piece. But on what would’ve been her 88th birthday, the songs took shape and I began working on the opening and, since it was planned to be a mirror of the opening, the closing as well, setting two short parallel texts as a prelude and postlude to the songs. Ultimately, it became a single movement piece rather than seven individual songs, but the seven different texts are laid into the orchestral continuity so as to create both an interrelated cycle and a continuous piece rather than seven songs in seven separate movement, pausing between each one.
Since I write using 6-note sets as my musical building blocks – very loosely, compared to the so-called serial or 12-note style associated with Schoenberg – I looked at these 8 pitches trying to find 6 notes that create a “set”. After working on a number of possibilities, some of which seemed to have less potential than others, I chose two that offered me what I thought would sound best and be different from ones I had used in the very intense string quartet and symphony of the past few years.
This Name-Motive was not intended to be used verbatim constantly. In a way, I thought of the piece unfolding as a set of variations on that motive, but it quickly became more imbedded than obvious in the whole context of the piece’s unfolding. But at points where I wanted it to surface, I started realizing in the past month or so that that “N” was giving me a problem: the harmonies that were working did not work well with the C-sharp of the motive.
Playing several of these instances together – from different parts of the work – I realized that a better pitch instead of the C-sharp would be... uh oh...
F-sharp!
Fortunately, I had not been so strict with the Name-Motive and the pitch-sets I wanted to use because by changing it now I would have to go back and start the piece over again using the new pitch-class set! And I am so very close to the end of the piece, now!
This problem was not something that would have surfaced in September when I was playing with all the various possibilities. But by going back and changing just a few spots where the Name-Motive was in the foreground, it could still work out. In fact, in each situation I went back to, the F-sharp sounded like an improvement.
There are lots of intangibles in creativity. It all works differently for each different person. How to explain to someone else why we choose what we choose is not that easy. You can analyze it to the smallest degree, but there is still no easy way to explain what makes it “right.” What sounds right to my ear might not sound any better to someone else than the other notes I’d tried. But there comes a point when, for whatever reason, you try three or four (or forty) possibilities and that one sounds right, not just okay, you begin to think about a lot of things differently.
- Dr. Dick
It was always an F-sharp.
There was never a passage where he’d say “That should be a D-natural” or “try a G-sharp there.” (Pat Long, who also studied with Adler and is now teaching composition at Susquehanna University, said his note was a B-flat. Always a B-flat.)
For the next ten years or so, whenever a new piece would start, the opening pitch would often be an F-sharp. Many of my pieces began with a single note spun out over several measures, usually changing instrumental colors until it would unfold or spring out into some gesture that would then become the material for the piece. But they always started and then usually came back to end on an F-sharp. I didn’t know why. It’s like, that was my pitch.
I figured Scriabin had his favorite key – F-sharp Major – which for him had various mystical properties: this was perhaps my way of tapping into the same emotional potential.
Then, for some reason, with the string quartet and the symphony, both written in the last five years, that pitch became an A. When I began “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” the pitches I started playing with as potential musical gestures - motives or whatever you’d care to call them – also started pointing to A as a focal pitch.
When I started work on the string quartet almost a year to the day after September 11th, 2001, it was several days till that “opening shape” came into focus. The first two notes had now become an A and a B – in my musical shorthand, using numbers on a blank page instead of pitch-notation on a sheet of manuscript paper, that became a 9 and an 11, the kind of symbol for 9-11 that no one would hear but which resonated with me as the quartet began taking shape as an emotional response to the terrorist attacks on that day. But after I’d found the first four notes that seemed right, writing the answering four notes took some time to figure out. I had settled on an F just so I could move forward, but it didn’t feel right. Then I thought I’ll substitute an F-sharp for that F and suddenly I could see Sam Adler smiling over my shoulder: that was the right pitch!
Last summer, when I was thinking about writing a piece in my mother’s memory, I tried turning her name into a musical phrase. Some letters, of course, corresponded to musical pitches automatically: G and A, for instance. For some pitches, you can use another language’s equivalent, the way Bach could spell his name because H in German was really a B-natural (and to make it confusing for us, B is really a B-flat) and S, as in Shostakovich, is in German E-flat. Then you could also substitute D for R because in Italian, D = Re. I is easier, because you have Mi (E) or Ti (B), and with three I’s in my mother’s name, I manipulated it to use both of them so as not be repeating the same pitch so often. In Russian, the letter that looks like B is pronounced V, so I used B to replace the V in Virginia, but I was also using B for one of the I’s... so I arbitrarily chose the German B (really, B-flat) instead.
This left N. What pitch could correspond to N?
For other letters, composers who play these name games find different solutions. By taking notes that are otherwise unassigned, you can spin them out until you find something that could correspond to the letter in question. Some composers simply leave them out. But I had created such an alphabet back in the ‘70s when I was writing my piano piece Poetries, and though I couldn’t find it in my piles of archived sketches, I followed the same process and came up with a C-sharp. So N was now assigned to C-sharp.
Thus my mother’s name, Virginia, became B-flat / E / D / G // E / C-sharp / B / A. For symmetrical purposes, I broke it into two four-note fragments.
It was months before work on the actual songs began: before that, I was thinking more in terms of a choral piece. But on what would’ve been her 88th birthday, the songs took shape and I began working on the opening and, since it was planned to be a mirror of the opening, the closing as well, setting two short parallel texts as a prelude and postlude to the songs. Ultimately, it became a single movement piece rather than seven individual songs, but the seven different texts are laid into the orchestral continuity so as to create both an interrelated cycle and a continuous piece rather than seven songs in seven separate movement, pausing between each one.
Since I write using 6-note sets as my musical building blocks – very loosely, compared to the so-called serial or 12-note style associated with Schoenberg – I looked at these 8 pitches trying to find 6 notes that create a “set”. After working on a number of possibilities, some of which seemed to have less potential than others, I chose two that offered me what I thought would sound best and be different from ones I had used in the very intense string quartet and symphony of the past few years.
This Name-Motive was not intended to be used verbatim constantly. In a way, I thought of the piece unfolding as a set of variations on that motive, but it quickly became more imbedded than obvious in the whole context of the piece’s unfolding. But at points where I wanted it to surface, I started realizing in the past month or so that that “N” was giving me a problem: the harmonies that were working did not work well with the C-sharp of the motive.
Playing several of these instances together – from different parts of the work – I realized that a better pitch instead of the C-sharp would be... uh oh...
F-sharp!
Fortunately, I had not been so strict with the Name-Motive and the pitch-sets I wanted to use because by changing it now I would have to go back and start the piece over again using the new pitch-class set! And I am so very close to the end of the piece, now!
This problem was not something that would have surfaced in September when I was playing with all the various possibilities. But by going back and changing just a few spots where the Name-Motive was in the foreground, it could still work out. In fact, in each situation I went back to, the F-sharp sounded like an improvement.
There are lots of intangibles in creativity. It all works differently for each different person. How to explain to someone else why we choose what we choose is not that easy. You can analyze it to the smallest degree, but there is still no easy way to explain what makes it “right.” What sounds right to my ear might not sound any better to someone else than the other notes I’d tried. But there comes a point when, for whatever reason, you try three or four (or forty) possibilities and that one sounds right, not just okay, you begin to think about a lot of things differently.
- Dr. Dick
Sunday, February 10, 2008
More Evidence the Piece Is Almost Done
It seems like forever since I last blogged about composing, but then it seems like almost forever since I’ve been able to really concentrate on composing: today was the first time in months I’ve been able to put more than a few hours a day on this song cycle, Evidence of Things Not Seen, which I’d started back in September. These days, I’m resigned to the idea of being a “slow, methodical” composer, but it’s more rewarding to spend the time finding “the right note” rather than just settling for the first choice. Unfortunately, I can spend a whole day on one beat of music only to come back the next day and scratch out the whole thing. This is known as decomposing...
These are the songs for mezzo-soprano and orchestra based on some of my mother’s favorite biblical verses, a work that should be about 16 minutes long, despite the fact I’ve been working on them almost five months, now, not counting several months of gestation before the idea even began taking any kind of practical shape. It’s an “arch-form” and my approach has been basically to compose a song on one side of the arch, then writing the mirror song on the other side, rather than starting at the beginning and working my way chronologically through to the end.
So I started the third song, a setting of Psalm 23 on November 2nd, finishing it on December 17th. This is mirrored by the famous passage from Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season,” the fifth song which I started almost immediately and then finished on January 6th. By that time, I was coming down with the flu and just didn’t feel like doing much of anything , though I managed to sketch out the two interludes that surround the “keystone” song, lines from John 14 (“Let not your heart be troubled”).
Each song’s orchestral part is really a kind of variation in an on-going process, rather than seven individual songs. In some respects, it’s as if the orchestra exists on one plane while the vocal part is another that nests within it. These two interludes I’d been working on since early January, though, were tricky: the first of them is really an extension of Psalm 23's underlying accelerando (a background harmonic layer that gradually speeds up) that overlaps with what becomes the different harmonic approach that will become the next song. In the psalm setting, this layer needed to be worked out very carefully, moving slowly enough to have its own harmonic direction. By the time the interlude begins and the beat-pulse has gone from three pulses in a bar (four beats) to three pulses in a beat (triplet eighth-notes), by the time this layer dissolves into thin air, it’s moving at 12 “pulses” per beat or a wash of sound that needn’t be quite so detailed. Still, just plopping notes down on the page often yielded some pretty “un-right” notes, so I went back to systematize it, using the six-note group that is the basic building-block of the piece as a scale rather than a source for chords.
But to avoid all the weaknesses we used to be on the look-out for when writing traditional harmony and counterpoint in 18th- and 19th-Century tonality (a.k.a. “Common Practice” as we like to call it), I had to go back over this very carefully, making sure it worked – and that means working theoretically as well as aurally. Sometimes I couldn’t find the best pitches in what was “permissible” theoretically, so I went with something that sounded better and usually found if it wasn’t the exact same grouping, it was one very close to it and so it still had some kind of logic to it. Very often, I found this laborious process more successful than just sitting down plunking out notes that I thought should sound okay: very often, with a little extra effort, I found pitches that (at least to my ear) sounded better. It’s like a poet who might trim and prune a line, trying to find the right rhythm (if not rhyme) with the right word that didn’t end up being trite or confusing (bonus points if it now had some inner logic you hadn’t noticed before). These are all things the casual reader or listener may not even notice, but to me, it’s the difference between getting it done and getting it right.
Of course, whether anyone else thinks they’re the right pitches is another matter. We’re all wired differently and I can’t account for what one person out of all those who might listen to it would agree or disagree. Stravinsky joked that while he was pounding out the “Rite of Spring” in his Swiss apartment, trying to find just the right note for a chord or a passage, his neighbors were probably convinced they were all the wrong notes. But it is my creative integrity I need to satisfy, first – not that I don’t care about the listener. I figure if I write something that I feel is the best I could manage (rather than just filling in the space on the page with whatever came to mind), then I hope that it goes directly to the listener as an emotional response, making sense on the one hand, however we might perceive that, but also making direct contact with the soul on the other.
This was something that struck me very strongly after listening to all five of the string quartets of Elliott Carter recently in New York City: here’s a composer – one of the most significant composers in my creative thinking the past 30 years (since I last heard all of the Carter quartets in one sitting, when there were only three) – whose music is considered the most complex, cerebral music in what is hardly the mainstream of today. He could be much more popular and much more frequently performed if he wrote in a more accessible, populist style as he’d started out. Even at 99, he is still composing in an uncompromising style – but there are people out there (more than just me) who love it, so he’s being successful if he manages to complete this creator-performer-listener continuum with champions like the Pacifica Quartet who can convince listeners to take this music on face value as music, not as a mathematical puzzle.
Coming back to my songs after having listened to a great deal of Carter’s music before and after this concert, then, has only strengthened my decision to keep working at it till I’m satisfied with it without giving in to those doubts and inner demons one constantly hears imbedded in the white noise of life (you think anyone's going to be able to play that? why don't you write something people might actually like!).
