Krzysztof Kieślowski's Bleu

Warning: if you haven't seen this 1993 movie, you should. For that reason I am putting spoilers at the end of this post. I'll let you know when to stop reading, but do come back . . .

In 1993 "we" knew a little about music that was written by women during the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century, but there was not much music written by women available on recordings. Some music was published, but not a lot. And much of the music that was published was published by small companies, and/or was out of print.

Most musicians active in the 1990s knew about Clara Schumann, Fanny Hensel (Felix Mendelssohn's sister), Amy Beach, Cecile Chaminade (at least if you were a flutist--but you might not have known she was a woman), Lili Boulanger and her sister Nadia, who was better known as a teacher than as a composer. Some knew about Germaine Tailleferre (one of Les Six), Augusta Holmes, and Louise Farrenc. I knew of only one recording of Pauline Viardot's music that was available on LP in the 1990s, and it was quite a while before her music was recorded on CD. "Viardot" used to be my word to search for in the early days of the internet. What a thrill it was to finally encounter another person who knew about her.

Most musicians knew something about Wendy Carlos because of "Switched on Bach," but she was establishing her career when she went by Walter. People also knew about Ellen Taffe Zwilich, because she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983.

Relatively few people knew much about Ruth Crawford Seeger, who was highly respected (for good reason) in new music circles, but her music, though recorded by excellent musicians, was too abstract for most people to play on the radio in the early 1990s. There were more recordings available of music by her and other important composers like Grażyna Bacewicz, Vivian Fine, Thea Musgrave, Sofia Gubaidulina and Kaija Saariaho available beginning in the the later 1990s. 

As one of only a couple of women on the reviewing staff of a major CD reviewing magazine, I got assigned most of the recordings that had music written by women. And I played those recordings on the radio, including music by Seeger.

Now I'll talk about the movie. Spoilers follow!

My memory of Bleu, which I saw in 1994 (it came out in 1993) was that it was a film about a composer going through a period of grief. I didn't think of myself as a composer at that time, and couldn't fully understand the nature of the protagonist's struggle. Seeing it thirty years later I realized that it is a portrait of Julie (played by Juliette Binoche) who was a ghostwriter for her husband, a composer held in such high regard that he had been commissioned to write a piece celebrating the unification of Europe. 

Julie's husband Patrice and five-year-old daughter die in a car crash. Julie survives and as part of her grieving process she gives everything away, puts her (huge) house up for sale, goes back to her birth name, and destroys the manuscript of the work-in-progress attributed to her husband. 

Her deepest desire is to do nothing. To be nothing.

But the music, mostly heard in monody, keeps haunting her, particularly while she is swimming. Julie is deeply attuned to a recorder player playing on the street, which is a clue to her musical sensitivity. At a few points during the film (and the beginning, at the middle, and near the end) there is speculation that Julie has actually written the music attributed to Patrice, something that she avoids addressing (perhaps because it is true). When her husband's assistant lets it be known (in a televised interview that Julie sees by chance) that he is planning to finish the piece (he took pictures of the score before it was destroyed, perhaps after the accident), Julie objects to his heavy-handed and opportunistic treatment of the music, and is compelled to complete the piece herself. She does it in her apartment, without a piano, and using the same handwriting that we saw in the manuscript before it was destroyed.

Julie also learns, from a photo shown in that television interview, that her husband had a mistress for many years. The assistant tells her that the mistress is a lawyer. Julie tracks the mistress down, and seeing that she is pregnant, confirms that Patrice is the father of the child she is carrying. Julie is very kind to the mistress, and gives the mistress the house that she, Patrice, and their daughter lived in. The mistress told Julie that Patrice spoke of her kindness and generosity. 

The text of the piece, sung in Greek, is the famous section from chapter 13 of First Corinthians.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

I can't get it out of my mind that in chapter 14, which follows in the King James Bible, we get the passage about women being silent in church.

Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.

This passage, by the way, is what brought about the process of castrating choir boys during the 16th century (but probably beginning far earlier) so that they could sing the soprano parts in sacred music.

Zbigniew Preisner wrote the excellent music for the film, which is available on Criterion. 

