A provincial pianist, part 4

“I want to celebrate being a country pianist...but I want to do so as if I’d been dropped here by accident instead of at the Wigmore Hall or Musikverein.” (A provincial pianist, part 1)

This is almost the exact scenario of “The Music Copyist”, a wonderful tale by “underground storyteller” Spencer Holst. The central event is a student recital presented by a local music teacher in a small Midwestern town. Though attending reluctantly out of family obligation, the title character finds himself charmed by the kids’ spirit and joyousness, when to his astonishment the final little piece on the program is swapped for a famously difficult, monumental piece for enormous forces, in a life-changing transcendental performance.

Can’t say more without spoilers. You can listen to an online audio version (starts at 13:14) read by the author with musical interludes by Tui St. George Tucker, who was the inspiration for the otherworldly music teacher in the story. The track streams for free (pay to download). 

If you want to read it instead, you can find it in Holst’s collection The Language of Cats. Not clear if there’s a legal online version. Currently you can “borrow” it with a free account at the Internet Archive; whether the borrowing feature is in compliance with copyright law is disputed, and if the rights holder lodges a complaint, the story may not remain available at the link.

A provincial pianist, part 3

My musings on my pianistic place in the world call to mind a well-known E.E. Cummings poem. (I see it all over the internet, on reputable sites, with no copyright notice, so I conclude it’s OK to post here in its entirety.) Reading it as a kid in New England, I assumed Cummings was thinking of some village church in New Hampshire or Western Massachusetts, much like the venues of the majority of my Vermont concerts. Which would have been perfect, but apparently it was inspired by the photo below of Saint-Germain-de-Charonne, a church in an outer arrondissement of Paris. 

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying
– i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april 

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness 

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains 

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
– i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing 

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness) 

A provincial pianist, part 2

 Yesterday I wrote:

I recognize that there are multiple facets of musicality, and I may be phenomenally wonderful at certain specific things or specific pieces.

Oscar Peterson was a giant. Superlatives are always a bit silly, but if they had to pick somebody, most listeners would say he was the most all-around technically proficient jazz pianist of the second half of the 20^th century.

The second half. Because at the all-time pinnacle of the pantheon of jazz pianists, technically at the very least, sits Art Tatum (1909-1956). Fats Waller, another stupefyingly magnificent technician, once stopped playing when Tatum walked in, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m just a piano player. But tonight, God is in the house.”

When Peterson first listened to a Tatum record, he stopped playing for weeks. (This is a common reaction.) He eventually got back to it, but during one of his first US nightclub residencies, when Tatum came by to check out the young Canadian phenomenon, Peterson froze, quickly finished the song, and refused to play any more. Then, as Peterson relates:

[Tatum] told us to come by this after-hours joint and he’d see what he could do with me. I was totally frightened of this man and his tremendous talent…We went to the club, and Art told me to play. “No way,” I told him. “Forget it.” So Art told me this story about a guy he knew down in New Orleans. All he knew how to play was one chorus of the blues, and if you asked him to play some more, he’d repeat that same chorus over again. Art said he’d give anything to be able to play that chorus of the blues the way that old man played it. The message was clear: Everyone had something to say. 

Such a beautiful story! And so Peterson was forever cured of his Tatum terrors. Haha no. Peterson continues:

Well, I got up to the piano and played what I’d call two of the neatest choruses of “Tea for Two” you’ve ever heard. That was all I could do. Then Art played, and it fractured me. I had nightmares of keyboards that night.

This story is precious for so many reasons. At face value, Tatum’s anecdote is brilliant, kind, loving, truth. There’s the added kick that it’s freaking Art Tatum, the greatest pianist who ever lived, telling us even he was humbled before this country piano player. And then the fact that Oscar freaking Peterson, of all people, needed the charitable affirmation and permission to be himself. 

Finally, there’s the gritty realism of Peterson’s admission that even this beautiful epiphany at the feet of the master was not an instant, all-time cure-all. Apparently, some of us need to remember and meditate on this lesson repeatedly to overcome self-doubt.

A provincial pianist, part 1

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
—Robert Browning 

One thing I’m coming/not coming to terms with in this project is how I compare to other pianists. I’ve figured out I’m not Horowitz. But when I prepare a piece in the standard repertoire I listen to him—and to all the best pianists of the last 100 years, so easy now thanks to YouTube. And of course I compare my playing to theirs. 

This is not a bad thing. It’s 90% constructive comparison: What are they doing? How are they doing it? I didn’t know you could do that!

(Then I’ll come across a performance by some recent conservatory graduate with great promise but no big name, and I’m not even in that league.)

