Igor Stravinsky: A Birthday and a Wedding

Since today is Igor Stravinsky’s birthday – born June 17th, 1882 – let me point you in the direction of a collection of humorous short stories based on the ‘what-if’ question inspired by this photo of “Stravinsky’s Tavern.”

Even Google’s home-page was getting into the act with a Stravinksy-inspired logo based on two of his best known ballets, The Firebird and, presumably, The Rite of Spring (at least I assume the garland of daisies has been left behind by the now-sacrificed virgin).

If you’re not familiar with The Rite of Spring, one of the most important works of the 20th Century, watch the videos of a reconstruction of the original choreography that created such a scandal at its world premiere in 1914 – you can see them on an earlier springtime post.

Another one of my favorite Stravinsky works is Les Noces which I discovered when I was in high school in the mid-60s but never saw as a staged ballet until the late-70s when I lived in New York City. My miniature score calls it “Свадебка” (“Svadebka”) or “Village [or Little Folk] Wedding” though it’s usually known in French as “Les Noces” or “The Wedding.”

The story follows the preparation and blessing of the bride-to-be for her wedding, then a somewhat rowdier one for the groom, leading to the departure of the bride from her parents’ home for her future husband’s home where they will celebrate the wedding and the wedding feast. It consists almost entirely of rituals – the bride’s hair is braided into long strands, she weeps not because she is sad but because she must weep. Stravinsky is supposed to have collected Russian folks songs related to weddings – though he stressed it was not his intent to ethnographically reconstruct a folk wedding on stage.

The ballet – it is more accurately described as “choreographic scenes” or a “danced cantata” – had a long gestation. Stravinsky began work on it in 1913 around the time he was finishing The Rite of Spring (perhaps a different sacrifice of a virgin, here – make no mistake about the choreography’s symbolism at the end of Les Noces when the husband leads his new bride off to the bed chamber, his arm raised in phallic salute), but it wasn’t until ten years later the work, in its final form, received its premiere. It began with an expanded orchestra similar to The Rite of Spring, but before he’d finished the first of its four scenes, he began to rethink it in several different ways. One of these included player pianos which proved to be for any number of reasons impractical.

The final version was scored for a quartet of vocal soloists, a choir and two groups of percussion instruments – pitched and unpitched – including four (count ‘em, four) pianos. When it was first performed in the United States, the four pianists were all composers, including Marc Blitzstein and Aaron Copland. The recording I grew up with was conducted by the composer with composer-pianists Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Lukas Foss and Roger Sessions.

This video produced by the Royal Ballet was staged in 1966 by Bronislava Nijinska using her original choreography and the costume designs from the 1923 premiere.

So even though it is Stravinsky’s birthday, let’s go to the wedding (to the wedding)…

- - - -
Part One – the Blessing of the Bride; beginning of the Blessing of the Bridegroom

- - - -
Part Two – conclusion of the Blessing of the Bridegroom – the Departure of the Bride – the beginning of the Wedding Feast

- - - -
Part Three – the conclusion of the Wedding Feast

- - - -

Happy Birthday, Igor - and ||: many happy returns :||

- Dr. Dick

Translating Poems into Song Texts: Part 1

In an earlier post, I wrote about getting started on a new work, a cycle of seven songs for mezzo-soprano and piano, and how I found the poems I decided to set to music (you can read that here). That part of the process started in Mid-March and took several weeks. This part of the process started in mid-April. I began working on the first song to be written only in mid-May and finished it last week (mid-June).

The irony in finding texts about Inspiration is that I would hope to find it as a composer. Someone listening to a song under three-minutes in length may not be aware it took three weeks to compose it. There was more work to be done before I even started that part of the process.

Since it’s now a song cycle rather than a collection of songs, it needs to become more organized and the process, therefore, needs to be more thought out: how the poems relate to each other as a series. It’s not telling a story, necessarily, songs that move in a chronological sequence like Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin; it’s more like Britten’s anthologies, different poems by various authors but all centered on a particular theme – sleep, for instance, in the Serenade for Tenor, Horn & Strings – moving in a particular dramatic or contrasting sequence.

After selecting the texts, determining the basic order of the poems was only one of several steps I needed to take. Building an arch form means finding a parallel poem for each block of the arch – like the call to the Muse in Shakespeare’s sonnet at the one foundation and the spontaneous combustion of Rumi’s poem which Coleman Barke translates as “Say Yes Quickly” at the other end. The Rilke poem, An die Musik (To Music) – the only poem specifically about music but not related to Schubert's justly famous song – was clearly my centerpiece. Saint-Amant’s “Lazy Poet” waiting for inspiration contrasts specifically with the hard-working, constantly weaving spider of Whitman’s poem who keeps building his web strand by strand (also implying Robert the Bruce’s inspiration from watching a spider, then tearing down the web only to watch the spider start all over again).

The short East Asian lines from Basho and Li Po balance each other in more than comparable length. Not satisfied with his creation the first time, a young poet seeks to do better the next, trying again to “capture the essence of Fuji.” Li Po, probably in a drunken ecstasy, celebrates the power of spontaneity, that whatever his pen creates is what was meant to be (a Christian attitude would interpret this as saying “what God intended”).

To create a dramatic rhythm from beginning to end, starting with the frustrated poet blaming the muse for not helping him means ending with a burst of creative energy that is the realization of some implicit creative spirit, muse-induced or not. In between, a lazy poet, after learning some discernment from Basho’s view of Fuji, turns into “a patient spider” after a soul-searching definition of creativity’s inner-workings heard in the Rilke poem.

It’s Li Po’s aphorism about Inspiration specifically that concerns me: as part of the dramatic flow, shouldn’t it come after the poet learns an important skill from a hard-working spider, breaking through the work it often takes to turn an inspiration into a completed work of art? But then the energy of Li Po’s lines is too close to that of Rumi’s. Of course, there’s a similar tempo to Basho’s artist, willing to start over again, and Saint-Amant’s lazy one who waits for inspiration no matter how long it takes. The difference between these two, however, is going from “waiting for inspiration” to doing something with that inspiration – revising it until one gets the best result one can, not just the first one that comes along. So I thought Rilke’s enigmatic lines would then, like a Bunsen burner, bring to a boil the confidence needed for Li Po’s inspiration: by applying the poet’s skills – taking the time to find the right words – the result is something that, regardless how long it takes to create, lives in the moment.

As listeners in an audience, we don’t think of the creative effort that went into Mozart’s overture to The Marriage of Figaro, realizing it was written down in one sitting the night before the opera’s premiere, even a few hours’ work resulting in something only a few minutes long. It seems perfect in itself, an act of genius.

Similarly, we don’t think of the struggles over a span of decades, not hours, that it took before Brahms had the confidence to complete (much less even begin) his first symphony. By the time we reach its triumphant conclusion, twenty-some years of dogged labor and countless discarded attempts hardly matter at all.

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

There was still a very real concern about copyright.

The two English poems were clearly public-domain. While the other poets were also long-dead, most of the translations were likely to still be under copyright. This practical concern prompted me to try my hand at my own translations, a problem in itself given my high-school and college German from years past, my lack of experience with French whatsoever and not having the Chinese, Japanese and Persian poems in their original, even if I could figure them out word-by-word.

It wasn’t that I felt I could “do better” than the ones I found already published (though in some cases, perhaps…). If two people could translate the same poem to come up with something even slightly different in English, why not a third? While I can say I “translated” Rilke and Saint-Amant, I call the other three “paraphrases” only because I took existing translations and reworked certain words and rhythms – and in the Rumi adapted interpretations and dropped certain lines which may have taken too much time to explain concepts easily understood to a Persian reader. After finding a very Victorian-sounding line-by-line translation of Rumi’s poem (though, I think, still without a title), I realized that Coleman Barks’ translation is as much a paraphrase as I was going for. Still, I can find no better title than his - Say Yes Quickly - something I am still tempted to use for the whole cycle (better than Seven Songs on Inspiration).

