Where’s Waldo, or, A Day in the Life of a Rural Piano Scout

Most concerts originate with an invitation from the venue, prompted by the general publicity around the project or audience word of mouth from prior performances. But I also do a fair amount of scouting, particularly in smaller towns, to identify locations with working pianos and, in essence, invite them to invite me. This may start with internet sleuthing for likely locations (church, town hall, Grange, etc.) and maybe a call to the Town Clerk or other contacts people may have tipped me to, but eventually many hours of on-the-road legwork too, going from village to village all over the state—some of them really ghost villages, yet often with a functional building and ancient but functional piano. This “Where’s Waldo” hunt for small-town piano-appointed public spaces is an ongoing and fascinatingly evocative facet of the project.

Last Thursday, I found myself in central Vermont with time on my hands and decided to tackle the towns of Pittsfield and Chittenden, for which I had no leads yet. In Pittsfield (pop. 504) I determined via Google maps that there was a federated church, a town hall and a library, all in the one village within spitting distance of one another. There was no one in the locked church. As I have done countless times, I peered into the windows along the sides, but they were shaded and there was no view. I wandered over to the Roger Clark Memorial  library, above the town clerk’s office, and asked Lisa, the librarian, if there was a piano in the adjacent Town Hall. She though not, but a trio of women who were planning the next book club meeting thought there was. Two of them, Doreen and Katrina, were on their way there to see if the library wifi signal would reach that far, as they had recently acquired a projector and were preparing to inaugurate a town movie series there. So I tagged along. The door code that the librarian had given them wouldn’t work for us, but Randy, the assistant town clerk, on his way back from the post office, used his own code and got us in.

There was indeed a piano—a Hughes & Son, serial no. 5084, manufactured for the Wade company in 1908, in Maine (the first Maine piano I’ve ever encountered). A grand old upright from the “golden era” of piano manufacture, when there were literally thousands of manufacturers in the U.S. alone. Someone at the factory had taken the trouble to hand-pant some arabesque filigree on the internal plate. The plate also had a record of past tunings, the most recent in 1985. Which, judging from its current sour intonation, may well have been the last time it was tuned. The 1985 tuner had noted that even after that tuning, the pitch was “1/2” (presumably a half-step, or maybe half of a half-step) low, no doubt because it had started so far below pitch that it wasn’t advisable to bring it up all the way in one tuning.

In other words, it was wicked out of tune. So far so, in fact, that some of the unisons (multiple strings tuned to the same note) sounded not like even out-of-tune unisons but rather a full half-step apart. I had to open the lid and check that the hammers were not just out of alignment and striking adjacent strings by mistake.

Even so, the old thing had life in it. Doreen was kind enough to take a couple of short videos of some Joplin and some James P. Johnson—music that is fast and reliant on rhythm for its interest while also harmonically relatively simple, and thus can come across even through deeply troubled intonation. And Doreen and Katrina volunteered on the spot to help facilitate and eventual Town Hall performance in Pittsfield. Assuming the pins and pin black are not faulty, and the strings not too badly rusted, it should be tunable. (The project never collects a performance fee or any other compensation, but we do ask that the piano be tuned. If this is a hardship, we can occasionally use some of our modest grant funds and patron donations to cover tuning costs.)

It’s always possible that the situation will be more favorable at the church—I’ll follow up there with calls or emails. But as most of the project concerts are in churches (to paraphrase Willie Sutton “because that’s where the pianos are”), I do enjoy scheduling Grange Halls, Town Halls, schools, and libraries for variety when I can.

This little diary covered half of my 6-hour piano scouting day in Pittsfield and Chittenden (where I also found a likely venue and several helpful friendly potential organizers). Or in other words, less than 1% of the 252 towns total, or just over 1% of towns remaining to be played. (Though I also squeezed in a visit to Ellis Music in Bethel, where I made contact with Tony who it looks will be able to identify locations and local collaborators for several of the adjoining towns.) As the saying goes: Magna patria, vita brevis.