And so yesterday I finished the first of these two interludes I’d been working on the past month (in all, a little over two minutes of music). Before I began this gradually accelerating “scalar layer,” I sketched out the main aspects (the foreground) of the companion, mirror interlude which continues the keystone song, the climax of the piece, overlapping with what will become the fifth song, the setting of Ecclesiastes, with its background layer that gradually decreases in apparent tempo (the foreground is a steady tempo while the background seems to slow down over time). Since I spent 17 days writing about 811 notes that go by in less than a minute, it seems odd to consider this a “mechanical” aspect of writing, but it’s like, I suppose, Georges Seurat painting hundreds of little red dots mixed in with hundreds of little blue dots to create a purple hat on one of his characters in “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Jatte” – the concept is there, the end result is basically in place all except for the exact notes. It’s just a matter of working them out.
While it was coincidental these songs took shape on what would’ve been my mother’s 88th birthday, I’d long hoped I would be able to finish them on (if not before) the first anniversary of her death. That is only two weeks away and at the rate I’ve been going, it seems an unlikely prospect, having been slowed down by innumerable flu germs as well as a herd of 800 dots.
Next, if I kept to the regimen I’d established early in the process, I should resume work on the background of the second of these two interludes, the transition from the keystone song back to the Ecclesiastes setting. But if that’s really “mechanical work,” I’d rather finish the creative work at least by February 23rd, so I’ve decided to plunge right into the longest of the individual songs, a setting of the lines that begin “Let not your heart be troubled.” The harmonic element here will be simpler than the surrounding interludes, and the vocal line not so involved, either. I’m not making any bets about completion, but at least by the end-of-day today, and seven hours of largely uninterrupted work, I had the complete text “distributed” rhythmically over the span of about 54 measures (maybe 3½ minutes of music). I know where the harmonies will change even if I don’t know what most of them will be, yet. The climax is already worked out and a little different now than initially planned after I realized the word that occurs at that point has a bad vowel to be singing on a high note (since it’s King James, it’s a little difficult to say “oh, I’ll just change the text a little”). A few words earlier, a high note would make sense on a vowel that would be much more reasonable on a High-A, but the real climax is in the harmonic and tonal resolution, not how high or how loud the voice-part gets. So yes, I think that will work out well. We’ll just have to see if I can finish it in two weeks.
Then, even if it’s past the 23rd, I can always go back to complete the “filling in” of the next interlude's missing background layer. After all, it’s still a sketch – all I have are pages and pages of a very rough draft. I’m just hoping it’s marked clearly enough that I can make sense out of it to start putting notes down in score format!
(This reminds me of Bartok’s comment about his viola concerto, the piece he was working on when he died. It was basically complete, just a mechanical matter of realizing the sketches. But when Tibor Serly took the manuscript to start work on it after Bartok’s death, it was difficult to figure out the continuity of the sketches or even the orchestration! To this day, no one could actually prove this is or is not anywhere close to what Bartok had in mind, even though they’re all supposedly his pitches!)
Onward!
-Dr. Dick
These are the songs for mezzo-soprano and orchestra based on some of my mother’s favorite biblical verses, a work that should be about 16 minutes long, despite the fact I’ve been working on them almost five months, now, not counting several months of gestation before the idea even began taking any kind of practical shape. It’s an “arch-form” and my approach has been basically to compose a song on one side of the arch, then writing the mirror song on the other side, rather than starting at the beginning and working my way chronologically through to the end.
So I started the third song, a setting of Psalm 23 on November 2nd, finishing it on December 17th. This is mirrored by the famous passage from Ecclesiastes, “To everything there is a season,” the fifth song which I started almost immediately and then finished on January 6th. By that time, I was coming down with the flu and just didn’t feel like doing much of anything , though I managed to sketch out the two interludes that surround the “keystone” song, lines from John 14 (“Let not your heart be troubled”).
Each song’s orchestral part is really a kind of variation in an on-going process, rather than seven individual songs. In some respects, it’s as if the orchestra exists on one plane while the vocal part is another that nests within it. These two interludes I’d been working on since early January, though, were tricky: the first of them is really an extension of Psalm 23's underlying accelerando (a background harmonic layer that gradually speeds up) that overlaps with what becomes the different harmonic approach that will become the next song. In the psalm setting, this layer needed to be worked out very carefully, moving slowly enough to have its own harmonic direction. By the time the interlude begins and the beat-pulse has gone from three pulses in a bar (four beats) to three pulses in a beat (triplet eighth-notes), by the time this layer dissolves into thin air, it’s moving at 12 “pulses” per beat or a wash of sound that needn’t be quite so detailed. Still, just plopping notes down on the page often yielded some pretty “un-right” notes, so I went back to systematize it, using the six-note group that is the basic building-block of the piece as a scale rather than a source for chords.
But to avoid all the weaknesses we used to be on the look-out for when writing traditional harmony and counterpoint in 18th- and 19th-Century tonality (a.k.a. “Common Practice” as we like to call it), I had to go back over this very carefully, making sure it worked – and that means working theoretically as well as aurally. Sometimes I couldn’t find the best pitches in what was “permissible” theoretically, so I went with something that sounded better and usually found if it wasn’t the exact same grouping, it was one very close to it and so it still had some kind of logic to it. Very often, I found this laborious process more successful than just sitting down plunking out notes that I thought should sound okay: very often, with a little extra effort, I found pitches that (at least to my ear) sounded better. It’s like a poet who might trim and prune a line, trying to find the right rhythm (if not rhyme) with the right word that didn’t end up being trite or confusing (bonus points if it now had some inner logic you hadn’t noticed before). These are all things the casual reader or listener may not even notice, but to me, it’s the difference between getting it done and getting it right.
Of course, whether anyone else thinks they’re the right pitches is another matter. We’re all wired differently and I can’t account for what one person out of all those who might listen to it would agree or disagree. Stravinsky joked that while he was pounding out the “Rite of Spring” in his Swiss apartment, trying to find just the right note for a chord or a passage, his neighbors were probably convinced they were all the wrong notes. But it is my creative integrity I need to satisfy, first – not that I don’t care about the listener. I figure if I write something that I feel is the best I could manage (rather than just filling in the space on the page with whatever came to mind), then I hope that it goes directly to the listener as an emotional response, making sense on the one hand, however we might perceive that, but also making direct contact with the soul on the other.
This was something that struck me very strongly after listening to all five of the string quartets of Elliott Carter recently in New York City: here’s a composer – one of the most significant composers in my creative thinking the past 30 years (since I last heard all of the Carter quartets in one sitting, when there were only three) – whose music is considered the most complex, cerebral music in what is hardly the mainstream of today. He could be much more popular and much more frequently performed if he wrote in a more accessible, populist style as he’d started out. Even at 99, he is still composing in an uncompromising style – but there are people out there (more than just me) who love it, so he’s being successful if he manages to complete this creator-performer-listener continuum with champions like the Pacifica Quartet who can convince listeners to take this music on face value as music, not as a mathematical puzzle.
Coming back to my songs after having listened to a great deal of Carter’s music before and after this concert, then, has only strengthened my decision to keep working at it till I’m satisfied with it without giving in to those doubts and inner demons one constantly hears imbedded in the white noise of life (you think anyone's going to be able to play that? why don't you write something people might actually like!).
And so yesterday I finished the first of these two interludes I’d been working on the past month (in all, a little over two minutes of music). Before I began this gradually accelerating “scalar layer,” I sketched out the main aspects (the foreground) of the companion, mirror interlude which continues the keystone song, the climax of the piece, overlapping with what will become the fifth song, the setting of Ecclesiastes, with its background layer that gradually decreases in apparent tempo (the foreground is a steady tempo while the background seems to slow down over time). Since I spent 17 days writing about 811 notes that go by in less than a minute, it seems odd to consider this a “mechanical” aspect of writing, but it’s like, I suppose, Georges Seurat painting hundreds of little red dots mixed in with hundreds of little blue dots to create a purple hat on one of his characters in “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Jatte” – the concept is there, the end result is basically in place all except for the exact notes. It’s just a matter of working them out.
While it was coincidental these songs took shape on what would’ve been my mother’s 88th birthday, I’d long hoped I would be able to finish them on (if not before) the first anniversary of her death. That is only two weeks away and at the rate I’ve been going, it seems an unlikely prospect, having been slowed down by innumerable flu germs as well as a herd of 800 dots.
Next, if I kept to the regimen I’d established early in the process, I should resume work on the background of the second of these two interludes, the transition from the keystone song back to the Ecclesiastes setting. But if that’s really “mechanical work,” I’d rather finish the creative work at least by February 23rd, so I’ve decided to plunge right into the longest of the individual songs, a setting of the lines that begin “Let not your heart be troubled.” The harmonic element here will be simpler than the surrounding interludes, and the vocal line not so involved, either. I’m not making any bets about completion, but at least by the end-of-day today, and seven hours of largely uninterrupted work, I had the complete text “distributed” rhythmically over the span of about 54 measures (maybe 3½ minutes of music). I know where the harmonies will change even if I don’t know what most of them will be, yet. The climax is already worked out and a little different now than initially planned after I realized the word that occurs at that point has a bad vowel to be singing on a high note (since it’s King James, it’s a little difficult to say “oh, I’ll just change the text a little”). A few words earlier, a high note would make sense on a vowel that would be much more reasonable on a High-A, but the real climax is in the harmonic and tonal resolution, not how high or how loud the voice-part gets. So yes, I think that will work out well. We’ll just have to see if I can finish it in two weeks.
Then, even if it’s past the 23rd, I can always go back to complete the “filling in” of the next interlude's missing background layer. After all, it’s still a sketch – all I have are pages and pages of a very rough draft. I’m just hoping it’s marked clearly enough that I can make sense out of it to start putting notes down in score format!
(This reminds me of Bartok’s comment about his viola concerto, the piece he was working on when he died. It was basically complete, just a mechanical matter of realizing the sketches. But when Tibor Serly took the manuscript to start work on it after Bartok’s death, it was difficult to figure out the continuity of the sketches or even the orchestration! To this day, no one could actually prove this is or is not anywhere close to what Bartok had in mind, even though they’re all supposedly his pitches!)
Onward!
-Dr. Dick
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Sleepless in Suburbia: The Rooms Are Singing
It has been over a month since I last posted here, busy with the station blogs and trying hard to avoid that year-end assessment post, the holiday post (“What I Did on my Christmas Break”) and the New Years Resolutions post. Part of the time at home (since this is essentially my “home blog”) has been spent not composing while dealing with the Flu That Would Not Die. Every time I try to get back into composing again, another round of congestion and never-ending headaches kicks in.
Reading in general has been useless except for the lighter, mindless variety where, in one eye and out the other, little retention is required and less accomplished. I managed to finish Ian McEwans’ “Atonement” on a night my sundry aches went into a brief remission last weekend, during which I was also able to write and present a pre-concert talk for the Harrisburg Symphony’s concerts – primarily about Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (you can read “BarTalk” here). I managed a few days of near-normalcy and was allowed to fit in a concert in Philadelphia for the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s amazing new violin concerto with chorus and orchestra called “The Singing Rooms” – then writing a review you can read here. The premise behind the poems of this part concerto/part choral work reflects a walk through a house, standing in the different rooms and how they speak (or sing) to you of distant memories before returning to the first room at a different time of day and seeing it in a different light. But I spent this weekend dealing once again with the redux of symptoms, thereby cancelling plans for concerts with the Wednesday Club and Market Square Concerts.
Dozing off during a day dreary and cold enough to match my mood wreaks havoc with the normal sleep patterns and so I find myself typing this at 6:30am, a rather ungodly hour for yours truly. I awoke about 45 minutes ago thinking I was sleeping in a vibrating bed only to discover mounds of cats wrapped tightly against my fetal form. In the crook of my knees were three of the kittens, though big if not old enough to no longer be called kittens, a few days shy of nine months, now: Blanche, Guy Noir and Charlie all bundled together in a heap, purring in polyrhythms as loud as an outboard motor that needs work. Against my chest was Max, 12 pounds of white fur with gray patches, himself purring contentedly for reasons known only to a cat. Perhaps contentedness is contagious? Perhaps this is how the room sings to them?
