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:

 
 

La Melanconia, or, My Project in 50 Words*

There is only one Play Every Town concert this April because I took on several non-PET engagements for a change. 

One was the performance of a piece I wrote for the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players’ annual premieres concert in Long Island and NYC. (Amtrak runs not one but two train lines between NW Vermont and NYC.) I called my piece Five Songs Without Words. But I included a short poetic epigraph before each “wordless” song…trying to have it both ways, I guess. The fourth song, “Malincolia”, is prefaced by an Italian Romantic pastoral, “La Melanconia”, in translation:

Melancholy, gentle Nymph,

I dedicate my life to you.

One who despises your pleasures

is not born to true pleasures.

I asked the gods for hills and springs;

they heard me at last; I will live satisfied,

never past that spring will my desires carry me, 

never beyond that mountain.   

I attached the text after I composed the music, and I chose it to fit the mood. But it’s also an on-the-nose description of my life arc: first finding my way to Vermont after almost five decades in flatter, drier, less glorious places; then my decision not to fly and to stick close to my new home, to these modest but awe-inspiring mountains and springs. 

As I’ve said here and at most of my concerts, staying close has been more of an enrichment than a privation. There’s no denying it comes with a humbling sense of contraction, a melancholic touch; yet within that there’s a new kind of contentment in accepting the boundaries of a smaller but richly varied world. (This happy/sad turning away from the greater world is the archetypical theme of the pastoral poetic tradition.)

The poet, Ippolito Pindemonte, captured all that in eight short lines. Pindemonte most likely means “mountain pine”, and the feast day of Saint Hippolytus, for whom he is presumably named, is August 13, my birthday.  

*46 in the original Italian

La Malinconia

Part of the reason tor the winter concert hiatus, beside the holidays and family gathering time, was a January composition deadline. I wrote Five Songs Without Words for the Stonybrook Contemporary Chamber Players, an ad hoc group of crack graduate students at SUNY-Stonybrook, for their annual premieres concert in April.

As the title promises, these songs have no words; they’re fully instrumental. But each carries a suggestive poetic epigraph. For the penultimate song, a pensive duet for violin and clarinet, I quoted a 19th-century Italian poem, La Malinconia, famously set to music by Vincenzo Bellini. This ode to Melancholy is not just a good fit for my piece, but also a remarkably apt description of my geographical life-arc—we spent years in the flatlands of the midwest feeling like exiles, aching to get to the mountains and to the northeast—and of my no-fly, Vermont-focused concert project and lifestyle. Fitting, as well, that the poet’s name, Pindemonte, appears to mean “mountain pine”.

Melancholy, gentle nymph, one who despises your pleasures is not born to true pleasures...
I asked the Gods for hills and springs; they heard me at last, I will live satisfied,
Never past that spring will my desires carry me, never beyond that hill.    

Silver linings

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)

Cross-posting Westmore writeup

As I said in my last post, I will be posting here whenever I put up a new concert write-up. So here is the one from Sunday’s concert in Westmore, site of the fabled Lake Willoughby. (I still need to write up the previous concert in Berlin, and Cambridge from way back in June.) As I say in the write-up, and as I said about Strafford, it’s pretty hard to see non-flying as a terrible hardship when the alternative is tooling around Vermont.

The privilege of not flying

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.

Out with the old

Last night was the launch concert. After all the non-music-related preparation of the past couple of months, it felt good to get to it. 

The program was half old, half new to me. The Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and two Scarlatti sonatas were first performances. The first half of the concert, my Bach “Double Suite”, I had played on my first-ever UVM concert and a few times before and after. (Here I am playing it on digital piano at a 2010 conference in Paris.) It’s virtuosic but familiar. I thought that programming it would give me some breathing room, given how preoccupied I knew I would be with project setup logistics, and function as a “safe” foundation to ground me from any anxiety about performing the new repertoire.

But the result was the exact opposite. I had more memory lapses and other extended glitches in the first half than at any concert over the past 30 years. I actually had to restart the Partita’s Courante after a false start. That can be ascribed largely to a special circumstance: I had just taken a brief unrehearsed speaking break to talk about Bach’s famous 280-mile walk (each way) from Arnstadt to Lübeck, to make a point about the dubious “necessity” of rapid long-distance travel to advance musical culture (and Bach didn’t even have the internet). My loss of focus came partly from jumping in after an unscripted chat, and partly from the anxiety of “coming out” in public, in person, as an evangelist for non-flying. Still, whatever the extenuating circumstances, overall the first half came closer than ever to validating performance anxieties which my rational brain had been telling me were phantasmagoric bugaboos.

And then, in the second half, with all the new rep, I was in the groove. I was able to let myself be in the moment more than I’ve been able to for any longish solo performance stretch in recent memory. (Being in the moment is the only way to fully realize one’s musicality, but can be scary because letting go of intention and forethought opens up the possibility of going completely off the rails.) It’s like skiing (also a challenge for me): paradoxically, the way to real control is to let go, to trust your body and gravity and send it.

From this experience, I can choose between two takeaways:

1. Yup, your impostor fears are grounded! You really don’t know what you’re doing. Sorry!
2. You’re on your game when playing music you’re most recently excited about and invested in. Keep on learning lots of new music!

Since I’ve committed to another 251 concerts over the next 4.5 years, I think I’ll go with Door #2.

P.S. All the above notwithstanding, the crowd was warm and appreciative, even of the first half. My favorite comment on this eclectic program: “When you have that, who needs Spotify?”

P.P.S. For another take on this concert, including a remarkably positive take on memory lapses, here is my wife’s write-up (guaranteed 100% unbiased).