Questions of Vacation

Questions Of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

Brooklyn Bridge

In a cab from Brooklyn to the upper east side Saturday night, I was swept up in the stunning urban pleasures of crossing the East River at night and flying up the FDR, city scintillant, gracefully curved edges belying its gridded rigors.

The crowd of us musicians who toil in the mid-town temples of classical music or the theaters of Times Square can easily become provincials, traversing the straight, underground pathway from the upper west side into various orchestra pits (also underground) rarely seeing the city seductively reflected in the river or curving north under girded bridges.

•

"way out; way in; romantic passageway
first seen by the eye of the mind,
then by the eye. O steel! O stone!
Climactic ornament, a double rainbow..."

---Marianne Moore from "Granite and Steel"

•

"O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms."

---Hart Crane from "To Brooklyn Bridge"

Please, Read

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: It Must Give Pleasure

by Wallace Stevens

To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,

To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude

And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on

The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart

That is the common, the bravest fundament,

This is a facile exercise. Jerome

Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,

The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

For companies of voices moving there,

To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,

To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.

But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,

On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,

As when the sun comes rising, when the sea

Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.

Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.

We reason about them with a later reason.

Contemplation

When a composer's music is perfectly fitted to his time, one can wonder what or even if he would have composed where he born a hundred years earlier or later. If Mozart lived in the 20th century, I expect he might have been a film maker rather than composer.

Centenary considerations are much on the mind these days, with Elliot Carter's big day widely celebrated around the city. On the hundredth birthday of Oliver Messiaen (today), I attended an sprawling program of his work at The Church of the Ascension.

Hearing the "Quartet for the End of Time" live is always a powerful experience. The performers tonight, Paul Kim, piano, Curtis Macomber, violin, Jonathan Spitz, cello, Alan Kay, clarinet, revealed the work's intense expression and spiritual questioning, within the framework of its beauty of both sound and form. After intermission, Jon Gillock played an impressive selection of movements drawn from various organ works into his own suite.

Listening, I was struck again by how constructed Messiaen's music sounds. Its madeness is conspicuous to the point of being part of its meaning. Music, by contrast, that sounds "natural" almost defies the idea of its being composed. There are songs by Stephen Foster and melodies by Mozart that seem so inevitable that it is hard to believe there was a time when they didn't exist, as if composers discovered rather than created them. The unnaturalness of Messiaen's music seems related to its task in that so much of what he writes asks us to look directly, unflinchingly, into the greatest mysteries of existence and not avert our gaze. The wrenching knowledge that such knowledge is unknowable is a difficult truth, a question with no answer. Such contemplation is essentially an unnatural act. Quite outside nature, it is supernatural.

Nature does not contemplate, existence is enough. When Messiean introduces bird song into his music, the ambivalent sounds of nature bring the personalness of our spiritual experience into sharp relief. It brings to mind Giovanni Bellini's 1480 masterpiece, St. Francis in the Desert, at The Frick Collection in New York City. The artist baths Saint Francis in one of the most extraordinary streams of light in Western art at the transcendental moment when he receives the stigmata. In the background, a crane, a donkey, and a flock of sheep stand unaffected by the miraculous transformation. The saint's moment in the light is his alone. The knowledge that nature is unconcerned about our struggles draws us to contemplate things beyond nature, beyond what is knowable. Messiaen's music is an indispensable guide. Mozart and Stephen Foster provide the perfect balm.

•

Musee des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden (1940)

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Reading in Autumn

"Summer Reading" by John Ashbery

With these lighter days a concomitant
urge to scrutiny arrives. Signing in,
my motivation palls, pusillanimous.
Are we to take it inside the house?
I have to go.

Tell me another dream. The long events surface
wider, farther apart, like autumn breakers.
Birds are suddenly there. The house of cards
on sand falters, fatally. I'm elated.

You never know how things work out
except through "sleight" of hand, sometimes.
I'm worried about knowing later.
The high-school principal killed his star student,

for instance. Feeling competent,
they quashed him. Until he wins the crisis
we can't promote it. Keep that rodent away.
What have you seemed to do?

Do interesting things well done and may
spring chasten you. We had everything in mind.
Everything softballed, wound up on my back porch.
It's okay, though. Keep us on your docket. Cut through the . . .

Water & Ice on a Hot Day—
110° in LA and We See Palm Trees . . .

