By the way, this is why human beings sing.

(Richard Thompson on guitar)

Nameless Mass

I like the title Missa Sine Nomine, by Josquin des Prez (c.1450-1521).

yellow lawn, raisin challah French toast, boulder to birmingham

1. The lawn is just as it should be at this time of year: drought-yellow, scattered with curled brown leaves of hackberry and rose. I pour it a deep long drink, and the grass laps up the water like a dog at its bowl.

2. Without even stopping to shower, before the kids wake up, I make myself raisin challah French toast.

3. I want to slow my body rhythms, ease off from the endless self-interruption, the food-gobbling, the ever-up-and-down chore-running. Well, at least my earworms are at a slower tempo:

That Big Rockin Chair Won't Go Nowhere

John doesn't have a Music Friday post today, not yet anyway, and I wanted to do one in any case.

I've been thinking about mortality lately -- "What, because of a kidney stone?" Well, yes, it was the first time I ever rode in an ambulance and the first time I ever had general anesthesia. A couple of days later I heard the song "Rockin Chair" on one of my Pandora stations, and its been singing in my head ever since.

The version I heard was a dignified, moving homage by Death Cab for Cutie on the tribute album Endless Highway.

And here's the real thing:

simple, small, maybe

1. I like simple things. Japanese brush painting. Early Hemingway. Three-chord songs. Art turned down so much it explodes. I suspect that not only will I never achieve it, but that given my personality, my history, my aptitudes and limitations and environment, my neural wiring, it’s exactly the wrong goal.

2. Or maybe I’m a born miniaturist.

3. Maybe.

your friend the brain, it’s the arts, it’s all a conspiracy

1. The human brain has no delete function, yet there has never been a case of one running out of storage capacity.

2. Stories are an attempt to see the future. Music is an attempt to undo time. Painting is an attempt to unfold space.

3. Society is a vast conspiracy to miss the point. But that may be the only way we can get where we’re going.

the last inexplicable fact in the universe, recipe for iced coffee concentrate, the ultimate secret revealed

1. Sales of cake are steady year-round, but sales of pie spike around Thanksgiving and again in late February. Why late February? No one knows.

2. Why did the laws of physics arrange it so that a pound of coffee steeped in a gallon of water for twelve to sixteen hours will produce a perfect iced-coffee concentrate? The units of measurement aren’t even metric.

3. Three o'clock: the grandfather clock's chimes harmonize perfectly with the indie-rock song on the speakers – and by “harmonize perfectly” I mean with a charming slight dissonance. The singer goes:

Last night I had the strangest dream
Where everything was exactly how it seemed.

How rare it is to grasp this truth!

chocolate brown parasol, hot key, Tejano soldier

1. Woman with a chocolate brown parasol, in a billowy white blouse, brown pants, tan leather handbag, walks past a half-built house with its pale tan walls, brown trim, half-exposed white drywall: a color scheme!

2. Getting out of my car on a June day, I put the key in my mouth as usual. It burns my lip.

3. The dusty old dark blue Ford Bronco has a bumper sticker: "My Brother Is in the Army."I pull up alongside at the light: its windows are open, Tejano music -- or is it conjunto -- is coming out: the worst music on the face of the earth! Oom-pah bass, polka-pumping accordion, jauntily would-be-seductive baritone. A horror beyond description! Is there anyone I don't owe my life to?

They say girls mature faster than boys, but...

On the bus to day camp, the girls sing:

Found a peanut, found a peanut,
Found a peanut just now

and the boys sing:

I lost my virginity to the killer queen

Nomination for the Academy of the Overrated

Glenn Gould, ladies and gentlemen.

It's bad enough to hear him turn Mozart's piano sonatas into the perseverations of a manic robot (and why play a piece if you hate the composer's work? unless you're such an anti-establishment rebel that you record what the label executives tell you to), but he turns the Two-Part Inventions of his beloved Bach into the twitchy expostulations of a streetcorner mutterer.

