The best ideas

A lot of the best ideas for the project have come from my life partner and self-appointed roadie/driver/recordist, Annelies McVoy.

Some of these are one-time little but valuable things, like paring down my project pitch summary (see yesterday’s post) from 1'50" to 1'35" while making it crisper and zingier. Or specific spur-of-the-moment performance suggestions, like singing Pete Sutherland’s “Robin Hood” with the audience in Sharon in his honor as he lay in hospice, or having Katie Oprea, who spent many years in Romania, play along on oboe to Bartok’s Romanian Dances (with zero preparation or rehearsal) in Bakersfield, both of which were concert highlights.

Some are more pervasive. The “about the piano” feature was Annelies’s idea, and is the most popular part of the concert writeups—and my own favorite aspect of them too.

The title of the project was all Annelies too. This is embarrassing to relate, but we came within days of launching the project with the perhaps lamest name in the history of project titles. 

I was looking for something short and sweet for a URL. The project title was already clear: 251 Community Concerts for a Cooler Climate. But that is of course too long for a URL. I admired the lean modernism of pianist Adam Tendler’s name for his play every state project: 88x50. That model was probably too much in my mind when I came up with (drum roll please)... 

251CCCC

which on further reflection got abbreviated to 

251C4

...I know, I know.

In my defense, I knew better than to act alone: I workshopped the name with my little team of interns. But even a group is susceptible to tunnel vision. We had been using “CCCC” and “C4” as informal texting shorthand for long enough that it sounded perfectly sensible to us. Never mind that the first connotation of “C4” is a military explosive. (We actually thought of that, but convinced ourselves it was not a problem.) Or that it’s not common knowledge, and therefore not memorable, that there are 251 towns in Vermont—hardly the same as the 50 states of 88x50. Not to mention that this number would change within two months of the project launch. Or that every damn time anyone said the URL out loud, they would have to add “That’s 251, followed by the letter C, followed by the number 4.” I thank Annelies for sparing us this fate every time I hear an ad for a company whose name is based on a cutesy trademarked non-standard spelling of a common word: their URL is announced in 1.5 seconds...and then spelled out, usually twice for good measure, for the following 10.

Anyway, there I was, working on my project logo or website within days of our launch, when Annelies looked over my shoulder, saw the 251C4, and said “What the hell is that?” I proudly explained it, she gave me the one-sided lip curl, and said, without a second’s pause, “Play Every Town.” Just like that. Damn.

Promotion and peripheries

I had an “extra” week between the Brunswick (6/11) and Bakersfield (6/25) concerts. Part of that was set aside for a 4-day family reunion, and I thought I’d use the rest to start catching up on concert writeups. However, I received a last-minute invitation to present a 3-minute elevator pitch on this project at the first annual UVM RISE (Research, Innovation, Sustainability, and Entrepreneurship) conference. This was additionally challenging because I decided to use half of that already short time for a compilation video, which meant (a) finally getting around to learning the basics of a real video editing application, Final Cut, and (b) extra effort figuring out how to get my pitch down to just over 90 seconds—as any writer or presenter knows, it takes much more time and thought to write a short summary than a long one.

I was glad of the opportunity to present my project to hundreds of in-person and virtual attendees, including possibly some looking to fund projects (though if so, I didn’t hear from them). After all, one of the main ideas of the project is talking about talking about the climate emergency, and to that end it doesn’t matter whether my audience is attending a concert or a conference. And I’d been meaning to do anyway to produce sleeker concert clips. Also, the video I made may turn out to be useful for other promo purposes. Finally, it was instructive to realize I could condense my core project spiel to under two minutes—in concerts, typically, I think I spend closer to 10 minutes cumulatively describing the different aspects of the project. Going forward I can be more pithy and have time for more music, or more chat specific to the locale and the repertoire.

That said, it really brought home just what a large proportion of my overall project time goes to non-music or para-musical tasks (something I touched on in one of my first blog posts). I spent the better part of four days compiling the video, editing, scripting, practicing, and delivering my presentation, and barely touched a keyboard. This was unusual in degree, but even in a typical week scheduling, promotion, composing concert writeups, finding my local performers and communicating with them, and so on, take up at least half my time, sometimes a good deal more.