“Jungle Drums” by James P. Johnson

How to schedule 252 concerts, part ??

Once again I’ve fallen behind in concert scheduling. I’ve been acting chair of the UVM music program, covering for a colleague on sabbatical. And for lots of reasons, including but not limited to the lawless chaos raining down from the authoritarian regime in DC, it’s been far more work than the advertised seat-warming gig. 

But whenever I’m in any kind of low point in the project, whether it’s because of delinquent posting frequency, scheduling challenges, new repertoire overwhelm, general burnout, or whatever, some serendipitous exciting new thing pops in to pull me up.

Today a quick call led to an immediate date just a few weeks ahead. (The hardest assignment is filling in the upcoming schedule on short notice.) At a nearby elementary school, a fun thing I’ve been looking to do more of. 

The only downside to an in-school gig is that it’s probably not appropriate to make it a fundraiser and may limit the audience—thus depressing my all-important STATISTICS. (I track attendance and donation amounts, partly for purposes of grant-writing, but mostly out of obsessive competitive self-analysis…I have a draft post about this, about the seductiveness and insidiousness of quantification.) 

But the school principal on the other end of the line said they were planning a celebration to dedicate a newly redone playground. On a Friday—my project’s only convenient weekday concert slot. Could we do something in conjunction with that? Thus making it a schoolday yet also a public event. 

I was already fully cheered up. Then he mentioned that a student was hoping to sing the national anthem at the event…there’s my “local collaborator” box ticked with no further legwork.

It was just one good vibe after another from there. To top it all off, he had what I (having admittedly little clue) would call a non-posh London accent. I’m a total sucker for that inflection; it was like talking to Idris Elba.

x

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. 

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.

Not the end of the world (yet)

One of the least tragic consequences of the recent flooding: 

My concert in famously never-inhabited Lewis, which was scheduled for the scenic Lewis Pond Overlook in the Silvio Conte Wildlife Refuge this September—very purposefully for the last weekend before the start of waterfowl season, so we would not frustate hunters by monopolizing the parking—was been postponed until at least next fall, as the road to the overlook was washed out by the recent record rainfall.

The July 10 flood claimed at least two lives in Vermont, and hundreds have lost their homes. Having to reschedule a concert is no tragedy. But it is interesting that this is already the second extreme-weather cancellation for me just this summer.  This project, like any ongoing regular activity, serves as a barometer of climate destabilization in Vermont, as concerts intersect ever more frequently with weather disasters and extremes.

There’s a map for that

...or, How to schedule 252 concerts, Part N+2

In my last post I bemoaned the time spent on scheduling now that I no longer delegate it to assistants. 

This is a real issue, but my experience of the last few weeks was (I hope!) atypically heavy on logistics, because I’ve been working my way through a huge backlog old notes and stale email threads going back sometimes to the first summer of the project, i.e. two years ago. 

I’m about ¾ through that task and feeling good about being much better situated for future scheduling, because I finally figured out to go visual.

From the outset, I’ve been working from a master spreadsheet of all 252 towns (actually 251 when I started). I just copy-pasted the one on Wikipedia, which came with populations, and added columns for things like contacts, venue leads or likely possibilities, local performer-collaborators, attendance, donation beneficiary and amount, and of course concert date. I tried to take all incoming email invitations, tips from other pianists, scribbled notes from conversations after concerts or from pianos seen when peering church windows as I passed through villages, etc. and enter all that into the spreadsheet. I did tend to get behind, which is why so much of the past month was spent digging up information. But otherwise I thought it was working just fine.

When thinking about scheduling a concert, though, it was always a bit disruptive to have to switch to a map view to see where the town lies—location being important not just to avoid concerts too close together in both time and space, but also to facilitate scheduling of double-concert weekends, where we desire the two concerts to be relatively distant from our home base, not too far from each other (but not too close), with an overnight in between. (As I said we might here, Annelies* and I have indeed settled on a plan where we devote two weekends a month to this project, to keep roughly half our weekends free for Everything Else, which now includes trips down to Boston to visit our grandbaby. To keep on my 7-year desired pace, that means every other weekend needs to be a double-header.)