How much extra credit does one deserve for being a near-psychotic crank and recluse?

And about this worship of classical soloists: they're playing other people's notes.

William Blake’s neighborhood, Texas radio, Indian blanket, spilled tea

While the service guys were installing the air conditioner coil, I was in the study writing a lesson on Romantic poetry for high school seniors. Blake’s neighborhood in London, Lambeth, during his ten years there “was already acquiring the characteristics of a peculiarly repellent urban slum with wretchedly built and undrained houses,” according to his biography, and with Industrial Revolution encroachments: “a stone manufactory and a wine factory, potteries and dye-works, lime kilns and blacking factories.”

Finishing a long day in the eighteenth century, I sank onto the couch to bathe deep in one of my customized radio stations, the one with Texas music. Lucinda Williams “Blue,” Tracy Chapman “Never Yours,” Neil Young “Star of Bethlehem,” Carrie Rodriguez “Never Gonna Be Your Bride” which is about Austin musicians, Eliza Gilkyson another Austinite, James McMurtry “Choctaw Bingo,” whose lyrics have the most knowing details of Oklahoma redneck life you could possibly imagine. John Prine “Angel from Montgomery,” which is one of the possibilities I might have mentioned if God had ever offered me the chance to write one song in the whole world. But there are a lot of songs in that group.

Out back, the wildflowers can’t stop blooming. For weeks it’s been deep in magenta flax, and now tall stalks of orange and red Indian blanket stand above them. In the past when I’d tried to sow wildflower seeds nothing happened, but this time I sprinkled one packet of seeds over the little plot and kept the soil moist like the directions said and the sun did the rest. Across the yard, the antique rose bush sprawls untrimmed like a teenager, pink blossoms on every twig, branches spilling over the old raw wood deck almost to the bur oak. Looking at it through the window while typing this and getting up to check the quote about Blake, I knock over the half-full mug of rooibos tea that’s on the coffee table. Fortunately the tea stain is more or less the same color as the jute rug.

That’s at least four beautiful things but I can’t help it.

The Festival at 3 a.m.

The last links of jalapeno smoked sausage have been washed down with wildly inappropriate wines. From the tentsites in the hills come guitar chords and whoops of celebration, and no one shouts, “Hey, I’m trying to sleep.” You sit at a campfire with people you don’t know, listening to songs you’ve never heard before. You half-stumble in the dark on the path to the community toilets, moving aside into a branch of a juniper to let two lovers pass on their way to their tent. Down in the hollow you stay another half-hour to watch the fire dancers twirl their flaming torches behind them and through their legs and across their shoulders as they bend and turn and arch their backs to a fierce song strummed by a hoarse singer.

If you spread your sleeping bag at your host’s campsite you’ll just toss awake listening to the song circles at the campfires. So you keep walking past the darkened outdoor stage, past the entrance gate, to the rocky, rutted farmer’s field that’s the parking lot, and for ten minutes you search for your car. Sometimes a couple or a threesome walks nearby, uncatchable phrases fluttering like batwings. Eventually you fit your key into the door lock. You perform a number of tests to see which would be less uncomfortable, curling up in the back seat or lowering the front seat, and your head knocks the rearview mirror awry and you knee knocks into the gearshift. The rear windshield is damply mud-specked but is that an almost-full moon through it? No, it’s the white light from the parking lot lamppost.

You get into position but you’re still awake. It’s a matter of waiting now, waiting for your mental state to shift, for hybrid animals, long-gone friends, and movie stars to appear and the landscape to change like a slide show, and then for it all to bow goodnight and sink away. You watch your consciousness slow down, speed up, a leg twitch, a new thought, a replayed conversation, a remembered face, will your mind spin till morning, which side will the sun rise on, will you wake up with a neckache, and is there any reason not to feel that this is the peak moment of your life?

