Alexander King: Guest Blogger

This story comes from Alexander King's 1958 memoir Mine Enemy Grows Older, and I am sharing it here with the kind permission of Margie King Barab. You will notice some anachronistic terms here and there, but I have chosen to forgive this singular man for his prejudices, and the choice terms he used to articulate them.

There was one curious aspect to my life during all those years, from 1917 to 1948, which I have somehow or other forgotten to mention to you before--that for more than thirty years I wore only pink neckties. Not ever any other color, under any circumstances. It finally got to be an identifying trademark for me, although, heaven is my witness, I never intended anything of the sort when I first started wearing them. In fact, I got into this pink-tie addiction when I was only seventeen years old, and believe me, any boy or man who was willing to wear such an unorthodox color back in those dark days of somber men’s attire had to have plenty of guts or plenty of stupidity, or plenty of both, to get away with it. Of course I stumbled into it all, as I fell into most things, by strictly minding my own business, and by just carefully putting one foot in front of the other. I was working on the New York Sunday World when I was seventeen, and I was also doing some cartooning jobs for the Big Stick, a Jewish joke paper that I already told you about. My salary on the World was twenty-five dollars a week, and I generally took long, leisurely walks every Friday afternoon, just to give myself, and those twenty-five bucks, a luxurious airing. These walks often included window-shopping tours ranging from Nassau Street and lower Broadway to Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue up as far as the Plaza. Well, then, loaded as I was, one of those Friday afternoons I happened to stop in front of Sulka’s window, somewhere in the Forties or Fifties, and I noticed that they were having a sale of neckties. Six dollars a tie. I wondered what in hell they could possibly have charged for them before the sale. I felt myself getting even a little indignant about the whole thing. However, in spit of my simmering annoyance I found that I was deliberately walking into their cool, expensive-smelling store. I stands to reason, doesn’t it, that I wasn’t planning to buy anything, and the clerk, whose face looked just like a shinbone with eyebrows, knew this as well as I did. But, like two idle dogs of the same gender who can’t resist their pointless browsing, this clerk and I forthwith proceeded to give the stock a judicious fingering; which means that I sneered disparagingly at the tie-racks, while he kept on constructing smart four-in-hand knots in mid-air, just to show off his really stupendous manual dexterity, and also to make me feel like a cheap piker. This went on for about twenty minutes or so, and I was just about to call off the whole silly ballet by making my exit, when the clerk, who was obviously a pansy, suddenly said to me, “You know, we have some colors that are much less popular, and those ties cost only one dollar apiece. Would you care to see any of them?” “Why not?” I said. “As long as I’m here, anyway. What sort of colors are they?” I’ll show them to you. To tell you the truth,” he said with a confidential smirk, “I’m saving some of them especially for my friends.” This, of course, instantly alarmed me, because I was quite sure that any friend of his was bound to be a leaping faggot, but just the same I decided to take a look. He pulled a box of the shelf, removed the lid, and exposed about two dozen crepe-de-Chine ties, all of then pink. “Not a very great selection,” I said. “How much are they, did you say?” “A dollar apiece,” he said. “They cost us more than that wholesale.” Now, then, who really knows what dark and sinister impulses are crouched and coiled in the recesses of man’s unconscious? Who can guess what terrible unfulfilled longings in a man’s heart are just waiting for the right word, or the right moment, to spring into instant, demoniacal action, for the sake of a long-deferred secret appeasement? In short I bought six of those pink crepe-de-Chine neckties, and, believe it or not, I even had a certain feeling hot high accomplishment out of this demented proceeding. It was as if I’d pulled a particularly cute caper, not just on Sulka and Company, but on all the goddamned expensive shops up and down Fifth Avenue. And that’s how it happened that I came to wear a pink tie to work the next day. I labored, a the time, in the tower of the old Pulitzer Building, down on Park Row, and, when I first took off my coat, the screams, the whistles, the yowls and the yodelings all around me stopped all human activity on that floor for the next ten minutes. But, since I was seventeen years old and a man of my convictions, I ignored this racket and quietly went about my business. My business was to make some black-and-white line sketches for the Sunday magazine section, and so I was able, for a while at least, to ben zealously over my drawing board, without having to meet anybody’s eye. This was certainly a help, but even so it was hard for me to ignore the mad cavortings of the office boys and the various