Franklin writeup posted

Franklin (almost a year past) was the first of what will eventually be 13 Canadian border town concerts. As I relate in the writeup, it was once the staging area for an invasion of Canada by Irish Republican American Civil War veterans. It is thus implausibly timely for our present insane historical moment, which is the reason I bumped it to the front of the queue as I deal with the backlog of 40 or so undocumented performances. That, and so I could have it up in time for St. Patrick's Day tomorrow.

As with Williston, I got maybe carried away with the interesting context. But this is what makes the writeups fun for me. I approach them as artistic creations just as much as the programs. Maybe more so: they are like compositions, and as people sometimes say about art, a way of making experience make sense. 

And they give the project a sense of solidity and completeness. Also I have a sieve-like memory, and without the writeups, past concerts would quickly dissolve into a hallucinatory vagueness.

complete comic by Kate Beaton here

Williston write-up posted

Here. I got maybe a bit carried away with some of the town context. But it’s a big part of what’s fun to me about the writeups and about the shape of the project as a whole. Of course, for most of the towns I know very little to start with, and not that much more even after reading and visiting. Because we lived in Williston for 5 years, and because Williston looms large in the contentious debate over development in Vermont, I had more to share.

It’s been a long time since my last writeup. Almost 6 months. I’m now about 40 behind—more than half of the 77 completed concerts, with the oldest undocumented concert almost 2 years old now. 

But my crack webmaster, UVM CS major Lindsay Hall, has designed an improved concert writeup template that allows for more flexible and easier-to-compose layout. And with each video clip I’m getting a little more fluent with Final Cut, my editing software. Clearly I need to examine how much background and detail I put into each writeup, but I’m optimistic these developments will help me get through the backlog in a few months.

It’s also been a long time since my last blog post—about 4 months. I have a lot to say, but recent events make me feel different about what’s worth saying. Also just other, non-earth-shaking life stuff has kept me extra busy. Still, a bunch of my thoughts do want to get said, so that will happen eventually.

the bells that still can ring

(thoughts after defeat)

I never thought we’d “win” the climate fight, that we’d stave off catastrophe. It’s always been about harm reduction, trying to do what we can to so things get less worse.

That remains true if the baseline of hope, what we can reasonably imagine can be saved, just got knocked down a piece, though it’s hard to get up and keep going after a big defeat. In an interview with Norman Solomon, peace activist Fred Bronfman said:

I find it hard to have much “hope” that the species will better itself in coming decades. I have also reached a point in my self-inquiries where I came to dislike the whole notion of “hope”. If I need to have “hope” to motivate me, what will I do when I see no rational reason for hope? If I can be “hopeful”,  then I can also be “hopeless” and I do not like feeling hopeless.

When I looked more deeply at my own life, I noticed that my life was not now and never had been built around “hope”. Laos was an example. I went there, I learned to love the peasants, the bombing shocked my psyche and soul to the core, and I responded — not because I was hopeful or hopeless, but because I was alive.

We respond because we are alive.

Back to Leonard Cohen (I guess things are dark when the appeal is to Cohen)—

I’m on the side that's always lost against the side of Heaven
I’m on the side of snake-eyes tossed against the side of seven 

Time to pick up the silver captain’s bars and pin them to our shirts.

Paralipsis, or, this is not a blog post

It feels like Nov. 5 changes everything, including the concerns of this project. So it would be weird not to post anything about it. On the other hand, I have nothing I want to say at this point, in this space. So I’m not writing a post-election post.

“Fight On” by Pedro Molina

National News: Local Man Does Local Thing

So last week’s Wall Street Journal feature on the project has had a pretty big impact. More about that in another post. Here I just want to talk about the story’s karmic genesis. 

I’ve courted press coverage since before the project launch, including from a couple of national publications. A core goal of my project is to amplify and normalize conversation around the climate crisis, so (ego aside) I see media attention not just as a means to boost the project but also an end in itself. Thus far though, none of my efforts to gain national notice have come to anything. 