Sir George Martin Kidnapped by Terrorists!

h/t: my brother Steve

Prodigies and Cousins

Have you been keeping up with the scandal in the classical music world concerning Joyce Hatto, the elderly pianist whose widower released CDs under her name that contained clips plagiarized from other pianists'recordings? The recordings won Hatto widespread praise; a critic called her “the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of.”. It's become a juicy gossip topic in that little world, and you can read about it here and here.

I'm not interested in Joyce Hatto, but one of the letters to today's NYT about the scandal contrasts the fraudulent Hatto with a genuine "prodigy of old age" still living and performing: Ruth Slenczynska (pronounced Slen-CHIN-ska), who is my late father's first cousin. Here is what the letter says about her:

[T]here is a legendary living pianist, Ruth Slenczynska, who was a world-famous child prodigy but is now in her 80s and still teaching, performing and recording with her own age-defying hands. Madame Slenczynska is a neighbor of mine, and I have the pleasure of hearing her practice daily.

She is a true “prodigy of old age” — not unlike her teacher and mentor, Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Les Dreyer
New York, Feb. 26, 2007
The writer is a violinist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

I've heard about this cousin all my life but alas, have never met her. What I've heard is that she was a genuinely top-tier child prodigy in the 1920s and 1930s, touring major European cities, playing with major orchestras, actually being called -- this will kill you -- "the greatest piano genius since Mozart" by critic Olin Downes. Then, in justified rebellion against her tyrannical father, she stopped performing at age 15. Later she returned to performing and was for many years a member of the music faculty at Southern Illinois University. Now she's retired in New York.

I've got a couple of her wonderful CDs, including this one of Schumann.

In 1957 she published a book about her life as a child prodigy, Forbidden Childhood. It's very hard to find now -- I've found copies listed in used bookstores in the UK and Australia for well over $100 -- and oddly enough, one of the jacket designers is listed as "Andy Warol." I think I know who that is, with an "h" added -- the late 50s were the era when he was making a living in commercial art.

Here's a catalogue showing libraries where the book can be found.

Trying to achieve a successful concert career as a pianist is one of the slimmest bets there is. In another branch of my family -- well, among my soon-to-be-ex-in-laws -- I have a cousin by marriage named Mark Salman who is as technically accomplished and stylistically interesting as the big-name pianists who make millions from concerts and CDs. Why does one career become global and another remain regional? Many theories can be broached, but if you love classical music, you'll be doing yourself a favor by buying any of these CDs, on which you can variously find Beethoven, Schumann, an obscure but brilliant 19th century composer named Alkan with a tragicomic life story, and contemporary piano-cello duets.

Take a Load Off

It was so windy in Ithaca last night, even hardened Wisconsites were squealing, "It's too cold!" So we slipped into restaurants and lounges and drank brandy and port and laughed about things we'd done, until people at the next table wanted to hear the story too and I told them, "It's too embarrassing!"

This morning I wake to this view:




Unlike those who might wake up to this view.

So after a trip to the complimentary continental breakfast bar and a dash outside to sample the air, I retreat to my room and take a look at something pretty:



Later, a country drive, assorted cafes, and a night of music from talented students.

h/t: Amba the Revelator

A Valentine from Richard 6.0

Belatedly, in my 50s, I find that I have all the problems of a gifted child. Transitions and big moments are hard for me. Holidays, vacations, house moves, big purchases — I’m liable to ruin them by sulking or retreating or throwing a tantrum. I don’t know what’s expected of me, and I get angry at those who expect something. When a good time is ending, I’m likely to say something that ruins it, perhaps because I don’t know how to say I’m sad it’s ending.

