To the tune of “NYC Has No Power” from Friends:
Things are looking bad for Boeing
Fuselages are exploding
But I have no fear of dying
Cuz I am no longer flying
Note for people of the future:
Federal officials order grounding of some Boeing 737 Max 9 jetliners after plane suffers a blowout (Jan. 6, 2024)
...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.
This blog has been dormant almost 2 months! That’s partly because of a 4-week concert break. But also, as I mentioned in my last post, because my concert write-ups (which are also a “web log”) have taken the bulk of my energy for reflection. While I do intend to resume distinct postings on this blog, I will also cross-post here whenever I post a new concert write-up.
The most recent write-ups are of the Rutland Town and Strafford concerts in late July.
One thing that comes up a lot in discussions of the tour is how I am coping with the supposed hardship of a no-flight lifestyle. As I wrote in the Strafford write-up:
Something I try to convey at all my concerts is that renouncing flying has not been a privation, but a boon. You can’t do everything, and if I were flying all over the world I would not be tramping all over Vermont. There is so much here, so much beauty, so much variety. Going from town to town can feel like traveling between worlds and even centuries.Because our daughter had a dance performance the day after the Strafford concert in nearby Corinth, my wife and I set up a tent at our son’s college roommate Bryn’s place in Chelsea...
Camping by Bryn’s pond, waking up to three (!) kingfishers battling for this prime territory in the pre-dawn, hiking nearby Wright’s Mountain...it is hard to see this as self-denial.
You can read more at the write-up, along with many pretty pictures!
This reminded me of something I read decades ago by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, famous for identifying and naming the psychological “flow” state. In the article “The Costs and Benefits of Consuming”, Csikszentmihalyi writes:
In one study we correlated the happiness that American adults reported experiencing in their free time with the amount of fossil and electrical energy that the activity they were doing at the time consumed (Graef, Gianinno, and Csikszentmihalyi 1981). If a person was reading a magazine when the pager signaled, for example, more energy was expended than if he or she had been reading a book, since producing a magazine (in terms of manufacturing paper, printing, sales, distribution, and so on) requires more BTUs of energy per unit of reading time than it takes to produce a book. Thus if there were a direct relationship between energy consumption and quality of experience, a person should be happier when reading a magazine than when reading a book. Instead, we found the opposite: a slight but significant negative relationship between the average BTU load of activities and the happiness people experienced while doing them.
People fly to get places, not for the joy of going through airport security. But the point is worth pondering. If you are lucky enough to have the option, are you happier driving to work, or taking the train? Taking the bus, or biking or walking?
Of course, as with everything from highway suburbs to industrial farming, our social and physical infrastructure has been set for a world that is unsustainable. Even highly privileged individuals are unwitting victims of larger societal choices. People have been establishing trans- and intercontinental extended families, for instance, with a casualness that comes from the expectation (unlike in past centuries) that they could see their relatives across the country or across the world almost as easily and often as if they lived a few towns over. Changing that expectation entails a lot of emotional adjustment and trauma.
That is a harsh reality. But the alternative to making deep changes in privileged lifestyles is incomparably, inconceivably more tragic. The earth breakdown that is now so clearly underway, if not halted as much as is still possible, will mean at the least the end of organized human society as we understand it.
The Piano Performance Places wiki spinoff idea was born because the idea resonated with other pianists. They could have been protective of the limited opportunities to play in the area, but have chosen instead to be generous in sharing information. Mostly because they are all first-rate human beings…but also because the ideas of expanding opportunities for players, increasing the musical offerings in small places, and of finding more localized ways of touring, all spoke to an existing desire.
The Play Every Town tour is showing signs of reverberating beyond my 252 performances in other ways as well. I’m planning what will be our first school concert with a former student who is now the instrumental music instructor there. I invited her and her vocal-music colleague to perform with me in a piece or two. She said good, her students know the she and her co-teacher play and sing, but their students haven’t heard them perform and it was time they should. In another town, the librarian hopes that our performance there will be a catalyst to advance dormant plans to fix up the piano and disused town hall auditorium above the library.
My project is just 252 pebbles dropped in a little pond. They’ll make their small splash, which might even ripple a ways. But those ripples will quickly subside—unless there’s resonance (lit. “sounding again”). If the pebbles drop at the right frequency, the waves will match the pond’s natural reverberance, and if that happens, the results are astonishingly powerful.
This is how I’m learning to think about individual actions to address the climate crisis. Yes, we need drastic, and drastically sudden, changes at a level that can only be effected by government policy. And because our governments have been thoroughly captured by industry, this will require a fundamental change in how we are governed: a revolution. But individual action is still important. Not because “if everyone did that, it would really add up” (there isn’t time for that; it won’t add up fast enough) but because individual actions, if they resonate, can have non-linear impacts. But only if we are vocal about them.
This is not a closely-guarded trade secret. Every presenter I’ve ever engaged with has told me each show and recording needs to have an angle, a title, a theme, a hook. Unless you’re pop-star-famous, in which case your theme can be “I’m Yo-Yo Ma.”* Otherwise, without a story, few people will come to your concert.
In this project, though, the theme is central and came first; it’s not the result of a tacked-on branding effort. As a result, I’ve been almost caught off guard by how much the project resonates with people, which I think accounts for the greatest part of their eagerness to sponsor shows and do even more: suggest venues in nearby towns, help me find local collaborators, pour on the concert publicity, and write or broadcast feature stories.
The other theme is the absurdity and unsustainability of long-distance touring. I’ll say right off that I don’t pretend to have the answers. As someone with a day job (university teaching) who does not depend on performing to earn a living, I’m not telling anyone what they should do. That would be in especially poor taste now that streaming services, which pay musicians ridiculously little—Spotify is believed to pay about 1/3 of one cent per stream—have made live music once again the (by far) main source of musical income for performing musicians.
I just know that routine jet travel (among many other things) is incompatible with the survival of civilization, and with the continuation of a great portion of current life on earth. And that staying alive is, you know, an even higher priority than “making a living”. Apparently this strikes a chord with lots of other musicians and audiences.
We’re all carrying a lot of cognitive dissonance: I don’t fly and I’m vegan, but (like virtually all US-ians) my greenhouse gas emissions are still far higher than the global average, and far above what is estimated to be the maximum for a livable future. (US average = 16 tons CO2 per person per year; current global average 4.5 tons per year; max for livable world, 2 tons.) Still, most people recognize that a lot of things are going to have to change radically, and radically quickly, or the consequences will be even more catastrophic than is already ensured.
Well, that got heavy. The footnote is light-hearted, anyway.