younger staff members, who made it their pleasure to pass my desk forty times and hour in that special mincing gait which has even been the immemorial hallmark of the camping fairy. I don’t know how I lived through that first morning. At any rate, right before lunch I took off my tie and hung it in a metal closet where I usually kept only a pair of torn rubbers. When I got ready to quit work that evening, I had a shocking surprise waiting for me. Somebody on that floor and dipped my tie in a large glue vat that was permanently stationed near the fire exit. That glue had completely dried up and left the tie with a texture like a smoked kipper; but since I knew that a lot of furtive eyes were certainly watching me at that moment, I just dropped my violated neckpiece casually into the garbage can and went home. Fools! I thought. Just a pack of crude, conventional fools. Ah, well, they believed I was routed, did they? They thought they had me down for the count, eh? Well, they’d soon learn different. Damned soon, too! I’d show those mush heads a thing of two--or even five, if it came to that, because, as you perfectly well know, I still had five more of those ties hanging at home in my closet, ready and waiting to be launched whenever the spirit moved me. I was determined to teach all those dopes a lesson, to teach them to respect a man’s right to wear whatever the hell he gooddamned well pleased. And so the battle lines were drawn, and no mercy was given or expected. I wore my pink ties every day from then on, and, do you know, as the tense weeks went by a very funny thing happened. In about a month or so, I couldn’t help but notice that slowly, ever so slowly, the fury and the clamor were beginning to die down. In fact, by the time I’d gotten around to wearing the third of my ties, somebody from the business office, who had never before seen my colorful haberdashery and was just about to launch himself into the gibbering state of epilepsy that the occasion seemed to call for, was stupefied into silence when a few of my nearby colleagues told him to shut his trap and to mind his own goddamned business. You see, the young journalists on my floor had not only become used to my pink ties, they had developed a certain comradely state of tolerance toward my special eccentricity. They had come to consider it their peculiar privilege to razz me for acting out of line, but they all stood defensively by me if any unlicensed outsider ever decided to put me down. In short, after six months of nothing but pink ties, nobody around me seemed any longer to notice that I was wearing anything out of the ordinary at all. And then came a real crisis. I gave five of my ties away to be cleaned, in a store on West Eighth Street, and when I came back a few days later to reclaim them, I found to my error that the place had been completely gutted by fire. It was a real calamity for me, as you can plainly understand. Those pink ties were the symbols of my individuality, weren’t they? And, to a certain extend, they had even become the tangible pennants that I had tremblingly fluttered before a hostile world, to announce my freedom of choice. I just couldn’t let myself down now. I simply couldn’t make my appearance at the office wearing some dark, practical colors, not after all I’d already been through, could I? If I did, all would be lost again. Oh, yes, I could just see all those blubber heads on the paper saying, “Well, you’ve finally got yourself straightened out! Decided to rejoin the human race again, eh? Good for you, boy!” No, no, no! It was out of the question. Eternal vigilance was the price of freedom! that was the basic rule of the game, and I damn well knew it. And so, in this frightening emergency, I quickly hustled up to B Altman’s on Thirty-fourth Street, and bought myself three years of candy-pink crepe-de-Chine material. Afterward I consulted a classified phone directory and found that the Acme Tie Company, right nearby, on Thirty-sixth Street, was prepared to make neckties in small quantities to private order. I had myself quite a time finding that goddamned tie place, too, because it was located in one of those depressing blocks between Eighth and Ninth avenues, where there weren’t’ even any drugstores or lunchrooms to break up the solid facade of grim wholesale manufacturing. Id did find it at last, and it was, literally, just a very small hole in a very thick and forbidding wall. Mr. Aron Buxbaum, the owner, turned out to be a neat little bearded elderly Jew who wore a black skullcap and satin sleeve garters, and who showed no surprise whatever at the unusual color of my material. “I’m in a terrible hurry about these ties,” I told him as I unwrapped the stuff. “How soon can I possibly have them?” “Day after tomorrow,” said Mr. Buxbaum. “We generally like to have more time, but, if it’s an emergency, we’ll just do the best we can.” “Fine,” I said. “I’ll pick them up around lunchtime on Friday.” When I returned, two days later, Mr. Buxbaum handed me a pretty good sized package, and a bill for fifteen dollars. I nearly fainted. “How come, fifteen dollars?” I said. “You’re charging me a fortune. After all, I supplied the material, didn’t I?” Mr. Buxbaum looked