From “The Lovers of Achilles” by Sophocles

When ice gleams in the open air,
children grab.
Ice-crystal in the hands is
at first a pleasure quite novel.
But there comes a point—
you can’t put the melting mass down,
you can’t keep holding it.
Desire is like that.
Pulling one to act and not to act,
again and again, pulling

•

"The Glass of Water" by Wallace Stevens

That the glass would melt in heat,
That the water would freeze in cold,
Shows that this object is merely a state,
One of many, between two poles. So,
In the metaphysical, there are these poles.

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink. There
And in that state, the glass is a pool.
Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws
When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws

And in the water winding weeds move round.
And there and in another state—the refractions,
The metaphysical, the plastic parts of poems
Crash in the mind—But, fat Jocundus, worrying
About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,

But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,
It is a state, this spring among the politicians
Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,
One would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung,
One would continue to contend with one’s ideas.

. . . at the End of the Mind

Thus

As for the key, we know it must be minor.

B minor, then, as having passed for noble

On one or two occasions.  As for the theme,

There being but the one, with variations,

Let it be spoken outright by the oboe

Without apology of any string,

But as a man speaks, openly, his heart

Among old friends, let this be spoken.

                                                            Thus.

The major resolutions of the minor,

Johann's great signature, would be too noble.

It would do certain violence to our theme.

Therefore see to it that the variations

Keep faith with the plain statement of the oboe.

Entering quietly, let each chastened string

Repeat the lesson she must get by heart,

And without overmuch adornment.

                                                         Thus.

by Donald Justice, from "The Summer Anniversaries" (1960)

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka at the Swim-Up Bar

Think of Van Gogh, needled by that ringing in his ear,
of Nijinsky in his straitjacket, of Robert Schumann.
Yes, think of Schumann, whose wedded bliss lasted
only four years before his mind betrayed him.
Not even Clara could save him from madness.
Not even she. If my wife were here, she’d say,

“Honey, don’t forget Dianne Arbus or Plath.”
And what about Virginia Woolf, contemplating
each stone she sewed into her sweater
before she waded into the stream.

Think of them all, I nod to myself,
though there must be other etcetera
to distill into palliatives, every plum
of suffering, every genus of indifference.

Even now, when I listen to my music
I catch myself muttering, “Fool.”
Fool who made the sorrows of all souls count
as nothing even as I squeezed the crystal,
everything vanished into the umlauts of Berlin nights.
Even my scores lightened, rose as cloud.

These days, I no longer need to sleep.
I remember, have always remembered too much.
No matter. The Hermitage, that ridiculous little gusli,
the Bolshoi. Computer problems with the Mir.
Bach’s Brandenburgs as played by six dozen balalaikas.
This is what they want to know about in the Provinces,
I tell Vladimir, the mixer at the swim-up bar,
the Four Seasons in Duesseldorf.

Vladimir looks as though he listens closely, I’ll give him that,
those silver wings tucked tight behind him,
angelic concern spread behind his Cossack moustache,
right finger checking and rechecking
the geography of his saber scar for luck.

There’s one conversation we’ve never had,
and Vlad leans into me, refills my Stoli on the house,
adds some ice—Say I loved Ludmila,
say how Ruslan comes to me speaking
one night with a voice made of cellos,
then next night keening like massed bassoons.

Say I even craved those nightly visitations—
that they awoke in me my Spanish dreams,
hummed a Jota Aragonesa, my Memory
of a Summer Night in Madrid,
though I’ve never been.

Oh, Vlad, you should have heard my dreams.
Like an eight-armed goddess retelling
the lives of czars while peeling oranges
and humming Prince Igor as I bowed.

By Jeffrey Levine from "Mortal, Everlasting" (2000)

You're It!!!!

Nicholas Phan tagged me in a meme-inspired game. The details are as follows:

The rules of this game of tag:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

With such fun rules, who couldn't not play along?

Nearest book: "Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box—Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragment" by Elizabeth Bishop

From her unpublished and unfinished poem: "Brasil, 1959"

"Meanwhile, you've never seen
a country that's more beautiful.
—or this part of it, anyway—
The delicacy of the green hills
the new bamboos unfurl the edges
are all so soft against the pink watery skies
below, the purple Lent trees.

Shall we change politicians?"

Shall we, indeed?

Thanks, Nick. I'll post my five tags in a bit.

Waking, I Always Waked You Awake, by Jean Garrigue

Waking, I always waked you awake
As always I fell from the ledge of your arms
Into the soft sand and silt of sleep
Permitted by you awake, with your arms firm.

Waking, always I waked immediately
To the face you were when I was off sleeping,
Ribboned with sea weed or running with deer
In a valentine country of swans in the door.

Waking, always waked to the tasting of dew
As if my sleep issued tears for its loving
Waking, always waked, swimming from foam
Breathing from mountains clad in a cloud.