Minutes later, in the John Cage Silence of the Night, I heard the familiar sound of another cat scratching in the litter box, located on the other side of my bedroom wall. This was probably Murphy who manages to spend five minutes scratching robustly around the litter pan but focusing mainly on the floor and the wall and the pipe under the sink without ever actually touching the offending mound in the middle of the box which by now I have gotten a serious whiff of.
Then I hear the equally familiar sounds of a pen shuffling off my desk into the oblivion of some Bermuda Triangle. For the next several minutes I can trace its progress across the room to the opposite corner, a slim space between an old end table and the outside wall of my bedroom, virtually inaccessible to a cat no longer a kitten and totally inaccessible to a human dealing with a pulled muscle aggravated by a week of sneezing and coughing. Fortunately I keep packs of pens handy since it’s easier to replace them than crawl around peering under furniture or behind the piano trying to rescue the old ones.
By now, the other cats have decided to investigate, leaving me free to extricate myself from the warmth of my bed to shuffle out to the bathroom where I discover something in the middle of the hallway, an odd bent-shaped bit of brown plastic that I recognize at one point would have had leaves and a flower on it, three inches of a small twig, once a silk rose that I had recently found and kept on the top shelf of my grandfather’s desk, the one that had been his graduation present, Class of 1905. I have no idea where the missing leaves and the peach-colored rosebud itself might be, padding back to the study to check that the rose indeed was missing. It’s not important but I had kept it because it reminded me of the beautiful old Peace Rose my grandmother had growing over a huge trellis in her backyard when I was a child, sitting on a small bench beneath it in the warmth of a summer day. I sat down now on the piano stool – which once belonged to my grandmother’s upright piano, purchased when they moved into their first house in 1919 – the remnant of a rose in my hand and was reminded of a poem I had once set to music as a college student that concluded something like:
Take this rose I give you now
And tear the leaves and petals off it one by one.
Trample them under your feet
As you have trampled on my love.
And when you have nothing left but the bare thorny stem,
Shove it up your ass.
And so my day has begun.
Reading in general has been useless except for the lighter, mindless variety where, in one eye and out the other, little retention is required and less accomplished. I managed to finish Ian McEwans’ “Atonement” on a night my sundry aches went into a brief remission last weekend, during which I was also able to write and present a pre-concert talk for the Harrisburg Symphony’s concerts – primarily about Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (you can read “BarTalk” here). I managed a few days of near-normalcy and was allowed to fit in a concert in Philadelphia for the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s amazing new violin concerto with chorus and orchestra called “The Singing Rooms” – then writing a review you can read here. The premise behind the poems of this part concerto/part choral work reflects a walk through a house, standing in the different rooms and how they speak (or sing) to you of distant memories before returning to the first room at a different time of day and seeing it in a different light. But I spent this weekend dealing once again with the redux of symptoms, thereby cancelling plans for concerts with the Wednesday Club and Market Square Concerts.
Dozing off during a day dreary and cold enough to match my mood wreaks havoc with the normal sleep patterns and so I find myself typing this at 6:30am, a rather ungodly hour for yours truly. I awoke about 45 minutes ago thinking I was sleeping in a vibrating bed only to discover mounds of cats wrapped tightly against my fetal form. In the crook of my knees were three of the kittens, though big if not old enough to no longer be called kittens, a few days shy of nine months, now: Blanche, Guy Noir and Charlie all bundled together in a heap, purring in polyrhythms as loud as an outboard motor that needs work. Against my chest was Max, 12 pounds of white fur with gray patches, himself purring contentedly for reasons known only to a cat. Perhaps contentedness is contagious? Perhaps this is how the room sings to them?
Minutes later, in the John Cage Silence of the Night, I heard the familiar sound of another cat scratching in the litter box, located on the other side of my bedroom wall. This was probably Murphy who manages to spend five minutes scratching robustly around the litter pan but focusing mainly on the floor and the wall and the pipe under the sink without ever actually touching the offending mound in the middle of the box which by now I have gotten a serious whiff of.
Then I hear the equally familiar sounds of a pen shuffling off my desk into the oblivion of some Bermuda Triangle. For the next several minutes I can trace its progress across the room to the opposite corner, a slim space between an old end table and the outside wall of my bedroom, virtually inaccessible to a cat no longer a kitten and totally inaccessible to a human dealing with a pulled muscle aggravated by a week of sneezing and coughing. Fortunately I keep packs of pens handy since it’s easier to replace them than crawl around peering under furniture or behind the piano trying to rescue the old ones.
By now, the other cats have decided to investigate, leaving me free to extricate myself from the warmth of my bed to shuffle out to the bathroom where I discover something in the middle of the hallway, an odd bent-shaped bit of brown plastic that I recognize at one point would have had leaves and a flower on it, three inches of a small twig, once a silk rose that I had recently found and kept on the top shelf of my grandfather’s desk, the one that had been his graduation present, Class of 1905. I have no idea where the missing leaves and the peach-colored rosebud itself might be, padding back to the study to check that the rose indeed was missing. It’s not important but I had kept it because it reminded me of the beautiful old Peace Rose my grandmother had growing over a huge trellis in her backyard when I was a child, sitting on a small bench beneath it in the warmth of a summer day. I sat down now on the piano stool – which once belonged to my grandmother’s upright piano, purchased when they moved into their first house in 1919 – the remnant of a rose in my hand and was reminded of a poem I had once set to music as a college student that concluded something like:
Take this rose I give you now
And tear the leaves and petals off it one by one.
Trample them under your feet
As you have trampled on my love.
And when you have nothing left but the bare thorny stem,
Shove it up your ass.
And so my day has begun.
Monday, December 17, 2007
The Beethoven's Birthday Storm
It was not much of a snow-event and not, certainly, as bad as some areas had been hit in other parts of the country, but here at Chez Dr. Dick, it was bad enough. The forecast as usual had been iffy, changing back and forth from snow to ice and sleet back to snow to rain and/or freezing rain to the usual grab-all "wintry mix" (or as I once said on-air, "fleet and sleezing rain"). Given that I'm not much of a fan of winter weather -- or for that matter, weather in general (or come to think of it, much of anything) - it was not going to be a pleasant weekend.It began on Saturday as a Big Delay. Scheduled (as much as one can schedule the weather in Outlook) to begin sometime Saturday morning, by late afternoon it was still a no-show. And the forecast was still vague, no doubt not to panic holiday shoppers. Still, when I stopped at the store after work on Friday night, it was clear lots of people were planning to feast on bread and milk regardless.
So a friend and I went out to engage in a bit of what turned out to be non-shopping, finding stores that were pleasantly not bursting at the seams, then grabbed a bit of dinner before heading over to the Harrisburg Borders. When we left, the sleet had begun and it was a quick trip home before things deteriorated any further.
When I went to bed, the forecast was leaning more in favor of a rain event. Fine.
I woke up to the sound of the cracking of wood. After realizing we had momentarily lost power overnight - only for a split second, perhaps - I looked out the window to see nothing but ice. Ice coating the branches of the maple tree outside my bedroom and study windows, ice coating the branches of the Japanese maple and kousa dogwood in the back yard (see photo), the front lawn coated in what looked like crystal shards, the large crimson king maple out front looking like it had a six-inch buckskin-like fringe of icicles hanging off the lower branches.
On the back porch were several birds - juncos, titmice, chickadees and a female cardinal - so I quickly rushed some fresh birdseed out into the feeder with more scattered across the floor of the porch.
The cracking of wood that I heard might have been branches from the oldest batch of silver maples, trees I've never been happy with, but they were saplings on the lot when my parents began building the house in the late-50s, since then spawning other batches in various parts of the yard. It looked like there was a new trunk but it turned out to be a sizeable branch standing kind of parallel to the trunk but upside down (see photo, below).
There was more sleet, there was more freezing rain, then there was a downpour of just plain rain which apparently was freezing on contact and, once in a while, a snow flurry.The lights kept flickering, the power going out just for a second but enough that I got tired of seeing the computer reboot before my eyes or having to reset the alarm clock and the microwave every hour or so. Then there was another fierce crack of wood, louder than the others I was hearing all morning and afternoon.
I was most concerned about the maple tree on the east side of the house. It had been a puny three-leaved seedling, a freebie when we bought the ginko, when we planted it and by now if it wasn't too close to the house, it was overhanging too many of the wires running the edge of the property. But that loudest crack was actually half of one of the other silver maples, this one on the western side by the old woodpile, which now stretched out across the yard, lying in front of the mound of forsythia. Smaller branches littered the lawn and fairly sizeable ones will need to be pulled out of the forsythia, though nothing, it seems, will ever harm the forsythia (in time, unchecked, I'm sure there would be no back yard, just one mound of forsythia working its way toward the house).
Eventually, the squirrels showed up at the feeder, later than usual. There are three of them, apparently one family since any more than those get chased off with a great deal of chattering and tail-fluffing. Squirrel Ives easily fills the feeder while the younger one, Hoover, works over the porch-floor. A white-footed one, Nureyev, is capable of making amazing leaps into the Japanese maple.
Though not today. Making it to one of the thicker branches in the middle of the tree, he barely managed to hang on -- looking like the kitten in the famous '70s "hang in there" posters -- and with considerably less grace than usual, pulled himself up onto the branch and worked his way cautiously to a spot he could jump more easily onto the ground. He left without further comment.
Once the freezing rain had apparently stopped (and the sun shone perversely for a few fleeting moments making everything sparkle brilliantly enough to almost take your mind off the potentially treacherous situation), it was a matter of waiting for the high winds - gusts up to 40-50mph in the follow-up forecast. Would the power stay on?
Thousands of people in the area were without power - 46,000 still, the day after the storm - with the prospect of it not being restored till Tuesday or Wednesday night. (Update - as of Wednesday morning, 12-19-07, 2300 in the Harrisburg area were still without power.) One friend told me about the number of trees damaged or ruined by the storm at his place, much worse than mine. The clean-up and its cost were things you tried not to think about: it was enough to be waiting for what else could happen before it was officially over.
At one point, a parade of township firetrucks, ambulances and something called a "Mask Unit" drove through my neighborhood, apparently looking for any tree damage that would need to be reported to PPL or the road crews, prepared to take anyone to the hospital in an emergency, ready to report damage to anyone's house from falling trees. Fortunately, on my short street, they were able to just keep on truckin'...
Another casualty for me was the Christmas Concert by the Susquehanna Chorale which I had planned on attending that afternoon. Though a member of the chorale told me the roads "were wet, not all that bad," I chose to stay in, reading too much on-line about falling trees and branches, then watching chunks of ice (some several feet long) cascade off the wires and branches, shattering onto the roadway. I didn't feel I wanted to try dodging stuff like that with my car, so I got some soup and hot chocolate before settling down on the couch to listen to a late Beethoven quartet (Op. 131 with Guarneri).
For me, in the new old house, it was my first major storm and I will remember it, no doubt, like the first major storm after I had moved into Harrisburg to my first midtown apartment in the early-80s, when the forecast called for flurries and we had something like 24 inches of flurries on Lincoln's Birthday. This one will be the Beethoven's Birthday Ice Storm of 2007.
And winter doesn't even begin until this weekend! Bah humbug, indeed!
- Dr. Dick
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Togetherness
While there are times I wonder if it was wise bringing in a pregnant stray cat (and there have been times, kittens being kittens, that I was convinced it wasn't -- with nodding assent from the Big 3), there were times in the past weeks where there was never any question. Here are three pictures of Kittens at Rest, a rather unusual state and enoyable on all accounts.At the top is the mother of all kittens, Frieda Farrell, on the right with her son Baker in profile. Though she's no longer officially "feral," she's not exactly the most acclimated of cats: she still won't let me near her (since mid-August, I have only touched her once and that was the second time since I brought her in in April), but she loves to curl up on the one chair, stretch out on a rug, even play around the scratching post. She's not really the Greta Garbo of Cats, either, but at least she's not spitting and hissing at me any more, like she was up until she was spayed.