I’m getting better, too, from my practice, from all this listening, and from learning more music (50% of it Scarlatti) more quickly than I have in decades. But I’m also aware that I don’t, and may never, have the pianistic prowess of my YouTube models. 

People tell me after my concerts that what they heard might have been anywhere. It was amazing! We could have been in Carnegie Hall! And maybe I believe that of my best moments. I know musicality has multiple facets, and I may be phenomenally wonderful at specific kinds of things or particular pieces. But I don’t believe I’m competitive in an all-around way with what I think of as “real concert pianists”, as flattering as it is to hear people say otherwise. 

I was expressing these thoughts to my son. He said “Isn’t that one of the main points of your project? That you, that this, is good enough?”

He’s right. But I seem to want it both ways: I want to celebrate being a country pianist, fulfilling a Vermont need without me or anyone having to hop on an airplane—but I want to do so as if I’d been dropped here by accident instead of at the Wigmore Hall or Musikverein. 

Yes and

Last summer my wife and I biked over to the neighboring town of Starksboro. The village had always seemed a little moribund to me on casual drive-throughs. I think it’s partly because the old general store is shuttered. Maybe also because it’s a mostly linear village, that is, the public buildings and most of the residences lie all on one road, without any significant activity on cross streets, which to me always makes a village feel incomplete. 

But you should never trust drive-by impressions. Turns out there are several public buildings of interest. I’d made plans to check out the old pianos in the old community church, which the town has been renovating, and upstairs in the library/town hall building, which some folks are also interested in resuscitating.

Like a lot of big century-old uprights, both pianos have solid bones and rich sounds but plenty of issues. The Meeting House is a humbly awe-inspiring space, the stained-glass windows and striking kerosene chandelier casting an orange-red glow on the roughly square intimate interior. But the piano hammers are bone-hard, allowing for a dynamic range from ff to fff in the acoustically boomy space. The Town Hall’s upstairs has a quaint old stage and similarly venerable piano, which makes some nice sounds but has a few nonworking keys. And the rickety stairs, no ramp or elevator, restrict access. I wanted to support town efforts to revitalize theses traditional gathering places, but neither piano/space was appropriate for a full-fledged concert.

Meanwhile, on an earlier pass through the village I’d snooped (as one does) into the windows of the other church in the village, the First Baptist, looking for pianos. (Were there ever two Baptist churches in Starksboro, I wondered, whose population back in more churchy times never reached 1,500?) I could see there was an upright piano of some sort and made a note to come back and check it later when Jan McCleery popped out the back door and asked if I needed any help. In New England, “Can I help you?”, when asked of a stranger on the property, usually means “go away”, but she asked in a kindly, inviting—I want to say Christian—way, and when I explained my project she proudly showed me the not one, but two old uprights in the church, one in the sanctuary and one in the community room below. Both in much better shape than those in the Town Hall and Meeting House. Jan said the church would be enthusiastic about hosting our concert.

But that wasn’t my first piano inquiry in Starksboro either. About a mile outside the village is Camp Common Ground, a wonderful inclusive family camp. They had a decent Yamaha upright console, though it was a little beaten up. And though the space was not acoustically great, it looked like it would be a mostly flat and not too bumpy shot to wheel it into their gorgeous renovated barn with a piano dolly.

Before I’d thought of Camp Common Ground, and before I realized the village center was not so disused as my casual drive-bys had led me to hastily conclude, I had reached out to the elementary school to ask if they had piano—they did. And before that, I’d been invited by Marijke Niles, proprietor of a perennials greenhouse outside the village, to do my Starksboro concert at her house—on her probably much better maintained Yamaha upright, but a venue that would not allow for much of an audience.

So there I was, with a lot of competing options, all intriguing, none ideal in every way. I was describing the situation to my friend Anya Schwartz, a freethinker who often has great off-center ideas, which must have rubbed off on me because I heard myself say, as if I'd already formed the idea, “I should do a multi-venue Piano Crawl.” 

A series of mini-concerts, maybe 20 minutes each, the repertoire tailored to each piano’s strengths, with the audience moving from place to place, or attending just the program(s) of their choice. My assistant Gideon reached out to all the parties with this idea, and amazingly managed quickly to zero in on a date only a few months away that would work for everyone. So we’re on! October 20, starting with an early matinee at Robinson Elementary, while the kids are still in school, and moving on from there. There’s even talk of a food truck. Watch the email updates for more info as it comes into focus.