Tonality and Life (drawing, that is)

My mother, who was a musician before she became a painter, told me, as she was showing me her life drawing sketches, that these were her "scales." (The quotation marks are mine, of course.)

With certain exceptions, human beings have bodies with the same number and kinds of limbs, and when drawing an unclothed model, a well-schooled artist would learn to understand the structural components of the human body: the bones, muscles, tendons, and veins.

It occurred to me this morning, while I was reading (slowly, of course) through the extremely triadic and tonal Beethoven Piano Sonata, opus 79, that the variety of musical tools (texture, dynamics, voicing, phrase structure, repetition, silence, etc.) available when working with functional triadic harmony is akin to the structure of the human body.  The things that make every human body unique are like the things that make each piece of tonal music unique.

Whether you want to use the structural components that make a piece of music feel grounded in tonality or not, I think it is really important to study functional harmony as thoroughly as possible in order to write original and imaginative contemporary music that feels "right."  Functional harmony is, to me, like the bones, muscles, tendons, and veins that support music and allow it to flow.

What it must be like to be tone deaf

Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.

Vladimir Nabokov's dislike of music is common knowledge (especially because of the well-known quotation above from Speak, Memory).

In his lecture on Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Nabokov finds sympathy in Kafka's feelings about music.

Without wishing to antagonize lovers of music, I do wish to point out that taken in a general sense music, as perceived by its consumers, belongs to a more primitive, more animal form in the scale of arts than literature or painting.

I am taking music as a whole, not in terms of individual creation, imagination, and composition, all of which of course rival the art of literature and painting, but in terms of the impact music has on the average listener.

A great composer, a great writer, a great painter are brothers. But I think that the impact music in a generalized and primitive form has on the listener is of a more lowly quality than the impact of an average book or an average picture. What I especially have in mind is the soothing, lulling, dulling influence of music on some people such as of the radio or records.

In Kafka's tale it is merely a girl pitifully scraping on a fiddle and this corresponds in the piece to the canned music or plugged-in music of today.

What Kafka felt about music in general is what I have just described: its stupefying, numbing, animallike quality.

This attitude must be kept in mind in interpreting an important sentence that has been misunderstood by some translators. Literally, it reads “Was Gregor an animal to be so affected by music?” That is, in his human form he had cared little for it but in this scene, in his beetlehood, he succumbs: “He felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved.”

Nabokov explained in a 1964 Playboy interview that he was "bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians."

Nabokov's short stories are full of visual descriptions. Overflowing, perhaps. I always wondered how such (what I would consider) musical sentences could come from a person who claimed he hated music. But his stories have given me more of a clue about his relationship with music.

In "Wingstroke" Nabokov mentions a "Boston," which is a waltz:

When the music started again, the youth invited Isabel to dance a Boston.

Being able to describe the rhythm of a dance shows that his ear is not unmusical (rhythm is part of music after all), but perhaps he wasn't able to discern the difference between pitches, which is what I understand actual tone deafness to be.

In "The Seaport" he shows that he certainly has an ear for texture:

Inside, beyond the tables, a violin wrung its sounds as if they were human hands, accompanied by the full-bodied resonance of a rippling harp. The more banal the music, the closer it is to the heart.

Maybe for a person with synesthesia, like Nabokov, who is hyper-endowed with the ability to translate his hightened visual sensitivities into language, describing music without the ability to appreciate its pitches is akin to a color blind person trying to describe the colors used in painting, or the ones that appear in nature (like in butterflies).

Here is a particularly revealing passage from the story "Music":

To Victor any music he did not know--and all he knew was a dozen conventional tunes--could be likened to the patter of a conversation in a strange tongue: in vain you strive to define at least the limits of the words, but everything slips and merges, so that the laggard ear begins to feel boredom.

And I can't resist using this passage from elsewhere in the story to end this post:

The music must be drawing to a close. When they come, those stormy, gasping chords, it usually signifies that the end is near. Another intriguing word, end . . . Rend, impend . . . Thunder rending the sky, dust clouds of impending doom.

Emilia Pérez

The film is excellent in many ways, but the music, written by Camille and Clément Ducol tops them all for me.