hurt. “We do very fine work here,” he said. “You just take a look at those ties, and you’ll see what you’re getting for your money. You’re getting a big bargain.” “Never mind,” I said. “I haven’t got time now, I have to get back to work. I don’t get through until four o’clock.” Luckily, because it was payday, I had a twenty-dollar bill on me, and I was able to square myself. “Wear them in good health!” said Mr. Buxbaum, when I finally stood in the open doorway. “Thanks,” I said. “By the way, how many ties did you manage to get out of that material, anyway?” “Exactly sixty two,” he said. “If you had bought just a quarter of a yard more, you could have had sixty five.” And that’s how it was. Ties, I later learned, are cut on the bias and really require very little material. And so, at one stroke, I had added to my wardrobe a matter of more than five dozen pink ties. They lasted for quite a while, too, and when the finally wore out I just bought some more material and had a new batch made up for myself over at Buxbaum’s. And that’s how it happened that I came to march through the ages as a peculiarly necked man. And then, sometime in 1947, all of my luggage was lost by one of the airlines, and I arrived in New York with only one pink necktie to my name, and one that I was wearing. Well, I naturally went straight up to Altman’s to get myself three and a quarter yards of fresh pink crepe de Chine. I’d made these trips and these purchases quite often during the past thirty years, and I no longer had the slights difficulty in locating the Acme Tie Company on West Thirty-sixth Street. But when I finally got there, old man Buxbaum wasn’t anywhere in sight. Instead, a sort of young and beardless caricature of him was sitting agains the back wall and making entries in a huge ledger. “You’re Mr. Buxbaum’s son, aren’t you? I said. “Yes,” he said, “I’m George Buxbaum. And you, I believe, must be Mr. King.” “I am,” I said. “But how in the world did you know that?” “Because,” said George Buxbaum, “my father is now dead, and you used to be his only customer.” “What?” I said. “You mean that I alone have kept his whole enterprise going?” “If you want to put it that way,” he said. “Actually, the matter is a little more complicated than that. You see, my brothers and I are probably the largest wholesale tie manufacturers in America. In fact, we own this building, which houses one of our four factories.” “And what about this store?” I said. “Ah, well, that was all my father’s wish,” he said. “You see, he came to this country as an immigrant and started to feel ties out of a cigar box, on Orchard Street. My mother used to make those ties on a foot-pedal sewing machine at home. Later on he got a pushcart, and by the time my brothers and I were going to high school he’d managed to get himself a nice little store on Second Avenue near Twelfth Street. Well, to make a long story short, we all of us somehow or other got into the necktie business, and we did so well in it that after a while the whole family kept pleading with my father to retire, or to take it easy, or at least to take some kind of an executive position in one of our plants. but, for some reason or another, he just never had any real confidence in our success. It was all too big and much to vague for him. Everything was done by bank drafts and checks, and in our places of business he never saw any real money changing hands; and so, every time we expanded, or opened a new factory, he just got more worried about us. “Finally, one day he pleaded with us to fix him up this little retail place right here, where he at least could go on making a real visible dollar across the counter. I think he felt that he was prepared to save the family from absolute ruin, when we had all smashed up with our grand and highfalutin notions. So we built this store for him, and for a while he even had a couple of dozen customers that used to trade here steadily. But for the last eight or ten years, the only jobs that came his way were your pink ties. “And that brings me to still another point,” he said. “You see, Mr. King, the whole family always gets together for dinner in my mother’s house on Friday nights, and my father and my brothers and I , we would spend hours and hours, wondering and speculating what could possibly be the meaning of all those pink ties. Some of us thought it must be the emblem of some secret society. Others had the idea that maybe it had a certain religious significance, or something. bu my father--you must excuse me of telling you this--my father was convinced that you were an artist, and that you painted naked girls on those ties, and that you sold them at stag parties.” “You father overestimated my talents,” I said. “No. I had those ties made for other good and sufficient reasons.” And then I told young Buxbaum, briefly, the gist of my story. “Well,” he said, “I’m very glad you’ve explained it at last, because if my father’s sporty is anywhere at all, it certainly must be hovering around this little store where he spent so many years of his life.” He opened a small desk file, and I could see that it contained only one single card. George Buxbaum showed me what his father had written on it. It was in Yiddish.