The Rilke was not difficult – the two or three translations I found were all very similar, in fact in many places identical. Certain words, after all, mean specific things, but sometimes finding an alternate word that doesn’t alter the meaning may sound more poetic, more musical or at least improve the rhythm.

Here is Rilke’s original German:

- - - -
Musik: Atem der Statuen. Vielleicht:
Stille der Bilder. Du Sprache wo Sprachen
enden. Du Zeit
die senkrecht steht auf der Richtung
vergehender Herzen.

Gefühle zu wem? O du der Gefühle
Wandlung in was? — in hörbare Landschaft.
Du Fremde: Musik. Du uns entwachsener
Herzraum. Innigstes unser,
das, uns übersteigend, hinausdrängt, —
heiliger Abschied:
da uns das Innre umsteht
als geübteste Ferne, als andre
Seite der Luft:
rein,
riesig
nicht mehr bewohnbar.
- - - -

Here is one standard translation I found in several places on-line (I could not find a credit for the translator):

- - - -
Music. The breathing of statues. Perhaps:
The silence of pictures. You, language where all
languages end. You, time
standing straight up out of the direction
of hearts passing on.

Feeling, for whom? O the transformation
of feeling into what? — into audible landscape.
Music: you stranger. Passion which
has outgrown us. Our inner most being,
transcending, driven out of us, —
holiest of departures:
inner worlds now
the most practiced of distances, as
the other side of thin air:
pure,
immense
no longer habitable.
- - - -

There is nothing wrong with this but Rilke specifically avoids the definite article “der/die/das” in several places, and so I thought not using “the” would be closer to his original intent. I can understand why the translator wanted to use the parallel structure with the word “Music” but the poet writes in the second part, “Du Fremde: Musik,” not “Musik: du Fremde,” placing the emphasis on “You stranger” instead.

And so I came up with my own adaptation of it, going back to the original German. I preferred the Mahler-like “Farewell” rather than “Departure” for Abschied (both are dictionary-correct). The ending is quite literal and I saw no reason to change it.

- - - -
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
Silence of paintings. You – language where languages
end. You – time
standing upright from the direction
of vanishing hearts.

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

Being a fan of the Golden Section, I noticed it occurs here (in the original German) before the line “Heiliger Abschied” (“Holiest Farewell”) which ties in nicely with my search for something stylistically comparable to Strauss’ Composer’s Aria from Ariadne auf Naxos (see previous post) with its line “Musik ist ein heiliger Kunst” (Music is a holy art). Ah, coincidence… Placed as the keystone of my song cycle, this line – Heiliger Abschied – becomes the Golden Section of the entire cycle.

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

Pardoning my French, which is nonexistent, The Lazy Poet depended solely on an old dictionary – still, not as old as the 17th Century poem I wanted to re-translate – and here, rather than being more literal to the poet’s original intent, I wanted to remove the topical references that may have endeared it to his readers in 1631, but which would need footnotes for those in 2009.

- - - -
Accablé de paresse et de mélancolie,
Je rêve dans un lit où je suis fagoté,
Comme un lièvre sans os qui dort dans un pâté,
Ou comme un Don Quichotte en sa morne folie.

Là, sans me soucier des guerres d'Italie,
Du comte Palatin, ni de sa royauté,
Je consacre un bel hymne à cette oisiveté
Où mon âme en langueur est comme ensevelie.

Je trouve ce plaisir si doux et si charmant,
Que je crois que les biens me viendront en dormant,
Puisque je vois déjà s'en enfler ma bedaine,

Et hais tant le travail, que, les yeux entr’ouverts,
Une main hors des draps, cher Baudoin, à peine
Ai-je pu me résoudre à t'écrire ces vers.
- - - -

The translation I’d first found – from the Dover Collection edited by Stanley Applebaum (who, I assume, is also the translator) – is curiously rhyme-free as happens often in translations where it might seem too fussy to re-create the same rhyme-scheme, striving more for understanding. But the original poem is, after all, a strict sonnet. For all its lethargy, being about the lack of inspiration, is he being witty or is he ironically stressing skill over inspiration, artifice over art? Not being a native speaker (and certainly not a 17th Century one), I have no idea. Here is the Dover translation:

- - - -
Overwhelmed with sloth and melancholy,
I dream in a bed in which I am trussed up
Like a boned hare sleeping in a pie,
Or like Don Quixote in his gloomy madness.

There, not worrying about the Italian wars,
The Count Palatine or his royalty,
I dedicate a fine hymn to the idleness
In which my languishing soul is practically buried.

I find this pleasure so sweet and charming,
That I think all good things will come to me while I sleep,
Since I already see my belly swelling with them;

And I hate work so much that, with my eyes half-closed,
With one hand out of the sheets, my dear Baudoin, I scarcely
Was able to bring myself to write you these verses.
- - - -

The rhyme-scheme and historical references (including his friend, the poet Baudoin) aside, references to swelling bellies and “one hand out of the sheets” might take more to explain than a simple paraphrase. So I went back to create a line-by-line translation and then worked out some freer translation that also allowed me to recreate the sonnet-form’s rhyme scheme (not the same one Saint-Amant used, but a comparable one).

- - - -
Overcome by laziness and melancholy,
I dream in a bed where trussed up I lie
Like a boneless rabbit asleep in a pie,
Or like some Don Quixote in his mournful folly.

There, oblivious to the latest wars,
To political views and all things ridiculous,
I compose this hymn in praise of idleness
Where my languishing soul, long-buried, snores.

I find this pleasure so sweet, so compelling,
Believing good things will come to my dreams:
I can see how my purse is already swelling.

How I hate all this work, these trials, the curses!
Eye half-closed, lying brain-dead, it seems
I can scarcely manage to write down these verses.
- - - -

I thought rhyming ridiculous and idleness was cute but was disappointed to have subsequently found another translation that rhymed wars with snores.

While I went closer to the original in the Rilke, I was amused to find myself more freely re-translating parts of Saint-Amant’s sonnet to be less literal to the poet’s original intent. Again, it has more to do with my needs for a song text than its having anything to do with the poem. The only way to be completely honest to the poet would be to set it in French, but that was not my intent, here, especially since I would be unable to provide the original Japanese, Chinese and Persian for the others.

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

Paraphrasing becomes even more important in the haiku of Basho. For instance, one of his more famous poems – about a frog jumping into a pond – can be translated several ways depending on how literal one tried to be to the original non-grammatical original. (I have to laugh: looking for this haiku led me to a site that has a transliteration of the original Japanese.)

- - - -
Old pond — frogs jumped in — sound of water.
(translated by Lafcadio Hearn, one of the first translators of Japanese into English who died in 1904)

The old pond,
A frog jumps in:
Plop!
(translated by Alan Watts, a famous modern translator of Asian verse)

A lonely pond in age-old stillness sleeps . . .
Apart, unstirred by sound or motion . . . till
Suddenly into it a lithe frog leaps.
(an almost Victorian, rhymed translation by Curtis Hidden Page, an early-20th Century, Missouri-born Harvard graduate)

Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water —
A deep resonance.
(translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa writing in the 2nd half of the 20th Century who disregards the traditional 3-line form of the haiku but creates something that might resonate more deeply with a Western reader)
- - - -

The original translation I’d found for the Basho haiku I wanted to use,

- - - -
Misty rain
Can’t see Fuji
Interesting
- - - -

had a 3+4+3 syllabic scan but I wanted to use the more standard 5+7+5. Somewhere on-line I found another translation less structured but which added something to the last line: “That’s interesting! Again.” But I have since found the original Japanese (here) and realize that “again” has nothing to do with the poet’s intent. As vague as the images of Haiku are meant to be – complex meanings from simple words – I think he meant that the image of Mount Fuji is so well known that even when you can’t see it shrouded in the mist and rain, you still know what it looks like. But by taking this “again” a step further, I took a not-so-subtle mis-translation even further to create what I was looking for, not necessarily what Basho wrote:

- - - -
Endless misty rain
Can’t see Fuji for the haze
Interesting. Once more…
- - - -

Now it implies, perhaps, that because you haven’t created a clear image of Mount Fuji (either in words or painting) you have to try again to create a better, clearer one, something not implied in Basho’s original and a concept certainly more Western than Japanese. Still, young poet-grasshoppers have to learn their craft somewhere, so perhaps I will let it stand.