Meanwhile, on another chair, this one with the red background, are Charlie and, in the foreground, Guy Noir.
On the gray background, an office desk kind of chair they love because it swivles and rolls around easily, are Abel and Blanche.With four male tabbies, three of them orange, it's difficult to tell them apart, given the lighting and their positioning.
Guy is the cream tabby (hardly 'noir') who at times is known as Guy Noodge for his incessant kittenish brand of curiosity, usually at times when I am most hoping for the chance to concentrate on composing or reading.
Abel, Baker and Charlie, so named at birth because there was no way of telling them apart then, have developed into distinct personalities. Curiously, I find myself going back to the early pictures and wondering if I had labeled them correctly.
Baker is just a bit more reddish than Abel but 95% of the time, I can't tell them apart without looking at their faces. Each has a V-shaped wedge on each cheek, opening toward the mouth (this would seem to be a standard tabby marking) and Abel has two darker spots inside this wedge. Baker's dots are underneath the wedge. When they're running past you and you want to know who just knocked over the wastebasket, it's tough getting them to sit still long enough so you can check the wedge...
Generally, Baker has the quieter and sometimes sweeter personality. Abel is more out-going and, frankly, more likely to get into mischief. Charlie, the largest of the five, has no white on him (Abel and Baker have white chins), the pinkest nose and lips and a tail on the verge of being fluffy (he also has his mother's curious tail-marking that almost looks like a wound, a zig-shaped Harry-Potteresque configuration, wherein, probably, lies a tale). He's also got the sweetest disposition of the kittens, too, and purrs like an outboard motor. He would make a great dog in the way he always wants to be right next to you: judging from the size of his paws, I'm wondering if he might not be a Lab in disguise...
At the left, helping me blog, are Guy Noir and Charlie.
Blanche (originally as in Guy & Blanche Noir), the smallest of the litter, can be a combination of all the others' personalities. Her expression is usually quizzical, since (being a tortoise-shell and basically a black cat with peeks of orange seeping through and small patches of white on her chest and belly) it's hard to see she actually has a nose and a mouth, just big round eyes.
She also went into heat for the first time the weekend after Thanksgiving, something no one in this household was thankful for. Confining her to the bathroom where she was born, I called the vets and made "the arrangements," setting up the requisit shots-and-bloodwork visit followed by, ten days later, the surgery. She will not be going into heat again.
BoxSpringHeights.jpg)
Naturally, now, it is the turn for her four horny brothers, but we'll save that (and them) for another day...
After the move, which finally occured in mid-November (the official unpacking has yet to begin), an old box-spring found its way into the bedroom which the kittens had, before they were left loose in the house, called home. This of course gave them every right to check out everything. Not only does it give them a great vantage point to watch the nests of white-capped sparrows and tufted titmice under the bedroom window, they can also oversee everything else that goes on in their room.
Small wonder I often find myself, walking around the house or sitting at the piano trying to compose, feeling I'm being watched.The other night, off sick from work, I had curled up on the couch hoping to read a few more pages of Ian McEwan's Atonement (before I probably decide not to see the movie after all), and soon found myself surrounded: Max had draped himself over my left arm, Blanche was in her usual fuzzy bandolier stretched across my chest, making reading impossible, and Guy, Abel and Charlie had heaped themselves next to my right hip, all of us taking up barely a third of the full length of the couch. There was no one who could take the picture for me and no sense in getting up to find the camera.
Oh well, another day and back to work, after I check out what that noise was in the living room....
-- Dr. Dick
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Toward a More Fugue-Efficient Car
Johann Sebastian Bach, in addition to the time he spent composing every day, always enjoyed tinkering in his workshop, whether he was trying to figure out ways of improving the clavichord, a kind of lap-top harpsichord, or working on a new book, “The Idiot’s Guide to Writing Cantatas for Every Sunday in the Church Year.” It was usually late at night, after the city of Leipzig had gone to sleep and the various Bach children had all been put to bed, that he loved most to sneak down to the basement.
His latest project was designing a more fugue-efficient car which he figured would be a major contribution to society, given the cost of supporting the arts these days. But he knew it was becoming hopeless because the younger generation had lost the knack for fugues: a simple melody with simple harmony was all they needed to make it run smoothly if not very far.
Those huge vans took whole symphonies, though, and proved to be time-consuming for the average motorist but yet everybody had to have one until they realized how difficult it was to write a symphony every couple of days. Even Haydn had given his van up for a smaller car that ran on variations.
And then Bach heard that Philip Glass was working on a new kind of engine system that could get several more miles out of just a single chord progression and didn’t even need a melody!
What did it matter to people like that, having something designed to run on the finest intellectual principles?
He had just recently perfected the fugue-injector engine with its dashboard application allowing you to insert the written-out fugue which is then transferred to the fugue tank where it is converted into fuel. This he found to be a big improvement over the original harpsicarburator engine which had a keyboard attached to the steering column but he found it distracting to be improvising fugues while driving (especially when Anna Magdalena would call him on his cell phone).
After he had started on the design, he quickly discovered that simple two-voice fugues, nothing terribly adventurous but suitable for beginning drivers, didn’t get you very far and were basically only good for quick trips to the store and back. For the daily commute, he needed at least a three-voice fugue with two good modulations in it. If the middle entries employed a good statement by inversion, then he added a little stretto before the final statement, he might be able to run a few errands on the way home, too.
Originally, he wanted to call it the Well-Tempered Car. Unfortunately, the engine frequently needed to be tuned which caused most of the fugues to burn slower than usual. Several times he found himself on the side of the road with his pitch-pipe trying to crank the engine back to A-440. Frustrated, he wondered “why bother,” watching everybody whizzing by in their Scarlatti Sonatas and Mendelssohn Cars Without Words.
But then he came up with another idea and that night he was back in the workshop.
Just the other week, he’d developed the compact version which he allowed the boys to drive around the neighborhood: this was the Clavicar which was capable of running on basic canons and two-part inventions, good for beginners.
Once when he was in a hurry, he let little C.P.E. write a fugue for him but the boy, who was usually as bored by fugal exercise as he was by aerobic exercise, had made too many mistakes – a botched tonal answer and a deceptive modulation that contained hidden parallel fifths – which just spun the engine off to the curb and poor Bach had to sit there and write out a whole new fugue just to make it to his rehearsal on time.
He found that you can’t just quickly dash off the same old/same old, either. Even though a fugue is a fugue, it has to be well-constructed with good material to really get some mileage out of it: too much “free counterpoint,” as they call it - he always thought it was just “filler,” watering your craft down with empty additives - and the car starts stalling at intersections or making rude gastrointestinal noises when it reached quarter-note = 120.
So each night, before going to bed, he would write a couple of fugues to get him through the next day. With any luck, he might go a whole day on a good double fugue - that would be great but it didn’t always happen, especially if he was behind on the weekly cantata. Invertible counterpoint was always effective but sometimes when you’re rushed you can make some miscalculations which could gum up the works and Bach, even though it would never happen to him, knew that his sons, for instance, would never have the discipline to manage one of those every day: maybe for a holiday trip, but not your daily commute.
There had been a fine five-voice fugue with two counter-subjects that he was able to drive around on for almost a week. And there was that whole series of fugues he’d written on a theme submitted by Frederick the Great’s Energy Secretary which got him all the way to Berlin and back, even though they laughed at his ideas...
Maybe one day, ja, like their father, C.P.E. and Wilhelm Friedemann and all of their generation will be able to master the fugue in all its many possibilities. His dream was to finish a collection he called “The Art of Fuel,” containing only the finest of those fugues with which he’d gotten the best mileage. It’s a dream that keeps him going.
- Dr. Dick
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
© 2007
His latest project was designing a more fugue-efficient car which he figured would be a major contribution to society, given the cost of supporting the arts these days. But he knew it was becoming hopeless because the younger generation had lost the knack for fugues: a simple melody with simple harmony was all they needed to make it run smoothly if not very far.
Those huge vans took whole symphonies, though, and proved to be time-consuming for the average motorist but yet everybody had to have one until they realized how difficult it was to write a symphony every couple of days. Even Haydn had given his van up for a smaller car that ran on variations.
And then Bach heard that Philip Glass was working on a new kind of engine system that could get several more miles out of just a single chord progression and didn’t even need a melody!
What did it matter to people like that, having something designed to run on the finest intellectual principles?
He had just recently perfected the fugue-injector engine with its dashboard application allowing you to insert the written-out fugue which is then transferred to the fugue tank where it is converted into fuel. This he found to be a big improvement over the original harpsicarburator engine which had a keyboard attached to the steering column but he found it distracting to be improvising fugues while driving (especially when Anna Magdalena would call him on his cell phone).
After he had started on the design, he quickly discovered that simple two-voice fugues, nothing terribly adventurous but suitable for beginning drivers, didn’t get you very far and were basically only good for quick trips to the store and back. For the daily commute, he needed at least a three-voice fugue with two good modulations in it. If the middle entries employed a good statement by inversion, then he added a little stretto before the final statement, he might be able to run a few errands on the way home, too.
Originally, he wanted to call it the Well-Tempered Car. Unfortunately, the engine frequently needed to be tuned which caused most of the fugues to burn slower than usual. Several times he found himself on the side of the road with his pitch-pipe trying to crank the engine back to A-440. Frustrated, he wondered “why bother,” watching everybody whizzing by in their Scarlatti Sonatas and Mendelssohn Cars Without Words.
But then he came up with another idea and that night he was back in the workshop.
Just the other week, he’d developed the compact version which he allowed the boys to drive around the neighborhood: this was the Clavicar which was capable of running on basic canons and two-part inventions, good for beginners.
Once when he was in a hurry, he let little C.P.E. write a fugue for him but the boy, who was usually as bored by fugal exercise as he was by aerobic exercise, had made too many mistakes – a botched tonal answer and a deceptive modulation that contained hidden parallel fifths – which just spun the engine off to the curb and poor Bach had to sit there and write out a whole new fugue just to make it to his rehearsal on time.
He found that you can’t just quickly dash off the same old/same old, either. Even though a fugue is a fugue, it has to be well-constructed with good material to really get some mileage out of it: too much “free counterpoint,” as they call it - he always thought it was just “filler,” watering your craft down with empty additives - and the car starts stalling at intersections or making rude gastrointestinal noises when it reached quarter-note = 120.
So each night, before going to bed, he would write a couple of fugues to get him through the next day. With any luck, he might go a whole day on a good double fugue - that would be great but it didn’t always happen, especially if he was behind on the weekly cantata. Invertible counterpoint was always effective but sometimes when you’re rushed you can make some miscalculations which could gum up the works and Bach, even though it would never happen to him, knew that his sons, for instance, would never have the discipline to manage one of those every day: maybe for a holiday trip, but not your daily commute.
There had been a fine five-voice fugue with two counter-subjects that he was able to drive around on for almost a week. And there was that whole series of fugues he’d written on a theme submitted by Frederick the Great’s Energy Secretary which got him all the way to Berlin and back, even though they laughed at his ideas...
Maybe one day, ja, like their father, C.P.E. and Wilhelm Friedemann and all of their generation will be able to master the fugue in all its many possibilities. His dream was to finish a collection he called “The Art of Fuel,” containing only the finest of those fugues with which he’d gotten the best mileage. It’s a dream that keeps him going.
- Dr. Dick
*** ***** ******** ***** ***
© 2007
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Under One Roof
It’s now official: I am no longer a mid-town resident. I have survived the move and various other non-related events from that week – all but the unpacking which has yet, officially, to begin. I spent Thanksgiving, thankfully, all under one roof.
