Climate chaos continued: Please don’t come to my concert

The upcoming Vershire performance is in the Town Center Building, and was initiated by (among others) the town clerk. It is truly a town concert. 

And the town has asked residents to stay home.

Vershire is on its third prolonged thaw-out of the year, and it’s still weeks before the traditional start of mud season. To make matters worse, the road foreman just quit because he was fed up with the constant complaints of townspeople who misdirected their frustration with the new climate at the road crew. To keep things from deteriorating further, and to avoid mishaps, the town has advised those on dirt roads to stay off them.*

I’ve already played on Vermont’s smokiest day ever and the warmest-ever day in November. Now we can add the muddiest March.

*Note to out-of-town fans: the main roads are fine. Please come!

A travelogue of picture-postcard charms

The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue

Of picture post card charms
Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm   

—Joni Mitchell, “Amelia” 

This project has given my wife and me the gift of sending us all over the state and getting to know its towns and villages—something we’d always meant to do, but never made the time for. In concerts and surrounding publicity, we emphasize the joy of experiencing Vermont’s surprising variety of landscapes and communities, and say that eschewing flying and staying close has been anything but a privation.

Yet even though we’re not scrambling from airport to hotel to venue like Joni Mitchell, we’re not exactly dawdling about. Fitting the concert journeys between the obligations of home, work, and pets waiting for our return; allowing time to set up and rehearse with local collaborators; practicing often to the last minute because of my commitment to playing concert-specific repertoire and a fresh Scarlatti and Scarlatti intro every time (what was I thinking?); then talking to the audience after, breaking down, and packing up—all this means that in 9 concert trips out of 10, there’s maybe 30-45 minutes left for anything else; a little bit more when we do back-to-back dates on successive dates with an overnight in between. 

My wife says we’ll need to do the tour all over again after it’s done, this time without any concerts. As it is, most of the time we have only have time to grab a photo or two of the venue and maybe walk the dog for a half-hour afterwards somewhere nearby. Even though we’re not going far, we’re acting like hurried tourists, and rushing to grap a few shots of the town to post in the concert write-ups can feel performative, inauthentic, Instagrammy. A travelogue of picture-postcard charms.

Partnerships and perfectionism

Just had a lovely concert (no. 49) in the Fairlee Town Hall. 

Including a collaboration with a town resident, which I thought of as an optional bonus feature when I started out, has become a vital component of each program for me. We haven’t had a concert without one since the early days of the project. 

I’ve also developed the habit of programming pieces relevant to key features of a town or key dates in its history. For instance, in Fairlee, I played Mendelssohn’s G minor “Venetian Gondola Song” because it spoke to the image of pleasure boats on Lake Morey painted on the Town Hall’s historic stage curtain. I also played Ernie Burnett’s “Steamboat Rag”, not so much because of the pleasure boating, but because the lake’s namesake, local resident Samuel Morey, built the first operating steamboat here* (yes, before Fulton’s Folly) and sailed it on the Connecticut River. And I played a variety of pieces from 1913 and 1914, the years the Town Hall was built and dedicated.

Such programming connects each concert to its town. But the most meaningful localization, maybe, and for me the most fun, are the resident collaborations. A couple of times it’s been with someone who lives nearby but works in the host town, and now and then a native son or daughter currently living elsewhere. But I’ve been strict that the connection has to be to the very town, not just the general vicinity.

In Fairlee, we had a couple of false starts in identifying a collaborator. But with less than two weeks to go, Deecie Denison (who also donated the Town Hall’s historic 1898 Chickering grand) connected me with a talented young songwriter, Robert McNelly, a high school senior who joined me on vocals and guitar for a couple of his own songs. I had already resigned myself to foregoing the collaboration part of the program, and I was delighted when Robert came through and kept us from breaking the streak. 

Then at the start of the concert, Kristin Post, the local emcee, introduced him as Robert McNelly, from Corinth. 

Not even an adjoining town, but one over. 

Of course I was still glad to play with him, and his songs were excellent, and he was a hit. Still, I thought to myself, rats, we didn’t quite check that box, oh well. 

Then I had the perhaps even more neurotic thought “but I don’t have to put that in the write-up, and no one else has to know...”**

—————————

*Actually I think Morey lived across the river in Orford NH at the time, but he later settled in Fairlee. And anyway the Connecticut runs between the towns so the boat voyage was just as much in Fairlee.***

**And you know what? I may have copped to it all here, in the blog, but I still might not put it in the “official” concert write-up. Instead I’ll probably finesse it: instead of saying “Fairlee” or “resident” in reference to Robert, I can use a non-specific term like “local”.

***But even that’s not so clear. The NH/VT border was long in dispute, and wasn’t settled until a 1933 US Supreme Court decision, which placed the border at the low-water mark of the Vermont side. In other words, virtually all of the river lies in New Hampshire (since 1933 anyway). Here’s a Seven Days article on the topic.