Li Po (or Li Bai, Li Tai-po as he is also known, depending on how you choose to transliterate the Chinese) was less of a problem. In this case, I took two different translations and found some middle ground (pun intended – China in Chinese means “Middle Kingdom”).

- - - -
Inspiration hot, each stroke of my pen shakes the Five Mountains.
- - - -
In high spirits I write, and thereby shake the Five Mountains. As a poem is accomplished I shout in ecstasy, I’ll bend the river!
- - - -
Inspiration! My pen with each stroke shakes the Five Mountains.
A poem becomes – I shout ecstatic, “I’ll bend the river!”
- - - -

I still have no clear idea what the Five Mountains are or how to explain them without maybe taking 6 extra lines to do so, but this seemed to me like a free paraphrase typical of some other translations I’ve seen of his often drink-induced ecstasy. Besides, if he’s going to “bend the river,” why can’t I?

The poem by Rumi, on the other hand, is an even longer story and I think at this point, I’ll save that for a separate post.

- Dr. Dick

Bloomsday 2009

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

-- Introibo ad altare Dei.”
- - - - -

And so began the original Bloomsday, June 16th, 1904. Today, it's being celebrated in Dublin in grand style, economy-be-damned:

- - - - -
"The annual literary hooley involves devoted Joyceans dressing in the fashions of 1904, eating the ‘inner organs of beasts and fowls,’ attending readings and celebrating at various venues and pubs mentioned in the book."
- - - - -

Every Bloomsday, I try to read a few more pages in my life-long bookcrawl through the 783 pages of my current edition of James Joyce’s epic novel, Ulysses, which describes a day in the life of Leopold Bloom and his travels through Dublin during the course of one spring day in 1904. Last Bloomsday, I made it to p.399 and then blogged about it here.

I’m not sure how far I’ll get today, but it is a good day for reading, cool and overcast. I'll pass on the dietary associations, though...

Below an uncredited portrait of the author are photos of a Dublin Celebration (during the Centennial celebration in 2004?), perhaps one of the largest bar-hops in the world, and a James Joyce re-enactor from 2003.

You can read Joyce's Ulysses on-line courtesy of the Gutenberg Project.

- Dr. Dick

The Next New Work: Deciding on Songs, Finding Texts

When I finished the violin sonata in February, I spent the usual post-part-copying depression (or more accurately, ‘down-time’) thinking about “the next piece.” For a while, it sounded like it might be a piano quintet for no particular reason except it seemed too complicated a piece to work on right now. More practical – at least from the compositional sense – would be a song cycle: I enjoy writing for the voice and haven’t done much in the past 8 years aside from last year’s biblical settings, “Evidence of Things Not Seen.” So basically, several miniatures that individually shouldn’t take much time sounded increasingly more realistic. Besides, I need to work on my piano writing (and playing) before I should be doing bigger, more serious stuff like a piano quintet.

So once the songs won the draft, the old question took up several weeks of research and contemplation: what texts? Unrelated, random poems or should there be a theme?

Much time was spent browsing through the few volumes of poetry I have, then at the library and a couple of bookstores and, of course, on-line. I find I tend to read poetry with a look to how it might work as a song-text rather than as a poem in itself and therefore I tend to avoid it, especially poets that are not in the public domain. Even Dead Poets might not be very accessible because their modern translators may be under copyright.

There was a brief flirtation, after listening to two of my favorite song cycles, both by Domenick Argento – “Casa Guidi” (from letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning) and “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf” – about choosing similar non-poetic texts. Or maybe a dramatic scene, some soliloquies from Euripides’ “The Trojan Women” (which I’d set as an opera back in the ‘70s) or Aeschylus’ “The Persians.”

Then, for some reason, I picked up my grandfather’s c.1905 copy of Shakespeare Sonnets (one of those little pocket-sized volumes) and took it along with me for odd moments of browsing – stuck in a line somewhere, waiting in a restaurant or sitting on a park bench.

I’d already set Sonnet 30 twice – “When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought,” one of my favorites – so I tried to think of something else this time, despite the fact I kept coming back to it, wondering how it might go now, 25 years or so after the last time. Somehow, I landed on Sonnet 100. I don’t think I’d ever read it before but then quickly realized I’d probably only ever read a dozen of them before: like Schubert songs, you think you know lots of them then realize, out of 600, you probably really only have heard a fraction of them.

- - - -
Where art thou Muse that thou forget'st so long,
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend'st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?

Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,
In gentle numbers time so idly spent;
Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.

Rise, resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey,
If Time have any wrinkle graven there;
If any, be a satire to decay,
And make time's spoils despised every where.

Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life,
So thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife.
- - - -

This seemed an appropriate poem for a composer still recuperating from a long dry-spell who hasn’t found it as easy to write as he once did (“when in doubt, blame it on the Muse”).

“Here,” one commentator writes, “the Muse is blamed for having dried up. She has spent her energies in worthless pursuits and is castigated for being devoted to trivialities, being forgetful and slothful.” Turning 60 certainly inclined me to think of many things, not the least of them “time’s spoils.” I imagined this as a fanfare-like song, opening a set of songs of… uhm…

A series of Shakespeare Sonnets? Can’t argue with the copyright… A series of poems about muses? Hmmm…

Then, paging through Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way,” a wonderful workbook for recovering artists (or for those who want to recover their creative selves), I saw a quote attributed to the 13th Century Persian poet and Sufi mystic, Jalai ud-Din Rumi:

- - - -
Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about…
Say yes quickly, if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.
- - - -

As slow as the composing process is for me, the creative process – the actual inspiration – sometimes comes in a flash. These three words – “Say yes quickly” – quickly informed me I would do a song cycle on “inspiration” and that Rumi’s poem, balancing Shakespeare’s call to the errant muse, would be the final poem.

It took a while to find the source of these lines. It’s translated by Coleman Barks, the single best-known translator of Rumi’s ecstatic poetry today. And so it came with additional burdens: copyright, mostly. I could set it without permission, but then it’s unlikely the songs could ever be published or recorded. I could write to him to ask permission and perhaps he would grant it. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to pay too much in the way of royalties for his work. I was curious, though, what the original may have been like.

Now, despite actually having a Persian dictionary in my library (over the years, I have accumulated many things I would never have thought realistic), finding Rumi in the original Persian would be, no doubt, a challenge even on the internet. But more of that, later.

So now I had an alpha and an omega – what would fit in between? Urging a recalcitrant muse would be a good way to start, ending in a flash of inspiration (ecstatic indeed) the logical way to end.

Then I remembered the Composer’s Aria from Richard Strauss’ opera, “Ariadne auf Naxos,” as the young composer of the opera-within-the-opera is about to see his work trashed by realistic circumstances and practicalities. The line “Music is a holy art” (about 1:30 into the linked video) has long made this a favorite hymn of mine, the importance of maintaining one’s own artistic integrity in the face of those who would cheapen it to attain popularity.

Not that Strauss’ aria was what I was looking for, but maybe something like that, something that gets to the core of being a creative person.

Several years ago, I had come across Rilke’s poem, “An die Musik” which intrigued me, given Schubert’s own hymn on the subject with the same title (setting some amateurish but directly emotional poetry by his friend and sometimes roommate, Franz Schober). I soon found it again and wondered if it were what I wanted. Yes, I thought quickly: it would become the mid-point in the path between Shakespeare and Rumi.