It was a timely move: having worked on the clean-up phase this past weekend until almost 10pm, I began feeling uncomfortable carrying odds and ends out to the car parked in front of my old apartment. Monday, then, when I went in to finish up, I heard that one of my neighbors, a resident of almost forty years there, had been mugged at gunpoint, walking back to his house after parking the car around 10:30 the night before.
For those readers outside the immediate vicinity of Central Pennsylvania, it has been a strange autumn here: the third week of November and many trees still had their leaves, and many of them still hadn’t changed yet. It has been autumnally cool but not really cold, only a brief encounter with measurable snow.
One of the things my grandfather always said: the date of the first measurable snow will indicate the number of measurable snowfalls that winter. I’d never really kept track of it since it sounded so odd for a scientific man like him who kept meticulous records to say that: one year not too long ago, with the first snow on December 4th, we had five measurable snows, so that wasn’t bad, but one of them as I recall was a 12" blizzard. Last year, we waited until I believe January 21st for the first official snowfall and we only had a few snowfalls, though the storm around Valentine’s Day was one to remember! So I cringe thinking “what if 18 is the correct number this year?” I think I’ll keep track of them on the kitchen calendar this time.
Several years ago, my mother had gotten, with the best intentions, some exercise equipment. While I stood there in my senior moment calling it first a “walker” (no, that’s for later), then a “stroller” (no, that’s at the other end of the cycle), the word finally came to me: “treadmill.” I know she had used it for a while, but living alone she was always concerned it would suddenly kick itself into highspeed and she would be stuck on it, going 40mph, hanging on for dear life and unable to step off the machine. This past weekend, I discovered that not only was it still plugged in back in its corner of the living room, it still worked. So I have started using it myself, set at a leisurely pace to accommodate the still aching pulled abdominal muscle, sneaking my way gradually into a routine of 10-15 minutes a day (it’s a start). The photograph above, taken a few days ago, is the view from that corner, so it was, at least for a couple days, a rather pleasant way to spend a few minutes.
I have also gotten back into the routine of putting seed out in the bird feeder, a simple squirrel-accesible affair nailed to a post on the back porch. 25 years ago, we would have sparrows and purple finches by the busload but today, other than the occasional white-crowned sparrow, most of the clientele are tufted titmice, chickadees, juncos, once in a while the Carolina wrens along with infrequent visits from cardinals and blue jays. And of course, the squirrels and chipmunks.
In the past two days, I have also seen a red-bellied woodpecker (so named despite the fact the red is on the cap and back of its neck, but not on the belly – not that they would call it the red-necked woodpecker – just enough to distinguish it from the red-headed woodpecker with its full head of red). Once in a while, there’ll be a downy woodpecker in the Japanese maple, maybe a flicker, once a meadowlark. In the front yard which is more open and meadow-like, there are birds I never see in the back yard: the bluebirds have probably left for the winter but yesterday I watched a family of white-breasted nut-hatches in the one tree out front.
But it was windy on Thanksgiving Day despite temperatures flirting with the 60s, so now most of the leaves have dropped, including the Japanese maple in the photo above, now an array of bare branches over a carpeting of dark red mulch. Still, looking out at night, seeing it in the light of the full moon is still a beautiful sight.
The kittens have turned 7 months old this week and it will soon be time to take the lone female, Blanche, in to be spayed. Their mother, the ever-elusive Frieda, has begun putting on weight but more uniformly than before: perhaps it’s just an indication she’s getting enough to eat rather than, having been spayed over the summer, that she’s discovered a secret uterus somewhere. I rather doubt I could coax her into joining me for a stroll on the treadmill.
And I am getting back to composing after being interrupted these past two weeks with the move and its follow-up: several hours were spent Thursday trying to figure out where I’d left off and how it should continue from there. I’m not convinced yet I’ve found the best solution.
But one day at a time, as they say... one day at a time...
-- Dr. Dick
It was a timely move: having worked on the clean-up phase this past weekend until almost 10pm, I began feeling uncomfortable carrying odds and ends out to the car parked in front of my old apartment. Monday, then, when I went in to finish up, I heard that one of my neighbors, a resident of almost forty years there, had been mugged at gunpoint, walking back to his house after parking the car around 10:30 the night before.
For those readers outside the immediate vicinity of Central Pennsylvania, it has been a strange autumn here: the third week of November and many trees still had their leaves, and many of them still hadn’t changed yet. It has been autumnally cool but not really cold, only a brief encounter with measurable snow.
One of the things my grandfather always said: the date of the first measurable snow will indicate the number of measurable snowfalls that winter. I’d never really kept track of it since it sounded so odd for a scientific man like him who kept meticulous records to say that: one year not too long ago, with the first snow on December 4th, we had five measurable snows, so that wasn’t bad, but one of them as I recall was a 12" blizzard. Last year, we waited until I believe January 21st for the first official snowfall and we only had a few snowfalls, though the storm around Valentine’s Day was one to remember! So I cringe thinking “what if 18 is the correct number this year?” I think I’ll keep track of them on the kitchen calendar this time.
Several years ago, my mother had gotten, with the best intentions, some exercise equipment. While I stood there in my senior moment calling it first a “walker” (no, that’s for later), then a “stroller” (no, that’s at the other end of the cycle), the word finally came to me: “treadmill.” I know she had used it for a while, but living alone she was always concerned it would suddenly kick itself into highspeed and she would be stuck on it, going 40mph, hanging on for dear life and unable to step off the machine. This past weekend, I discovered that not only was it still plugged in back in its corner of the living room, it still worked. So I have started using it myself, set at a leisurely pace to accommodate the still aching pulled abdominal muscle, sneaking my way gradually into a routine of 10-15 minutes a day (it’s a start). The photograph above, taken a few days ago, is the view from that corner, so it was, at least for a couple days, a rather pleasant way to spend a few minutes.I have also gotten back into the routine of putting seed out in the bird feeder, a simple squirrel-accesible affair nailed to a post on the back porch. 25 years ago, we would have sparrows and purple finches by the busload but today, other than the occasional white-crowned sparrow, most of the clientele are tufted titmice, chickadees, juncos, once in a while the Carolina wrens along with infrequent visits from cardinals and blue jays. And of course, the squirrels and chipmunks.
In the past two days, I have also seen a red-bellied woodpecker (so named despite the fact the red is on the cap and back of its neck, but not on the belly – not that they would call it the red-necked woodpecker – just enough to distinguish it from the red-headed woodpecker with its full head of red). Once in a while, there’ll be a downy woodpecker in the Japanese maple, maybe a flicker, once a meadowlark. In the front yard which is more open and meadow-like, there are birds I never see in the back yard: the bluebirds have probably left for the winter but yesterday I watched a family of white-breasted nut-hatches in the one tree out front.
But it was windy on Thanksgiving Day despite temperatures flirting with the 60s, so now most of the leaves have dropped, including the Japanese maple in the photo above, now an array of bare branches over a carpeting of dark red mulch. Still, looking out at night, seeing it in the light of the full moon is still a beautiful sight.The kittens have turned 7 months old this week and it will soon be time to take the lone female, Blanche, in to be spayed. Their mother, the ever-elusive Frieda, has begun putting on weight but more uniformly than before: perhaps it’s just an indication she’s getting enough to eat rather than, having been spayed over the summer, that she’s discovered a secret uterus somewhere. I rather doubt I could coax her into joining me for a stroll on the treadmill.
And I am getting back to composing after being interrupted these past two weeks with the move and its follow-up: several hours were spent Thursday trying to figure out where I’d left off and how it should continue from there. I’m not convinced yet I’ve found the best solution.
But one day at a time, as they say... one day at a time...
-- Dr. Dick
Friday, November 02, 2007
The Adventures of a Luddite: Man vs. Car
For sixteen years, I drove a fairly basic car. It didn’t have much in the way of fanciness to recommend it and it was kind of boxy and ugly to boot, but it got me where I needed to go (except for those times it kept stalling on me whenever I’d fill the gas tank: that was kind of weird but only lasted for a few months) and, when the end came, I only went to replace it because it just wouldn’t pass inspection any more. Yeah, I felt like I was abandoning an old friend when I dropped it off to pick up my brand new used car, a much snazzier version I’ll probably be lucky to be driving sixteen years down the road.
This newer car has a lot of now-standard bells and whistles, things that weren’t available in the Dark Ages when I’d bought the other one. The CD-player was a nice plus and I find myself listening to the radio less, now, when I’m driving around, especially on weekends. I’m finding Simone Dinnerstein’s “Goldberg” Variations wonderful mood-adjusting music for driving to and from work, for that matter, especially in heavy traffic.
I never needed a keyless entry remote before. You walk up, put the key in and unlock the door. Why do I need to do it from 200 feet away? (Do I sound like Andy Rooney? OMG, I’m even beginning to look like Andy Rooney…) Turns out, it didn’t really work from 200 feet away, after all: sometimes I’d be standing two parking spaces away and it might work. Okay, big deal.
Then there was the alarm system. Living in mid-town Harrisburg at the time, I thought this was a good idea, given the increase in crime in my neighborhood. Of course, I had a garage to park it in, but you never know.
Keep the car empty, they told me sixteen years ago, and no one’s tempted to break in. But it got broken into anyway, by a short person who apparently just wanted to steal the car, not anything that was in it (I know this, because they’d adjusted the rear-view mirror). And a neighbor’s car had gotten broken into by one of the more colorful local characters who thought the cigarette lighter was really cool-looking. Great.
Some time in April, after moving into my house, I’d gotten into the car to retrieve a CD from the player. I quickly turned on the ignition, retrieved the CD, shut off the ignition and the car started to scream. I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off. Now, at the time, I was sitting in my garage. It’s not like I was trying to break in or anything.
So I called the dealer’s service people and they said “oh, that means it’s in Valet Mode.” What, I asked naively, is Varlet Mode? No, no, he clarifeid, "Valet Mode." They explained what that is but could not answer how it got there. After several calls, the solution was just to bring it in for them to look at. Later.
Checking one of the booklets, it appears I had three choices: Normal Alarm, Valet Mode and Off. Since “Normal Alarm” was for some reason no longer one of them, I opted for “Off” since the alarm would just start screaming every time I put the key in the door.
This worked fine for several months. Then an odd thing happened. Parking on a city street one afternoon, the alarm (which, you'll remember, I had turned off) started screaming when I got out of the car and locked the door. It stopped when I got back in and put the key in the ignition. Weird. It's like I was trying to break out of my car.
This happened two more times, each time when I parked on a city street. Like it could smell fear.
Then last weekend, it happened again, only it wouldn’t stop. Nothing I did made a difference. Finally, after two minutes of ear-splitting din, it just stopped. But every time I put the key in the door or in the ignition, it would go off again. I couldn’t drive the car. So I called a friend to come in and give me a ride back to the house. Because it was the weekend, the service garage wasn’t able to help me till Monday morning.
And so Monday, I called about the car. Nope, nothing as easy as “press the alarm button three times while turning the key in the ignition and clapping in a flamenco rhythm” to reverse the curse, of course. “Bring it in.” Which means it had to be towed. They gave me a special dealership roadside service 800-number to call.
“And where are you,” I asked after I reported to this guy what I would need.
“Arizona.” I had an image of me waiting while this tow truck was driving out from Phoenix.
They connected me with a local towing service (hmm, I think I could've done that myself). They would be there in 40 minutes. Well, make it 90, but hey…
So the guy went to get the car ready to be hauled up onto the flat-bed. This took about fifteen minutes. During which the car’s alarm system never stopped screaming except every two or three minutes when it might take 15 seconds to catch its breath.
Did I mention I have a hearing condition where certain frequencies can attain near-painful levels? Mmmmm...
By mid-afternoon the next day, the car was… well, not exactly ready. I had originally said I just wanted the alarm system disemboweled. They told me they weren’t sure they could do that since it was tied into the car’s computer and removing it might affect other electrical systems. Swell.
