Thetford write-up

 ...here. Accompanying Linda Galvan on the cello pieces was a delight, and I posted them easily and cheerfully, without the common cringing at things I should have done better. 

The “local color” on the Camp Fire Girls was already taking the concert review pretty far afield, so I didn’t see fit to also include this, but I will here. Just days before the concert, I came across the following news item. It was helpful; as a result of the article I decided this was not the trip for scouting out other locations in the area via back roads:

Flat tire spike in Thetford blamed on sharp rocks meant to mitigate mud season

According to the Town Manager quoted in the article, the road crew had “wanted to try a different material that would provide traction, but hopefully not contribute to the degradation of our gravel roads.” The change was prompted by last year’s mud season, which many Vermont residents said was the worst they could remember—a consequence of climate change. 

But what the article didn’t say was that this probably wouldn’t have been a winter story—that is, people would not have been encountering so much free rock to get in their tires—if January had not also been one of the warmest on record.

Ludlow write-up

 ...is here. It includes observations about the United Church’s remarkable Shingle Style building, longtime Ludlow resident Ida May Fuller (recipient of the first-ever Social Security check, who eventually received 925 times her total contributions), and, via Don Quixote, the relation between activism and mental health. 

When I told the bit about Social Security to my physical therapist, she said “...and that’s why there will be nothing left for us.” So, first of all, no; Social Security is pretty secure, and could be completely paid for decades into the future with just modest changes like raising the income cap on contributions. 

But more importantly, why should the Social Security program have to break even? Do we expect federal highways to pay for themselves, without general revenue funds? What about the Department of Defense? 

The linkage of Social Security benefits to a payroll tax was, as much as anything, a political move on the part of President Roosevelt. It was a way to overcome resistance to the idea of a social safety net by making the benefit into something that each worker has to at least partly earn by paying into the system. 

The link is real, both in the sense that tons of money flows into the federal government through payroll taxes, and in that individual benefits are tied to the length and amount of individual contributions. But that does not change the facts that the linkage has its origins in overcoming American resistance to the idea of unearned government aid, and that there is no reason the program should be expected to cover 100% of its expenses any more than any other public service has to.

Where was I? Oh yes, the write-up has pictures, descriptions, and clips of the concert, also, too.

Mega-media and monopolies

Following up on my last post. Of course I could solve the context problem by using another platform to host my videos, one that lets me embed them without making them otherwise publicly findable. But in the present moment, if a video is not on YouTube or Vimeo or the like, it feels like it’s semi-hidden. Which I guess is what I’m after, but it feels at cross purposes to the goal of increasing overall awareness of the project.

Likewise I’m not a big Facebook fan, but for now it remains a go-to for promotion of all kinds, and keeping a project off the platform is self-limiting. 

There can be positive aspects to monopolies and monoliths, like the expectation that you can check just one or two major clearinghouses to find information about an event, or that you can share files in universally comprehensible formats (DOCX, PDF). When the organizations that regulate these quasi-monopolies are well-governed, distributed, and not for profit, like Wikipedia or the MIDI Manufacturers Association, the results are often excellent. When they’re private and for profit, results are often at least kludgy (Word) and not infrequently dangerous and malign (insert social media platform of your choice). 

Richmond write-up

The Richmond write-up is up. I was happy I could include shout-outs to Cochran’s ski area, where I learned to ski on moving to Vermont, and to xkcd. It was the last of my 2022 performances not posted, so my backlog is now down to three concerts, all fairly recent.

Why did it take three months to wrap this one up? Partly because it came after a long string of closely spaced concerts that took a while to document, but also out of self-consciousness: it took me a while to settle on what clips I was comfortable posting. 

As I’ve noted before, recording the concerts and putting recordings online is at cross-purposes with working to stay in the moment and not focus on product. In the case of Richmond, I knew I wanted to include at least some of the Brahms F minor clarinet sonata: it was the centerpiece of the program, and we played the whole thing, a substantial investment of practice and rehearsal. It was the one collaborative piece, and I’m pretty sure the full and enthusiastic house was largely due to the presence of homegirl Ginny Churchill.

And it was fine; we put it across. It was warmly received, and people applauded after each moment. But every movement had messy moments, and all but the third had at least one real clunker. In the context of live performance, or of this project as a whole, or of the ambitious goal of doing a collaboration in every town, it was a job well done. But a published recording is different. It isn’t a matter of mere perfectionism or unrealistic standards; wrong notes simply matter more in recordings than they do live. 

Whatever I put up on YouTube kind of has to stay there, because the clips are embedded in my write-ups, and the write-ups are integral to the project. If I were curating a YouTube channel for the purpose of showcasing my pianism, I would be much more selective. Most concerts wouldn’t have anything that I would post. I feel fine about people listening to these clips as part of the concert write-ups; but if people come upon them out of context, I worry about the level of editorial selectivity they represent. I’m please that I’m putting together the Scarlatti sonatas as quickly as I do, including the thematically and numerically customized ii-V-I improvisatory preludes. Yet if I were to chance upon some of my own Scarlatti recordings—by searching for recordings of a particular sonata, for instance—I would not listen through, and I would wonder why the performer had chosen to publish them. (I’d also be pretty confused by the intros, I guess!)