For the next few weeks, I continued to scour around for poems about inspiration: given how frequently poets write about it, needing it, not finding it, celebrating having found it, you’d think I could find more of them. I found a few by Pushkin that might work but I was unhappy with most of the translations I found or with the poems for what I wanted. I even found a few of these in the original Russian which then of course begged another question: do I set these poems in their original language? I now had English, Persian, German and perhaps Russian.

While flipping through a slim anthology of French poetry, an example from the 17th Century caught my eye: I figured was not going to provide me with anything likely, anyway, but then I read “The Lazy Poet” by Marc Antoine Gérard de Saint-Amant – if anything, a hymn to sloth and a witty take-off on all those caricatures of creative wanna-bes lying around waiting for Inspiration to strike. From what turned out to be a strict sonnet and no lazy man’s work, the final lines clinched it for me:

- - - -
And I hate work so much that, with my eyes half-closed,
With one hand out of the sheets, my dear Baudoin, I scarcely
Was able to bring myself to write you these verses.
- - - -

It was nice to have something light-hearted in this mix, looking at different ways creativity – inspiration – the muse – works at different times. Even though I’m still not sure how I’m going to set it to music, I figured it should go right after the Shakespeare.

A big fan of symmetrical forms, I figured this would need to be an arch-form that now required something to balance Saint-Amants’ Lazy Poet. Something… industrious, hard-working, “steady-as-she-goes”… like a spider, maybe, building a web.

That’s when I remembered Walt Whitman’s poem, “A Noiseless Patient Spider.” For some reason, I couldn’t locate it in my volume of “The Leaves of Grass” which I thought included everything and this, I was sure, was one of his more famous poems. Once again, I went on-line to locate it and copied it from there.

This one, however, I knew exactly how I’d set as soon as I read it. Two parallel verses (though of very different metric structures), the first about the spider, the second about the poet’s “soul” and how, like the spider spinning its web, the poet might… well… that’s not exactly clear. What a poet means and how a reader interprets it may be two or three different things and unless Whitman specifically wrote somewhere “this is what this poem means,” it’s really up to the reader. The fact a poem can offer different interpretations is a mark of its being great art, something you can return to and discover something new about it each time.

In this particular sense, I saw it as a poem about creativity, the hard-working spider spinning out filament after filament of its web and the poet, casting a similar effort out from his “soul,” writing a poem. It doesn’t specifically say that, but what is the soul of a poet meant to be if not something creative, constantly spinning out lines, some of which take and others of which do not? It would consist of a steady filament of eighth-notes in the piano under a free-floating vocal line that circles around certain key pitches.

- - - -
A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them — ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, — seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d — till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
- - - -

Now I had five poems – by an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, an American and a Persian. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something from China and Japan? Now, my search for thoughts on inspiration, muses or not, was becoming more culture-based.

When I was at Eastman, I wrote a work for soprano, mezzo and small ensemble, a George Crumb-inspired cycle of seven random poems by the great Chinese poet usually known as Li Po. Having found them in the original Chinese, I managed (with the help of a very good Chinese dictionary courtesy of the Rochester Public Library) to come up with my own translation. It was a very interesting project for a lazy summer week, much of the time spent lolling around under the trees of Rochester’s Highland Park. If nothing else, I was able to use Li Po’s poetry without worrying about copyright regulations. I even sent the result to my former college roommate from Hong Kong who gave me the equivalent of “thumbs-up.”

So, over 35 years later, I went back to Li Po. Most of the poems I found were more about nature or the joys of drunkenness. These lines, whether they’re from a longer poem or just a self-contained haiku-like aphorism, struck me as just what I needed. Unable to find the original Chinese and no longer having access to that Chinese dictionary, I paraphrased them this way:

- - - -
Inspiration! My pen with each stroke shakes the Five Mountains.
A poem becomes – I shout, ecstatic, “I’ll bend the river!”
- - - -

This would fit into the second half of the arch. I now had a progression of creative involvement, starting with Shakespeare’s call to the muse to appear and inspire him again, then Saint-Amant’s lazy poet, lying in bed barely able to write a sonnet, reaching a climax in Rilke’s passionate view of music’s interior world before turning to Whitman’s spider-like view relying more on constant work (this is what a spider does, this is what a poet does), the antithesis of waiting for inspiration to strike, before ending with Li Po’s and Rumi’s ecstatic avowals of a flame-like creativity bursting forth in the moment.

At this point, I needed a complement to Li Po’s lines for the first half of the arch, something contemplative. The Japanese form we know as haiku meditates on one small glimpse of nature – a fly in springtime landing on a bamboo shoot, a frog jumping into a summer pond. I was not able to find something that opened so overtly with the word “Inspiration!” but after reading through several collections of haiku, some strict according to the original rules, others just simply short aphoristic lines glimpsing a moment in time, I found one by one of the great masters of the form, Basho.

After reading over various translations of the same poems, whether from French or Persian, I decided, now, that I would once again do my own “translations.” In the sense of Japanese, the characters used for haiku are not necessarily exact nouns and verbs with syntax but often images that the listener would put into some context. English, by comparison an OCD language, requires a different approach yet still needs to fit into the pre-ordained restrictions of numbers of lines and syllables. So my paraphrase of Basho’s poem became

- - - -
Endless misty rain
Can’t see Fuji in the haze
Interesting. Once more…
- - - -

The antithesis of Li Po’s and Rumi’s moments, Basho’s haiku reflects the “if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed” reaction that parallels Whitman’s spider. But the brevity of the Japanese and Chinese poems required that they be placed in parallel locations: the only question has been which ones? At the moment, I see them flanking Rilke’s “An die Musik,” though every time I look at the texts, I begin to wonder perhaps if they should be in the 2nd and next-to-last positions. We’ll see…

During April, I finalized the texts if not their exact order – conceiving the songs as a single work rather than just a collection of seven songs – but because a bout of flu prolonged itself into an annoying sinus infection that lasted several weeks, I didn’t really start composing the music until mid-May. Out of the past three weeks, two were spent spider-like spinning out 32 measures. I finished it two days ago. I was joking that the original sketches reminded me of something created by one of Gary Larson’s less-than-competent spiders from The Far Side, so perhaps I should realize the sketch into a more finite draft before I go on to the next one, but more of that in a later post.

- Dr. Dick

Jennifer Higdon's Violin Concerto - in Baltimore & On-Line

When scouting around for a Philadelphia Orchestra concert to include in a tour to see the new Kimmel Center some years ago, one program that season jumped out at me – Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben, a tried-and-true war-horse that was a specialty of the orchestra’s conductor, Woflgang Sawallisch; and a Concerto for Orchestra being given its world premiere by a composer I’d never heard of before, Jennifer Higdon. Familiarity & Curiosity on one program. So we chose this concert.

The glowing review in the Philadelphia Inquirer ecstatically detailed highlight after highlight in Ms. Higdon’s Concerto – in fact, the headline was “Concerto for Orchestra Debut Shimmers.” At the end, the critic, David Patrick Stearns, added as almost an afterthought, “The orchestra also played Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben.”

Since then, her works have been performed, commissioned and recorded far more quickly than is typical of most living composers.

For those concert-goers in the mid-state region who remember fairly recent performances of Jennifer Higdon’s music – “Blue Cathedral” and her Percussion Concerto with the Harrisburg Symphony and “river sings a song to trees” from CityScape with the Lancaster Symphony when she received the orchestra’s Composer’s Award in 2008 – there’s a special opportunity to hear one of her latest works, given its world premiere five months ago in February (read about it here). The Violin Concerto was written for Hilary Hahn who’ll be playing it with her hometown orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, this week with performances Thursday & Friday nights and Sunday afternoon at the Meyerhoff Concert Hall and on Saturday night at the Strathmore Center.

For those (like me) unable to make any of these performances, this past week’s concerts with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (its European premiere) will be broadcast on-line today on BBC-3. The broadcast is scheduled at 19:00 GMT which I presume translates into 3:00pm EDT (GMT does not believe in saving daylight). [added later: SO I WAS MIGHTILY SURPRISED, not to mention annoyed, to go to the BBC website and discover that it had actually begun at 2:00pm EDT after all -- aaargh...]