Yet somehow, even though a state/town map is prominently featured in both the Concerts page of the website and also, in physical form, at each concert, where the host gets to fill in the town being played…somehow I didn’t connect dots to realize I needed a scheduling map as well. A third map, one that shows not only the towns already played (like our giant physical poster) plus those coming up (like the map on the website) but also the towns where I have a lead or a conversation started.

But I got there eventually! and now I have a top-secret home map that shows everything: towns played (filled in with highlighter), and towns both scheduled (with little sticky notes and a date) and with scheduling conversations (with blank sticky notes). The image here shows the map after going through about 3/4 of my communications backlog. It’s a bit heartening, because while I’m now a bit under 1/4 through the project, the map indicates some sort of activity—past, scheduled, or in discussion—for about half of the 252 towns.

Now, whenever an invitation comes in, or whenever I’m considering a particular town, I can see at a glance where it is relative to us, and how close it is to other towns awaiting a date. So obvious! Not sure why it took me two years to figure it out.

*i.e. my life partner and also project partner. I hate saying “my wife” which to me has a patriarchal legacy connotation I can’t shake off. And “spouse” is just an ugly word. 

How to schedule 252 concerts, Part N+1

(Another logistical-technical and slightly complainy post. Probably boring, with apologies to my Dear Readers, as this blog serves as my personal record of project progress and reflections, as well as a place to share them publicly.)

One of the reasons I haven’t caught up on concert write-ups even after the end of my teaching year is that scheduling logistics has been taking up a huge amount of time.

Except for looking into very small towns where I anticipate it might be tricky to find a piano, I no longer do a lot of internet sleuthing and Google map searching to try to find venues. I rarely cold-call anyone anymore. Instead, invitations keep rolling in, and at the current pace of three concerts a month, I have more than a year’s worth of invited concerts to schedule.

About a year ago I decided to stop delegating searching and scheduling to my assistants. The problem was that I was never sufficiently disengaged from the discussion to make the time savings worth the complication in communication. I thought that by using a shared internet calendar, and marking blackout days in advance, it would be fine to have other people making booking decisions.  

But unlike a full-time touring musician, I’m trying to lead a more or less normie life, with a full-time day job, wanting to keep half my weekends free for non-concert activities (and not always able to plan months ahead exactly which weekends will be claimed for special family or other events). I would inevitably find myself back in the conversation soon enough, if not to confirm the place and date, then soon after to talk about finding a local collaborator. Which is also delegable, but it was hard for an intermediary to “feel out” the situation exactly how it would feel to me. Similarly for getting a sense of the piano being proposed—that’s hard for a non-pianist assistant to assess via emails or phone calls, or a quick phone video of someone playing all the keys from bottom to top.

By contrast, interns can assess the energy and enthusiasm of an inviting group—a very important factor in setting up a successful event—about as well as I can. But then there would often be a decision to make, whether to respond with an immediate yes or to politely express that we needed to consider the options in that town before settling on a venue…and again, that would involve a side conversation with me first. Again, it just felt like the time gained for me in not making the initial outreach or search was largely lost to the inefficiency of an added layer of communication.

But the grass is always greener! After spending most of my project time the last few weeks on scheduling and programming, I wonder if I should reconsider delegating more. 

Westford writeup

I posted the Westford writeup on Saturday. It’s my first writeup in over 8 months, and I was already behind before that; there are now 25 completed concerts still awaiting writeups.

The gap doesn’t require a ton of explanation beyond it being hard to keep everything going while doing my day job during the 9-month academic year, This project is a second full-time job (unpaid, just to be clear). But there are some more specific reasons too.

The video editing is a bit fussy, mostly because I’m still a total novice with the software (Apple’s Final Cut).

It’s also challenging for me to choose performance clips I want to upload. My concert playing is getting more professionally consistent, but there’s still a difference between what rocks live in person and something that’s clean and that I can comfortably live with being on the internet indefinitely. (The writeups are archival, so I don’t intend to take down less good performances as my playing evolves.) Something can both rock and be of “recording quality” too, obviously, but it’s common for something to be amazing in concert yet have real glitches that don’t stand up well on recording.

