Hartland writeup & regime kidnappings

  ...a few days ago actually, here.

Another one of the serendipitous occurences I keep running into, this one poignant and somber. I’d been following the case of Mohsen Mahwdawi, who was kidnapped by ICE agents just five days earlier and is being held in violation of his first amendment rights; the protest demonstration for his upcoming court appearance in Burlington was in my calendar. But we drove down to Hartland not knowing it was home to Mohsen’s church. 

And the concert, rescheduled from a couple weeks earlier because of weather. was on the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution, fought to free the colonies from a mad king restricting civil liberties (and imposing unfavorable trade policies...)

When we arrived, our sponsor, Chiho Kaneko, told us the church had just hosted a 300-person vigil where, she said, the fear was palpable. 

On the spot, we added Woody Guthrie’s classic “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” to the program. The entire audience joined in, and I think drew some courage from the music and the special solidarity that comes from singing together.

The speed and effectiveness with which the current regime has been wrecking our government and norms  is breathtaking. But the pushback is having a manifest effect.  I suspect it is not a coincidence that two of the three currently most high-profile immigration cases  are being heard in Vermont, home to just 0.2% f the US population but to 50% of the team  (Bernie and AOC) that has been barnstorming the red states with their message of resistance. If it was intentional, it will prove to be another instance of overreach. Vermont has a strong and deep tradition of independence and libertarianism. Just saying.

Franklin writeup posted

Franklin (almost a year past) was the first of what will eventually be 13 Canadian border town concerts. As I relate in the writeup, it was once the staging area for an invasion of Canada by Irish Republican American Civil War veterans. It is thus implausibly timely for our present insane historical moment, which is the reason I bumped it to the front of the queue as I deal with the backlog of 40 or so undocumented performances. That, and so I could have it up in time for St. Patrick's Day tomorrow.

As with Williston, I got maybe carried away with the interesting context. But this is what makes the writeups fun for me. I approach them as artistic creations just as much as the programs. Maybe more so: they are like compositions, and as people sometimes say about art, a way of making experience make sense. 

And they give the project a sense of solidity and completeness. Also I have a sieve-like memory, and without the writeups, past concerts would quickly dissolve into a hallucinatory vagueness.

complete comic by Kate Beaton here

Williston write-up posted

Here. I got maybe a bit carried away with some of the town context. But it’s a big part of what’s fun to me about the writeups and about the shape of the project as a whole. Of course, for most of the towns I know very little to start with, and not that much more even after reading and visiting. Because we lived in Williston for 5 years, and because Williston looms large in the contentious debate over development in Vermont, I had more to share.

It’s been a long time since my last writeup. Almost 6 months. I’m now about 40 behind—more than half of the 77 completed concerts, with the oldest undocumented concert almost 2 years old now. 

But my crack webmaster, UVM CS major Lindsay Hall, has designed an improved concert writeup template that allows for more flexible and easier-to-compose layout. And with each video clip I’m getting a little more fluent with Final Cut, my editing software. Clearly I need to examine how much background and detail I put into each writeup, but I’m optimistic these developments will help me get through the backlog in a few months.

It’s also been a long time since my last blog post—about 4 months. I have a lot to say, but recent events make me feel different about what’s worth saying. Also just other, non-earth-shaking life stuff has kept me extra busy. Still, a bunch of my thoughts do want to get said, so that will happen eventually.

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.

Salisbury writeup

...posted.

As I wrote there, this was probably the finest piano on the tour so far...even though I thought that I don’t believe there is such a thing, as instrument quality is not on a one-dimensional scale.

As I did not write there, I was not able to take full advantage of the piano’s crystal sound and exquisite responsiveness due to sleep deprivation. My wife and had been out until 2 am the night before: on returning home from the Ferrisburgh concert Friday evening, already played out but at a reasonable hour, we found that our recently spayed puppy had torn a stitch, and we spent the next several hours in the emergency vet hospital waiting to get her stapled back up. 

But an extraordinary instrument helps make everything sound good, so it was maybe lucky that I had such a fantastic partner to help me along in my dazed state. I just wish I’d been alert enough to really nail the Mozart Sonata K.545 (which I played entire, not just the Rondo as written on the program) because it was the ideal Mozart piano—I would have loved to get that on video. 