After today’s broadcast, the recording of the concert will still be available on-demand for the next 7 days.

Further good news: the Liverpool performance was recorded the next day for eventual release on the Deutsche Gramophone label!

Jennifer Higdon’s music is back on mid-state programs for at least two performances, both in January 2010. She’ll be here with the Cypress Quartet when they play her “Impressions” on January 23rd for Market Square Concerts. The Harrisburg Symphony will perform “SkyLine” from CityScape on their concert a week later, January 30th-31st. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (with soloist Augustin Hadelich returning to Harrisburg) will be on that program as well.

Imagine if you had a chance to hear Beethoven talking (or even writing) about how he wrote his Violin Concerto for Franz Clement who gave it its premiere (preferably recorded before the concert which was something of a disaster: it took another generation before this concerto became anything near the staple in the repertoire it is today). Hilary Hahn, who was a student of Jennifer Higdon’s at Curtis and who commissioned the concerto, interviewed her in this video available on (where else?) YouTube:



You can also listen to an NPR interview from Weekend Edition on May 23rd with conductor Marin Alsop talking with Jennifer about this week’s concerts in Baltimore.

Here are some other reviews and comments about the new concerto following its premiere: Mary Ellen Hutton blogging in Cincinnati and James Tobin at Classical.net, including this Portland OR interview by James Bash for The Gathering Note with Jennifer about creativity in general and this segment from a PBS documentary called “Being Creative in Philadelphia.”



- Dr. Dick

Busy Week at Dr. Dick Plaza

After the long zombie siege of “flu-like symptoms” morphed into my first ever case of sinusitis abetted by the first spring allergies I’ve dealt with in over 20 years, I've been slathering down antibiotics with codeine-laced cough medicine and on the verge of feeling almost sub-human.

I found it impossible to employ circular breathing which I’ve never managed to master while in the midst of a coughing jag but after several days of that and the additional aggravation to the previously mentioned groinal injuries, I also found it near impossible to walk and sometimes even to carry a mere gallon of water out to water some recently planted supposedly deer-proof ground-covers.

On top of that, the doctor said my blood pressure was kind of high: 170/90. After she told me that and several minutes passed in which I should’ve been able to relax a bit, she took it again. It was now 170/102. Uhm… So yeah, now there’s medication for that, too.

Meanwhile, I’ve been getting ready for a busy week.

There’s a pair of posts about Tchaikovsky and his 4^th Symphony - an up-close & personal look at the man and some of the issues behind the symphony's creation - over at the Harrisburg Symphony Blog. With any luck, some people will find it before the orchestra’s concerts this weekend. Given Stuart Malina’s busy schedule after the last concert – “Stuart & Friends,” the Pops Concert, a week with the Naples (FL) Philharmonic – and the fact during most of that time I’ve been highly contagious, there wasn’t any chance to get together to record a podcast about this weekend’s concerts. Like I want to infect the maestro...

Fortunately, today is the first day the coughing has been hacked down to a minimum. This afternoon, I’m going in to midtown to hear Concertante’s pre-concert preview with the new work by Kevin Puts that’s been commissioned as part of their “1+5 Series.” This one features cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach as the “1” with her colleagues. It’s receiving its world premiere tomorrow evening (Thursday May 14^th) at the Rose Lehrman Arts Center at HACC on a program that also includes a Beethoven string trio and Schoenberg’s sextet, Verklärte Nacht or Transfigured Night. The concert is at 8:00 but I’ll be doing a pre-concert talk starting at 7:15, hopefully with the composer, Kevin Puts, to talk about his new piece.

This is not the only World Premiere in Harrisburg this week! Jeremy Gill – a composer born in Harrisburg and now living in Philadelphia, teaching at Temple University – will be in town to hear his Symphony No. 1 given its world premiere with Stuart Malina and the Harrisburg Symphony. Those performances are Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 3 at the Forum – the pre-concert talk an hour before each performance will be given by Stuart Malina who’ll be talking to composer Jeremy Gill about his symphony.

I hope to catch some of the rehearsals and find some time around those and some educational out-reach events to talk with Jeremy and post some information at the Harrisburg Symphony Blog.

And then, on Friday night, I’ll be doing some on-stage hosting thing with the Susquehanna Chorale conducted by Linda Tedford and their “Spring Concert,” 8pm at Whitaker Center. But more on that later... Right now, after dealing with nuisance issues re:Blogspot and my newish computer, I’m going to be running later if I don’t get this posted, like, now!

- Dr. Dick

Gifts that Keep on Giving

Most of the past few weeks have been either busy or not busy and when “not busy” either “sick” or unable to focus on writing any more recent posts, here.

Some of the seeds I planted on April 21st actually sprouted. The other day, I counted 14 moon-glory seedlings bursting their first round of leaves up through the soil. Something else started to do the same but when I checked it later in the day, it was obvious it had already become lunch to a squirrel.

Last weekend, I was involved in rehearsals and performances for the Harrisburg Symphony’s concert version of Tosca – but just attending, not performing. I’ve been blogging about them over at the Harrisburg Symphony Blog, along with a couple of posts about Tuesday’s chamber music program, “Stuart & Friends.” I still need to post something about the Harrisburg Symphony Youth Orchestra concert that night, too.

Meanwhile, April 23rd was the 2nd Birthday for the Copperfields – Abel, Baker, Charlie, Blanche & Freddie. New catnip toys and some more pom-pom balls (the kind that are not perfectly round so they bounce and roll in all different directions) were added to those already lurking in the various Bermuda Triangles that inhabit this house. Pictures were kind of pointless since it’s impossible to get all of them to stand still long enough for the camera – or at least, this camera.

Another important anniversary passed on Friday, the 1st of May. It was two years ago I had to go to a hospital emergency room to find out if the intense pain on the lower right side of my abdomen was a hernia or appendicitis.

Since it happened at work, the result of pulling opening the very heavy sound proof door to the radio control room where I worked then, my doctor would not see me until I had filled out the necessary paperwork with Workman’s Comp, had a file with a claim number and everything ready to find an approved specialist who would then examine me instead (the nurses’ cynical laugh as she told me this did not bode well). But since this new doctor couldn’t see me for, like, two weeks, I was told to go to E.R. if appendicitis was a concern for me (and since I still had all my original parts, it was). When I signed in, the admitting nurse was surprised I had all this information all ready for her: she dutifully filled it into the appropriate forms (so it surprised me when, sometime later, I received a bill for this only to discover this information had somehow not made it to the billing department). I was wheeled back – past the room where my mother had been examined before her death 6 weeks earlier – then taken down for an MRI which revealed it was neither appendicitis nor a hernia. It was, in fact, TWO hernias, one on either side of the groin, plus a pulled abdominal muscle and – oh, yes – gall-stones.

Without going into too detailed a history of the two years since then, let’s leave it that the doctor examining me later that month felt the hernias were not that serious and could be “taken care of” after the pulled muscle (which could not be taken care of by surgery or medicine) had a chance to heal. A few weeks? A couple of months? Well, more like six months. Then they could work on the hernias. Meanwhile, I could return to work if I didn't lift anything over 10 pounds. It didn't seem likely to put in for a six month leave-of-absence. Knowing what I know now, I'm sorry I hadn't.

About four months later, then, the company had installed a new “automatic door opener” with a handicap logo on the button. Until it was installed, since I worked the evening air-shift, most nights I could just leave the door propped open a little bit, enough to break the vacuum seal that made it relatively sound-proof but of course three of those nights were when the Vacuum Guy and his family came to clean the building and one of those nights was Listener Requests night when I would have to open the door repeatedly for the jaunt down to the music library at the other end of the Atrium. Then after a couple of weeks, it broke and I was back to pulling the door open to get out of the room and re-injured myself. The claim was still active so at least I didn’t need new paperwork to see the specialist again.