The selection and nice layout of images is also a sticking point. Not to get deep into the webby weeds, but basically html is not inherently well set up to format text and simultaneously manage both vertical and horizontal image layout. However, I have a CS student intern, Lindsay Hall, working with me on upgrading the website this summer, and hopefully she can set up some templates and techniques that will make graphics layout more efficient and elegant.

And all of this, especially the video and image editing, is painstaking, non-ergonomic work for me. And the worst is doing it all while sitting. Besides messing me up physically, both extended screen time and extended butt time make me stupider and less efficient. So I've been meaning to make a good, 2-display, standing setup in my home office. But that requires procuring furniture of the right shape and height, and which in turn requires decluttering and organizing the many piles of sheet music, programs, maps, etc. in the space, and then after that requires finding the right connectors and adapters to get the perfectly usable old monitors etc. lying around to talk to the computer. I’m well along in that sequence, but the reverse domino effect needed to get it all going was like procrastination crack.

And of course, just generally, the longer you let something go, the more daunting it seems and the more re-initiation energy it takes to get back to it.

Anyway it feels good to have popped out a new writeup after so long. And I hope that over the rest of the summer break, as I continue to do about 3 concerts a month but not extra, I’ll be able to implement all the website improvements Lindsay is cooking up and get mostly caught up on the writeups.

I also have a ton of blog posts in mind that I haven’t written, mostly for overarching reason no. 1 (too busy). What I think of as interesting ones, not just about my mundane logistical hassles like this post.

Climate chaos continued: Please don’t come to my concert

The upcoming Vershire performance is in the Town Center Building, and was initiated by (among others) the town clerk. It is truly a town concert. 

And the town has asked residents to stay home.

Vershire is on its third prolonged thaw-out of the year, and it’s still weeks before the traditional start of mud season. To make matters worse, the road foreman just quit because he was fed up with the constant complaints of townspeople who misdirected their frustration with the new climate at the road crew. To keep things from deteriorating further, and to avoid mishaps, the town has advised those on dirt roads to stay off them.*

I’ve already played on Vermont’s smokiest day ever and the warmest-ever day in November. Now we can add the muddiest March.

*Note to out-of-town fans: the main roads are fine. Please come!

A travelogue of picture-postcard charms

The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue

Of picture post card charms
Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm   

—Joni Mitchell, “Amelia” 

This project has given my wife and me the gift of sending us all over the state and getting to know its towns and villages—something we’d always meant to do, but never made the time for. In concerts and surrounding publicity, we emphasize the joy of experiencing Vermont’s surprising variety of landscapes and communities, and say that eschewing flying and staying close has been anything but a privation.

Yet even though we’re not scrambling from airport to hotel to venue like Joni Mitchell, we’re not exactly dawdling about. Fitting the concert journeys between the obligations of home, work, and pets waiting for our return; allowing time to set up and rehearse with local collaborators; practicing often to the last minute because of my commitment to playing concert-specific repertoire and a fresh Scarlatti and Scarlatti intro every time (what was I thinking?); then talking to the audience after, breaking down, and packing up—all this means that in 9 concert trips out of 10, there’s maybe 30-45 minutes left for anything else; a little bit more when we do back-to-back dates on successive dates with an overnight in between. 

My wife says we’ll need to do the tour all over again after it’s done, this time without any concerts. As it is, most of the time we have only have time to grab a photo or two of the venue and maybe walk the dog for a half-hour afterwards somewhere nearby. Even though we’re not going far, we’re acting like hurried tourists, and rushing to grap a few shots of the town to post in the concert write-ups can feel performative, inauthentic, Instagrammy. A travelogue of picture-postcard charms.