As waking, always waked in the health of your eyes,
Curled your leaf hair, uncovered your hands,
Good morning like birds in an innocence
Wild as the Indies we ever first found.

Experience . . .

"Experience has taught me that powerful hands capable of performing whatever is most rapid and light are not always those which show to best advantage in tender and expressive pieces, and I declare in all good faith that I am more pleased with what moves me than with what astonishes me."

François Couperin, L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin, Paris, 1716

•

"And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The hairy gown and mossy cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heaven doth show,
and every herb that sips the dew,
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain."

Milton, Il Penseroso, 1633

Madeleine Moments

Few events are as provocative as performing a piece of music in adulthood that one first played as a child. I began my career as a professional musician only a year after switching to the oboe from unsuccessful attempts with the violin and clarinet. I joined the Northwestern Michigan Symphony Orchestra as second oboe to my teacher, Nancy Brammer. At the age of 16, I was confronted with the great works of the orchestral canon almost entirely without cultural reference. I can remember distinctly my maiden voyages with Brahms symphonies and especially the second piano concerto, with Tchaikovsky symphonies, Mozart "Linz," Rachmaninoff piano concerti, and especially with Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev. The NMSO accompanied Joffery II when their national tour brought them to northern Michigan.

Before the dancers arrived in town, our English hornist, Lynn Hansen (now principal of Traverse City's West Junior High School) had some of the younger orchestra members over to her house to watch a video of Joffery dancing to Prokofiev's score. We gathered around the television, excited about what we were about to discover and what we were about to perform. No work of art more perfectly expressed the emotional complexity of the teenage protagonists' love-confused story, their self-deception and the multi-layered ambivalence of the outside world's dealings with their tragic end. No work of art spoke more directly to my emotional world at the age of 16, dealing both with the seemingly insurmountable challenges of Prokofiev's score and the difficult emotional truths the music itself kept revealing.

So it is little wonder that two and a half decades later, when performing this work with the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, I should slip back in time. The notes themselves becoming Proust's cookie crumbs dissolving in warm tea. My fingers trace the very same motifs, and the logic of the body returns to me the emotional mysteries, long buried but somehow potent as ever.

From Proust:

"An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? . . . . What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day."

And so, as I sit in the orchestra, the mind wonders over and through waves of sound, of memory, emotion. Lost loves, potent now in different guises, step up and offer invitations to tangled dances. Tripping, spectral visions, at once past's dreams, and the present's wonders, seduce the mind from the printed score. The notes are the same today as they were when I was young. Middle "C" still requires three fingers from my left hand and four from my right. And so that "C" exists in two centuries and all the possibilities dreamt between. If Wallace Stevens in Esthétique du Mal finds both the physical and non-physical worlds sprawling in fields of green corn, overcome in the gleaming richness, so he suggests what it means for one musical phrase to split time and carry us careening between ourselves and ourselves. Gratitude and fearsomeness form the forms that rift and shift the shape of our lives.

Esthétique du Mal by Wallace Stevens

XV

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,
After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,
Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe
The green corn gleaming and experience
The minor of what we feel. The adventurer
In humanity has not conceived of a race
Completely physical in a physical world.
The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals
Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat,
The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.

This is the thesis scrivened in delight,
The reverberating psalm, the right chorale.

One might have thought of sight, but who could think
Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees:
Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound,
But the dark italics it could not propound.
And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.

Her Cardboard Lover by John Ashbery

Her Cardboard Lover by John Ashbery

The way you look tonight
is perishable, unphotographable, laughable. Sometimes
dyslexia strikes in late middle age. You are
the way I look tonight. At last
my love has come along.
And you are mine at last.
Slowly the orchestra wives pick over the set,
go behind a wall. The big smiley man is thinking,
thinking he has an IDEA! Well, if he says so.
You gotta believe him. One orchestra wife comes back.
She has forgotten her pearls. The orchestra riffs around,
they come back. “Well, I never! Of all things!”
Oh, it plays

to the breach. You see it. Her lover and best friend came
along the hall. “I’m sorry, Dan.
But I just couldn’t.” So it’s all alright,
he thinks. He thinks it’s a secret.

Cymbeline

Bart Feller and I attended a performance of this uneven Shakespearian oddity at Lincoln Center last night. I thought of minor pieces by major composers; it comes from genius but does not arrive a masterpiece. Harold Bloom finds the work so full of the author's self-parody, as to defy genre. "Everything about Cymbeline is madly problematical, as Shakespeare, in a willful mood, evidently intended." He writes in "Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human."