Not complaining, just observing. I enjoy having non-music tasks. I like the feeling that I’m working on a music project even when I’m not practicing or composing. Often there’s a natural limit to how much time I can be musically productive, and the adjacent labors can feel like a welcome relief that still feels productive. I remember reading once that the poet Rilke, who wrote in hypercreative spurts in-between long bouts of writer’s block, would complain of being stuck to his friend Rodin, who was unable to sympathize because he was always busily engaged—but that was because as a sculptor, Rodin always had something to do, casting, or finishing, or realizing previously made sketches, even if he was not in a “creative” state of mind.

Anyway here’s the video I made. The first 15 seconds is just a screen capture showing me navigating the Concerts page map to get to a concert writeup. That’s followed by a one-minute, four-concert mini compilation to show the variety of venues, collaborators, music, and pianos. The drone footage of the Silvio Conte National Wildlife Refuge was taken by Neil Bainton just before the concert.

Smoke Gets In My Eyes

Sunday I played a concert in Bakersfield on what was the smokiest day in Vermont history. More of Quebec has gone up in smoke in the last 20 days than in the previous 20 years. For a time, little Burlington Vermont had the worst air quality of any recording station in the United States.

And last fall, in nearby Sheldon, I played on what was the hottest November day ever. As I said in the writeup of that concert, it will surely not be the last all-time temperature record of this project. 

Only a year into this project, I feel the part about “calling attention to” the climate crisis at my concerts is already markedly less called for than when I started—rapidly becoming altogether superfluous.

I’ve always feared that by the time the change in climate was undeniable to ordinary perception, it would be too late to address. Meanwhile, some of the best climate scientists and communication experts say it’s never too late to prevent ever worse outcomes. I want to believe them! But tipping points are tipping points. When systems like the polar icecaps, or the carbon-rich permafrost, or the Amazon forest change state, the effects might be orders of magnitude larger than any human reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, or any human effort to strengthen carbon capture. The falling-off-a-cliff analogy could pertain here, and there's no return from that, not in a human-relevant timeframe.

What’s your hurry, or, Hold my beer while I save the planet

In my last post, I said I would blog and maybe psychoanalyze the feelings behind my urge to complete this project sooner rather than later.

UPDATE: I see I blogged about tempo and urgency once already! Repeating myself in my old age. Apparently I've been more preoccupied with this than I realized.

1. Urgency. This project is my response to the climate emergency, and nothing says “emergency” like “let’s relax and take our time, maybe see how things go”. Come to think of it, that’s exactly how governments and other institutions are responding to the climate crisis, but obviously this is the problem.

I recognize that this thinking is silly on some levels. Like what, the worst climate impacts are going to be averted because I completed my 252 concerts in time? But relatedly, I’m pretty pessimistic about where we are and where we’re headed—a few more years from now, no one is going to need any reminding that the planet is cooking and maybe cooked, and then what’s the point of me tooling around trying to raise awareness? With every passing month of climate news it becomes less fantastical to think that organized society may be coming apart at the seams seven years from now. Our save-something-worth-living window is now, and narrowing fast.

2. Moving on. I’m coming to be identified with this project, which is likely to become the most high-profile thing I’ve done. And I kind of like that, but I don’t want it to define me publicly for the rest of my life either. 

That said, if I proceed at a slower pace, maybe it doesn’t have to be so self-defining; I’ll have more time to do other things too. 

3. Newsworthiness. I feel that some of the project’s romance lies in its ambition, which derives partly from its scope (every town, 252 concerts) but also from its pace. If it takes too long, maybe it won’t catch people’s imagination. And buzz is not just ego-boosting, and not just something that helps the project build audiences and makes it easier to land invitations for performances, but really the central goal. In some sense, what matters most is how people hear and maybe think about it, whether that’s because they attend a concert, follow the project online, or read/hear about it in the media.

But as the project putters along, I’m not so sure that the heroic timeline is so central to its appeal. People seem to find the project inherently interesting and thought-provoking, and media attention continues to ramp up. And even if a slower pace does result in some loss in intensity of attention, the longer duration of that attention might make up for it.

4. Busyness. I’m happier when I’m too busy with my creative projects than when not busy enough. My key takeaway from the little existentialist literature and philosophy I’ve read is that we construct the fiction that what we’re doing matters, and this fiction is self-actualizing. We pretend something matters, and if we care enough, then it does. A corollary to that is that the busyness and sense of urgency that come with a tighter project timeline sharpens this sense of purpose, the degree to which I feel I can give myself over to the project, that I have a reason to get up in the morning (and to practice).