Basically it took about a year for the muscle to finally heal well enough but by then the hernias were becoming increasingly more urgent. In the spring, I decided I would have to take time off – people were saying maybe two or three weeks – but I would wait until after an important fund-raising campaign and other events were out of the way. By that time, I was “laid off.”

So now, we had to clarify the role of Workman’s Comp in all this since I was no longer an employee where the work-related incident occurred. It also turned out the doctor had informed the insurance company the left hernia appeared to be slightly older than the right one and since it didn’t have its own file and claim number, it would not be handled by Workman’s Comp. All of this occurred during a transition period running parallel with my being “laid off” where one Human Resources director was being replaced by another.

So now this also meant I had to wait until the health insurance coverage was clarified. For some reason, there were a couple of confusions about setting this up and so I had to wait a few months which of course involved another visit to the doctor’s because it had now been longer than the allowable lapse between a visit and scheduling the surgery. By December, there were days I was barely able to walk or do steps. The surgery was scheduled for early February, the right one billed to the Workman’s Comp company, the left one to my personal health insurance, being maintained through a COBRA agreement (now, when I discuss a free-lance gig, I think in terms of how many weeks of medical insurance it will cover – even a semester’s worth of adult education classes for the fall looks like it will pay for two months).

Now, since the diagnosis in May ‘07, whenever I went to the grocery store I had to take along a friend when I needed to buy cat litter since the 20-pound containers were too heavy for me to lift. After a while, I could manage to lift the 14-pound containers, but to carry them from the car to the respective litter boxes at the other end of the house, living alone, I would usually either drag them on a beach towel or use what had been the li’l red wagon of my childhood. If my pack horse could not go with me when I needed to get groceries, I would make a special run when he was, stocking up on litter and, say, those 40-pound bags of water-softener salt I needed periodically. Needless to say, I have aged considerably in those two years, as friends will attest.

After an agonizing few weeks healing after the hernias’ repair, things began to feel markedly better. So one day, while cleaning the litter boxes – with nine cats,, I could not do them all in one day since it was too much bending, stooping, scooping and hauling out to the trash – I thought I should by now be able to pick up a 20-pound container. I lifted it six inches off the ground and knew immediately this was a mistake. As the day progressed, I realized I had injured myself to some extent - again...

Another trip to the doctor indicated the repaired hernias were fine but I had “aggravated” the old pulled abdominal muscle. It might take, say, another two or three months for it to heal – that would mean, perhaps, mid-May or mid-June. And how do I find out if I’m ready to resume something like normalcy? Lift a 20-pound container of cat litter again, just to see?

Since December, I have been unable to exercise on my treadmill and I’ve probably put on another 10-15 pounds, having been sedentary for about 6 weeks before the surgery and for the three months since: I can go about 5-10 minutes before it begins to hurt instead of the 40-45 minutes I could do the summer before. But I can get the same effect walking up a flight of steps. It gets very frustrating.

Through all this, my workman’s comp representative has been wonderful. The specialist I’ve been going to has been great and the surgery and subsequent recovery flew by not as fast as I’d like but as well as could be expected, having had two matching hernias operated on at the same time.

What was unexpected, however, was a bout with flu-like symptoms this past week. Unless you’ve been living under a media-free rock, you would know that a person with a runny nose had as much power as a terrorist with a bomb to divert a plane from Munich to Washington, forcing it to land in Boston. “Swine Flu” is on everybody’s lips: people in Mexico are dying of it, there are suspected cases of it popping up all over the world but, fanning our own fears, more critically in this country. The fact that Pennsylvania is surrounded by states with confirmed cases has sent most of the state into Panic Mode.

When I started getting a sore throat Tuesday night, after spending a few days in a crowded and very warm auditorium with a couple thousand people during our summer-like 90+ heat-wave, I wasn’t surprised. That one of my friends who had stopped by on Sunday, dropping off an old computer of his to replace my 6-year-old veteran, had just come back from a business trip to Mexico, however, got me to wondering about it a little more seriously. What if it weren’t just “a” flu, but “the” flu, the Flu–du-Mal?

Fortunately, I did not develop any of the nasty symptoms that supposedly differentiated normal flu from Swine Flu and my friend whose computer could put a different spin on the term “computer virus” was fine, F-I-N-E, fine. So I shouldn’t worry. My flu developed just like other bouts in the past, almost indistinguishable from those near-annual “change-of-season” colds that last a few days then burn themselves out of your system on their own.

Unfortunately, one of those symptoms was a nagging cough and one of the side effects of regular coughing fits is abdominal pain, especially when you are overweight, out-of-shape and dealing with an aggravated formerly-pulled muscle. I could deal with the aching rib-cage, but this abdominal pain is making it difficult, once again, to walk, bend over or lift much of anything. I figure I’ve now put the muscle back another 2-3 months, making it maybe July or August, now, before it might be back to normal, a state quickly fading from memory.

The fever officially broke around 4am on Friday morning. By Saturday morning, the headache is less, the body-ache bearable but I’m still coughing, despite the Robitussin (less phlegm but still racking waves across the abdomen).

Needless to say, after two years, this has really gotten old...

So as I contemplated the 2nd birthday of the Five Kittens – born two days after I rescued their stray cat of a mother from my old mid-town neighborhood – and in my flu-state meditated on the Hernias’ 2nd Anniversary, it is not the kittens I look at and think “the gift that keeps on giving.”

- Dr. Dick

Life & Art

One of those ironies of Life/Art.

Tonight, I was watching a TV broadcast of the original movie version of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, with its classic reworking of the story of Romeo & Juliet reset in 1950s New York, replacing Shakespeare’s feuding families with gangs of White & Puerto Rican teen-agers.

After it’s over at 11pm, I switched to Channel 21 News to hear this, by way of this Associated Press bulletin:

POTTSVILLE, Pa. (AP) -- An all-white jury on Friday acquitted two Pennsylvania teenagers of all serious charges against them stemming from the fatal beating of an illegal Mexican immigrant last summer.

An Earth-Day Journal

Another Earth Day rolls around though it was yesterday, in a warm sunny lull between a rainy Monday and a stormy Tuesday afternoon, I managed to plant some seeds and pot up some pachysandra and euonymous that I’d been rooting over the winter. The few strands I’d trimmed off the euonymous last fall, a low bushy, vine-like version of the plant, is now all I have left after the deer, ignoring the fact it was touted as being “deer-proof,” nibbled it to the ground where it has yet to resprout. The forsythia are fading, the leaves now adding a tinge of lemony green to the once solid golden mounds in my back yard. The neighbor’s magnolia tree whose scent made it almost pleasant to walk to the mailbox to pick up my junk-mail, has passed its prime, shedding its thick milky-white petals onto brown-turning heaps on the grass.

With the milder weather, it’s good to see plants I had been afraid had died over the winter were actually showing signs of life. The clematis out front is already full of leaves and dozens of buds (usually it has 10-15 flowers on it; last spring it had 104) but the three varieties of wild milkweed I’d planted to be a refuge for monarch butterflies had so far not materialized. The oak-leaf hydrangea I planted last fall has managed to survive, pinkish-red nubbins that will gradually unfurl into these huge leaves.

In the back, the white bleeding heart was one of the first to emerge (I quickly put a peach-basket over it so it wouldn’t becomes someone’s lunch) and now the astilbe which looked like it had died last fall is sending up spindly red shoots. The peonies are back, mostly in places where they won’t do well any more. When they were planted 50 years ago, it was sunny but now the dogwood overshadows everything and they will get little sunlight once its leaves come out, including the one surviving deep red one, part of the original stock my mother had brought from her mother’s first house where it was planted in 1919 (it didn’t bloom last year, but I’m afraid to move it to a better spot for fear of killing it outright).

The “beauty berry” bush, with its iridescent purple berries that the birds love, so far shows no signs of rejuvenation. The two different kind of hosta and the “lamb’s ear” I’d planted near it, however, seem to be on the verge of life. It depends how tempting they look in Nature’s Cafeteria in this land where the deer and the jackalope play...