Aristides von Manowarda Viola d'Amore Duet

[Played so beautifully by Yvain Delahousse and Cheryl Swoboda]

But who was Arisides von Manowarda? All I could find out is that this piece is part of a collection of manuscripts and published material that belonged to Karl Stumpf that is in the archives of the New York Public Library. You can follow this link for the contents of the archive.

von Manowarda was around Vienna in 1942, and his parents were singers connected with the Vienna State Opera (Josef von Manowarda and Cornelia "Nelly" Pirchhoff-Manowarda), where Aristides seems to have played viola, but that is all I know (aside from learning from the above Wikipedia article that his father was a Nazi). Maybe that's all I need to know. I hope Aristides didn't embrace his father's ideology, but fear he may have.

Oy.

If you know more please leave information in the comments. Or maybe it is better not to know more.

If I am not for myself . . .

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?

Hillel the Elder is well known for this bit of wisdom, which can be interpreted and applied in many ways. One application has to do with self care versus selfishness. Another has to do with not waiting for a time when it is convenient to stand up for yourself (or for others).

I have been thinking about this in relation to people promoting the creative work that they do. The idea of "self-promotion" has never  been attractive to me. Perhaps it’s because I came of musical age in a world where people I encountered would spend a lot of time letting me know how well they played and how great their career was progressing.

I came up with the phrase, "Play it, don't say it," when I was at Juilliard in the 1970s. I rarely said it out loud, but I often found myself thinking it about when engaging socially with many of my fellow instrumentalists. 

I preferred to spend time with people who showed their artistic qualities through their playing, but those were often people who had little time for socializing because they were usually practicing.

I have learned over the decades that nobody will pay attention to me or my work if they don’t have any idea who I am or what I do. And since I do not have (or do not hire) a professional person to promote my work, I am left to do it myself. That means I have to engage in some sort of self-promotion, something I have come to accept as necessary if I want to play in the musical world. 

Fairly recently (before I stopped using Facebook) I got a response from a moderator of a forum after sharing a link to a piece of music in the IMSLP that I thought would be of interest to the group.  The moderator (or bot) said that self-promotion was not acceptable in this forum, a forum that had previously encouraged the sharing of new music and transcriptions. 

In the Meta world is "self promotion" now the opposite of "paid promotion?" I wonder. 

Now that Facebook has effectively replaced the public square, the pathways towards constructing musical communities that involve people who don't live in cities (where they can participate in real time with multiple networks of musicians) are hard to find and even harder to create for adults who are not connected with universities or other musical institutions.

Transcription: Florence Price Adoration now for String Quartet or Flute and String Trio

I have wanted to make a string quartet arrangement of Adoration for quite a while. A friend asked me to make an arrangement for flute and string trio for a concert that I am playing with her in March, and I was thrilled to find that the arrangement I made in A major works just as well for string quartet as it does for flute and strings.

The upper register of the flute and the violin are polar opposites: the flute, when played expressively, is quite opaque up in the ledger regions of the treble clef, while the violin can be transparent, brilliant, or transparently brilliant.

You can listen here. You can find the score and parts here as well as on this page of the IMSLP.

None Shall Escape

I was first attracted to the 1944 film "None Shall Escape" because the music was by Ernst Toch, one of my favorite twentieth-century composers. And then I remained amazed at the frankness and the prescience of the film, which was made during World War II.

You can watch it on YouTube here.

Silvie Pierre wrote an excellent essay about the film in 2000, which you can read in an English translation here.

"Bewilderment" by Florence Price

What so many of us are feeling on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

[performed in 2021 by Karen Slack and Michelle Cahn]

I ask you this:
Which way to go?
I ask you this:
Which sin to bear?
Which crown to put
Upon my hair?
I do not know,
Lord God,
I do not know. 

 Langston Hughes 

The title of the poem is "Prayer" as found in Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927)

Ghosts of Chicago

Michael and I are two thirds of the way through Erik Larson's 2003 The Devil in the White City, a book about the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In addition to being fascinating, reading it has prompted me to look deeper into my maternal (Chicago-based) family history.

I imagine that my grandmother took this photo of my mother June Blume (the eight-year-old girl on the left), her father Henry (obviously in the foreground), and her grandmother Machko (her actual name was Elizabeth Blume, neé Rabinowitz) sitting behind Henry. My grandmother would have made the dress.

