National News: Local Man Does Local Thing

So last week’s Wall Street Journal feature on the project has had a pretty big impact. More about that in another post. Here I just want to talk about the story’s karmic genesis. 

I’ve courted press coverage since before the project launch, including from a couple of national publications. A core goal of my project is to amplify and normalize conversation around the climate crisis, so (ego aside) I see media attention not just as a means to boost the project but also an end in itself. Thus far though, none of my efforts to gain national notice have come to anything. 

The WSJ’s Betsy McKay, on the other hand, randomly walked into a concert at a senior living center in Rutland Town where she was visiting her parents, who were residents at the venue. The performance, unlike virtually all the project concerts, was semi-private, on account of Covid and the distinguished age of the core audience. Although Rutland Town, with almost 4,000 residents, is not small by Vermont standards—it ranks 40th in population out of 252 towns and cities—it has few public buildings, the villages having been absorbed into what is now Rutland City or split off into what is now West Rutland and Proctor. So I wasn’t so much “settling” for a non-public venue as I was fortunate to find any group space with a piano where I could check off Rutland. And I like playing senior centers. (The way a lot of concert audiences are trending these days, likewise the median age of Vermont’s population, behind only Maine and New Hampshire, I play to a lot of seniors anyway.)

But for all that, playing a no-fee concert at a senior center feels distinctly beneficent, a mitzvah. I think it’s sweet—and exemplative—that the project’s first major* national recognition, a front-page feature in the country's largest newspaper, happened because I played a small rural retirement home.

*There were two previous out-of-state stories: this early story was picked up by the AP and ran (among other places) in USA Today, and this regional feature in the Northeast edition of the AAA’s Explorer magazine by Kim Knox Beckius, who did a fantastic job of capturing the project in under 200 words. These, too, came about organically, not directly from my outreach efforts.

Wolcott writeup

Posted this yesterday. I rushed to get it up in time for the publication of a feature in the Wall Street Journal that mentioned the Wolcott concert and included a video clip from it; I wanted to be able to include a writeup link in the WSJ piece.

As I mention in the writeup, Wolcott made the list of concerts marked by climate-chaos-caused weather extremes. Originally scheduled for June, we had to postpone it because of a freak tornado warning; while the entire state was under a tornado watch. It was a standout concert for happier reasons too—our first house concert, it was in the chapel built by Steve Young after Medieval Norwegian and Scottish models. You can read all about that, with links to more info, at the writeup.

I may have buried the lede a bit—the WSJ article was a big deal for me! But that will get its own post.

1/4

I’m writing this after completing 64 concerts: one quarter of the way through the project. (A quarter of 252 is exactly 63, but I need to play the four gores and grants too, as I discuss here, which makes 256.)

For months, I’ve been looking forward to this landmark as the appropriate moment to post an initial statistical summary, breaking down the first 25% of concerts by venue type (church, former church, town hall, performance center, library, etc.) and variety of piano (age, make, model) and audience size and town population and donation total and collaborator repertoire and demographics and all kinds of groovy things, maybe even throw in some 4:3 color glossy jpegs, with circles and arrows and a paragraph underneath each one explaining what each one was...

And I’m still gonna do a post like that. Sometime soon I hope. 

But this has turned out to be a different kind of milestone than I expected, and one which prevented me from doing the legwork for that summary stats post just yet: a high-water mark of burnout. 

As I’ve posted before, motivational ebb and flow is natural in any long-term project. It's not the concerts. They keep going well, and I keep getting better, and it’s still fun to meet new collaborators and new pianos and new audiences and see new towns. 

It’s the preparation, not just logistical but musical. It’s too much. I need to pare back how much I customize each program to its locale. The resident collaborations are one thing, but I’ve also taken to playing music written in key years of a town’s timeline (e.g. the year the town was founded, the year of its first meeting, the year the venue was built, the year the piano was manufactured) plus pieces thematic to town history, like “Magnetic Rag” in Brandon where the electric motor was invented, “Steamboat Rag” in Fairlee where the first steamship launched, “Atomic Power” in Vernon where I played at the site of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant, “Beets and Turnips” in Wardsboro where the state vegetable, the Gilfeather Turnip, was developed, etc.