KING, ALEXANDER PINK TIES. ONLY PINK TIES. WHY? The children think he is some kind of a bolshevik, but I’m sure he only makes a few harmless dirty pictures. He is a good and steady customer. May God preserve him from mischief. And from the police.

On the bottom of this card young Buxbaum now wrote Account Closed. “So you are finally giving up the store,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “By the end of next week the door and window will be walled up, and premises will have been absorbed by the rest of the building. But don’t worry, for old time’s sake we’ll make you this last batch of ties from the material you just brought. You’ll just have to call for them on the seventh floor.” And that was the end of the Acme Tie Company, and that was the last of my pink ties, too, because I never had the heart to take my business to anybody else.

© Margie King Barab

The "Awfulness" of Classical Music?

I found myself unable to comment on this article by Richard Dare called "The Awfulness of Classical Music Explained" (perhaps it just wouldn't go through because I don't do "social media").

If Dare is being serious (and I can't tell), he is one of those people who seems to think that people should be able to applaud where they want to during a classical music concert, and that not being able to applaud between movements is somehow insulting to an audience member's freedom of expression. I think that systematically applauding between movements can be annoying to the members of the audience who like to experience a multi-movement piece as a whole. Not knowing where to applaud is a lame excuse for not knowing where to applaud. Just do an internet search using the words, "when to applaud during a classical concert."

An usher could also explain what those Italian words mean, and why a piece might be divided into parts. Here's a handy on-line guide.

As far as remaining quiet during a concert, I believe reports of rudeness during concerts during the 19th century were truly reports of acts of rudeness, and it is possible (believe it or not) that they were exceptional circumstances. We do know that during the 19th century (and before), concerts were the only way people who were not musicians, didn't employ musicians, or didn't have friends or members of their household who were musicians could hear music. It is rude to other members of an audience (who came to listen) if you interrupt the music to blurt something out at the people who are performing. It's rude to the people performing, and it always has been.

George Bernard Shaw took issue with conventions of how audiences dressed for concerts and operas in 1905. In this letter Shaw writes about the convention of standard "evening wear" for men, and suggests that evening wear for women should be equally uniform. I particularly like this passage, delivered mostly his with tongue deliberately in his cheek:

Not only was I in evening dress by compulsion, but I voluntarily added many graces of conduct as to which the management made no stipulation whatever. I was in my seat in time for the first chord of the overture. I did not chatter during the music nor raise my voice when the Opera was too loud for normal conversation. I did not get up and go out when the statue music began. My language was fairly moderate considering the number and nature of the improvements on Mozart volunteered by Signor Caruso, and the respectful ignorance of dramatic points of the score exhibited by the conductor and stage manager — if there is such a functionary at Covent Garden. In short, my behavior was exemplary.

