Blogging vs. flogging

For some reason I come to these blog posts with a different attitude than for the rest of the website, social media, and other public-facing elements of this project. Every form of writing is filtered, and entails (I think) some attempt to give order and meaning to experience, and usually some desire to cast the writer in a good light. But I feel comparatively freer and more open in my blog posts, more confessional, more willing to discuss self-doubt and shortcomings. 

I’ve talked about bad performances, for example. Not only would I not put second-rate performance clips in the concert summary postings, I wouldn’t even allude, in that venue, to the obvious fact that the recorded selections there are curated, and that there are performances from each concert (plenty!) that I would never, ever post online.

This distinction between blogging and the project’s other publicity is a little silly. I mean, this blog is embedded on the project website. Still, I welcome the freedom to let it all hang out here, even if that freedom is arbitrarily self-granted. And limited. Like even here in the blog, I wouldn’t mention my insecurity about performing while 15 pounds above my ideal weight. (oh whoops)

Anyway, the original impetus for this post was just to say, if you are a blog reader but not checking out the rest of the site, that a lot of my energy documenting this project is going into the write-ups on the Concerts page now, more than to this blog. Check them out!

Point of order: towns, villages, gores, and grants

This Saturday’s concert in Jeffersonville prompts me to revisit the question of community place names.Someone asked me “Where are you going to play in Moscow?”. I say “Nowhere—didn’t you hear I stopped flying?” Haha, I kid, I know they meant Moscow, Vermont. But the answer is still “nowhere”, at least not for purposes of fulfilling this project mission, because Moscow  is not a town but a village in the town of Stowe, whereas I will most likely play in Stowe (village), which is…also a village in Stowe. I get similar questions about other villages. As I wrote in a post back in May:

In Vermont, “towns” are large-ish areas defined by boundaries that were mostly set arbitrarily by distant power brokers in New Hampshire or New York, usually long before there was much European settlement within those borders. “Villages” are clustered settlements within towns: the places you’ll probably find a church and maybe a general store, town hall, railway station (as in Essex Junction) etc. Towns can have multiple villages. Villages can be incorporated or unincorporated, but in either case they are still a part of their surrounding town and are not counted in the tally of Vermont’s 251 (soon 252) distinct municipalities.  

This project is Play Every Town (and city), not Play Every Village. It is understandably confusing. Many towns, like Stowe, have an eponymous village. Or back to this weekend’s concert, I will be playing my Cambridge performance in Jeffersonville, not in the other village in Cambridge, which is…Cambridge. 

Adding to the confusion, a few villages are located in more than one town, like the nearby village of Underhill Flats, which straddles Underhill and Jericho.

And I didn’t even trouble you with the onetime Cambridge “hamlets” of Pleasant Valley, North Cambridge, and East Cambridge. As far as I can tell, a hamlet is just a smaller village, but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Except that some villages are officially incorporated, meaning that they have at least some services and taxes, such as water or sewage, that are in addition to the services provided by the encompassing town. But even Vermont’s 35 incorporated villages (soon to be 34, I suppose, when the village of Essex Junction becomes an independent city on July 1) are not counted in the official 251 (soon 252) tally of towns and cities. Like Essex Junction, most of Vermont’s 10 (soon 11) cities came into being when large-ish villages calved off from their parent towns.

I don’t have an official Vermont village count, and I don’t think an unarguable count would be possible. But many towns have multiple villages, so I am guessing a fair tally would be around 600. Some are officially incorporated, others are Census Designated Places but not government entities, others are barely detectable historical relics from a time when a few dozen homes a few miles distant from the next village was occasion enough for another post office or general store. And since Scarlatti wrote only 455 sonatas, I can’t play in every village, as this will make clear.

Then there are a few towns without villages, because they are almost or completely without people. I’ll be playing those towns too, because they’re on The List. And as I mentioned in the May post referenced above, I’ll play the four gores and grants for an even 256, lest I leave blank spots on my concert map. More about those another time, I have to go practice.

Be here now?

Thinking about my last post, where I said that one reason I’ve been blogging less is that I’ve been too busy doing. And that the “doing” is mostly logistics: booking, publicity, locating/assessing piano venues, finding local collaborators. In other words, everything but playing music.

And also, I’ve spent a lot of time creating the multimedia write-ups of the first four (so far) performances on the Concerts page of the website. When I was young, one often saw persons of a certain nationality,* a people known for its dual loves of travel and high-tech gadgetry, in places of touristic interest. It was common to make gentle fun of the fact that these people were so busy photographing every moment of their trip that they seemed not to be actually experiencing any of it directly.

Well, they won. That’s most of everyone now, walking around protected from direct interaction with the world by their smartphones. If they’re even present at all (as opposed to texting, scrolling, gaming) they’re often engaging with the world behind the lens...or they’re in front of the lens, engaging with it.

Not exactly the same thing, but all the logistics and oversight and documentation for this project reminds me of when Alan Gilbert began as music director of the New York Philharmonic. He decided to blog about it, which was doubly cool: blogs were not associated with the buttoned-up world of elite orchestras, and also, back in 2009, blogging was just still...cool. 

You can read his first post here, but the gist of it was: being Music Director of one of the top orchestras in the world, the one he’d dreamt of leading since he was a boy in NYC, is 10% musical activity and 90% shit work. (I’m paraphrasing; he was much more diplomatic, and he didn’t use any bad words.)

This resonated deeply. I had similar thoughts about my job in academia, which was ostensibly 40% teaching, 40% performance, creative, and scholarly work, and 20% service...but in actuality was about 65% teaching, 30% administrative work (much of it of little consequence) and 5% actual “doing music”. But I was an associate professor at a regional state university, not artistic leader of a world-class orchestra. It was both astonishing and oddly reassuring that Maestro Gilbert felt the same way.** That it was not, even where he stood, all rainbows and unicorns.

Then, if I recall correctly, he never wrote another blog post about his directorship. Which was kind of QED: who has the time?

*I have learned well from my mother, diplomatic and respectful to an extraordinary degree, who literally told jokes like so: “Three members of an ethnic group walk into a bar...”

**Particularly since Alan and I were at college together, where he was just another talented young guy. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the time I beat him out for a plum college conducting gig. (Spoiler: my triumph had zilch to do with our relative conducting skills.)

Still here

Long time no post. Don't know if anyone was noticing the hiatus, but I note that readership is up a bit (views deep into double digits for one post!) so I thought I should explain. 

For one, I’ve been in thrall to the project’s relative success so far. That is, I’ve been swamped with booking, publicizing, fielding media queries, and working with my team of crack interns in beginning to delegate a lot of those tasks—which is ultimately a time-saver, obviously, but in this ramping-up stage is sometimes more work than just doing something oneself. Especially when one’s self, too, is just feeling out as one goes how to do all these things for the first time. Oh, and also there’s a b1t of practicing, rehearsing, touring, and performing (all non-delegable).

For another thing, a lot of my energy for documenting and diarying has gone towards creating the writeups of each performance on the Concerts page of the project website. Soon, after I implement an improved script, clicking on the town in the map on the Concerts page will present you a link that jumps to the writeup for that concert. For now, you can just scroll through them (they’re in alphabetical order; not hard to scroll through as there is a grand total of three posted so far).

Hoping to get back to somewhat steadier blogging tempo now that our booking and PR etc. procedures are beginning to take shape as manageable routines.