But an hour later, I was assured they could, if I really wanted them to, disable the alarm. Would it be covered by the expensive warranty package I had purchased with the car the year before? Uhm, well, no, that wouldn’t be a repair, would it, and the warranty would only cover certain repairs.
Ah. So if I had them fix the alarm system so it worked properly, would that be covered under the warranty? Well, not exactly. So, I asked naively, because something screwed up with the computer, I would have to pay this out of my own pocket? Uhm… yes...
So it would cost me $158 to disable the alarm system and keyless entry. Or it would cost me $485 to repair it.
Curiously, I’d just gotten a recent offer from Dell about buying a new PC with a discount that would make it under $500. So I could buy a whole new computer for what it would cost to fix one bell and whistle (as it were) on my car’s computer.
So I made my decision. And peace has once again returned to Hooterville.
-- Dr. Dick
This newer car has a lot of now-standard bells and whistles, things that weren’t available in the Dark Ages when I’d bought the other one. The CD-player was a nice plus and I find myself listening to the radio less, now, when I’m driving around, especially on weekends. I’m finding Simone Dinnerstein’s “Goldberg” Variations wonderful mood-adjusting music for driving to and from work, for that matter, especially in heavy traffic.
I never needed a keyless entry remote before. You walk up, put the key in and unlock the door. Why do I need to do it from 200 feet away? (Do I sound like Andy Rooney? OMG, I’m even beginning to look like Andy Rooney…) Turns out, it didn’t really work from 200 feet away, after all: sometimes I’d be standing two parking spaces away and it might work. Okay, big deal.
Then there was the alarm system. Living in mid-town Harrisburg at the time, I thought this was a good idea, given the increase in crime in my neighborhood. Of course, I had a garage to park it in, but you never know.
Keep the car empty, they told me sixteen years ago, and no one’s tempted to break in. But it got broken into anyway, by a short person who apparently just wanted to steal the car, not anything that was in it (I know this, because they’d adjusted the rear-view mirror). And a neighbor’s car had gotten broken into by one of the more colorful local characters who thought the cigarette lighter was really cool-looking. Great.
Some time in April, after moving into my house, I’d gotten into the car to retrieve a CD from the player. I quickly turned on the ignition, retrieved the CD, shut off the ignition and the car started to scream. I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off. Now, at the time, I was sitting in my garage. It’s not like I was trying to break in or anything.
So I called the dealer’s service people and they said “oh, that means it’s in Valet Mode.” What, I asked naively, is Varlet Mode? No, no, he clarifeid, "Valet Mode." They explained what that is but could not answer how it got there. After several calls, the solution was just to bring it in for them to look at. Later.
Checking one of the booklets, it appears I had three choices: Normal Alarm, Valet Mode and Off. Since “Normal Alarm” was for some reason no longer one of them, I opted for “Off” since the alarm would just start screaming every time I put the key in the door.
This worked fine for several months. Then an odd thing happened. Parking on a city street one afternoon, the alarm (which, you'll remember, I had turned off) started screaming when I got out of the car and locked the door. It stopped when I got back in and put the key in the ignition. Weird. It's like I was trying to break out of my car.
This happened two more times, each time when I parked on a city street. Like it could smell fear.
Then last weekend, it happened again, only it wouldn’t stop. Nothing I did made a difference. Finally, after two minutes of ear-splitting din, it just stopped. But every time I put the key in the door or in the ignition, it would go off again. I couldn’t drive the car. So I called a friend to come in and give me a ride back to the house. Because it was the weekend, the service garage wasn’t able to help me till Monday morning.
And so Monday, I called about the car. Nope, nothing as easy as “press the alarm button three times while turning the key in the ignition and clapping in a flamenco rhythm” to reverse the curse, of course. “Bring it in.” Which means it had to be towed. They gave me a special dealership roadside service 800-number to call.
“And where are you,” I asked after I reported to this guy what I would need.
“Arizona.” I had an image of me waiting while this tow truck was driving out from Phoenix.
They connected me with a local towing service (hmm, I think I could've done that myself). They would be there in 40 minutes. Well, make it 90, but hey…
So the guy went to get the car ready to be hauled up onto the flat-bed. This took about fifteen minutes. During which the car’s alarm system never stopped screaming except every two or three minutes when it might take 15 seconds to catch its breath.
Did I mention I have a hearing condition where certain frequencies can attain near-painful levels? Mmmmm...
By mid-afternoon the next day, the car was… well, not exactly ready. I had originally said I just wanted the alarm system disemboweled. They told me they weren’t sure they could do that since it was tied into the car’s computer and removing it might affect other electrical systems. Swell.
But an hour later, I was assured they could, if I really wanted them to, disable the alarm. Would it be covered by the expensive warranty package I had purchased with the car the year before? Uhm, well, no, that wouldn’t be a repair, would it, and the warranty would only cover certain repairs.
Ah. So if I had them fix the alarm system so it worked properly, would that be covered under the warranty? Well, not exactly. So, I asked naively, because something screwed up with the computer, I would have to pay this out of my own pocket? Uhm… yes...
So it would cost me $158 to disable the alarm system and keyless entry. Or it would cost me $485 to repair it.
Curiously, I’d just gotten a recent offer from Dell about buying a new PC with a discount that would make it under $500. So I could buy a whole new computer for what it would cost to fix one bell and whistle (as it were) on my car’s computer.
So I made my decision. And peace has once again returned to Hooterville.
-- Dr. Dick
Monday, October 22, 2007
Pilling the Cat
It has not been the best weekend, kitty-wise, though they are, today, six months old! Perhaps I should have a party for them but as I get closer to finding homes for three of them, I feel a mixture of pending relief that things might be more manageable in the nearer future but also that sadness knowing I will miss them even when I won’t miss the cyclone of energy all five of them can at times create.
It was Max’s turn to go to the vets this time: his eyes were again running and now he had started sniffling and sneezing, the equivalent of a cat cold. He’d had something like this when I first brought him in almost six years ago when he was probably seven or eight months old. In fact, his eyes were so watery, the goop draining from his eyes looking like bad mascara, one of his name options at first had been Tammy-Faye before I realized this was a male cat.
So now I am to give him eye-drops 3x/Day and two different pills 2x/Day each. He was not keen on this regimen when he was confined to my apartment’s bathroom, pending his release among my other cats (which then included a 12-year-old diabetic cat and an 18-or-19-year-old cat I had inherited from my neighbors after they had both passed away). And now he is nearly twice the size and weight he was then, making the wrestling match not as well balanced as it had been. He was now a seasoned six-year-old with an attitude that could easily defy a mere middle-aged human.
It took me nearly two hours to get the first pill in him on Saturday. The one, just a half-pill, kept falling out of the “pill-popper” I need because, being only one person, it is otherwise impossible to hold him still, pry the mouth open and insert the pill all the while retaining the normal set of appendages I had been born with. He has also become an expert squirmer: coiling him with copper wire and placing a magnet beside him, pilling him could become an alternate energy source for my house. Clenched tightly in the equivalent of a full nelson between my knees, he can still turn his head from side to side with such speed, I managed to get the half-pill in his right ear which he then shook out onto the floor. After placing that back up on the desk, I decided perhaps the capsule would be easier. But it became too exhausting, so I would sit back and wait, taking ten minute breaks hoping that perhaps he would finally give in to the inevitable. While I was resting, he was storing up more energy and probably could have kept this up all day. Finally, somehow, I managed to get one capsule down his throat. He went and sat in the corner to preen himself for the rest of the morning, hoping to restore his image before the other cats.
After a busy day, I was too bushed to wrestle him for the evening’s pilling so I chose to wait till morning. At 9:30, I succeeded with the eye-drops. By 10:15, I had managed to stop the flow of blood.
He had chomped down hard on the tip of my left index finger and though I do not, normally, play the piano with any regularity to warrant dreams of being a pianist per se, I still like the idea of keeping my finger. It took a good 15 minutes to staunch the wound, leaving me with a sink full of blood spatterings and a mound of cotton balls damp with hydrogen peroxide. Fortunately, when I’d brought in Frieda, the feral cat and mother of the kittens-to-be, I had stopped on the way home to replenish the first aid kit, considering she had given me two healthy bites in the process of catching her (practically the last time I was able to touch her).
And of course I lost my temper. So now I and the cat are both traumatized at the idea of a twice-daily pilling.
Oh, and when I placed the errant half-pill on my desk after the first attempt at pilling? I opened the door to the room where all this was happening to find all five kittens waiting curiously for the outcome, wondering if, like their bout with the diarrhea medication they’d been subjected to a couple of weeks earlier, they were now going to be next. When I failed to come after any of them, they resumed their normal kittenish curiosities which, in Charlie’s case, involved checking out my desk. Before I could grab the half-pill to put it away, he had sniffed at it and swallowed it down! Just like that!
It was Max’s turn to go to the vets this time: his eyes were again running and now he had started sniffling and sneezing, the equivalent of a cat cold. He’d had something like this when I first brought him in almost six years ago when he was probably seven or eight months old. In fact, his eyes were so watery, the goop draining from his eyes looking like bad mascara, one of his name options at first had been Tammy-Faye before I realized this was a male cat.So now I am to give him eye-drops 3x/Day and two different pills 2x/Day each. He was not keen on this regimen when he was confined to my apartment’s bathroom, pending his release among my other cats (which then included a 12-year-old diabetic cat and an 18-or-19-year-old cat I had inherited from my neighbors after they had both passed away). And now he is nearly twice the size and weight he was then, making the wrestling match not as well balanced as it had been. He was now a seasoned six-year-old with an attitude that could easily defy a mere middle-aged human.
It took me nearly two hours to get the first pill in him on Saturday. The one, just a half-pill, kept falling out of the “pill-popper” I need because, being only one person, it is otherwise impossible to hold him still, pry the mouth open and insert the pill all the while retaining the normal set of appendages I had been born with. He has also become an expert squirmer: coiling him with copper wire and placing a magnet beside him, pilling him could become an alternate energy source for my house. Clenched tightly in the equivalent of a full nelson between my knees, he can still turn his head from side to side with such speed, I managed to get the half-pill in his right ear which he then shook out onto the floor. After placing that back up on the desk, I decided perhaps the capsule would be easier. But it became too exhausting, so I would sit back and wait, taking ten minute breaks hoping that perhaps he would finally give in to the inevitable. While I was resting, he was storing up more energy and probably could have kept this up all day. Finally, somehow, I managed to get one capsule down his throat. He went and sat in the corner to preen himself for the rest of the morning, hoping to restore his image before the other cats.
After a busy day, I was too bushed to wrestle him for the evening’s pilling so I chose to wait till morning. At 9:30, I succeeded with the eye-drops. By 10:15, I had managed to stop the flow of blood.
He had chomped down hard on the tip of my left index finger and though I do not, normally, play the piano with any regularity to warrant dreams of being a pianist per se, I still like the idea of keeping my finger. It took a good 15 minutes to staunch the wound, leaving me with a sink full of blood spatterings and a mound of cotton balls damp with hydrogen peroxide. Fortunately, when I’d brought in Frieda, the feral cat and mother of the kittens-to-be, I had stopped on the way home to replenish the first aid kit, considering she had given me two healthy bites in the process of catching her (practically the last time I was able to touch her).
And of course I lost my temper. So now I and the cat are both traumatized at the idea of a twice-daily pilling.
Oh, and when I placed the errant half-pill on my desk after the first attempt at pilling? I opened the door to the room where all this was happening to find all five kittens waiting curiously for the outcome, wondering if, like their bout with the diarrhea medication they’d been subjected to a couple of weeks earlier, they were now going to be next. When I failed to come after any of them, they resumed their normal kittenish curiosities which, in Charlie’s case, involved checking out my desk. Before I could grab the half-pill to put it away, he had sniffed at it and swallowed it down! Just like that!
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Kitten Pictures I Have Missed...
When they were born, I began taking pictures of the kittens every day. As they got older and reached a plateau where they appear to have stopped growing, I have practically stopped taking pictures, though they tend to stand still less for the ritual than they had even three months ago when they realized these legs were meant for flying.