I know that my mother was no older than eight because when she was eight she had rheumatic fever which left her with arthritis. Going out in a boat would not have been in the cards.

The site of the World's Columbian Exposition was Jackson Park, and I know from Michael's search of the 1940 census records that the Blume family lived in Ward 7 of Chicago. I recall their apartment was on a street in the 60s (it could have been 68th street), just five blocks from access to one of the Jackson Park harbors. This picture could have been taken there. And it could have been taken with my grandfather's Argus C3 camera, which I used as a teenager before it was stolen.

My investigative mind wandered to Henry's father, Israel (I have written about him here), who, as I learned from his gravestone, was "a restless soul who found peace."

Israel died at just fifty-four in 1932, the year my mother was born.

I know that Machko lived with Henry and my grandmother Anne in 1940 because she was named in the census as part of their household. I'm unable to find out any information about my great-grandmother's death because there is so little information on the internets about women, particularly widows, from the early 20th century.

I do know a lot more about Henry, but I will save that for another time.

Connections

I stopped using Facebook a few weeks ago, and it hasn't been easy. Like the zillions of people who, over the past two decades, followed the siren song that put them in easy-as-pie contact with people they knew from every corner of their lives, I got sucked into feeling the illusion that connections I had through the app were real connections that would continue if I were no longer using it.

That is, unfortunately, not the case. A good many of my (former) Facebook friends also made the decision not to feed the beast. They are probably feeling the same kind of "let down" as I feel every time I pick up my phone. I though that once I left Facebook my email correspondence might increase, but there is very little I see of a personal nature in my inbox.

Most of what I get are substacks encouraging me pay to subscribe, messages asking me to support candidates for public office in states other than my own, advertising emails from stores I have purchased something from during the past year or two, countless reminders about medical appointments (five or six about a single appointment), and bulk messages from people I do not know who ask me to listen to recordings and make blogposts about them. Most are in musical styles that I am not equipped to discuss. Clearly the people who send those requests have never actually read my blog.

Sometimes I get a request to review a recording that is both appropriate and interesting to me, but that hasn't happened for a long time.

I still do the stuff that I do, and find joy in the doing. But I feel like I have forgotten exactly how to interact with people the way I once did. When I do send a personal email I worry that I might have said too much, or that the person getting the email message, who is not as prompt at ridding their inboxes of spam and ads as I am, might forget to respond. 

Remember the email exchanges we had twenty years ago, when the internet was young? I loved those days.

I clean my inbox several times a day. And it isn't much fun to do all that cleaning without the reward of having actual contact with living beings. And the degree of instant contact and attention we have been conditioned to receive over the past two decades is unrealistic. But gradually, without even being aware of it, our appetite for attention increases. 

At least mine has. 

This new "normal" (and I guess it is normal and human to communicate in ways that we can control, particularly when it comes to not questioning whether what we say and what we hear is true) is going to take a lot longer to adjust to than I thought.

Clayton Haslop Playing Kreisler

Here's a gentle (and beautiful and exciting) reminder of the some of the beauty that exists and endures in our world:

It is so refreshing to watch this video and hear him talk about breathing, and technical aspects of holding the bow and the violin that I teach to my students (and practice myself).

As well as a woman

Why is it that the question about gender equality in the world outside of the home is so often expressed in terms of women being "as good as" men at various tasks?

Here is a series of questions that generally would be answered with either, "of course," or a resounding "yes."

Can a man raise children as well as a woman?
Can a man cook breakfast (or any meal) as well as a woman?
Can a man do laundry as well as a woman?
Can a man clean a bathroom as well as a woman?
Can a man bake bread as well as a woman?
Can a man garden as well as a woman?

You get the idea.

And now in more ambiguous territory:

Can a man keep track of household expenses as well as a woman?
Can a man read directions as well as a woman?
Can a man help kids with homework as well as a woman?
Can a man keep up correspondence as well as a woman?
Can a man keep track of children's schedules as well as a woman?

Can a man teach preschool as well as a woman?

These would also rank a "yes" in my book, as long as the man has the time, patience, and the interest.