Then he goes on to describe the women who sat in front of him:

At 9 o'clock (the Opera began at 8) a lady came in and sat down very conspicuously in my line of sight. She remained there until the beginning of the last act. I do not complain of her coming late and going early; on the contrary, I wish she had come later and gone earlier. For this lady, who had very black hair, had stuck over her right ear the pitiable corpse of a large white bird, which looked exactly if someone had killed it by stamping on the beast, and then nailed it to the lady's temple, which was presumably of sufficient solidity to bear the operation.

Shaw does have a valid point: It is distracting to have a dead bird staring you in the face while you are trying to watch an opera, and, by extension, women who wear large hats to concerts and operas should remove them when they are members of an audience.

Dare's points confuse me. Is he trying to be funny? Is he trying to be serious? And what is he doing as the CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic if he is a relative novice as a classical concert audience member (he doesn't explain how many years ago "some years ago" is, so I don't have much to go on). What's going on here? And why does he give his article such a nasty title?

IDPTUTT: I Don't Pretend To Understand These Things

A person I imagine is a Musical Assumptions reader sent me a link to this 2004 New York Times article by Bernard Holland that I found to be great food for thought. I won't duplicate my reply, but I will use this moment as an excuse for a ramble.

Holland touches (without articulating it as such) on the difference between ways of knowing that are best demonstrated by looking at the German "to know" verbs Kennen and Wissen. Wissen could be applied to "stuff you know about," while Kennen is used to talk about things you know personally, like people.

I'm not sure if I could use Kennen to talk about a composer who I have never met, but I suppose could use it to talk about his or her music.

Anyway, my ramble concerns the what Holland muses on concerning the difference between appreciation and understanding when it comes to music. I consider the road between appreciating and understanding music, particularly of the "classical" kind, to be long, winding, dangerous, and always under construction. As a matter of fact, once I think I understand something, I am often proven wrong.

When I was growing up my father used to abbreviate his saying, "I don't pretend to understand these things," as the word "IDPTUTT." I totally forgot about that "saying" until ten minutes ago. He used it to try to explain (or explain away) the interpersonal workings of musicians and administration in his orchestra. I use it to try to explain what it is I know about music itself. Which, I can proudly way is more slanted towards the "easy" slide of the teeter-totter, and we can call "appreciation."

The more I mess with music as a practicing and performing musician, the more I am able to observe patterns, tendencies, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, and "personality" in the music I play, but the more I write, the less I am able to see those things in my own music.

IDPTUTT.

The closer a person is to me, the less I seem to know about the way that person thinks and acts. Perhaps that is the reason we develop close relationships: the element of surprise and delight that they can bring.

IDPTUTT.

I have close friends who have absolute feelings about the teachings of their religion(s). These are really good people who "walk the walk" in addition to "talking the talk," and appear to be certain that their understanding of the universe, life, and their concept of an afterlife is correct. (Some of my favorite composers like Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and Brahms fall into this category as well). My sense of "understanding" anything is constantly in flux, and I can't even imagine what it would feel like to be certain about anything. In a way I envy that singular mindset, but I always seem to pull away from it by trying to learn new things and new ways of looking at and listening to everything.

Perhaps we return most to those things that we can't understand, because we experience them with our senses rather than with our minds. Food would be an example. Some people can conjure up flavor from out of the blue, but when they do it becomes a craving for the real thing. We may not "understand" why we want something, but we are sure happy when we get it. Our senses sing.

It works the same way with music for me.

We can know (as in the verb Wissen) what needs to go together to make a particular kind of food come together, but perhaps it is our senses that allow us to know (as in the verb Kennen that something needs a bit of salt. Or cumin.

And with music it works the same way.

IDPTUTT.

You can supply your own examples. It's time for me to think about lunch.