Valentine’s Day has often been a bad day for me, and thus for those who’ve loved me. I have a big romantic streak but I’ve mostly hidden it, out of embarrassment. I never quite believed that I was supposed to murmur endearments, declare my devotion in impassioned phrases, let myself be swept off my feet; stranger still, I never quite believed that others wanted that from me. (“It never entered my mind,” as Sinatra is singing while I type this.) Only in the past few years have I learned to show my romantic self, and I’ve loved it. And I’ve learned that the best thing to do on a special occasion may be precisely the clichéd, corny thing I always looked down. Buy the flowers, buy the candy, light the candles, dim the lights. You don’t have to feel bad because you’re not chartering a jet to fly her to Paris. Or because you’re not as above it all as you thought.

The saving grace amid my ignorance and immaturity has been that I’m able to learn, and to teach myself when no one else will. There’s a saying, “When you lose, don’t lose the lesson,” one of the many adages, mottos, and slogans with which I cement the rough-hewn stones of my personality.

So I keep fixing the bugs and glitches. I calculate that I’ve gone through at least five versions of the Richard software and have just launched the sixth:

1.0: childhood (a naïve, enthusiastic startup)
2.0: adolescence (a huge flop – almost sank the company)
3.0: first marriage (brought me back a long way)
4.0: bachelorhood (this version didn’t stay on the market long, but earned big profits)
5.0: second marriage (I thought this would be a perennial)
6.0: ?

Whoever gets version 6.0 is going to get the benefit of a lot of trial and error, late-night sessions and working breakfasts. But during the upgrade, I don’t have a valentine.

I’m planning to spend it like any other day. Wednesdays are my busiest evenings, come to think of it: group therapy and tai chi. The tai chi attendance will be light, and those of us who make it will throw each other bouquets of wry half-smiles.

Who will be my next valentine? And when? A year from now, five years, ten? I can handle any of those answers. I have good things to learn from being alone, giving myself time for reading, writing, solo walks, and long, recklessly confessional emails. Evenings and weekends of stepping out the door without a plan, but with a smile.

There are special pleasures, though, in observing forms. So I need to ask someone to be my valentine.

Reader, how about you?

Beauty Is What Matters

The radio is playing one of his divertimenti for strings -- they didn't give the K. number, but it sounds like a really early work, rhythmically straightforward, not much dazzling embellishment or many lightning leaps from idea to idea -- it must have beeen written about the time when Haydn said to papa Leopold Mozart, "I swear to you before God and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name."

All over the world we are celebrating his 250th birthday, in a global audience that sits with one shared multicolored dreamy-eyed smile, as in the audience shots in Bergman's film of THE MAGIC FLUTE.

Some people carp and say that he wasn't enough of an innovator. He didn't break apart old forms and install new ones as Beethoven or Debussy did; he didn't even resuscitate old styles and refashion them, consolidate them, raise them to unprecedented grandeur, as Bach did. He was content to take what he found and do it better than anyone else. He simply wrote down, as fast as he could, what he heard in his head: what the inexhaustible source poured out. He was content to be God's songbird.

Mozart shows up the fallacy of avant-gardism, and that in itself seems like a new thing in this day and age. Thousands of graduate students sit in seminars solemnly nodding, "Yes, Professor, we will question authority. Yes, Professor, we will transgress." Mozart laughs at them. Some art shocks and breaks rules, but those qualities are not what make it art. An artist who does nothing more than invent his generation's device is insuring that his work will end up irrelevant. He might as well have built a horse-drawn plow. It might have its place in history, but who today would want to use it?

Students in art school nowadays are taught that art is not about creating beautiful objects. They are being taught wrong. Listen to Alicia de Larrocha playing the Piano Concerto No. 27. That's all the argument I need.

December 8, 1980

We were living in an NYU-owned studio apartment on the fifteenth floor of Washington Square Village on Bleecker Street. I was awaiting the publication of my first book and writing the second one; Ann was in her last year of law school and pregnant with our first child, who, three months later, we decided to name John.

The clock radio woke us, and the first sound that came over it was an announcer’s voice: “We’ll have more about the murder of John Lennon after this.”