But you never hear questions like this:

Can a man drive a car as well as a woman?
Can a man run a race as well as a woman?
Can a man manage his career as well as a woman can manage her career?
Can a man perform as well on a standardized test as a woman can?

Can a man perform surgery as well as a woman?
Can a man run a business as well as a woman?
Can a man prepare taxes as well as a woman?
Can a man do scientific research as well as a woman?
Can a man play piano as well as a woman?
Can a man teach piano as well as a woman?
Can a man write music as well as a woman?
Can a man play music as well as a woman?
Can a man paint and draw as well as a woman?
Can a man teach college as well as a woman?

Your answer for the above two lists might include reference to the fact that a particular man may or may not have the desire, training, intelligence/ability, or opportunities for study than a particular woman might have.

But if you reverse the gender order of the questions:

Can a woman drive a car as well as a man?
Can a woman run a race as well as a man?
Can a woman manage her career as well as a man can manage his career?
Can a woman perform as well on a standardized test as a man can?

Can a woman perform surgery as well as a man?
Can a woman run a business as well as a man?
Can a woman prepare taxes as well as a man?
Can a woman do scientific research as well as a man?
Can a woman play piano as well as a man?
Can a woman teach piano as well as a man?
Can a woman write music as well as a man?
Can a woman play music as well as a man?
Can a woman paint and draw as well as a man?
Can a woman teach college as well as a man?

your answer would be a resounding "yes."

Think about it.

Female Ancestors

Our son found my paternal great-grandfather's immigration and naturalization papers which informed me that the paternal side of my father's family immigrated from Pruzany, Poland by way of Libau, Latvia in February of 1907. According to family lore the boat sank and all the papers were destroyed, so this is information I never thought I would know.

I also learned that my great-grandfather Jossel Fein, which was Americanized to Joseph Fine, signed his name with an X ("his mark"), which means that though he was a carpenter by trade he could not sign his name. He also might not have corrected the immigration form that spelled Anna's name "Annie" because he probably couldn't read English.

I never knew anything about Anna, my paternal great-grandmother. From this naturalization document I learned that she had just given birth to my grandfather Nathan just before leaving Poland (his birthday was the fifteenth of January, 1907); they reached New York on the fifteenth of February. Nathan's older brother Max was ten months old when the family arrived.

That means that Anna had back-to-back pregnancies, and that she must have had one hell of a time on that trip with two babies. But there was clearly no choice but to leave Poland.

My great-grandfather didn't become an American citizen until 1938. I imagine that the rest of his family became citizens at the same time, but who knows. Who knows about Anna? Was the path to citizenship for Max and Nathan, who were not born in the United States, the same as the path for their two younger siblings who were born here?

And who was Anna? (She is the elegant woman in the upper left). Nathan and Burton were musical, and I know that Max had musical children as well (one was a pianist who studied at Curtis). Did the Fine family's musical nature come from Anna?

The photo to the right of Anna is another Anna, my paternal grandmother. I know very little about her except that her mother was named Sadie Kwitch, and that she came from a shtetl near Kiev. Sadie's husband Philip died in 1931, a year after my father was born, and she married Joe Goren, a fishmonger who had a shop in West Philadelphia.

Anna Fine, My paternal grandmother, who died in 1963, spent the last fifteen years of her adulthood dealing with complications from multiple sclerosis. I heard that she was a great cook who never wrote down her recipes, but other than a story about her telling my father to keep his mouth shut so that he could ride for half fare on public transportation, and my Aunt Phyllis saying that she was like the character of Louey in Maureen Duffy's That's How it Was, I know nothing about her (but how I is wish I did).

The woman in the lower left is my mother's maternal grandmother, Fannie Feingold, who married George Bohrod. They immigrated together from Bessarabia (now Moldova), and had four children. The boys, Aaron and Milton, became important people (Aaron was a painter and Milton was a doctor), and the girls became wives. Lillian, my great aunt, was a happy party girl who liked to play cards. She spent her retirement (her husband's retirement) in Las Vegas, and Anne (my grandmother, who also liked to play cards, became a malignant narcissist. She isn't included in the photograph because I know too much about her.