And as I’ve said, my camera is slow on the re-set with a three-second delay between pushing the button and activating the flash that can be a C-Change for a Grade-B Camera with its AA-Batteries. Since I do not have it slung on my hip the way some people carry their cell-phones and key-chains, I usually find myself and the photographic subject in a room distant from the location of the camera. By the time I would retrieve it, the cats have moved on to some other pose not nearly as interesting.
The other day, I was in the master bedroom which for the first several months of their lives had been theirs, when I heard a thump behind me. Turning to see what they’d gotten into, now, it turns out they had “up-dumped” the little two-hole cat condo on its side. Blanche was peering out of the one hole wondering how that could possibly have happened when one of the four blondes hopped into the other hole and quickly assumed the same position. They were now, apparently, waiting for the other cats to come and roll the condo around as they do on occasion. I had seen them do this, as I stood cameraless in the doorway, with Blanche inside. In a flash it had been over and she sauntered out a bit dazed but looking like “let’s do that again.” Of course they never did. Nor did they this time, either. Before I could even move much less retrieve the camera, they had hopped out and the condo was now empty.
A few nights ago, sitting at my computer, I happened to turn around to catch Charlie peering out from under the chair by my bed. As most of my chairs are covered with old throws and blankets in an attempt at protecting what is left of their upholstery, the space beneath this particular chair becomes a much sought-after cave, draped off from the rest of the world by a maroon blanket and a wheat-colored chenille throw with fringed tassels on the ends. There sat Charlie, between the two throws, looking up at me, his head between the tassels, a few knots hanging loosely over his forehead and others draped around his shoulders like a wig gone askew that reminded me of Janis Joplin if she had been a blonde. My camera was only two feet away but of course the move to reach for it became a new curiosity and before I could touch the camera, Charlie was on the desk checking it out, his wig hanging limply off the chair like, well... like an old throw with tassels on the end.
Walking into the kitchen the other morning, pre-coffee, I had this eerie feeling I was being watched. Turning to get something out of the refrigerator, there on the top were Abel and Guy, their chins both resting over the edge, peering down at me. Then Guy looked up toward the ceiling which reminded me of the famous painting of the two presumably innocent cherubs. Blanche sometimes also likes to perch on top of the fridge, leering over the edge like Snoopy’s impression of a vulture.
There are times I simply do not want to imagine what is going through their minds.
-- Dr. Dick
And as I’ve said, my camera is slow on the re-set with a three-second delay between pushing the button and activating the flash that can be a C-Change for a Grade-B Camera with its AA-Batteries. Since I do not have it slung on my hip the way some people carry their cell-phones and key-chains, I usually find myself and the photographic subject in a room distant from the location of the camera. By the time I would retrieve it, the cats have moved on to some other pose not nearly as interesting.
The other day, I was in the master bedroom which for the first several months of their lives had been theirs, when I heard a thump behind me. Turning to see what they’d gotten into, now, it turns out they had “up-dumped” the little two-hole cat condo on its side. Blanche was peering out of the one hole wondering how that could possibly have happened when one of the four blondes hopped into the other hole and quickly assumed the same position. They were now, apparently, waiting for the other cats to come and roll the condo around as they do on occasion. I had seen them do this, as I stood cameraless in the doorway, with Blanche inside. In a flash it had been over and she sauntered out a bit dazed but looking like “let’s do that again.” Of course they never did. Nor did they this time, either. Before I could even move much less retrieve the camera, they had hopped out and the condo was now empty.
A few nights ago, sitting at my computer, I happened to turn around to catch Charlie peering out from under the chair by my bed. As most of my chairs are covered with old throws and blankets in an attempt at protecting what is left of their upholstery, the space beneath this particular chair becomes a much sought-after cave, draped off from the rest of the world by a maroon blanket and a wheat-colored chenille throw with fringed tassels on the ends. There sat Charlie, between the two throws, looking up at me, his head between the tassels, a few knots hanging loosely over his forehead and others draped around his shoulders like a wig gone askew that reminded me of Janis Joplin if she had been a blonde. My camera was only two feet away but of course the move to reach for it became a new curiosity and before I could touch the camera, Charlie was on the desk checking it out, his wig hanging limply off the chair like, well... like an old throw with tassels on the end.Walking into the kitchen the other morning, pre-coffee, I had this eerie feeling I was being watched. Turning to get something out of the refrigerator, there on the top were Abel and Guy, their chins both resting over the edge, peering down at me. Then Guy looked up toward the ceiling which reminded me of the famous painting of the two presumably innocent cherubs. Blanche sometimes also likes to perch on top of the fridge, leering over the edge like Snoopy’s impression of a vulture.
There are times I simply do not want to imagine what is going through their minds.
-- Dr. Dick
Monday, October 15, 2007
Earth & Home
Today is a blog-action day for “environmental-oriented” posts, though at the moment I should probably be writing about the new composition I’m working on, the novel I want to get started if I weren’t working on a new composition or about the kittens who continually keep interrupting me from concentrating on either.
In all honesty, I’m concerned about environmental issues but often feel there’s not much I can do by myself, at the same time admitting that if everybody felt that way, nothing will be accomplished. Even to change a little bit is a huge improvement and once even that little is accomplished, it gives me a little bit of incentive to go on and try something more. Sorting recyclables has been probably the first major inconvenience to learn, rather than just throwing it all in the trash: it gets annoying when you’re trying to figure out what “number” of plastic a thing is and whether that recycling bin at work or at home accepts that or not. I can fill up my trash-can-sized recycling container with cat food cans and plastic cat litter jugs in no time!
When I buy cat food, for instance, it bothers me that the kind they prefer to eat, 9-Lives, is packaged in an un-environmentally-friendly wrapping of thick plastic sheeting which usually has a couple of “holes” in it that can prove traps just like the plastic rings you find on soda bottles. Ever since I’d seen pictures of sea-birds with their heads stuck in these (or the character Lovelace in “Happy Feet”...), I’ve taken the scissors to things like this and chopped them up into small hole-free units, but that’s still a lot of plastic to dispose of. It’s not just that that’s often the cheaper brand the stores offer, it’s only one of two main brands of canned cat food on the shelves at all, anymore, so why spend more money on food the kittens won’t eat which I’m going to be throwing away (at least the food is biodegradable)? A lot of the cheaper “house brands” were among those in the earlier recalls from Menu Foods, responsible for causing pet deaths through poisonous chemicals that had been put into the food accidentally or just to cut corners on costs. So I’m a little cautious about just picking up something because of one issue or another: it’s cheaper, it’s better for the environment, maybe it won’t kill my pet.
A long time ago, I stopped using shaving cream and other aerosol sprays, probably from the time in 1978 when I sleepily mistook the shaving cream can for my under-arm spray-on deodorant. While room “infusers” are probably adding something undesirable into the immediate atmosphere as it is, I started buying Febreze because it says on the canister it contains no CFCs which deplete the ozone layer, but what else is it doing to the environment at large? One hopes it’s not just an advertising ploy that doesn’t contain something else that could be as dangerous or worse.
Since I’ve become a “home-owner” now rather than an “apartment renter,” my sense that I ought to be doing something more is much stronger. When I was a kid back in the days LBJ was going around the White House shutting lights off in rooms that weren’t being used, the first time anybody talked about the idea of conserving electricity seemed silly – and people would tell me when I’d shut off a light after leaving a room, it was a waste of electricity shutting the lights off and on all the time, creating wear and tear on the bulbs, therefore wasting money by needing to buy more bulbs.
Now they tell us we should unplug all our appliances when not in use, especially the ones with remotes because they’re always drawing on some minuscule amount of power that quickly adds up. But who wants to crawl around to get to those discreetly hidden-by-design outlets every time you want to turn on your TV set?
For every convenience there seems to be an equal and opposite inconvenience.
For every idea there also always seems to be a negating counter-idea. One person’s scientific data is another person’s junk science. Both sides can claim the other side’s science is motivated by a political agenda. It’s enough spin to make your head do more than spin...
So I don’t drive a big gas-guzzling vehicle with a mezzanine in the back (one big enough to carry a full live orchestra in it, not just a CD-player), but I’ve owned nothing but Japanese-made cars since my Corvair fell apart in 1976, just like Ralph Nader said it would, earning me no points with people saying I was not doing my part for the U.S. economy. Of course today, I guess most American made cars are no longer made completely in the USA, but it hasn’t changed my attitude about the American car.
During the warmer weather, I do my best to buy gas after sundown, when it’s supposed to be better for the atmosphere. Unfortunately, I find I need the air-conditioner on in my car more often than I used to because (a) I bought a used car not thinking it was painted black and had black-leather interior, a veritable microwave-on-wheels, (b) the windows fog up in matter of seconds on humid nights which, I’m told, means the car is so wonderfully air-tight which is a good thing but I hate turning a corner and suddenly not being able to see through the fog on my windshield, and (c) global warming or not, I’m getting older and just can’t take the heat as much as I could a decade ago.
Suffering through five interminable summers in my most recent first-floor city apartment where I couldn’t keep the windows open even when I was home for fear of what street-creature was going to break in, I swore my next place would have central air. And so it does. Fortunately, I didn’t have to run it as much as I thought I might this summer, but I also have windows I can leave open that are not accessible to street crime. I can also hear my neighbors’ air-conditioner units running a lot more frequently than mine. I’m very happy my electric bills this summer were less than I would have expected. And considering my previous apartment (with its one valiant window unit keeping the study habitable when I needed to write) may be one third the space of the house, my present utility bills are nowhere near three times the size they’d been in the apartment! Go figure.
One of the first things I did was replace a lot of light bulbs with those “energy smart” twirly-looking compact fluorescent bulbs. Now, my previous landlord had gotten one to put in the building’s hallways and they were horrible, way too bright. But the Giant had a buy-one/get-one-free special one week so I figured I’d try it. I’ve never been a fan of fluorescent lights, normally, but putting these two bulbs into reading lamps in my house, I felt much better about the whole idea. They’re not as bright as the old-fashioned bulbs which I always felt were too bright for what I needed anyway. And these new much-touted bulbs don’t look or “feel” like old-fashioned fluorescent bulbs, either. So I went out and bought a bunch more, and now have ten different lights in my house with these energy-saving bulbs.
Of course, the down-side is they contain mercury and need to be disposed of carefully: soon, I guess, someone will be complaining about the high levels of mercury entering the landfills from people throwing away their compact fluorescent bulbs. But they last longer – five years, if the advertising is to be believed – so it might take a while before that hue-and-cry is heard.
This, however, is kind of scary: what to do if one of these bulbs break! Hmmm... I remember putting one of the first ones in a hard-to-get-at lamp and having it fall on the side of the table, shattering over the carpet and the foyer. Not even thinking about the “danger of mercury,” I just swept it up with a dust-pan and put it in the trash can! It wasn’t till later that I noticed the warning on the back about containing mercury and disposing of it “in accord with disposal laws.”
Well, with every advance in technology comes another issue that requires more care and potential risk. But if that kept us from dealing with changes, we’d still be living in caves watching TV by moonlight.
I hadn’t built up a utility history in this house yet, so I don’t know how my normal usage of electricity or heat would compare to my newly enlightened (no pun intended) usage, just to compare it to what my mother’s had been in past years; so far, light bulbs and air-conditioner usage has resulted in substantially lower bills, both in terms of use and costs. I feel good about that: at least it’s a start. Of course, now the heating season is upon us. But the house is currently registering 66 and is still comfortable. When it got that chilly in my previous apartment (where I didn’t control or pay for the heat), I felt I needed to get out the parka. Perhaps it’s the different kind of heat, who knows?
Then there’s the yard.