Mojo come, mojo go

For much of July and August my energy for this project was faltering, right when I’d imagined it would be picking up because I didn’t have to divide my energies with teaching classes. At least I had the self-awareness to realize it could have something to do with a broken toe (no tragedy, but an extended and frustrating summer debility), anaplasmosis (also no tragedy, but an energy sap), and the ever-worsening local and global news from the climate and biosphere (beyond tragedy, but not a surprise, except in its rapidity). Also I’d always anticipated there would be low points in a project this long and involved. So I allowed myself to feel mildly daunted and unenthusiastic without also worrying about feeling that way, which would only have amplified it.

And then I had an especially energizing concert in little Landgrove, pop. 177, with a great vibe, an old country upright with a great backstory, and our highest audience:population ratio by far— 35%! Plus we had a happy stay in Brandon on the way home—mostly for fun! though we did check out the piano (superb) at the see-it-to-believe-it Barn Opera while we were there. And now I feel excited again.

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.

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. 

The best ideas

A lot of the best ideas for the project have come from my life partner and self-appointed roadie/driver/recordist, Annelies McVoy.

Some of these are one-time little but valuable things, like paring down my project pitch summary (see yesterday’s post) from 1'50" to 1'35" while making it crisper and zingier. Or specific spur-of-the-moment performance suggestions, like singing Pete Sutherland’s “Robin Hood” with the audience in Sharon in his honor as he lay in hospice, or having Katie Oprea, who spent many years in Romania, play along on oboe to Bartok’s Romanian Dances (with zero preparation or rehearsal) in Bakersfield, both of which were concert highlights.

Some are more pervasive. The “about the piano” feature was Annelies’s idea, and is the most popular part of the concert writeups—and my own favorite aspect of them too.

The title of the project was all Annelies too. This is embarrassing to relate, but we came within days of launching the project with the perhaps lamest name in the history of project titles. 

I was looking for something short and sweet for a URL. The project title was already clear: 251 Community Concerts for a Cooler Climate. But that is of course too long for a URL. I admired the lean modernism of pianist Adam Tendler’s name for his play every state project: 88x50. That model was probably too much in my mind when I came up with (drum roll please)... 

251CCCC

which on further reflection got abbreviated to 

251C4

...I know, I know.

In my defense, I knew better than to act alone: I workshopped the name with my little team of interns. But even a group is susceptible to tunnel vision. We had been using “CCCC” and “C4” as informal texting shorthand for long enough that it sounded perfectly sensible to us. Never mind that the first connotation of “C4” is a military explosive. (We actually thought of that, but convinced ourselves it was not a problem.) Or that it’s not common knowledge, and therefore not memorable, that there are 251 towns in Vermont—hardly the same as the 50 states of 88x50. Not to mention that this number would change within two months of the project launch. Or that every damn time anyone said the URL out loud, they would have to add “That’s 251, followed by the letter C, followed by the number 4.” I thank Annelies for sparing us this fate every time I hear an ad for a company whose name is based on a cutesy trademarked non-standard spelling of a common word: their URL is announced in 1.5 seconds...and then spelled out, usually twice for good measure, for the following 10.

Anyway, there I was, working on my project logo or website within days of our launch, when Annelies looked over my shoulder, saw the 251C4, and said “What the hell is that?” I proudly explained it, she gave me the one-sided lip curl, and said, without a second’s pause, “Play Every Town.” Just like that. Damn.

Promotion and peripheries

I had an “extra” week between the Brunswick (6/11) and Bakersfield (6/25) concerts. Part of that was set aside for a 4-day family reunion, and I thought I’d use the rest to start catching up on concert writeups. However, I received a last-minute invitation to present a 3-minute elevator pitch on this project at the first annual UVM RISE (Research, Innovation, Sustainability, and Entrepreneurship) conference. This was additionally challenging because I decided to use half of that already short time for a compilation video, which meant (a) finally getting around to learning the basics of a real video editing application, Final Cut, and (b) extra effort figuring out how to get my pitch down to just over 90 seconds—as any writer or presenter knows, it takes much more time and thought to write a short summary than a long one.