The last woman is my mother's paternal grandmother known as "Machko," but the records show that her name was Elizabeth "Lizzie" Rabinowitz. She married Israel Blume who was known as the "merchant poet" of Chicago who ran the Cafe Royal (you can read about him here). Israel and Machko also ran a resort up in Michigan. It occurs to me, if only from looking at her face, that my great-grandmother was a person of consequence. I imagine that she handled the business end of the operation, and had something to do with the food. Her son, my grandfather Henry grew up to become an accountant.

Social or Not

It has been several days since I dismounted from Facebook, and I have to say that it is a real adjustment. Since I am writing here (and will remain writing here as long as there is a here here), it is clear that I need to reach out to the larger world and share my thoughts about things that matter to only a handful of people. But they (as in you) are MY handful of people. People who might need a bit of company as they ponder life from their little particular islands.

I also added my face and a few words to Bluesky (@musicalassumptions.bsky.social), but I haven't been able to figure out how to use the app for my purposes.

But I can get news in nearly real time from Bluesky, and it seems mostly to be from reliable sources.

In my snow-covered Illinois world Michael and I are starting to read Infinite Jest. He has taught it, and has a bunch of supplemental material to share with me to bolster the experience.

If The Power Broker helped me understand the workings of the world that we were presented with during the last couple of months, and I am hoping that this book will help me to understand the unfolding of the outside world in the months to come.

As for Facebook and Instagram, I will miss the calligraphy. I will miss the animals. I will miss the musicians and the discussions about music. I will miss the art, and will miss the news about local events, though they often come into my feed--or came into my feed--after the event passed.

If you are a person I know from the Facebook world, please leave a comment here (or on any post). I don't like what has happened to the Meta platform, and I don't like the fact that leaving it (whatever it is) makes me feel like I have lost touch with friends.

I need to remind myself that we are people who live in the actual world, and the actual things we do in that world matter. The high speed of communication in the Metasphere makes my real-time life feel kind of unimportant, which is silly to say, because it is the only life I have. But I choose not to contribute my humanity to a world controlled by a group of money-making entities promoting a set of "truths" that I am not willing to accept.

Waldstein and Other Monuments

With the exception of the "Leicht Sonaten," Opus 49, numbers 1 and 2 (Sonatas 19 and 20), I have only been able to make my way reading through the Beethoven Piano Sonatas at what I call "composer speed." What I think of as composer speed is a tempo slow enough to hear every single harmonic change while playing all the notes correctly. Composer speed is my happiest place at the piano.

I know that I will never have an actual piano technique, and I know that I will never have the confidence on the instrument to ever play it in public. In my house with the door closed and/or nobody listening is my happy piano place.

I do play with my students, and it puts them at ease because they know I am not a pianist, and that chances are I will make more mistakes they they will.

[And, by the way, I need to drop this little aside in about "composer speed." Composers always hear music in their heads at a faster tempo than it should (or even could) be played. That's why composer-generated metronome markings are always too fast.]

Yesterday I made it through the C major miracle known as the "Waldstein." A normal competent performance by a real pianist lasts a little under thirty minutes. My read took three days (maybe forty-five minutes each day). At composer speed the harmonic movement is slow, but at composer speed the music is just as exciting as hearing it played at pianist speed. And after making my way up the mountain of the piece, I have a newfound respect for pianists that have made Beethoven's expressions their own.

Most of the piece fits comfortably in the hands and arms, but how anyone can actually play the right-hand trill at the end eludes me, even considering Beethoven's instructions on how to present the illusion of playing a trill. It is like the tricks that Ricky Jay does with playing cards.

Part of my personal "Project 2025" is to read through all of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas at "composer speed." I have six to go, but those six take up 209 pages. After I make my way reading through the final six (which might take me until March or April), I plan to start the cycle from the beginning again. I do pepper my piano experience with Bach and other diversions, including my old friends Haydn and Mozart, but there is something about the defiant resilience of Beethoven that I imagine (or hope) will continue to give me courage as we navigate our way as musicians through the next couple of years.

Schubert is too hard right now, and I'm still too young for Brahms. Maybe by the time I'm old enough to play Brahms (maybe when I am close to 70, in four years) the figurative sun will rise up to illuminate our world, and I will be able to play some Schubert to greet it.