It’s been an on-going challenge once the deer nibbled down the epimeium after it started sprouting. Planting seeds in starter-pots seems pointless to me but at least if they germinate, they have a better chance of making it to seedlings than if I planted them directly into the ground. Last year’s lush carpet of pre-pubescent alyssum and impatiens were mowed down by rabbits in less time than time-lapse photography could’ve recorded their sprouting. Then I bought plugs of already grown plants to plant there instead: they lasted a day.

I joked about using lady-bugs to control aphids and praying mantises to control grasshoppers, but I’m not sure what I would use to control the squirrels, rabbits and deer. Perhaps a puma but then what would I use to control the puma population? Fire-arms do not strike me as a terribly green solution, regardless of the legality of firing them in my own back-yard.

The other night, sitting in the darkened living room with the drapes closed after watching the 11pm news (with some report of another escaped criminal a county away), I heard the scrape of a porch chair pushed back against the picture window and wondered if I really wanted to open the drape to see what was there. I’ll assume it was rabbits frolicking on the porch who bumped against it or maybe a deer coming up to see if the drive-through window was open ("Got any house-plants in there?").

This morning I looked out to see pile of – let’s assume – rabbit-barf on the porch with the remains of what can only have been an iris once growing twenty feet away. Fortunately, there were many shoots to choose from, so this was less devastating than it might have been had it been the lone white bleeding heart recently freed from its peach-basket protection. I’m wondering if I should clean up the barf or move it over closer to the iris bed to remind them, “see, this is what this plant makes you do.” But like little children they’ll probably have to check it out one more time, at least, to see if it does it again.

All of the trees in my yard were planted within the first year my parents had built this house. In fact, the biggest silver maples in the very back had been saplings on the field when we bought it and, unfortunately, my mother decided we should try to keep them – free trees, you know. Unfortunately, there are now three other clumps of silver maples across the yard and we have dealt with this nemesis of “whirrly-gig” propeller seeds in the spring and the copious quantities of leaves in the fall clogging up rain-gutters. I’m wondering how much it would cost to take them out – they’re all huge – especially now that dead branches are constantly falling into the yard: one three-foot branch was impaled in the grass, sticking almost straight up most of the winter (this photo, right, was taken in February, looking toward the parent clump that in 1959 had been a small sapling).

But then the yard would seem so much less without trees there. I had joked when I was a kid and had to mow the grass (about 3/4s of an acre was huge to a teen-ager even on a riding mower) that if I ever lived here in the future, I would plant nothing BUT trees until it killed all the grass. So it seems odd now to be thinking about removing trees...

Considering the Japanese Maple is turning 50 (we were told it might live 25-30 years) and the two dogwoods have also lived well past their standard shelf-life, I wonder what to plant in readiness? At my age, with all due apologies to Joyce Kilmer, I would probably never see full-grown trees there again.

Then there are the forsythia which originally came from a bush we’d been given by my father’s mother. Most nursery-bred forsythia seem to be sterile and don’t spread, making nice little accent shrubs along the house or round bushes in the middle of the yard. This one, probably a forest-born weed that had been growing too close to their back door, soon took over our back yard. That first summer, we planted it in what was then the bare eastern corner at the back of the house. Somehow it started growing in the northeast corner of the yard. Trimming it one fall, Mother kept a bunch of branches cut into three foot lengths, for some reason, stacked in the garage for several years before she thought they would make great stakes in the vegetable garden she was going to put in in the northwest corner of the yard, growing peppers and tomatoes and, alas, zucchini.

I think this lasted three or four summers before the amount of work it took to raise them far outweighed the frustration of either eating all the zucchini or trying to give them away. She would forget to harvest them for a few days only to find they had developed into potentially lethal weapons. Since the rabbits didn’t seem to eat these plants, I figured we could use the zucchini to club them to death. If you just turned them into compost, no doubt the seeds would sprout and soon we wouldn’t be able to see the house for zucchini vines. Anyway, even before the garden expired, the stakes from the forsythia – the ones that had been kept in the garage for several years – had sprouted and spread like the undead. And now there are two vast clumps on the western side of the yard that clearly have an agenda of their own. Beautiful for the month of April, they create a vast wooded network for squirrels and rabbits, protection for the birds from overhead hawks and ample space for a complexful of catbirds to nest in.

In the mid-80s, N and I came out to chop down the original forsythia which had by then, a storey tall, taken over the corner of the house. N’s dad brought out his saws and clippers and, of course, the “chipper” for turning tree branches into sawdust. This project took the three of us most of the day and I was exhausted before we were even half-way through, though N’s dad, then in his mid-70s, was still going strong as the sun began to set. As I look around the yard 25 years later, I figure that original pre-sawdust forsythia was maybe 1/12th of what there is out there now... and it’s still growing and spreading from the original stump which no chemical seemed capable of killing.

Meanwhile, one of this spring’s project is staring me in the face: reseeding the vast patch of brown where the geothermal system was installed last August. I have not yet calculated the increase in my electrical usage to heat the house this winter compared to the previous winter’s expenses with the old oil furnace, but I was glad to be able to declare “30% of the installation cost” on my federal taxes last week – or rather, the “up to $2,000" part of it which was really less than half of that 30%. But still, comparing that to the 0% amount allowed by Pennsylvania, I’m not complaining.

Amidst the calls of birds – does it mean something different when a call of a falling perfect fourth repeated four times is answered by an inversion of those same pitches but repeated five times? – I hear the cry of the lawn-mower as I sit on my bench under the Japanese Maple and work my way slowly past the half-way point of David Copperfield (only because of time dedicatable to reading, not for any lack of enjoyment). Floyd the Pink Flamingo (an original 1955 Florida souvenir, not any cheap modern plastic imitation) is now back in place after migrating to the living room for the winter.

Once again the Earth has gone full-circle, constantly renewing itself as it has done for centuries and eons, by whatever means man has devised for the telling of time. I drive through my community which I remember was mostly farm-land fifty years ago and is now chock full of houses – though I can still see the pond not far away where we used to swim when we were kids, now home to mallards and geese and the occasional passing white egret. I look at the topographical map my grandfather gave me that was printed in 1899 and though many of the basic roads are already there, the place seems unrecognizable otherwise.

This area had been settled in the 1750s, woods and fields before it became farmland. And now some 300 acres of nearby woods, fields and farmland are being turned into townhouses and McMansions, just one of the most recent development projects in the vicinity. The impact on the region’s traffic and infrastructure is one thing but I wonder about the deer, for instance, whom I’d never seen in my back yard before: why are they stopping by now? Probably because their fields have been foreclosed and they have to move on? Maybe I should not worry so much about them eating a few of my plants...

- Dr. Dick

Another Blog!

Well, I've started another blog this morning - in addition to the one for Market Square Concerts, there is now one for the Harrisburg Symphony where I've posted about the up-coming concert next weekend with Puccini's Tosca, including the conversation Stuart Malina and I had earlier this week about the opera, and also about the YouTube Symphony with Harrisburg Symphony bassist Devin Howell was one of 96 players chosen from around the world, performing this past Wednesday at Carnegie Hall (you can even see a video of the first half of the concert - I'm waiting for them to post the second half, so check back later).

Meanwhile, it was announced yesterday that composer Lisa Bielawa has won this year's Rome Prize and will be spending her time in the Eternal City writing a new work for Market Square Conccerts which will be premiered on the February Concert of the 2009-2010 season! You can read more about that, here.

Meanwhile, it's a gorgeous sunny WARM spring day and I'm going out on my back porch to spend the afternoon reading... and shooing away the rabbits and the deer who are eating my plants... ah, nature...