Studs Terkel Interviews Dorothy Parker

This episode of The Story includes a fascinating radio conversation from 1959 that Terkel had with Dorothy Parker where she describes the "beat poets" as not being very interesting and not really having anything "new" to say (it has all been said before). I love hearing Parker's diction next to Terkel's.

It comes from a commercial recording called "Voices of Our Time" that is made of Terkel's recorded radio conversations with scads of people from the second part of the 20th century. Musicians include Copland, Cage, Bernstein, Segovia, Betty Carter, Mahalia Jackson, and Pete Seeger. There are three more episodes of "The Story" celebrating what would be Terkel's 100th birthday.

. . . and here is a series where Studs Terkel talks about himself:

Mine Enemy Grows Older

My friend Margie King Barab, who is married to Seymour Barab, was, as a young woman, married to Alexander King (she was his fourth and final wife). Margie is in the process of writing a memoir about her life with King, and after reading the draft of Margie's memoir, seeing Alexander King's paintings hanging on the walls of the apartment where she and Seymour live, and seeing video recordings of "Alex in Wonderland" (which belong only to Margie), I could see how as very young woman coming straight out of Nebraska, Margie might have been charmed by this brilliant man. After reading around 100 pages of Mine Enemy Grows Older, I can understand completely why she was smitten.

The book, published by Simon and Schuster in 1958 (my copy is its sixth printing), comes with two dust covers. The one with the cello and the horse (how did Alex know that Margie would marry a cellist after he died?) is the outer cover, and the grey one is the inner cover. The text on the outer cover reads, "NOTE: If this jacket (the author painted it) is too strong for you, take it off. There's a conservative jacket for conservative people underneath."




The reviewer I linked to above (on The Neglected Books Page) seems to think that the book becomes tiresome towards the end. I'll let you know when I get there. But for the time I remain thoroughly entertained. I'm not quoting anything because I taking the copyright warning seriously. I did not take the above photos: they came from an Amazon listing!

If you can find a copy of this book in a used bookstore, grab it.

Handy iPad Stand

Michael prefers to use a doorstop, but we always seem to have a cork or two rolling around the table (and they don't roll once you prop an iPad on 'em). They are light enough to keep in a pocket or purse.

For years I really believed that corks grew on trees:

Burn Relief

It sounds crazy, but two hours ago I was in terrible pain from a "little" steam accident involving vegetables, a microwave, some plastic wrap, and a serious dose of stupidity. I wrapped my finger in aloe (we keep a plant on the window above the sink), but when it began to hurt so much that it made my stomach hurt, I took to the internet and found a discussion about using aluminum foil to treat burns. What? It sounds crazy, but it really does work. It may be because the foil keeps the burned skin away from the air, it may be because the foil makes the finger sweat, and sweat promotes healing, of it might have something to do with the foil itself. I will be keeping this thing on all night (no practicing for me), but I can tell you that it really doesn't hurt much at all right now.

It was also therapeutic to read about the other stupid ways other people managed to burn their fingers.

UPDATE:



After 12 hours (a night of sleep) my finger feels normal. I'm typing with it. It looks a little worse for wear, but there is no blistering. This is really a miracle cure. Aluminium foil! Who woulda thunk!

The Four Ages of Woman or My Life as a Series of Kitchen Devices

When I think about being "young," I group youth into a 25-year continuum of events that ended in an identifiable personality that I sometimes recognize in photographs (and sometimes don't). The kitchen device that most comes to mind is a French press coffee maker (a device that wasn't in common use until after I was 25, by the way). You put the grounds in, you add boiling water, and you press the spent grounds to the bottom, leaving their essence in a uniform beaker of coffee. What you do with that coffee after it is pressed has a lot of variation: the choice of cup and portion size, the choice of sugar, milk, cream, soy milk, ice, ice cream, liquor, and the choice of when in the day you drink the stuff. The main point is that what went in becomes a uniform brew made from the quality of its blend of ingredients.