Those who do . . .

The old saying, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" has always bothered me. It suggests many things that are simply wrong to me. For example, I know that I wouldn't be able to teach anyone anything that I don't know how to do. And I find it immoral to teach anyone something that I am unable to do myself. If it is something that I know can be done, I would send that person elsewhere to learn how.

It occured to me the other day, while talking with a friend, that there should be a category for "those who do." Some of us get joy from doing things, regardless of the outcome. But when that task (project, piece, work of art) is finished the joy of doing soon fades. Giving it to somebody who can enjoy the spoils of doing (an object, a piece of music, a meal, a recording, a household task, etc.-- even a blog post) allows that joy to remain alive, for a time. The goal of creating something that will have a life of its own once it leaves my "care" inspires me to make "it" the best it can be, so it doesn't disappoint (or annoy for its incompleteness or its weaknesses), and inspires me to continue to do.

I once (it was thirty years ago!) met a young composer who told me that he prefers to "have written" than to "write." This was before I started writing music. Once I started writing I realized that I prefer to "write" than to "have written," though occasionally when I hear an expressive performance of something that I have written I feel proud to have played a part in the larger flow of music, and am glad that I put the pitches in the right places, and was able to notate the rhythms and dynamics in such a way that they present possibilities for another human being to engage in the musical lines in a meaningful way.

There is also a joy of doing without having a notated or concrete object to define the end (or doneness) of that doing. When I practice I enjoy the act of practicing. I enjoy the way it engages my mind and my body, and I enjoy the way it makes the next day's practice more enjoyable. I also enjoy the way it makes the "nowness" of a musical experience with others more connected; more about the music itself and less about my ability to play it.

The physical developments remain (as long as they are kept up) but the experience of practicing fades into the realm of memory. I can embrace that memory of a previous "doing" as I try to replicate or echo the value of the experience at another time. 

I suppose it works when reflecting on the "doing" of people who are no longer alive too. People who have left us the options for musical experiences in notated music, experiences with language in all forms of language, or experiences of the visual in pieces of art. Also all the people involved in preserving images on film and sound on recordings. We cannot forget the people who have left us genes and childhood memories, and the people who left us houses, buildings, and streets. And parks.

I know. Memories of my recent reading experiences are showing. Sometimes people we don't know (never would have known) and don't particularly like put their best selves in (worthwhile) things that they left behind. Also, the joy of reading allows us the joy of re-reading. And the joy of discovery of connections between the things we read and the world (literary, artistic, and otherwise) at large is itself a kind of doing.

Now I find myself thinking about a post I wrote this past August about eternity and now, and the joy that it brings me to be able to sit down and write a blogpost to share with you (whoever you are and whenever you read this) on this very quiet and snowy day, before I think about what I want to have for lunch.

The Power Broker

Tonight Michael and I finished Robert Caro's marvel of a book.

We read it in 15-page portions, except when we just had to read more. I can’t say that any book I have read, in recent memory, has taught me more about the way the world we live in works. And for anyone who has ever lived in New York (I did for four years) it throws everything on its ear, and makes you look at the city in a totally different way.

Perplexed about 2025 and its projected major players (power brokers, so many of them)? This book is both a “how to” manual and a cautionary tale about someone totally obsessed with systematically chasing and holding, for the longest time, ultimate power. And the long tail of his power has wagged its way into the second decade of the 21st century, where a good deal of cleanup is still happening.

It is beautifully written. So clever. So honest. So earnest. So satisfying. All 1166 pages of it.

You can look at a preview here.

And make sure to read Michael's excellent post about the book.

Who knows what 2025 will bring?

For anyone who has kept a blog as long as I have (it will be twenty years in February), there is a lot of personal history and writing that you may want to preserve. This blogger platform has been so great for my needs, but I can't help feeling how much I would have to lose if Google could no longer support it.

I have taken action over the past few years to copy most of the posts that I have made (leaving out the ones that only have links, or leaving out the parts of the posts that point to links) into document files and export them as PDF files. I keep those files on my computer, and also have them saved in Dropbox.

If you want to see how I have done it, you can go to this post.

You can also use sitesucker to download everything as you would see it online.