I was glad of the opportunity to present my project to hundreds of in-person and virtual attendees, including possibly some looking to fund projects (though if so, I didn’t hear from them). After all, one of the main ideas of the project is talking about talking about the climate emergency, and to that end it doesn’t matter whether my audience is attending a concert or a conference. And I’d been meaning to do anyway to produce sleeker concert clips. Also, the video I made may turn out to be useful for other promo purposes. Finally, it was instructive to realize I could condense my core project spiel to under two minutes—in concerts, typically, I think I spend closer to 10 minutes cumulatively describing the different aspects of the project. Going forward I can be more pithy and have time for more music, or more chat specific to the locale and the repertoire.

That said, it really brought home just what a large proportion of my overall project time goes to non-music or para-musical tasks (something I touched on in one of my first blog posts). I spent the better part of four days compiling the video, editing, scripting, practicing, and delivering my presentation, and barely touched a keyboard. This was unusual in degree, but even in a typical week scheduling, promotion, composing concert writeups, finding my local performers and communicating with them, and so on, take up at least half my time, sometimes a good deal more.

Not complaining, just observing. I enjoy having non-music tasks. I like the feeling that I’m working on a music project even when I’m not practicing or composing. Often there’s a natural limit to how much time I can be musically productive, and the adjacent labors can feel like a welcome relief that still feels productive. I remember reading once that the poet Rilke, who wrote in hypercreative spurts in-between long bouts of writer’s block, would complain of being stuck to his friend Rodin, who was unable to sympathize because he was always busily engaged—but that was because as a sculptor, Rodin always had something to do, casting, or finishing, or realizing previously made sketches, even if he was not in a “creative” state of mind.

Anyway here’s the video I made. The first 15 seconds is just a screen capture showing me navigating the Concerts page map to get to a concert writeup. That’s followed by a one-minute, four-concert mini compilation to show the variety of venues, collaborators, music, and pianos. The drone footage of the Silvio Conte National Wildlife Refuge was taken by Neil Bainton just before the concert.

What’s your hurry, or, Hold my beer while I save the planet

In my last post, I said I would blog and maybe psychoanalyze the feelings behind my urge to complete this project sooner rather than later.

UPDATE: I see I blogged about tempo and urgency once already! Repeating myself in my old age. Apparently I've been more preoccupied with this than I realized.

1. Urgency. This project is my response to the climate emergency, and nothing says “emergency” like “let’s relax and take our time, maybe see how things go”. Come to think of it, that’s exactly how governments and other institutions are responding to the climate crisis, but obviously this is the problem.

I recognize that this thinking is silly on some levels. Like what, the worst climate impacts are going to be averted because I completed my 252 concerts in time? But relatedly, I’m pretty pessimistic about where we are and where we’re headed—a few more years from now, no one is going to need any reminding that the planet is cooking and maybe cooked, and then what’s the point of me tooling around trying to raise awareness? With every passing month of climate news it becomes less fantastical to think that organized society may be coming apart at the seams seven years from now. Our save-something-worth-living window is now, and narrowing fast.

2. Moving on. I’m coming to be identified with this project, which is likely to become the most high-profile thing I’ve done. And I kind of like that, but I don’t want it to define me publicly for the rest of my life either. 

That said, if I proceed at a slower pace, maybe it doesn’t have to be so self-defining; I’ll have more time to do other things too. 

3. Newsworthiness. I feel that some of the project’s romance lies in its ambition, which derives partly from its scope (every town, 252 concerts) but also from its pace. If it takes too long, maybe it won’t catch people’s imagination. And buzz is not just ego-boosting, and not just something that helps the project build audiences and makes it easier to land invitations for performances, but really the central goal. In some sense, what matters most is how people hear and maybe think about it, whether that’s because they attend a concert, follow the project online, or read/hear about it in the media.

But as the project putters along, I’m not so sure that the heroic timeline is so central to its appeal. People seem to find the project inherently interesting and thought-provoking, and media attention continues to ramp up. And even if a slower pace does result in some loss in intensity of attention, the longer duration of that attention might make up for it.