The next stage of life for me would be a sieve. Motherhood, by its very nature, gives us the gift of forgetting large chunks of the difficult times like the exhaustion and the stages of parenting that are challenging. We are happy to forget the lack of personal time, the isolation, and the knowledge that everything is changing constantly before our very eyes. There is, for a period of time, nothing to hold on to.



My next stage would be that of a funnel. After our children no longer need every bit of our attention, personal substance starts to creep back into our lives. The process of liquid in and liquid out is slower, partially because there is more there. We don't want to spill the liquid because it is precious, but we have to be patient while it works. Funnel technology has been around for a long time, and funnels come in all sizes and can be used for many things.



I have, as of last week, entered a new stage of life that I associate with a new kitchen device: the Vinturi Wine Aerator. This device is a combination of a sieve and a funnel, and is used for that great comfort of adulthood: a glass of wine. The device is a funnel that is constructed in such a way to draw air into wine as it is being poured. This brings out the flavor of the wine, the way pouring a glass and swishing it around for a while brings out the flavor, but it happens instantly, and it makes a nice sound while it works.



We tried it in New Jersey, while visiting with our friends who always have great wine (and I mean GREAT wine), and then we bought two Vinturis: one for my father, and one for ourselves.

Yes, the ideas still need their time to come together, but they are so much more interesting when they blend with the air from the here and now. And they also work best one glass at a time.

Things WE learned on our summer vacation

Unfortunately one of the things I learned recently is that a computer can die suddenly. Mine died yesterday, right after lunch, and during an afternoon that I planned to fill with computer-based work.

Oy.

Anyway, while I was not doing what I planned to do, Michael wrote a terrific blog post about our recent trip to Boston and New York (and New Jersey) that I will share here.

What Edith Mirielees taught John Steinbeck, and what they both can teach us

. . . The only way to write a good short story, you said, was to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, you told us, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.

The basic rule you gave us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from writer to reader and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, you said, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and technique at all—so long as it was effective.

As a subhead to this rule, you maintained that it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of a story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three or six or ten thousand words.

So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that you set us on the desolate lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades you gave my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterwards upheld your side, not mine.

It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done, thanks to your training. Why could I not do it myself? Well, I couldn't, and maybe it's because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

This excerpt from John Steinbeck's 1962 letter to Edith Mirrielees, his writing teacher at Stanford, could apply easily to the experience of writing music.

Adventures in Piano Land

I had the most inspiring music teacher when I was in elementary school. We parted ways after I finished sixth grade, because she married an Asian history scholar who built harpsichords, and left Massachusetts for Ohio. Pat and I were out of touch for a decade or so, but I happened to find her phone number in a listing in the 1985 Boston Early Music Festival catalog, and called her to let her know that I was moving to the midwest. It happened that she and her husband were just about to leave Ohio (perhaps even that week) and start a piano museum in the small town of Ashburnham, Massachusetts.

Michael and I went to Ashburnham (which is a 75-minute drive from Boston) on Tuesday, and Pat and I saw one another face-to-face for the first time in more than 40 years. Aside from the obvious signs of age, neither of us had really changed; and when Pat demonstrated the awe-inspiring array of pianos in their collection (all of them restored and in perfect playing condition), I felt like I was floating around in some kind of timeless abyss involving my journey from childhood to adulthood, and the piano's journey from the kind of instrument it was during Mozart's time to an instrument we might think of as a grandfather to the "standard" 20th century piano. (To add boggle to nostalgia, one of the most recent pianos in the collection just happens to be the same model Mason & Hamlin piano that was in my high school music room--getting its "heart and soul" battered about by thousands of adolescents through the years.)

If you live anywhere around the Boston area, I would seriously suggest planning a day trip to visit the Historical Piano Study Center. Hearing Beethoven (or playing Beethoven) on the same kind of piano Beethoven used, hearing Brahms (or playing Brahms) on the same kind of piano that Brahms used, and hearing (or playing) Debussy on the same kind of German (!) piano that Debussy used, changes everything.