The WSJ’s Betsy McKay, on the other hand, randomly walked into a concert at a senior living center in Rutland Town where she was visiting her parents, who were residents at the venue. The performance, unlike virtually all the project concerts, was semi-private, on account of Covid and the distinguished age of the core audience. Although Rutland Town, with almost 4,000 residents, is not small by Vermont standards—it ranks 40th in population out of 252 towns and cities—it has few public buildings, the villages having been absorbed into what is now Rutland City or split off into what is now West Rutland and Proctor. So I wasn’t so much “settling” for a non-public venue as I was fortunate to find any group space with a piano where I could check off Rutland. And I like playing senior centers. (The way a lot of concert audiences are trending these days, likewise the median age of Vermont’s population, behind only Maine and New Hampshire, I play to a lot of seniors anyway.)

But for all that, playing a no-fee concert at a senior center feels distinctly beneficent, a mitzvah. I think it’s sweet—and exemplative—that the project’s first major* national recognition, a front-page feature in the country's largest newspaper, happened because I played a small rural retirement home.

*There were two previous out-of-state stories: this early story was picked up by the AP and ran (among other places) in USA Today, and this regional feature in the Northeast edition of the AAA’s Explorer magazine by Kim Knox Beckius, who did a fantastic job of capturing the project in under 200 words. These, too, came about organically, not directly from my outreach efforts.

Wolcott writeup

Posted this yesterday. I rushed to get it up in time for the publication of a feature in the Wall Street Journal that mentioned the Wolcott concert and included a video clip from it; I wanted to be able to include a writeup link in the WSJ piece.

As I mention in the writeup, Wolcott made the list of concerts marked by climate-chaos-caused weather extremes. Originally scheduled for June, we had to postpone it because of a freak tornado warning; while the entire state was under a tornado watch. It was a standout concert for happier reasons too—our first house concert, it was in the chapel built by Steve Young after Medieval Norwegian and Scottish models. You can read all about that, with links to more info, at the writeup.

I may have buried the lede a bit—the WSJ article was a big deal for me! But that will get its own post.

1/4

I’m writing this after completing 64 concerts: one quarter of the way through the project. (A quarter of 252 is exactly 63, but I need to play the four gores and grants too, as I discuss here, which makes 256.)

For months, I’ve been looking forward to this landmark as the appropriate moment to post an initial statistical summary, breaking down the first 25% of concerts by venue type (church, former church, town hall, performance center, library, etc.) and variety of piano (age, make, model) and audience size and town population and donation total and collaborator repertoire and demographics and all kinds of groovy things, maybe even throw in some 4:3 color glossy jpegs, with circles and arrows and a paragraph underneath each one explaining what each one was...

And I’m still gonna do a post like that. Sometime soon I hope. 

But this has turned out to be a different kind of milestone than I expected, and one which prevented me from doing the legwork for that summary stats post just yet: a high-water mark of burnout. 

As I’ve posted before, motivational ebb and flow is natural in any long-term project. It's not the concerts. They keep going well, and I keep getting better, and it’s still fun to meet new collaborators and new pianos and new audiences and see new towns. 

It’s the preparation, not just logistical but musical. It’s too much. I need to pare back how much I customize each program to its locale. The resident collaborations are one thing, but I’ve also taken to playing music written in key years of a town’s timeline (e.g. the year the town was founded, the year of its first meeting, the year the venue was built, the year the piano was manufactured) plus pieces thematic to town history, like “Magnetic Rag” in Brandon where the electric motor was invented, “Steamboat Rag” in Fairlee where the first steamship launched, “Atomic Power” in Vernon where I played at the site of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant, “Beets and Turnips” in Wardsboro where the state vegetable, the Gilfeather Turnip, was developed, etc.

Lately at least a handful of pieces on each program have been keyed to the location, on top of the collaborative repertoire. Audiences like this, and I enjoy the serendipity: it’s fun to build programs around pieces I “have to play” for reason of some theme or arbitrary chronology. But it’s getting to be a too much of a good thing—too much music to learn. (And too much time looking up pieces to fit the bill!) And of course there’s the new Scarlatti sonata each time. 

I’m not about to quit the project, though. Whenever I wonder if it's worth it, I run into someone who enthuses about it, or I get an appreciative email or card or comment. In the course of my performances, I’ve already run into two musicians who were part of (separate) ensembles that aimed to play in every town—endeavors which petered out long before completion. I don’t want that to be me! As Scott Ross said about recording all 555 Scarlatti sonatas in just 15 months: I’m not patient but I’m stubborn.