I also kind of pawed my way through James Scott’s Frog Legs Rag. I learned it as a gag because the concert beneficiary was the Vermont Reptile & Amphibian Atlas. But it turns out it’s a classic for a reason—it’s extraordinarily catchy both to the ear and the fingers, and really merits greater preparation. Well, I’m going to keep working it up, and in fact I have occasion to play it in the Starksboro Piano Crawl this Friday because it was written in a year I needed, as I'm pegging my repertoire to the building construction and piano manufacture years, and I needed a piece from 1906. Two actually, one for the old Town Hall’s Witney piano and one for the Baptist church’s Albrecht. The other will be Charles Johnson’s Dill Pickles, the second rag (after the Maple Leaf) to sell a million copies of sheet music.

Ferrisburgh writeup

 ...is posted.

Ferrisburgh was my first of Vermont’s seven “burgs”, and is one of the three that has resolutely held on the to final “h” in spite of the push in the 1890s from the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to drop it. 

And at the end of the month I’ll play Starksboro, my first “boro”. To my knowledge no Vermont town has persisted in resisting the Board on Geographic Names to the point of retaining the three extra letters in “borough”—though if what George R. Stewart wrote in his 1945 classic Names on the Land is on the mark, those letters didn’t go down without a fight:

Vermonter or Missourian alike might not care a penful of ink between ‑borough or ‑boro. In fact, as a practical man, he might even prefer ‑boro. But if anyone told him he must use ‑boro, he was likely to invoke all the shades of the Founding Fathers in asserting his inalienable right to ‑borough.

In addition to accompanying resident soprano Helen Lyons, I yielded the bench to Ferrisburgh native David Oliveira to play two of his solo piano Nocturnes. This atypical “collaboration” made the grade because David was my composition student at UVM, and I’d even given some feedback on one of these nocturnes. I had originally thought to play them myself, but as the concert approached I knew he’d do a much better job. It’s not just that during the teaching semester I find myself pressed for time even with just 2-3 concerts a month; David’s rendition of his own music is amazingly sensitive and expressive.

Barnard writeup

 ...is now posted. 

I made a resolution to complete new writeups within days of the concert, even as I have a large backlog to work through, so as to avoid adding to that backlog. Also so that we can create timely post-concert social media posts. In support of this I reminded myself that not all writeups need to be elaborate and multifaceted, like the prior one I did for Landgrove. 

However, I felt compelled to make a decent video (below) of the collaborative piece I did with artist Pamela Fraser—because it was cool, but also to help the new UVM School of the Arts document the interprogram collaboration that leadership is so keen to promote. This meant compiling a split screen from different source videos, incorporating good stills of the before and after art pieces multi-source, aligning the audio from the different sources, etc. Nothing state-of-the-art, but a solid day’s work for me and my still newbie video editing skills. Maybe the next writeup will be a quickie.

I was pleasantly surprised at how the collaboration worked out. Free group improvisation always presents the challenge of coming to a satisfying ending together. In a musical group effort, the players can communicate through sound and gesture. In this piece, Pamela wasn’t making any sounds, and I couldn’t see what she was painting from where I sat. At the outset, Pam said she’d need at least 5 minutes, and my spouse and on-stage videographer had the presence of mind to give me a sign when Pam was wrapping up. That end cue was very valuable, but it was of no help in letting me know when I was (say) one or two minutes from wrapping up, making it hard to shape the improvisation accordingly. But if it was a little rambling, I was nonetheless happy with how pleasant it sounded and how much I caught the stark angularity of Pamela’s piece with my opening idea.

I was also satisfied with the Scarlatti and my intro, for a change. It sometimes got a bit brash—the piano was nice but astonishingly loud and bright—but overall I felt like I achieved maybe 85% of my happy, at-home, in-my-sweats pianistic potential, as opposed to the typical ~60% of my potential I felt I reached in most performances when I played my first project concert 16 months ago.

Landgrove writeup is online

Posted last Friday, actually, and forgot to note here.

I went a little nuts on this one. It includes several threads: the town history, history of the Town Hall building and the piano, reflections on old uprights in general and on playing Ives on this piano in particular, even an investigation into the roll-down map of Europe...in addition to the usual concert description, clips, and photos.

My assistant Gideon had mentioned that social media postings which included interesting B-roll video that my wife Annelies had taken in South Hero (our dog Stella dreaming of running while I played) and Warren (an outdoor-to-indoor walking clip where the sound of the rushing Freeman Brook, swollen with the historic July rains, gradually gives way to my rendition of James P. Johnson’s also stormy “Jungle Drums”) generated an above-average number of likes. So in Landgrove I asked Annelies to look for interesting side stories, which resulted in two posted videos: another outdoor-to-indoor clip, this one of the Maple Leaf Rag, and host Sally Ogden recounting her husband’s experience when the Town Hall venue was Landgrove’s one-room schoolhouse. 