We sat bolt upright in bed. Had we heard correctly? It had come to us at the tail end of sleep, maybe he had really said some other name, or not the word “murder.”

But when the commercial was over, we learned that it was true. Then we remembered hearing an unusual storm of sirens when we’d gone to bed around midnight, sirens which we now learned had been a couple of miles north of us.

I remember the disc jockey, Scott Muni, vowing that morning that as long as he remained in the business he would open his program each day with a John Lennon song. It was no harsh restriction, there were so many songs. Scottso had been one of the first wave of deejays to interview the Beatles in America. He was legendary in New York from the doo-wop days of WABC-AM, and in 1980 he was program manager at WNEW-FM, which was at that time the leading progressive commercial rock station in town.

I remember getting two phone calls in the next half hour or so, one from each of my younger brothers. The middle one was a rock musician up in Albany, and we sobbed together and agreed that Lennon was the most important of all of them, and like a father to us. The youngest brother was a newspaper reporter in Binghamton, just a year out of college, and he was so upset he didn’t want to go to work that morning. I told him it was important for him to go to work: he was a journalist, he had to confront hard things.

Our style of wisecracking had been learned from Beatle interviews and press conferences. Countless times we’d quoted his lines from HELP or A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, and sung along with “I’ll Cry Instead” and “Slow Down” and “Hide Your Love Away.”

Once in the 1970s, when we were living up in Yorkville, Ann and I went with a childhood friend of mine to a fancy French restaurant, Residence, on First Avenue in the lower Eighties. Sitting at the next table were John and Yoko. It was the window table and John’s back was to the room. His hair was shoulder-length, and I don’t remember whether he had a beard or not. We sat near them for almost the full length of our meal. None of the other diners approached them. At one point John and Yoko went to the bathroom together. She was pregnant with Sean. At the end of their meal, the maitre d’ brought them a tray with lots of liqueurs, and they chose samples from it. I have no memory of what I ate, and probably wasn’t noticing what I ate at that moment.

My childhood friend was a Wall Street lawyer at the time and has gone on to much greater prosperity. During our meal, he tried to minimize the importance of this closeness to greatness: he himself, he said, knew all kinds of big shots, such as financier Michael Milken and the president of Columbia University, and so he took such encounters in stride.

“What’s the matter, Cone, why are you acting so intimidated?”

“Because he writes better songs than me,” I said.

Another anecdote: a different friend of mine, who lived on the Upper West Side, was sitting at a glassed café terrace on Columbus Avenue with his Chinese-Filipino girlfriend one day, when John and Yoko went strolling past. John noticed my friend’s girlfriend and stopped suddenly and stared at her through the window for minutes on end, before Yoko came to scold him away. My friend’s girl wasn’t outstandingly beautiful. The man liked Asian women.

Some time on the morning of December 8 I went out for my daily jog, a few circuits of Washington Square Park. Or maybe it was the next day. I think I remember that it was a chilly gray day, much as it is here in Austin today. And I remember how quiet and still the streets were. Few people were out walking. There were no laughing groups of young people.

All that weekend, no one could think or talk about anything else. There were moments of silence around the world. Radios and TVs were on all the time and there was little conversation. We were all waiting for signals about how next to show our grief. I got sick of the song “Imagine,” especially as quoted by the very authorities it challenged. What I imagined was poor John Lennon being reduced to that one song, treacly and nihilistic at the same time. There were so many other songs.

We went to a law students’ party, and one guy, a student’s husband, a short, plump, blond-haired young man, told us that he and his wife lived on the Upper West Side and had been out walking at the time of the murder, just a couple of blocks away, and had heard the horrible sirens, and without knowing anything about what they were for, he had suddenly begun to cry as he walked home.

I didn’t go uptown to join the throng outside the Dakota apartment building or light candles or place flowers. I don’t like displays for the cameras.

That’s all I remember about that weekend, and it’s more than I wish there were to remember.

UPDATE: Read Ann's version here.