So…did my self-talk-therapy work? It’s anyway made me fully comfortable with changing the goal to seven years from “just under five years” (I’d originally said I would finish by the end of 2026, which would be 4 yrs and 7 months from the first concert). Beyond seven years…I’ll have to wait and see how I feel, and also see if my marriage can tolerate a 3-per-month average as we learn from experience how to do this more smoothly and efficiently.

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium; or, the Five-Year Plan didn’t work so good for Stalin, and it’s not working so good for me

Often people ask me if I’m done yet with my concert project, or how it turned out, or something to that effect. 

I assume these folks have not fully registered that there are 252 towns in Vermont. Or maybe they think I just pull up to the town green with my keyboard, bang out Chopin’s Minute Waltz, and drive off to the next municipality. If I were done now, I would have played about five concerts a week. Not real!

In the initial publicity for this project—and as of now, what it still says on the “About” page of the project website—I said I would complete this by the end of 2026, which is a bit under 5 years from the start, or an average of just over one concert per week.

Yeah, that’s not happening either.

The pace of concerts so far has been a strain. There were no huge miscalculations as to what this project would entail, but several small and medium ones. Among other things, I underestimated the time I would spend on concert writeups, the time it would take to learn the typical Scarlatti sonata, and the time it would take just to do a concert: sometimes a 2-hour drive or more each way, arriving 2 or more hours early to have time to rehearse with my local collaborators, 90 minutes for the concert, time after for breakdown and to schmooze, plus time on either end to pack and unpack. It’s almost always a full day, often a long one. Sometimes extra long because we try to cram in a piano-venue scouting mission or a recreational activity once we’re making the trip—but so far these have been just that, crammed in, which is very much at odds with the “recreational” concept.

My wife Annelies appointed herself roadie, driver, videographer, and (often) dog minder. I didn’t ask this of her: she volunteered. She’s as enthusiastic about the project as I am, hasn’t missed a concert, and (as of now) doesn’t intend to. That said, I don’t know how I would do this if she weren’t my 100% concert-day assistant. Initially I had imagined having one of the project interns come to concerts to do recording and maybe help with odds and ends, but that was before I realized just how long the typical concert day would be. At this writing, I don’t have anything like the budget to pay my interns for 10- or 15-hour road days.

So I’ve started to re-think this as a 7-year project. That would come to exactly three concerts a month on average. If we get better at advance planning, we could arrange one overnight double-header each month, which means we could do three per month while leaving half of our weekends free for other things. And seven years has a nice Biblical ring to it.

I told this to Annelies, and she did not see this as a solution!

Because the pace so far—the pace that has already been a strain, and has cut into our other activities together—has been about three per month anyway, so Annelies doesn’t see how the shift to a 7-year plan is any alleviation. 

Her assessment sounds self-evident. Except that there’s a learning curve to every aspect of the project, including concert-day planning and logistics, and I think that the same pace will be more manageable in the second year and beyond than it was in the first. Greater financial support, which I’m actively pursuing, would also allow some relief, in the form of course releases and more background assistance. But I totally understand her skepticism: this could all be wishful thinking on my part.

For now, we’ve agreed to present just two concerts this July as we take stock and discuss different strategies. This is the opposite of my original thinking, that in the summer I could do 4 or 5 concerts a month to balance out a slower pace the rest of the year, when juggling the demands of teaching and winter travel.

But what we do for any one month will make little difference in the long term, so I can let that go for the moment. And it makes a lot of sense to reconsider the pacing from a place of relative calm, and after having caught up a bit on the purely recreational time together we’ve been missing. Plus there’s a backlog of a zillion concerts I need to write up for the website. And I can look ahead at upcoming Scarlatti sonatas and other repertoire I’ve been wanting to learn but have been too busy to work on. And focus on some auxiliary aspects such as the funding pursuit.

In the next post I’ll look at my reasons for wanting to complete the project sooner rather than later. I think they partly make sense and partly don’t, and maybe blogging them will serve as a kind of out-loud self-analysis to put things in perspective.