4. Busyness. I’m happier when I’m too busy with my creative projects than when not busy enough. My key takeaway from the little existentialist literature and philosophy I’ve read is that we construct the fiction that what we’re doing matters, and this fiction is self-actualizing. We pretend something matters, and if we care enough, then it does. A corollary to that is that the busyness and sense of urgency that come with a tighter project timeline sharpens this sense of purpose, the degree to which I feel I can give myself over to the project, that I have a reason to get up in the morning (and to practice).

So…did my self-talk-therapy work? It’s anyway made me fully comfortable with changing the goal to seven years from “just under five years” (I’d originally said I would finish by the end of 2026, which would be 4 yrs and 7 months from the first concert). Beyond seven years…I’ll have to wait and see how I feel, and also see if my marriage can tolerate a 3-per-month average as we learn from experience how to do this more smoothly and efficiently.

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium; or, the Five-Year Plan didn’t work so good for Stalin, and it’s not working so good for me

Often people ask me if I’m done yet with my concert project, or how it turned out, or something to that effect. 

I assume these folks have not fully registered that there are 252 towns in Vermont. Or maybe they think I just pull up to the town green with my keyboard, bang out Chopin’s Minute Waltz, and drive off to the next municipality. If I were done now, I would have played about five concerts a week. Not real!

In the initial publicity for this project—and as of now, what it still says on the “About” page of the project website—I said I would complete this by the end of 2026, which is a bit under 5 years from the start, or an average of just over one concert per week.

Yeah, that’s not happening either.

The pace of concerts so far has been a strain. There were no huge miscalculations as to what this project would entail, but several small and medium ones. Among other things, I underestimated the time I would spend on concert writeups, the time it would take to learn the typical Scarlatti sonata, and the time it would take just to do a concert: sometimes a 2-hour drive or more each way, arriving 2 or more hours early to have time to rehearse with my local collaborators, 90 minutes for the concert, time after for breakdown and to schmooze, plus time on either end to pack and unpack. It’s almost always a full day, often a long one. Sometimes extra long because we try to cram in a piano-venue scouting mission or a recreational activity once we’re making the trip—but so far these have been just that, crammed in, which is very much at odds with the “recreational” concept.

My wife Annelies appointed herself roadie, driver, videographer, and (often) dog minder. I didn’t ask this of her: she volunteered. She’s as enthusiastic about the project as I am, hasn’t missed a concert, and (as of now) doesn’t intend to. That said, I don’t know how I would do this if she weren’t my 100% concert-day assistant. Initially I had imagined having one of the project interns come to concerts to do recording and maybe help with odds and ends, but that was before I realized just how long the typical concert day would be. At this writing, I don’t have anything like the budget to pay my interns for 10- or 15-hour road days.

So I’ve started to re-think this as a 7-year project. That would come to exactly three concerts a month on average. If we get better at advance planning, we could arrange one overnight double-header each month, which means we could do three per month while leaving half of our weekends free for other things. And seven years has a nice Biblical ring to it.

I told this to Annelies, and she did not see this as a solution!

Because the pace so far—the pace that has already been a strain, and has cut into our other activities together—has been about three per month anyway, so Annelies doesn’t see how the shift to a 7-year plan is any alleviation. 

Her assessment sounds self-evident. Except that there’s a learning curve to every aspect of the project, including concert-day planning and logistics, and I think that the same pace will be more manageable in the second year and beyond than it was in the first. Greater financial support, which I’m actively pursuing, would also allow some relief, in the form of course releases and more background assistance. But I totally understand her skepticism: this could all be wishful thinking on my part.

For now, we’ve agreed to present just two concerts this July as we take stock and discuss different strategies. This is the opposite of my original thinking, that in the summer I could do 4 or 5 concerts a month to balance out a slower pace the rest of the year, when juggling the demands of teaching and winter travel.