Anti-oil, pro-antibiotic

In my concert spiel about eschewing jet travel and questioning some of our routine conveniences, I sometimes say “Some aspects of modernity are literally life-saving: I’m not suggesting we give up antibiotics…” 

That was in the abstract. But right now, as I start to get on top of this anaplasmosis bug, I’m happy I renounced air travel and not doxycycline.

Then, as I was thinking that thought, I realized one of the major US political parties endorses, or at the least condones, just the opposite: maximizing fossil fuel development and minimizing vaccination.

Not that the other major party is particularly serious about curtailing fossil fuels either...

Fact-checked! or, Try this in a small town

A couple of months ago I had a lovely conversation with a reporter who writes for travel magazines. Yesterday I got an “URGENT: Fact-checking” email from AAA Explorer—mostly the kind  of questions I’d expect: when did I start my tour, how long will it take, do I travel in my EV, did Rachmaninoff really play the piano in little Plymouth Vermont. One stood out:

Is it true that not every town has a performance-ready grand piano?

I don’t recall, but I must have said that as a wry understatement. This snippet of my 252-gig spreadsheet should serve to answer:

Essex Junction write-up

Posted a few days ago, actually, but in my anaplasmosis fog I forgot to note it here. Hopefully it marks he beginning of me finally getting caught up. The Warren concert happened in the meantime, so there’s still a backup of 11 concerts, but at least now I’m only three months behind...

Climate chaos interfering with my project to call attention to climate chaos

Getting ready for tomorrow’s concert, we’re having to keep an eye on the weather: more significant rainfall is expected. It’s unlikely to cause a big problem in Warren if it comes at the predicted rates and amounts, but there were hard to predict, major local variations in the recent rains, so anything is possible. 

Meanwhile I was unable to practice the last two days because I felt so under the weather. I thought it was literally that: the air quality here was in the low-mid 100’s—the orange zone, “unhealthy for some groups”—this time courtesy of British Columbia fires instead of Quebec. But when I took a turn for the worse I got myself checked out and found out I have anaplasmosis, a tick-borne disease whose recent prevalence in this area is also a result of climate change. Eminently treatable, especially when caught early, so no tragedy, certainly not comparable to the recent catastrophic flood damages, to say nothing of the impending collapse of major agricultural and fresh water systems.

But again, the “calling attention to the climate emergency” part of my project seems increasingly quaint. 

Can’t keep up

The climate emergency is so unfathomably enormous that any undertaking in response to it, even efforts much much larger and more powerful than my little project, seems puny and insignificant. 

This is always the case, but there are times when the enormity and immanence—and proximity—of climate impacts make my efforts feel particularly quaint. I’ve already played concerts on the warmest Vermont November day in history and on the smokiest Vermont day ever. Now, when scheduling out the fall, I have to take into account the impact of flooding that in many places exceeded Tropical Storm Irene. I need to be careful not to make concert inquiries just now in places that were hard hit in this week’s deluge; I consult flood and precipitation maps before sending out emails. A venue I was in active conversation with took in several feet of water; that’s one conversation on hold now. At the end of this month I’ll be playing in Coventry, site of Vermont’s sole remaining active landfill. As we drive by block after block with piles of ruined furniture and other belongings stacked by the road, I keep thinking about how every sofa, every crib, every box of books is going to end up there in Coventry with me.

If it weren’t so dire, it would be funny how this project, in a state considered a climate haven, is itself racing the climate crisis. It is no longer obvious what sort of Vermont I’ll be playing in five, two, even one year from now.

If I’m able to salvage anything like a thread of hopeful purpose in the face of the terrifying acceleration of climate breakdown, it’s in the adaptation (as opposed to mitigation) aspect of my effort. While our current trajectory will quickly lead to conditions that are beyond adaptation, it’s easier to make and to see a tangible impact on adaptation than it is to influence net emissions, never mind the unfolding geophysical consequences of the already unsafe atmosphere, which are essentially beyond any human power to control. For instance, in the recent flooding, some places that saw river crests at or near Irene levels nevertheless suffered less damage, thanks to improved riparian area management and building practices. Similarly, our message of localizing community art activity, and whatever contribution these concerts make to efforts to bolster the vitality of village venues, even the fundraising we do for local organizations, may be of some value as long as the state remains habitable.

Some gorey details

By chance, I’m playing two towns in a row at the end of July which have historical connections to two of Vermont’s four remaining gores: concert no. 37 in Warren and concert no. 38 in Coventry. In a further coincidence, each town is oddly distant from its associated gore, but very close to the gore belonging to the other.