Lately at least a handful of pieces on each program have been keyed to the location, on top of the collaborative repertoire. Audiences like this, and I enjoy the serendipity: it’s fun to build programs around pieces I “have to play” for reason of some theme or arbitrary chronology. But it’s getting to be a too much of a good thing—too much music to learn. (And too much time looking up pieces to fit the bill!) And of course there’s the new Scarlatti sonata each time. 

I’m not about to quit the project, though. Whenever I wonder if it's worth it, I run into someone who enthuses about it, or I get an appreciative email or card or comment. In the course of my performances, I’ve already run into two musicians who were part of (separate) ensembles that aimed to play in every town—endeavors which petered out long before completion. I don’t want that to be me! As Scott Ross said about recording all 555 Scarlatti sonatas in just 15 months: I’m not patient but I’m stubborn. 

Everybody Wants To Be Somebody, or, The Piano Jet Set

I’m getting ready to play at the Calvin Coolidge Homestead in Plymouth next weekend, where I’ll perform on the Grace Coolidge Piano, a Baldwin grand originally installed in the White House in 1923. I’ll include a set of pieces composed or published that year, ranging from music by ultramodernists Josef Hauer (Atonale Musik no. 9) and Henry Cowell (The Harp of Life) to a novelty number by Zez Confrey (Dizzy Fingers) and maybe the Charleston, the James P. Johnson song that ignited the dance craze.

Since the piano arrived at the White House in December, my September concert falls within the piano’s centenary year. The piano is reputed to have been played played by Rachmaninoff. And—wonderfully apt for my project, which has as its starting point my decision not to fly to concerts—it’s said to be the first piano ever flown on an airplane! 

Only the thing is, it wasn’t. Flown on an airplane, that is. Or played by Rachmaninoff.

As I was thinking about programming and promotion for this concert, I did my usual mostly online research about the town and the venue. I noticed that every reference to the piano being airborne circled back to the Coolidge Homestead, and I didn’t see any sort of historical citation. I even dug up a contemporaneous article about the piano from the February 2 1924 edition of Presto magazine, which said nothing about an airplane. Clearly, if it was flown from the factory to DC in the era when the railways ruled and most airplanes had a total payload less than the weight of a grand piano, it must have been a publicity stunt. So it struck me as especially odd that the plane went unmentioned.

I reached out to the Coolidge Historic Site Administrator, the fabulously named Rejoice Scherry, to ask what she knew about the piano. Rejoice had already researched this at length, and had learned that two baby grands did in fact fly in the Sikorsky S-29-A from NY to DC, piloted by Igor Sikorsky himself…in 1925, 16 months after the “Coolidge Piano” arrived. The flying pianos were Brambachs, not Baldwins. One was consigned to the First Lady, but its destination was a community center she was interested in, not the White House. And the blows from Rejoice kept coming: “Unless Rachmaninoff entered the president’s private apartments, he didn’t play the Grace Coolidge piano. He performed on three occasions through the Coolidge Administration and used the golden Steinway now in the Smithsonian collections.” 

There’s a meta-story here, I think. The Coolidge piano is plenty special: it belonged to the First Lady, lived in the White House, and is maintained for concerts at the historic Coolidge Homestead in Plymouth, Vermont, pop. 641. But somewhere along the line, someone—a family member? a tour guide?—must have felt that wasn’t special enough, and, intentionally or unintentionally, conflated it with pianos flown in an airplane and played by Rachmaninoff.

And I see exactly how this could happen, because a similar thing came up in connection with my Brandon concert a couple of weeks ago. Through friends of friends, a party of four gravel bikers ended up as our houseguests for a few days in mid-August at the end of their cross-Vermont bike trip. One of them was the great pianist Brad Mehldau. My very next concert was in Brandon, at the Barn Opera. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a barn refitted as an opera house that puts on shoestring but musically first-rate opera productions. And it has a first-rate piano: a 1981 Steinway D numbered CD 486, a designation that indicates it was specially selected to be one of the instruments in the Steinway Concert and Artist Department for use by touring Steinway artists. CD 486 was a favorite of the Newport Jazz Festival—where Brad first played in 1993. 