Gideon put both of the videos on social media as teasers in a scheduled lead-up to the posting of the Landgrove writeup. It was all a bit of a production. In particular, producing every additional video (these were besides the four pieces from the concert that I included in the writeup) takes a fair bit of my time.

All in all I’m pleased with the result. It was worth the effort: the B-roll videos were compelling enough, as was the overall energy of the Landgrove concert, that I felt they called for a fancy concert report. But it took three solid workdays, which I can’t do for every concert; some have to be more minimal. Still have 10 to catch up on! 

It’s tempting to go all in on all of them though. Which is an indication that what I say at concert after concert is true. Every one is really distinctive: the locale, the village, the community, the venue, the collaborators, the program, the audience. And that you really don’t have to go far to travel.

South Hero writeup

Posted just now.

I’ve acquired some basic skills with Final Cut, so I’m starting to do slightly fancier things in some of the concert clips. My wife Annelies took some B-roll footage of our dog Stella running in her sleep to part of Eve Beglarian’s haunting “Another Time”, which I incorporated into a video of the whole piece. Today is exactly 17 months since we brought Stella to the vet to extract a cracked tooth, only to have the vet tell us she couldn't do the surgery because Stella’s blood work showed severely reduced liver function, the result of a passel of tumors throughout the organ. She gave Stella six months to live. But Stella did not get the memo. She’s still with us—weaker, less active, and emaciated, but still trotting happily, if not running, at least a couple of times a day .

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...

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.

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.

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!)

Not-so-masterful webmastering

This post has nothing to do with concerts or community or climate. Nothing to do with music at all. It’s a technical note about website structure. But as with so many endeavors, the core activity of this project—playing with and for people while encouraging climate conversation—represents a small fraction of the overall time and effort. Dealing with the site is one of many background activities that feel very foreground when I have to engage with it, so I’m documenting it here.

The Concerts area has become the heart of the website, containing not just the project map and info about upcoming performances, but also the ever-growing archive of past concert write-ups. Until yesterday, all the write-ups were part of one long webpage. As I noted before, as it gets larger, it takes longer to load, and this can make links to anchor tags (such as a direct link to a particular concert write-up) problematic. This is because lots of web layout is defined by widths, with height being a consequence of (say) how much text is in a given element. 

[You’re only halfway through this post. Really, no reason to read this if you’re not interested in webby stuff.]

Browsers can figure out the space needed for text almost instantly. However, when an image’s display is defined by width, the browser doesn’t know the image height until it’s had time to look it over, and thus doesn’t know how much vertical space to allot for it. This is why pages with lots of images may “chatter” up and down as the content fills in. 

It’s possible to define image height and avoid this problem, but it’s relatively complicated to do this in a way that doesn’t risk distorting the image proportions—not impossible, but fussy and involved, and time-consuming if there are lots of images of different aspect ratios. Even if I were to upgrade my web code to be super slick about image layout, though, the page would still be very long, unwieldy both to load and to edit. This was true already with only 20-some concert write-ups on the page; with hundreds, it would be a nightmare. 

So I made each concert write-up into its own separate page. This involved a bunch of routine slicing and dicing, but I also had to go into the JavaScript script that my former student Blaine Billingsley kindly wrote for the cool clickable map, so that the “more info” link for a given town would go to the new individual concert write-up page, instead of to the location of that write-up within the one ginormous Concerts page as before. Still really basic stuff! But not my home base, so it required me putting on my thinking cap. 

Even little things are not so little, everything takes time.

Cambridge write-up

I finally posted the Cambridge write-up. The performance was back in June, a full eight months and nineteen concerts ago. I’d misplaced some of the photos I was planning to use, and by the time I found them the concert was already long past and there no longer seemed any particular urgency about putting it online. I do feel a great sense of relief now, though.

It’s a picturesque write-up because the concert was in the Bryan Memorial Gallery—our first art gallery concert—and I included several gorgeous paintings from the exhibits.

The building is charming, with a clerestory that brings in lots of light. It falls indirectly on most of the gallery, but it was right above the piano. I didn’t say anything about this in the write-up, but it was warm and sometimes blinding! Immediately after I posted the video clips, someone commented “you look like you needed sunglasses”.