Click here to see a photo listing of the pianos in their collection as well as the ones waiting "in the wings" (ugh Flügel--I couldn't help it).

What We Talk About When We Talk About Fugues

Sean Mallone has a new blog called Contrapuntalism that I am certainly bookmarking and planning to visit often. This post has a very clever grid-type chart that helps clarify the various contrapuntal features of some often-used forms, particularly forms used in the baroque period. There's lots of stuff about pencils and music paper too.

Why is it so and not otherwise?

Coleridge is famous for saying, “Nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.” That has been the cornerstone of my creative life since I found it in Malamud's The Tenants when I was a teenager.

Writing music is often a case of serial (or non serial, in my case) problem solving, and there is usually one solution that appears to be better than all the others. When I look at music by Bach, particularly the Toccatas, I notice that he tends to exhaust all possibilities of "so and not otherwise" by spinning out each possibility systematically. His answer to the question of "so" and "not otherwise" is to make the "so" big enough to encompass the "otherwise," and he is able to do it in a way that remains interesting and engaging throughout. Most of us mortals are lucky to find a "winner" among the choices, and that "winner" sometimes displays the qualities necessary for it to live as a musical phrase, a chord progression, a choice of dynamic, or a kind of articulation.

The choices we have when we play are far greater, and they are far more difficult to identify or duplicate. And when we duplicate something it usually comes out sounding "duplicated." Nobody wants that. It destroys the creative element in music making, and simply cannot "permanently please" if it is "canned." In playing the "why it is so, and not otherwise" has to come from a larger feeling, a sense of the moment, a great degree of concentration, and a whole bunch of experience. "Why it is so, and not otherwise" often becomes "because that's the way I play it," or, in the case of something worked out through practicing, "because that's the way the phrase needs to go."

This post is actually a ramble. My original thought for it came from watching a group of people talking on one of the Book TV channels. I don't want to name names, but two were well-known writers, one was a relative of a well-known writer, and the other was a person from the world of acting known for reading (aloud) the works of one of the writers. Everyone in the panel was "of a certain age," and at the end they took questions from the audience.

One woman stood up to ask a question. She mentioned (right away) that she had written a book, and she told the panel on stage that people told her that it wasn't a book because it was self-published. She mentioned that she carried it around with her alongside two self-published books written by one of the writers on the panel. Her question for the panel concerned the need to ask permission for validity, and ultimately she was asking how she, who admired the people on the stage, could maker her way to be valid they way they had validity.

The answers from the people on the panel didn't really address the question.

I thought about how I would answer her question, and my answer, which might have been informed by the Coleridge quote, wouldn't do her any good. What she really wanted was to have someone on the panel say, "Let me see your book, and I'll tell you if it it is a real book." Then she would be able to connect herself with the accomplished person on the panel, and use that connection to get to the "next level." She would have been happy if someone in the audience (and there were well-positioned people in the audience) would look at her work. She was asking, in a very public way, for validity, while asking at the same time why as a woman writer she felt the need to ask permission to be a writer at all.

She brought up a question that could really make a good panel discussion in itself.

Aside from a couple of serious acts of misogyny (which make me cringe and I will NOT duplicate here), Coleridge said some more clever and insightful things.

Film Music: El Hotel Electrico

I have always wanted to write film music, but I have never gotten the opportunity, so I decided to try my hand at writing music for this 1908 film by Segundo de Chomón.



The score and parts are in the IMSLP.

Appalachian Spring Full Ballet with the Original Cast

What a treat it is finally get a chance to see Graham perform this ballet!



Here's the rest:

Appalachian Spring Part 2
Appalachian Spring Part 3
Appalachian Spring Part 4

and here's an excerpt from the ballet with Hawkins and Cunningham that is mentioned in the comments!