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.

Blogging vs. flogging

For some reason I come to these blog posts with a different attitude than for the rest of the website, social media, and other public-facing elements of this project. Every form of writing is filtered, and entails (I think) some attempt to give order and meaning to experience, and usually some desire to cast the writer in a good light. But I feel comparatively freer and more open in my blog posts, more confessional, more willing to discuss self-doubt and shortcomings. 

I’ve talked about bad performances, for example. Not only would I not put second-rate performance clips in the concert summary postings, I wouldn’t even allude, in that venue, to the obvious fact that the recorded selections there are curated, and that there are performances from each concert (plenty!) that I would never, ever post online.

This distinction between blogging and the project’s other publicity is a little silly. I mean, this blog is embedded on the project website. Still, I welcome the freedom to let it all hang out here, even if that freedom is arbitrarily self-granted. And limited. Like even here in the blog, I wouldn’t mention my insecurity about performing while 15 pounds above my ideal weight. (oh whoops)

Anyway, the original impetus for this post was just to say, if you are a blog reader but not checking out the rest of the site, that a lot of my energy documenting this project is going into the write-ups on the Concerts page now, more than to this blog. Check them out!

Point of order: towns, villages, gores, and grants

This Saturday’s concert in Jeffersonville prompts me to revisit the question of community place names.Someone asked me “Where are you going to play in Moscow?”. I say “Nowhere—didn’t you hear I stopped flying?” Haha, I kid, I know they meant Moscow, Vermont. But the answer is still “nowhere”, at least not for purposes of fulfilling this project mission, because Moscow  is not a town but a village in the town of Stowe, whereas I will most likely play in Stowe (village), which is…also a village in Stowe. I get similar questions about other villages. As I wrote in a post back in May:

In Vermont, “towns” are large-ish areas defined by boundaries that were mostly set arbitrarily by distant power brokers in New Hampshire or New York, usually long before there was much European settlement within those borders. “Villages” are clustered settlements within towns: the places you’ll probably find a church and maybe a general store, town hall, railway station (as in Essex Junction) etc. Towns can have multiple villages. Villages can be incorporated or unincorporated, but in either case they are still a part of their surrounding town and are not counted in the tally of Vermont’s 251 (soon 252) distinct municipalities.  

This project is Play Every Town (and city), not Play Every Village. It is understandably confusing. Many towns, like Stowe, have an eponymous village. Or back to this weekend’s concert, I will be playing my Cambridge performance in Jeffersonville, not in the other village in Cambridge, which is…Cambridge. 

Adding to the confusion, a few villages are located in more than one town, like the nearby village of Underhill Flats, which straddles Underhill and Jericho.

And I didn’t even trouble you with the onetime Cambridge “hamlets” of Pleasant Valley, North Cambridge, and East Cambridge. As far as I can tell, a hamlet is just a smaller village, but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Except that some villages are officially incorporated, meaning that they have at least some services and taxes, such as water or sewage, that are in addition to the services provided by the encompassing town. But even Vermont’s 35 incorporated villages (soon to be 34, I suppose, when the village of Essex Junction becomes an independent city on July 1) are not counted in the official 251 (soon 252) tally of towns and cities. Like Essex Junction, most of Vermont’s 10 (soon 11) cities came into being when large-ish villages calved off from their parent towns.

I don’t have an official Vermont village count, and I don’t think an unarguable count would be possible. But many towns have multiple villages, so I am guessing a fair tally would be around 600. Some are officially incorporated, others are Census Designated Places but not government entities, others are barely detectable historical relics from a time when a few dozen homes a few miles distant from the next village was occasion enough for another post office or general store. And since Scarlatti wrote only 455 sonatas, I can’t play in every village, as this will make clear.

Then there are a few towns without villages, because they are almost or completely without people. I’ll be playing those towns too, because they’re on The List. And as I mentioned in the May post referenced above, I’ll play the four gores and grants for an even 256, lest I leave blank spots on my concert map. More about those another time, I have to go practice.

Be here now?

Thinking about my last post, where I said that one reason I’ve been blogging less is that I’ve been too busy doing. And that the “doing” is mostly logistics: booking, publicity, locating/assessing piano venues, finding local collaborators. In other words, everything but playing music.

And also, I’ve spent a lot of time creating the multimedia write-ups of the first four (so far) performances on the Concerts page of the website. When I was young, one often saw persons of a certain nationality,* a people known for its dual loves of travel and high-tech gadgetry, in places of touristic interest. It was common to make gentle fun of the fact that these people were so busy photographing every moment of their trip that they seemed not to be actually experiencing any of it directly.

Well, they won. That’s most of everyone now, walking around protected from direct interaction with the world by their smartphones. If they’re even present at all (as opposed to texting, scrolling, gaming) they’re often engaging with the world behind the lens...or they’re in front of the lens, engaging with it.

Not exactly the same thing, but all the logistics and oversight and documentation for this project reminds me of when Alan Gilbert began as music director of the New York Philharmonic. He decided to blog about it, which was doubly cool: blogs were not associated with the buttoned-up world of elite orchestras, and also, back in 2009, blogging was just still...cool. 

You can read his first post here, but the gist of it was: being Music Director of one of the top orchestras in the world, the one he’d dreamt of leading since he was a boy in NYC, is 10% musical activity and 90% shit work. (I’m paraphrasing; he was much more diplomatic, and he didn’t use any bad words.)