Also didn’t make the write-up: A bunch of us went looking for dinner afterwards and found Moog’s Joint in neighboring Johnson. The name is fairly unusual, and the place features live music, so I had to ask owner Tom Moog if he was any relation to Robert, inventor of the compact modular synthesizer (mentioned in this post). 

He’s not. Nice place though.

Charlotte write-up

Posted the Charlotte write-up yesterday. Backlog is down to four now.

Scarlatti K.24 is fiendishly difficult, with lots of rapid repeated notes, sixteenth-note double thirds, and wide, lightning-fast hand crossings. Fortunately I had three weeks to learn it, but it was still a bit messy: I should have played it slower. Though my tempo of about 120-132 puts me near the bottom of the range—apparently virtuoso pianists use this as a technical showpiece, judging from the performances on YouTube. This rendition by Veronika Kuzmina Raibaut is jaw-droppingly fast but still clean, crisp, and expressive. It’s an amazing feat, even though a bit aggressive and much faster than I’d play it if I could, which I can’t. 

But I was pleased with my intro, which uses several different motifs from the sonata and has a nice flow, I think.

Tech note: when I set up the website, I did not anticipate how bulky the Concerts page would become, with all the photos embedded in the write-ups. Already with only 8% of all concerts posted, the page takes a good moment to load even with a pretty fast internet connection. And this means that links meant to go directly to a particular point on the page (like the one at the top of this post) may not work right, as the user’s browser tries to guess how far down the page the anchor point will be before all the content above has filled in. I’ll fix this by modifying the site structure so that instead of (eventually) 252 concerts on this one ginormous page, there will be 252 separate pages in the Concerts area. This won’t affect the user experience, except that you won’t be able to browse write-ups by scrolling. Instead, I’ll add a text list of towns to the main Concerts page, so you can find towns alphabetically as well as geographically.

Sharon write-up

The Sharon write-up is posted. I’ll expand the “about the piano” section when I get some additional information.

Our most common venue categories are churches, Granges, and schools. As I explain in the write-up, the Seven Stars Arts Center has been all three, giving it a special place in the project. It was also an automotive shop at one point, making this our first garage concert. 

I posted lots of clips, including the impromptu singalong tribute to Pete Sutherland, who was in hospice at the time. It was unprepared, so a bit bumpy, but as I wrote Pete’s music is pretty robust, and the audience’s engagement and appreciation were too great not to share. We miss you, Pete!

Northfield write-up

The Northfield concert write-up is now posted. 

In it I talk about the perilousness of doing a new Scarlatti on every program, especially a tricky one with only five days between concerts. 

This is probably a little whiny—making excuses. This project doesn’t just entail me coming to grips with recordings of my live playing, something I’ve always done minimally and reluctantly in the past. Having decided to post at least each Scarlatti sonata, I’m stuck with posting a bunch of live first performances, which are always more likely to be rocky.* 

Often, it’s things other than the tricky places—things I didn’t expect to be a problem—that go wrong. Or there may be surprise inconsistencies, like an unintended speeding up in the easy bits. These hidden pitfalls are among the many things you discover and work out in the first performance or two. And that can be galling, because I know that only a little more practice—far less than I spent on the perceived challenges—would take care of them and make the performance much stronger.

There’s another hazard in posting every Scarlatti. I’ve been working hard to stay in the moment, to get away from the mindset of caution, inhibition, and second-guessing that comes from thinking too much about product and permanence. Knowing, as I’m playing, that the Scarlatti is destined for YouTube makes this harder.

Ah well. This project is part reality check, coming to grips with the pianist that I am, not the one I imagine myself to be. At the same time, not just performing frequently, but listening to the recordings of every performance as I prepare these write-ups, may do more to improve my pianism than anything I’ve done in the past several decades.

*Acute readers may have noticed that there is no recording of Scarlatti’s Sonata K.1 on the first concert write-up. This is because of a recording snafu. I imagine I’ll reprise the first sonata on the final concert. See you in 5 years!

Chester write-up

The Chester concert write-up is now posted. It includes the obligatory Scarlatti clip (ii-V-I intro went well, sonata was OK but with some stumbles) and also a cool slo-mo of Bach hand crossing reflected in the mirror-like polished fallboard.

It’s been two months since I last posted a concert write-up. I was waylaid by a spate of concerts in a row, followed by the end-of-term crunch in my day job. And that was followed by some good old-fashioned burnout and procrastination.  Now that I'm back on the horse I hope to get my remaining backlog of five write-ups posted before the next concert on January 15.