P.S. “Or maybe they think I just pull up to the town green with my keyboard, bang out Chopin’s Minute Waltz, and drive off to the next municipality...” Not gonna lie, when I wrote that just now it sounded surprisingly tempting. Maybe I have been going a bit hard.

How to book 251 concerts, part N: super-presenters (impre-CZAR-ios)

Sometimes we reach out to people we think can help us identify a venue in their town. Sometimes they reach out to us. Now and then an angel agent appears who fingers venues or local performers for many towns at once.

Composer Sara Doncaster is the longtime head of the music program at Lake Region Union High School. The typical town in Vermont does not have its own high school but belongs to a consortium of several towns with a single school, the result of a rural and aging population, and the fact that Vermont has the highest number of towns per capita any US state. So Sara knows decades of current and former students from multiple towns. For many years she also ran a new music festival in the Northeast Kingdom, using several venues, so she knows most of the places in her area with decent pianos. Sara has helped us to identify venues or student musicians in Brownington, Conventry, Irasburg, Albany, Lyndon, Newport, Derby, and probably others I’m not recalling now.

Anne D’Olivo is ideally situated to offer us help: a percussionist and singer who has performed and directed church music for years throughout Southwestern Vermont, she is also founder of the local node of 350 Vermont—and was formerly an arts promoter in the UK. She knew the places to play and people to play with in half of the towns in and around Bennington County, and reached out to her extensive network to get information on many more. She organized our Manchester concert, negotiating with the Southern Vermont Arts Center to offer us their fancy facilities at no cost and engaging local favorite vocalist Maxine Linehan, helping to draw a large and enthusiastic crowd. Anne may also act as the presenter or promoter for future Play Every Town concerts in the area.

Special mention goes to Mark Violette. He found us locations in “only” three Northeast Kingdom towns, but as a church music director in all of them, acted as the presenter for all three, making him our only triple-sponsor so far: Brownington, our first “away” gig; Westmore, pop. 357, our first seriously small town, and Holland, Mark’s hometown, date TBD at this writing. 

Jericho write-up

The Jericho write-up is posted, over two months since the last one, the longest gap so far. There was just too much going on at school, plus other project and non-project demands. My backlog is now down from nine to eight.

Like the concert, it’s something of a music history lecture-demonstration on the Lutheran musical reformation. But fun, and with killer guest performances by Rev. Dr. Arnold Thomas, bass, and the Freedom and Unity Chorus.

The demands of art

And so as I was playing the Scarlatti Sonata no. 31, which ought to have been going pretty smoothly but wasn’t, I was stressing about how I’d have to post this shoddy performance in my concert write-up, because I’d committed to posting all the Scarlatti performances—when there suddenly occurred to me an intriguing, even compelling alternative possibility: 

What if, instead of posting every single Scarlatti rendition, I…didn’t?

This might sound silly: of course I don’t have to. But the thing about art, like most human endeavors to impose order on experience, is while nothing is necessary—this entire project is optional—that very optionality creates an existential vacuum that gives the seemingly voluntary artistic aims and conditions an urgency, a compulsory power. Having made a plan to post all the Scarlatti performances, deciding not to feels like a big deal.

This might seem like a form of perfectionism or purism, but that’s not quite it.* It’s more a concern that acknowledging that any one aspect of the project is not obligatory might open the entire project to question. It exposes the truth that none of this has to happen, which aside from anything else risks upending the sense of obligation that is sometimes necessary to keep going. 

I’m not saying that every single aspect I ever contemplated is indispensable. I’m happy with my decision to pick and choose the Scarlatti I post from now on: I think it will let me be in the moment for the Scarlatti and may well result in a better overall musical experience. I’m just saying that letting go of any of an artwork’s aspirations is not a decision that can be made lightly.

*If you’re not convinced this isn’t just perfectionism, consider instead the central goal of playing every town. What if I had set a goal of playing half the towns in Vermont? That could be a thing, I guess, but it would be a whole lot less compelling. Or all the towns of over 500 people...that would at least provide some logic, but it would be more than a little less cool.

One never knows, do one

And then...it was as if Scarlatti saw me coming. Sonata no. 31 is a notch less virtuosic and complex than most of the sonatas in the Essercizi...

And yet, I kind of flubbed it. The piano had a very heavy action—never blame the instrument, but it didn’t help—my vibe was off, it just didn’t happen. You never can tell, especially with first performances.