When I first moved in town, one of my crazier neighbors passed on a book called “The No-Dig No-Weed Garden” which sounded like a perfect fit for me, though I was convinced the author probably owned a scythe-making factory somewhere. I’m not one to do yard-work and was always happy it was the landlord’s responsibility to mow the postage-stamp of a yard, except for my last landlord who would break down and mow it maybe twice a year. I don’t see the need for neatly kept acres of grass, especially with all the time spent mowing it and all the problems trying to keep it green and pristine during summer droughts. At this stage in my life, I’m very happy having a guy come and mow the yard every 2 weeks or so. It’s mostly green because it’s mostly weeds, but still greener than some of my neighbors who planted some kind of designer grass that maybe thrives lushly only in the tropics. When I was living in this house with my parents, I joked about planting lots of trees so it would kill all the grass, concrete not being a viable option, but then there was the avalanche of leaves to contend with in the fall: it’s bad enough with just eight or so.
My garden did not prove to be much of a success this first summer: what the rabbits didn’t mow down themselves just never managed to take off on their own. I planted morning glories and moon glories in planter boxes along the back porch and under the kitchen windows, but they only started doing well late in the season: the moon glories, good flowers for a night person like me, didn’t even start blooming until a week ago. It was always enjoyable to sit on the porch at night, unwinding after work, but this year I missed their huge white blossoms – usually 6" across – which I used to enjoy from late-July till frost.
Something I’d often thought of doing was finding a spot in the yard where I could plant some milkweed. I’ve always been fascinated by Monarch butterflies, ever since I was in grade school. I’ve noticed several Monarchs flitting around in the yard this summer, so I might try that next spring. At least a few plants along the back of the house.
My father always loved watching the birds that would come to the back porch feeders, especially early in the morning when he would wake up before everybody else. It was normally just the run-of-the-mill sparrows, but the cardinals were favorites along with the occasional evening grosbeak or rufus-sided towhee. There’s only one feeder left, now, but this year it’s attracting, aside from the usual seed-swilling squirrels, a bevy of tufted titmice – is that the correct plural for titmouse? Titmouses just seems silly – and scores of chickadees which are a delight to watch. I always put part of the scoopful down on the porch floor for the chipmunks who scurry out to fill their cheek-pouches: if nothing else, it keeps the kittens occupied for a few minutes and that’s a good thing...
There are the occasional downy woodpeckers in the Japanese maple, and the wrens are more often heard than seen. Out front, a family of bluebirds flies in from somewhere to swing back and forth between the trees and the phone-lines, often swooping up onto the eave of the roof right at the kitchen window where I stand and watch them. At times, I can count six or seven of them. I wonder about putting a nesting box out in the middle of the yard somewhere for them next year.
Ah well, always more to learn and think about.
-- Dr. Dick
In all honesty, I’m concerned about environmental issues but often feel there’s not much I can do by myself, at the same time admitting that if everybody felt that way, nothing will be accomplished. Even to change a little bit is a huge improvement and once even that little is accomplished, it gives me a little bit of incentive to go on and try something more. Sorting recyclables has been probably the first major inconvenience to learn, rather than just throwing it all in the trash: it gets annoying when you’re trying to figure out what “number” of plastic a thing is and whether that recycling bin at work or at home accepts that or not. I can fill up my trash-can-sized recycling container with cat food cans and plastic cat litter jugs in no time!
When I buy cat food, for instance, it bothers me that the kind they prefer to eat, 9-Lives, is packaged in an un-environmentally-friendly wrapping of thick plastic sheeting which usually has a couple of “holes” in it that can prove traps just like the plastic rings you find on soda bottles. Ever since I’d seen pictures of sea-birds with their heads stuck in these (or the character Lovelace in “Happy Feet”...), I’ve taken the scissors to things like this and chopped them up into small hole-free units, but that’s still a lot of plastic to dispose of. It’s not just that that’s often the cheaper brand the stores offer, it’s only one of two main brands of canned cat food on the shelves at all, anymore, so why spend more money on food the kittens won’t eat which I’m going to be throwing away (at least the food is biodegradable)? A lot of the cheaper “house brands” were among those in the earlier recalls from Menu Foods, responsible for causing pet deaths through poisonous chemicals that had been put into the food accidentally or just to cut corners on costs. So I’m a little cautious about just picking up something because of one issue or another: it’s cheaper, it’s better for the environment, maybe it won’t kill my pet.
A long time ago, I stopped using shaving cream and other aerosol sprays, probably from the time in 1978 when I sleepily mistook the shaving cream can for my under-arm spray-on deodorant. While room “infusers” are probably adding something undesirable into the immediate atmosphere as it is, I started buying Febreze because it says on the canister it contains no CFCs which deplete the ozone layer, but what else is it doing to the environment at large? One hopes it’s not just an advertising ploy that doesn’t contain something else that could be as dangerous or worse.
Since I’ve become a “home-owner” now rather than an “apartment renter,” my sense that I ought to be doing something more is much stronger. When I was a kid back in the days LBJ was going around the White House shutting lights off in rooms that weren’t being used, the first time anybody talked about the idea of conserving electricity seemed silly – and people would tell me when I’d shut off a light after leaving a room, it was a waste of electricity shutting the lights off and on all the time, creating wear and tear on the bulbs, therefore wasting money by needing to buy more bulbs.
Now they tell us we should unplug all our appliances when not in use, especially the ones with remotes because they’re always drawing on some minuscule amount of power that quickly adds up. But who wants to crawl around to get to those discreetly hidden-by-design outlets every time you want to turn on your TV set?
For every convenience there seems to be an equal and opposite inconvenience.
For every idea there also always seems to be a negating counter-idea. One person’s scientific data is another person’s junk science. Both sides can claim the other side’s science is motivated by a political agenda. It’s enough spin to make your head do more than spin...
So I don’t drive a big gas-guzzling vehicle with a mezzanine in the back (one big enough to carry a full live orchestra in it, not just a CD-player), but I’ve owned nothing but Japanese-made cars since my Corvair fell apart in 1976, just like Ralph Nader said it would, earning me no points with people saying I was not doing my part for the U.S. economy. Of course today, I guess most American made cars are no longer made completely in the USA, but it hasn’t changed my attitude about the American car.
During the warmer weather, I do my best to buy gas after sundown, when it’s supposed to be better for the atmosphere. Unfortunately, I find I need the air-conditioner on in my car more often than I used to because (a) I bought a used car not thinking it was painted black and had black-leather interior, a veritable microwave-on-wheels, (b) the windows fog up in matter of seconds on humid nights which, I’m told, means the car is so wonderfully air-tight which is a good thing but I hate turning a corner and suddenly not being able to see through the fog on my windshield, and (c) global warming or not, I’m getting older and just can’t take the heat as much as I could a decade ago.
Suffering through five interminable summers in my most recent first-floor city apartment where I couldn’t keep the windows open even when I was home for fear of what street-creature was going to break in, I swore my next place would have central air. And so it does. Fortunately, I didn’t have to run it as much as I thought I might this summer, but I also have windows I can leave open that are not accessible to street crime. I can also hear my neighbors’ air-conditioner units running a lot more frequently than mine. I’m very happy my electric bills this summer were less than I would have expected. And considering my previous apartment (with its one valiant window unit keeping the study habitable when I needed to write) may be one third the space of the house, my present utility bills are nowhere near three times the size they’d been in the apartment! Go figure.
One of the first things I did was replace a lot of light bulbs with those “energy smart” twirly-looking compact fluorescent bulbs. Now, my previous landlord had gotten one to put in the building’s hallways and they were horrible, way too bright. But the Giant had a buy-one/get-one-free special one week so I figured I’d try it. I’ve never been a fan of fluorescent lights, normally, but putting these two bulbs into reading lamps in my house, I felt much better about the whole idea. They’re not as bright as the old-fashioned bulbs which I always felt were too bright for what I needed anyway. And these new much-touted bulbs don’t look or “feel” like old-fashioned fluorescent bulbs, either. So I went out and bought a bunch more, and now have ten different lights in my house with these energy-saving bulbs.
Of course, the down-side is they contain mercury and need to be disposed of carefully: soon, I guess, someone will be complaining about the high levels of mercury entering the landfills from people throwing away their compact fluorescent bulbs. But they last longer – five years, if the advertising is to be believed – so it might take a while before that hue-and-cry is heard.
This, however, is kind of scary: what to do if one of these bulbs break! Hmmm... I remember putting one of the first ones in a hard-to-get-at lamp and having it fall on the side of the table, shattering over the carpet and the foyer. Not even thinking about the “danger of mercury,” I just swept it up with a dust-pan and put it in the trash can! It wasn’t till later that I noticed the warning on the back about containing mercury and disposing of it “in accord with disposal laws.”
Well, with every advance in technology comes another issue that requires more care and potential risk. But if that kept us from dealing with changes, we’d still be living in caves watching TV by moonlight.
I hadn’t built up a utility history in this house yet, so I don’t know how my normal usage of electricity or heat would compare to my newly enlightened (no pun intended) usage, just to compare it to what my mother’s had been in past years; so far, light bulbs and air-conditioner usage has resulted in substantially lower bills, both in terms of use and costs. I feel good about that: at least it’s a start. Of course, now the heating season is upon us. But the house is currently registering 66 and is still comfortable. When it got that chilly in my previous apartment (where I didn’t control or pay for the heat), I felt I needed to get out the parka. Perhaps it’s the different kind of heat, who knows?
Then there’s the yard.
When I first moved in town, one of my crazier neighbors passed on a book called “The No-Dig No-Weed Garden” which sounded like a perfect fit for me, though I was convinced the author probably owned a scythe-making factory somewhere. I’m not one to do yard-work and was always happy it was the landlord’s responsibility to mow the postage-stamp of a yard, except for my last landlord who would break down and mow it maybe twice a year. I don’t see the need for neatly kept acres of grass, especially with all the time spent mowing it and all the problems trying to keep it green and pristine during summer droughts. At this stage in my life, I’m very happy having a guy come and mow the yard every 2 weeks or so. It’s mostly green because it’s mostly weeds, but still greener than some of my neighbors who planted some kind of designer grass that maybe thrives lushly only in the tropics. When I was living in this house with my parents, I joked about planting lots of trees so it would kill all the grass, concrete not being a viable option, but then there was the avalanche of leaves to contend with in the fall: it’s bad enough with just eight or so.
My garden did not prove to be much of a success this first summer: what the rabbits didn’t mow down themselves just never managed to take off on their own. I planted morning glories and moon glories in planter boxes along the back porch and under the kitchen windows, but they only started doing well late in the season: the moon glories, good flowers for a night person like me, didn’t even start blooming until a week ago. It was always enjoyable to sit on the porch at night, unwinding after work, but this year I missed their huge white blossoms – usually 6" across – which I used to enjoy from late-July till frost.
Something I’d often thought of doing was finding a spot in the yard where I could plant some milkweed. I’ve always been fascinated by Monarch butterflies, ever since I was in grade school. I’ve noticed several Monarchs flitting around in the yard this summer, so I might try that next spring. At least a few plants along the back of the house.
My father always loved watching the birds that would come to the back porch feeders, especially early in the morning when he would wake up before everybody else. It was normally just the run-of-the-mill sparrows, but the cardinals were favorites along with the occasional evening grosbeak or rufus-sided towhee. There’s only one feeder left, now, but this year it’s attracting, aside from the usual seed-swilling squirrels, a bevy of tufted titmice – is that the correct plural for titmouse? Titmouses just seems silly – and scores of chickadees which are a delight to watch. I always put part of the scoopful down on the porch floor for the chipmunks who scurry out to fill their cheek-pouches: if nothing else, it keeps the kittens occupied for a few minutes and that’s a good thing...
There are the occasional downy woodpeckers in the Japanese maple, and the wrens are more often heard than seen. Out front, a family of bluebirds flies in from somewhere to swing back and forth between the trees and the phone-lines, often swooping up onto the eave of the roof right at the kitchen window where I stand and watch them. At times, I can count six or seven of them. I wonder about putting a nesting box out in the middle of the yard somewhere for them next year.
Ah well, always more to learn and think about.
-- Dr. Dick
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