But what we do for any one month will make little difference in the long term, so I can let that go for the moment. And it makes a lot of sense to reconsider the pacing from a place of relative calm, and after having caught up a bit on the purely recreational time together we’ve been missing. Plus there’s a backlog of a zillion concerts I need to write up for the website. And I can look ahead at upcoming Scarlatti sonatas and other repertoire I’ve been wanting to learn but have been too busy to work on. And focus on some auxiliary aspects such as the funding pursuit.

In the next post I’ll look at my reasons for wanting to complete the project sooner rather than later. I think they partly make sense and partly don’t, and maybe blogging them will serve as a kind of out-loud self-analysis to put things in perspective.

P.S. “Or maybe they think I just pull up to the town green with my keyboard, bang out Chopin’s Minute Waltz, and drive off to the next municipality...” Not gonna lie, when I wrote that just now it sounded surprisingly tempting. Maybe I have been going a bit hard.

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.

Project tempo and the existential void

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here or sent an email update. It turns out that a concert every weekend, seven weeks in a row, in the midst of a full-time teaching semester, is a little too much. (As I’ve said before, it’s not just playing the concert, it’s learning the new Scarlatti sonata and the collaborative music each time, composing the elaborate post-concert web write-up, plus ongoing work of booking, promotion, and grant-seeking.)  That 7-concert run concluded last Sunday, and I’ve been catching up with school, and just without the oomph even to write a short paragraph like this explaining that I don’t have energy to post. 

After a sparse holiday season schedule (only one concert in December) we’re going to aim for two weekends a month in the spring semester, maybe trying to make every other one a two-fer mini-tour when playing farther from home. My life partner (and principal project advisor, videographer, roadie, and driver) thinks even this may be too much, for our relationship if not for the project. While I think it might be fine in a semester with two classes instead of three, or with a Tuesday-Thursday teaching schedule. We’ll see.

To stay on track for my stated 5-year timeline, I need an average tempo of one concert a week. My wife asks, “Why five years? Who cares?” It’s a fair question. Maybe we will adjust it, but I do have some reasons. 

I love this project, but don’t want it to define my musical life indefinitely. And the project is my response to the climate emergency—taking my time and moseying along doesn’t feel very emergent. I feel it’s more newsworthy if more compact: “Guy says he’ll eventually play everywhere in Vermont, probably” doesn’t make as compelling a story (though I concede I may be exaggerating the significance of this particular point). 

Finally, there is this existentialist, life purpose angle. I’m happier when hyper-engaged with something I feel I have to do, even while I realize it’s only me saying I have to do it. It’s built on air, but as long as I’m fully immersed, it feels real and compelling. I do better overcommitted than at loose ends.

How to book 251 concerts, part 6: Have help. Pay them.

I haven’t said much here about my team of crack assistants, all undergrad Music Technology and Business majors at UVM: Elizabeth Indorato, Brady Jalili, and Willow Phoenix. Elizabeth and Willow run the Facebook and Instagram sites, respectively (Reason #17 for geezers to keep young people around, though honestly they’re a bit young for Facebook) while Brady helps coordinate publicity with the various presenters for each concert.

They also assist with booking. To be brutally honest, the reason I didn’t mention them earlier in this context is that we only recently passed the crossover point where their help in this regard actually saves me time. It can at first take longer to explain how to do something than to do it oneself, all the more so because not only were they not very experienced with this—neither was I, so I was figuring out how to do it at the same time that I was figuring our how to ask for help.

But now we’ve progressed to this magic place where one of them will message me and tell me I’ve got a gig on this date, in this town, on this kind of piano. Sometimes I was involved along the way, but increasingly it just gets sprung on me. It’s an amazing experience for someone who has never had management.

Side note: as a typical performer/composer type, I’ve always seen promotion and advance work as a grind, and done it only begrudgingly (and minimally). It is odd to me that my team of music business majors are actually glad for the experience! 

Though of course I pay them. On this Labor Day, I feel compelled to opine that unpaid internships should not exist. They devalue not only the worker but the work, lowering the market value of the labor of others doing similar work for a living. And they make internships a privilege not affordable to students who need to earn, helping to perpetuate inequities.