- Dr. Dick

Rites of Spring

Once past the groundhog, then past the Vernal Equinox and finally by the time I begin to feel like it’s actually Spring, once the forsythia are in bloom and I can tell whether some of the plants in my garden will make it back for another year, I think of all the “Spring Music” that easily comes to mind and that, for 18 years, I had programmed abundantly through the hope of March and the showers of April – from symphonies by Schumann or Britten to songs by Schubert or (without words) by Mendelssohn – and one work stands out for me: Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, Le sacre du printemps or, as we know it in English, The Rite of Spring.
From the original Russian, the title (not pictured above, btw) translates more accurately as “Sacred Spring” but somehow the idea of ritual became part of the title and it has become part of my spring ritual, as well.

My first encounter with this music, one of the most significant works for the 20th Century, was in a cartoon. Walt Disney’s Fantasia, to be exact. I don’t remember when I first saw it – probably when I was in 2nd Grade, about 7 or 8 years old. Classical Music was not new to me: I had heard Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D Minor or Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony before, somehow, but I had never SEEN them before. I remember my mother thinking the Night on Bald Mountain was simply too scary for a child my age but the thing I remember most about the movie was the dinosaurs.

A couple of years later, after my folks gave me a collection of 12 LPs called “Music of the World’s Greatest Composers” which included The Rite of Spring, I could only listen to it thinking of dinosaurs. Otherwise, the music didn’t make sense, not like Beethoven’s Eroica or even Wagner’s Prelude & Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde which were also included in this collection. Eventually I realized what Disney did to the music – going back to the opening at the very end and all that – had nothing to do with Stravinsky’s original story, that of a young girl (what did a 9-year-old know of virgins?) who dances herself to death as a sacrifice to the God of Spring. Funny, but the violence of the fighting dinosaurs was okay, but the human drama would have been too much, no doubt. Given the beauty of Disney’s animation even then, I wonder what an actual setting of the Sacrificial Dance would have looked like?

As often as I heard the music, through recordings or concert performances, I actually never SAW the ballet danced till I was 27. I was teaching in Connecticut and a bunch of friends and I decided we just had to go to the Metropolitan Opera in June of 1976 to see the production by the American Ballet Theater. It was choreographed by Glen Tetley and though it was fairly abstract, it still essentially followed the essence of Stravinsky’s plot. The opening of Part Two, the night scene, was a long (and brightly lit) pas de deux with Martine van Hamel and Clark Tippet that was far more beautiful than anything I had ever imagined with this eerie music. The other thing that was rather surprising: the Chosen One, the virgin who dances herself to death, was a man.

I have no idea how you prove he’s a virgin. We were sitting in a balcony box near the front of the stage, looking down on the dancers. After the Chosen One was writhing on the ground and then ran across the stage to throw himself down a few seconds later over there, you could see the complete outline of his body marked in sweat on the floor.

As the wild rhythms of the Sacrificial Dance grew to a goose-bump inducing, eye-widening frenzy, the other dancers pounced on the Chosen One as if they were going to tear him limb from limb. Four men hoist his now limp body above the crowd - there is that amazing silence - and then, on the last crashing chord, he flew up above the stage, what seemed to be higher than our 2nd balcony seats, his arms spread wide like a crucifix, frozen into a pin-spot followed a second later by a black-out.

I was so startled by this, I almost fell over the balcony railing into the pit below. To be very honest, nothing has ever given me that same visceral response in a live performance. Even the best concert performances pale – ho hum – by comparison.

Two more times that summer, I drove down from Storrs to New York to see that production. The information I can find on-line mentions Baryshnikov danced the opening night, but in all three performances, I never saw him dance the role (he had only defected to the west two years earlier and was quite the rage, then). The name I remember is Charles Ward.

After moving into New York, I saw two more productions of the ballet. One, for some reason, I can’t recall. The other was by a touring company from Germany with a famous dancer/ choreographer whose name I cannot remember, either, but this production was clearly from his Alley Oop period, as a dancer friend of mine described it. Instead of an abstract setting with leotards or body stockings, this was more realistic, taking Stravinsky’s original scenario very much to heart. To a point.

In this case, the Chosen One is danced to death by the High Priest (the famous dancer/ choreographer) who is dressed in a shaggy bear-skin over-the-shoulder affair that would have annoyed the politically correct Geico cave-men no end. At the very end, standing on a rock (was it in front of a cave?) high above the wildly gyrating crowd, the High Priest throws the girl up in the air, she lands straddling his shoulders, spinning around as he turns his back to us (this, during that momentary silence) so that, on the final chord, she suddenly falls backwards, as if hanging with her feet around his neck, arms splayed and the whites of her eyes visible from the second tier of seats!

The only thing I remember about the third one – a literal telling of the story but not so realistically staged or costumed – ends with four long-bearded sages each carrying a long staff who close in on the Chosen One during her final dance, getting imperceptibly nearer to her as she becomes increasingly more terrified. By the end, they have her confined in a narrow space between them, almost hiding her from the audience. At the end, the four sages raise these staffs on the flutes’ up-beat, poised over the dancer in that frozen silence, then on the final chord bring them crashing down as the lights black out, a brutal sacrifice in the old sense of the word.

The sheer physical athleticism required by the music may well make up for any shortcomings in the choreography in general. Bejart’s famous 1970 production (which I did not see) seems to start among germinating rodents before turning into the Sex Olympics. Pina Bausch’s version (I found only the final scene on-line) appears to take place at a singles bar where the dancers in the background seem totally uninvolved as the Chosen One who seems more like the Rejected One convulses before finally keeling over (if Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction disturbed you, you may want to skip this one).

But Nijinsky’s original choreography (more the cause of the riot at its 1913 premiere rather than Stravinsky’s music) has been reconstructed by the Joffrey Ballet. I recently found it complete at YouTube (of course), dividing (badly) the two parts of the ballet into three segments. But it will give you an idea of the power of the ballet. Keep in mind how this must have looked in Paris in 1913 – when people had never seen anything like Martha Graham or Modern Dance or gratuitously overdone psychological symbolism and people must have been wondering what happened to the tutus and all those graceful pliés and leg extensions. Ignore the fact many of the costumes make them look like Dilbert’s Elbonians.

Spring in Russia arrives with a violence unknown in other climates as the frozen soil suddenly erupts with a great upheaval and cracking of the ice. This, I think, is actually described near the end of Part One – in the middle of the second screen, below – after the Ancient Sage kisses the earth and the music erupts into a frenzy of upward motions.

What surprises me most about this choreography is how well it suits the music, more than just physical actions set to very physical music. There is a great deal of stamping as if the dancers feet become another percussive extension of the orchestra, as well as hand-clapping and even thigh-slapping: the dancers are not only seen but heard. In the final dance, the Chosen One may be limited to a series of repetitive gestures in a very small physical space stage center – and it is not easy to stand still so long in that tense position before her dance even begins – that emphasizes her supplication to the gods, her life in return for a good crop, but also her personal fear of death in such a bargain.

Screen 1 (Beginning of Part 1)
- - - - - - -
- - - - - - -
Screen 2 (End of Part 1 - Beginning of Part 2)
- - - - - - -
- - - - - - -
Screen 3 (End of Part 2)
- - - - - - -
- - - - - - -
Stravinsky’s music has been subjected to a wide range of interpretations – realistic, psychological, violently symbolic – and some of it perhaps a great deal of silliness beside. Though at first I thought this next one was one of the sillier ones (for all its athletic virtuosity) it is one of the more fascinating I’ve seen if only for the question “how do you choreograph horses?!”

Yes. Horses. This is a performance with dancers and horses and very often dancers ON horses, filmed in 2002 in an arena with L’Orchestre de Paris conducted by Pierre Boulez. The dancers are members of Zingaro, the choreographer goes by the name of Bartabas (you can read more about him, here). Of course there is also the practical concern, thinking what dancer wants to be rolling around on a dirt floor when horses, cantering about, answer Nature’s call, but leave those thoughts aside. The horses make their entrance about four minutes into the ballet. The pure white horses during the night scene that opens Part Two are themselves the dancers. Then in the final dance, watch the build-up as the Chosen One is selected.
- - - - - - -

- - - - - - -

After that, there is nothing more to say.

- Dr. Dick