This resonated deeply. I had similar thoughts about my job in academia, which was ostensibly 40% teaching, 40% performance, creative, and scholarly work, and 20% service...but in actuality was about 65% teaching, 30% administrative work (much of it of little consequence) and 5% actual “doing music”. But I was an associate professor at a regional state university, not artistic leader of a world-class orchestra. It was both astonishing and oddly reassuring that Maestro Gilbert felt the same way.** That it was not, even where he stood, all rainbows and unicorns.

Then, if I recall correctly, he never wrote another blog post about his directorship. Which was kind of QED: who has the time?

*I have learned well from my mother, diplomatic and respectful to an extraordinary degree, who literally told jokes like so: “Three members of an ethnic group walk into a bar...”

**Particularly since Alan and I were at college together, where he was just another talented young guy. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the time I beat him out for a plum college conducting gig. (Spoiler: my triumph had zilch to do with our relative conducting skills.)

Still here

Long time no post. Don't know if anyone was noticing the hiatus, but I note that readership is up a bit (views deep into double digits for one post!) so I thought I should explain. 

For one, I’ve been in thrall to the project’s relative success so far. That is, I’ve been swamped with booking, publicizing, fielding media queries, and working with my team of crack interns in beginning to delegate a lot of those tasks—which is ultimately a time-saver, obviously, but in this ramping-up stage is sometimes more work than just doing something oneself. Especially when one’s self, too, is just feeling out as one goes how to do all these things for the first time. Oh, and also there’s a b1t of practicing, rehearsing, touring, and performing (all non-delegable).

For another thing, a lot of my energy for documenting and diarying has gone towards creating the writeups of each performance on the Concerts page of the project website. Soon, after I implement an improved script, clicking on the town in the map on the Concerts page will present you a link that jumps to the writeup for that concert. For now, you can just scroll through them (they’re in alphabetical order; not hard to scroll through as there is a grand total of three posted so far).

Hoping to get back to somewhat steadier blogging tempo now that our booking and PR etc. procedures are beginning to take shape as manageable routines.

Transcend the piano, transcend yourself

The United Church of Underhill has three pianos: one in the basement that I did not see, a 1986 Yamaha console upright in the sanctuary, and an old Everett upright grand in the community room behind the altar. The console in the sanctuary, a gift made in memory of an active choir member by her family, is well-maintained and fairly responsive. The big old Everett, a monster from the heyday of the upright grand (roughly a century ago) is less cared-for but still quite stable. It sounds like it would hold a tuning well (it was in decent tune despite its relatively infrequent care) and has a beautiful, rich, evocative sound.

But the concert (#3, May 21, 2022) was on the Yamaha console. It was a good representative of its class, clear, consistent, and in tune. But I struggled to make dynamic contrasts, and the model’s short bass strings couldn’t do justice to the register. While this was sometimes frustrating, it also had paradoxical salutary effects.

Beethoven’s first sonata, dedicated to his sort-of teacher Haydn, is indeed Haydnesque in its lean proportions and thematic economy. But it already evinces the heroic, heaven-storming Beethoven, particularly in the furiously fast finale. 

To put it bluntly, the requisite sounds for Beethoven’s heroic style just weren’t on this piano. In order to approximate the maniacal intensity and dynamic contrasts the piece cries out for, I had (again to be blunt) to play the living hell out of it. This required me to perform with real abandon—and the thing being abandoned was any care or concern about my own abilities. The result was perhaps not a rendition for the ages, but surprisingly strong. The audience was electrified, and my support team, who as musicians were aware of the piano’s limitations, told me they were listening with slack-jawed astonishment.

It reminded me of the time in grad school when I was learning Beethoven’s last sonata. I was practicing it on the Packard* in my basement apartment, one of those grand old uprights like the above-mentioned Everett. It had a big, rich sound, but not as big as demanded by late Beethoven in his full-on chest-beating Titan mode, as in the first movement of op. 111. My friend Justin Davidson, at the time not yet the esteemed music and architecture critic but just some guy with a good ear, opined that the piece sounded in some ways better than on a modern grand, because of how hard I had to struggle to make the piano roar. 

He was right! This wasn’t merely a sentimental romantic conceit, the idea that it is vaguely ennobling to fight to push the machine past its limits. Rather, you play a certain way when you’re sending it, which is very different from how you play when you’re holding back. And Beethoven, even deaf as he was, understood that he was pushing the limits of the small, wood-framed pianos of his time, knew that the passagework and registral leaps and dynamic juxtapositions of his heroic style would require the pianist go all out. Whereas on a modern 9-foot concert grand, the piano simply does what the performer asks, and in places the situation Beethoven had in mind is even inverted: the pianist has to pull back or slow down to keep the piano from overpowering the music.

But right now, in light of my project to become a more present and giving performer, what interests me about this is how having to fight to overcome an instrument’s limitations pulls me out of ego-driven negative thinking into a much purer, more positive frame of mind. Instead of worrying if I am living up to the music, it puts me and Beethoven on the same team: we’re just struggling together to do the best we can with the imperfect instruments we’ve been given. 

*No relation to the car company, though their logos are strikingly similar. I regret that the internet has made it so easy for me to ascertain their non-relation; back in grad school, pre-Google, I assumed the auto manufacturer and instrument maker were the same outfit. (Why not? It’s true for Yamaha and motorcycles.)