So, a beautiful coincidence: I was about to perform on a piano that had been played 40-odd years earlier by my illustrious guest when he was just hitting the big time.

Except I wasn’t. It turns out that CD 486 was retired from the Concert Department in 1992. It’d been played by Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner, Michel Petrucciani, Ray Charles, Ivan Moravec, Shura Cherkassky, and John Browning—but not by Brad Mehldau. It missed him by a year, just as the Brambach pianos took to the skies a year after the Coolidge Baldwin was delivered. And sort of like the way Rachmaninoff played the Steinway in the next room over.

But the Brandon Steinway was still a great piano. And that’s enough! I’m looking forward to playing Grace Goodhue Coolidge’s Baldwin too, even if it’s ungraced by the gorilline fingers of Rachmaninoff. And is earthbound. Like me. Good enough. 

(Edited to add: This is too on the nose. I just found out that Rachmaninoff personally bankrolled Sikorsky in 1923, the year the Coolidge Baldwin was delivered, so that Sikorsky could complete development of the S-29-A, the plane that would soon carry the Brombach pianos. He even agreed to be VP of the company, to lend his name recognition to the then obscure Sikorsky. More at the link, including a photo of the two Russian expats in front of the plane, the same one in the pics below.)

Enjoy some pictures of flying pianos!

Brambach baby grands being loaded/unloaded at the airfield

Lounge of the Hindenburg, with specially designed lightweight aluminum piano by Blüthner

American Airlines 747 Economy (!) Class “Piano” Bar (with Wurlitzer organ)

...and the earthbound Coolidge Piano, from Presto magazine, Feb. 2 1924:

 
 

Offstage Fright...or Post-Formance Anxiety

The other night I dreamt I had back-to-back Saturday/Sunday concerts—with very distinct programs, as is usual these days. And it was already Saturday morning...and I realized I hadn’t made the programs yet. They weren’t just not formatted and printed; I hadn’t completely worked out exactly what I was going to play on each concert. I wasn’t full-on freaking out, but it was tense.

Then—this was somehow later on, in standard dream discontinuity—as Annelies and I were leaving town, we passed a house full of kids where we heard Joplin’s “The Entertainer” being played on a recording, or maybe a toy. A dinky little portable keyboard appeared, and I thought it would be a real hit with the kids if I started playing the tune live from the street. And it was—a whole crowd of them came out of the house, hooting and bopping around (this much is realistic enough; the elementary-age crowd does go nuts for live ragtime) as I struggled, somehow successfully (this part is somewhat more fantastical) to telescope the exuberant melody and expansive oom-pah accompaniment into the keyboard’s 2½-octave range.

But that wasn’t the end of the episode. As the kids were romping in joyous abandon, I was very concerned that Annelies have her phone out to record the scene (credit where due: she already was, every bit as on top of things in the dream as in real life) so that I could document it on the website, in the concert writeups area. An area where I am at this writing well over a year behind…

It was a classic stage-fright dream—except that instead of the stereotpyical situation, facing some music I’d never seen or an instrument I don’t play, I wasn’t actually worried about anything on stage; I was anxious about the fussy busywork of the before and after: of composing, framing, and documenting the performances. 

Immediately on waking, even while still in the liminal mist between recollection and reality, I saw the dream’s implications and had a wry laugh. It represented both a win—I started this project partly to overcome my performance anxiety, which is apparently tamed to the point that even my subconscious barely has time for it—and a spot-on diagnosis of the anxiety that’s taken its place: a chronic sense of administrative beleagurement and delinquency, weighted down by the sometimes tedious, sometimes daunting work of planning, scheduling, programming, documenting.

Hmm…it may be time to reconsider how much more I can delegate, beyond the current assistance with concert promotion and web redesign.