La Malinconia

Part of the reason tor the winter concert hiatus, beside the holidays and family gathering time, was a January composition deadline. I wrote Five Songs Without Words for the Stonybrook Contemporary Chamber Players, an ad hoc group of crack graduate students at SUNY-Stonybrook, for their annual premieres concert in April.

As the title promises, these songs have no words; they’re fully instrumental. But each carries a suggestive poetic epigraph. For the penultimate song, a pensive duet for violin and clarinet, I quoted a 19th-century Italian poem, La Malinconia, famously set to music by Vincenzo Bellini. This ode to Melancholy is not just a good fit for my piece, but also a remarkably apt description of my geographical life-arc—we spent years in the flatlands of the midwest feeling like exiles, aching to get to the mountains and to the northeast—and of my no-fly, Vermont-focused concert project and lifestyle. Fitting, as well, that the poet’s name, Pindemonte, appears to mean “mountain pine”.

Melancholy, gentle nymph, one who despises your pleasures is not born to true pleasures...
I asked the Gods for hills and springs; they heard me at last, I will live satisfied,
Never past that spring will my desires carry me, never beyond that hill.    

Silver linings

To the tune of “NYC Has No Power” from Friends:

Things are looking bad for Boeing
Fuselages are exploding
But I have no fear of dying
Cuz I am no longer flying

Note for people of the future:

Federal officials order grounding of some Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners after plane suffers a blowout (Jan. 6, 2024)

Playing as the ship goes down

At the start of every semester, I ask my students to share a surprising fact about themselves. Two years ago, I learned that my theory class included the great-great-nephew of one of the cellists on the Titanic. Like approximately everyone, I’d always been struck by the story of the band playing to the very end. Impressive as it was, though, it had the soft blur of legend. The presence of this descendant in my classroom gave that existential fable a reality it hadn’t had before.

A few days ago, for the first time in at least 125,000 years, the average temperature of the planet was 2C above the pre-industrial baseline. Of course, this was a transitory high, not the sustained, possibly civilization-ending +2C that we’re supposedly still trying to avoid; still, until recently, the sustained +2C was not expected before the 2060s, and now we seem likely to get there decades ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, based on what we’re already experiencing at +1.2C, many climatologists now consider +2C too high for the maintenance of organized society. 

As all this befell with next to no coverage in the major media, it occurred to me—not for the first time—that not only is my little project is not going to Save The World, the world may well not be saved. And even though the project has confirmed the claim of climate activists and psychologists alike that activism is the best cure for despair, paradoxically, committing to a cause can also make you more vulnerable to feelings of futility. It’s hard not to be frustrated by the at best miniscule effect of your efforts when they’re taking up a big part of your life energy. If instead you do nothing…then nothing you do is in vain. Nihilism keeps you from playing the fool.

Anyway, my starting thought here was that at my concerts, even those who share my dim view on the odds for a decent future express to me their enjoyment and their positive feelings about what I’m doing, and about being there. It's a feeling somewhere between playing as you go down and not going down without a fight.

Salisbury writeup

...posted.

As I wrote there, this was probably the finest piano on the tour so far...even though I thought that I don’t believe there is such a thing, as instrument quality is not on a one-dimensional scale.

As I did not write there, I was not able to take full advantage of the piano’s crystal sound and exquisite responsiveness due to sleep deprivation. My wife and had been out until 2 am the night before: on returning home from the Ferrisburgh concert Friday evening, already played out but at a reasonable hour, we found that our recently spayed puppy had torn a stitch, and we spent the next several hours in the emergency vet hospital waiting to get her stapled back up. 

But an extraordinary instrument helps make everything sound good, so it was maybe lucky that I had such a fantastic partner to help me along in my dazed state. I just wish I’d been alert enough to really nail the Mozart Sonata K.545 (which I played entire, not just the Rondo as written on the program) because it was the ideal Mozart piano—I would have loved to get that on video. 

I also kind of pawed my way through James Scott’s Frog Legs Rag. I learned it as a gag because the concert beneficiary was the Vermont Reptile & Amphibian Atlas. But it turns out it’s a classic for a reason—it’s extraordinarily catchy both to the ear and the fingers, and really merits greater preparation. Well, I’m going to keep working it up, and in fact I have occasion to play it in the Starksboro Piano Crawl this Friday because it was written in a year I needed, as I'm pegging my repertoire to the building construction and piano manufacture years, and I needed a piece from 1906. Two actually, one for the old Town Hall’s Witney piano and one for the Baptist church’s Albrecht. The other will be Charles Johnson’s Dill Pickles, the second rag (after the Maple Leaf) to sell a million copies of sheet music.