You, dear reader, are likely by now asking “what is a gore?” I’ve mentioned them in two earlier posts but without explanation. In the broadest definition, a gore is any “irregular parcel of land, as small as a triangle of median in a street intersection or as large as an unincorporated area the size of a township.” (Wikipedia) In New England, a gore is more specifically a piece of land that has never been incorporated as a town, and so has limited local government, if any, and often few or no inhabitants. (A once established town that is depopulated and stripped of its municipal status is called something else, an “unincorporated town”, at least in Vermont, which has two: Somerset, pop. 6, and Glastenbury, pop. 9.) Of the New England states, only Maine and Vermont have remaining gores. Typically, gores are “leftovers” resulting from incomplete, erroneous, or conflicting surveys, but they can also be created intentionally. 

On July 21 I’ll be playing in the United Church of Warren. As most of Vermont was being divided into towns in the late 1700s, the aim was to create roughly 6-mile-square parcels. When the town of Warren was chartered in 1789, the main tract of land intended for it, in the Mad River valley, was on the small side. To make up for this, a roughly 11 square mile gore was added—about 100 miles northeast. The gore has always been treated as distinct from the town of Warren proper, and no one was recorded living there until the 1970s. At some point it was officially separated. It’s referred to variously as Warren Gore, Warrens Gore, and Warren’s Gore.

Meanwhile in 1780, Major Elias Buel, a veteran of the Revolutionary War originally from Coventry, Connecticut, put together a group that petitioned the Vermont Legislature for a grant in the area south of Middlebury. But there was a misunderstanding about the surveying (which is odd, because one of the Buel group was Ira Allen, the Surveyor General of Vermont) and it turned out there was no longer enough unincorporated land there for a town. So a few years later the Legislature let them convert their claim into a “flying grant”, basically permission to go hunting around the state for enough acreage to make up a town. They ended up cobbling together three parcels: the main one, which they called Coventry; a gore called the Coventry Leg, which was eventually annexed to the town of Newport, and a second gore far to the south, a little triangle of land that looks like it could be the dot under the question mark of the town of Huntington (where I live). Known as Huntington Gore, it now became Buel’s Gore, changed to Buels Gore when the US Postal Service told everybody to get rid of their apostrophes.

If all this seems a bit geographically insane, it helps to know that the chartering of towns was a largely financial and speculative business. Governors and legislators sat in rooms sometimes hundreds of miles away and, often to curry favor or pay political debts, granted to speculators the rights to land they might never have seen, about which they may have known very little, and where they often had no intention of settling. Sometimes the grantees planned to establish farms or lumbering operations, but often they were just looking to make a quick buck by selling their holdings. Adding to the general chaos, prior to the establishment of the Vermont Republic in 1777 there was a race between the governments of New York and New Hampshire to plant towns as quickly as possible to bolster their competing claims to the Vermont lands.

More on Vermont’s gores: 
Mark Bushnell, Then Again: A use for Vermont’s leftover bits and pieces
Good Seven Days article on Buels Gore: Ruth Horowitz, Gore Values

Number theory

I like 251. It’s prime, which is a pretty rare distinction at this magnitude (there are only 16 primes between 201-300). And it was the foundation of my Scarlatti ii-V-I intro pun. 

But when the village of Essex Junction calved off from Essex Town, my number went to 252. Not prime, but it has some redeeming features. It’s 7 x 36, and 6 x 42, Coincidentally, as I write this, I’m exactly 1/7 of the way through (36 completed concerts) while 6 more are fully confirmed, meaning exactly 1/6 of all towns (42) have been played or scheduled. And 7 x 36 also means that at an average of exactly 3 concerts a month, the project will last exactly 7 years, which is my current goal. Which is of course subject to change, like everything about the project. Like everything, period. If the destabilization of the climate continues to accelerate as it has been, it’s not obvious we’ll have a well-organized society six years from now.

However, 252 is not my actual number. I plan to play the four gores and grants as well, as I suggested at the outset of the project. The gores and grants are not, and have never been, officially organized municipalities, so they were never part of the official tally of 251 or 252. But I’m using a gradually filling-in map as the trademark representation of the project's progress. If I don’t play the gores and grants, there will be residual white space, and the project will look forever incomplete.

So my true target number is 256. Also not prime, but a power of 2, 2⁸, which is nice. 

As the gores and grants are not proper towns, I don’t have to do proper concerts there. Like: I don’t have to play a new, ordinally matched Scarlatti sonata, I don’t have to have a local collaborator, I don’t have to play a full concert of an hour or more, and I don’t necessarily have to play the piano. Also, to avoid confusion, I’ll give them ancillary numerical designations, like “51a” for a gore performance that follows the 51^st regular concert.

Again, as with everything about this project, all professed schemes are subject to change, with details coming into focus as the events approach.