In Act III, scene iii, Morgan tries to dissuade his two young male charges from their desire to move from the mountains where they live to seek their fortunes in the city.

"Did you but know the city's usuries,
And felt them knowingly: the art o' th' court,
As hard to leave as keep: whose top to climb
Is certain falling: or so slip'ry that
The fear's as bad as falling.

Nay, many times,
Doth ill deserve by doing well: what's worse,
Must court'sy at the censure."

Quite a different evocation of city life than Milton's youthful lines from L'Allegro:

"Towered cities please us then,
And the busy hum of men,
Where throngs of knights and barons hold,
In weeds of peace, high triumphs hold,
With store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influence, and judge the prize
Of wit or arms, while both contend
To win her grace whom all commend.

Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream."

Milton was young when he wrote these lines, Shakespeare, experienced in the ways of London politics when he wrote Morgan's speech.

Czesław Miłosz's 1991 poem Youth, brings to mind, through veils of experience, this draw of the city to the young and its disorientations. I remember very well arriving in Manhattan at age 23. The city's hum, its pleasures, its cruel usuries and political treachery, all yet to come.

YOUTH by Czesław Miłosz (1991)

Your unhappy and silly youth.
Your arrival from the provinces to the city.
Misted-over windowpanes of streetcars,
Restless misery of the crowd.
Your dread when you entered a place too expensive.
But everything was too expensive. Too high.
Those people must have noticed your crude manners,
Your outmoded clothes, and your awkwardness.

There were none who would stand by you and say,

You are a handsome boy,
you are strong and healthy,
Your misfortunes are imaginary.

You would not have envied a tenor in an overcoat of camel hair
Had you guessed his fear and known how he would die.

She, the red-haired, because of whom you suffered tortures,
So beautiful she seemed to you, is a doll in fire,
You don’t understand what she screams with her lips of a clown.

The shapes of hats, the cut of robes, faces in the mirrors,
You will remember unclearly like something from long ago
Or like what remains from a dream.

The house you approached trembling,
The apartment that dazzled you—
Look, on this spot the cranes clear the rubble.

In your turn you will have, possess, secure,
Able to be proud at last, when there is no reason.

Your wishes will be fulfilled, you will gape then
At the essence of time, woven of smoke and mist,

An iridescent fabric of lives that last one day,
Which rises and falls like an unchanging sea.

Books you have read will be of use no more.
You searched for an answer but lived without answer.

You will walk in the street of southern cities,
Restored to your beginnings, seeing again in rapture
The whiteness of a garden after the first night of snow.


And finally, from Cymbeline:

"Nay, do not wonder at it: you are made
Rather to wonder at the things you hear
Than to work any." (Posthumus, V.iii)

Noise, and the rest

When I showed up in the pit of the State Theater tonight for NYCO's performance of Cav/Pag, piccolo player, Kathleen Nester, asked me, "Did you see your blog mentioned in The New Yorker?"

Extrapolation, enthusiasm, etc.

The mention was oblique, but it was there. Click here to count the ways. This self-publishing venture has changed my life in ways little and big and the attention Maestro Ross has given my little corner of the blogateria has been meaningful.

In fact, here, the many are united. No one is blogging about classical music for the wrong reasons! We love it. We love to play it, we love to hear it, we love to write it, we know, oh how we know, our lives would not be as rich without music. We want everyone to love it the way we do, and so, we write, and we self-publish.

I remember playing the 2nd oboe part to Brahms' second piano concerto with the Northwestern Symphony Orchestra when I was a high school student. In Brahms I first heard the promise of something larger than small town Michigan where I grew up. I followed that promise to Juilliard and New York City.

Extrapolation, enthusiasm, etc.

Tonight at dinner between matinée and evening operas, my friends—civilians—talked about their upcoming vacations. I don't take vacations. I have a day off every few months, no more than a handful a year, really, but what would I do with time away from music. A musician's life is full of questions, strains, uncertainty, and utter splendor. There are riches unaccountable by accountants. There are secrets musicians know.

The very best ones will share.

•

"To A Friend Contemplating Her Biography Of Hawthorne" by Richard Howard

“We were not, it is true, so well acquainted
at college, that I can plead
an absolute right to inflict
my ‘twice-told’ tediousness
upon you; but I have been glad of your
success in literature,
and in more important matters.”
What had been—

what could have been, I wonder—
“more important” to Hawthorne, sequestered for
a dozen years in Salem,
struggling to make himself a writer? And for
his initially cautious
correspondent, the fatally fluent
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
savoring the first of those dread successes:
for him, too, could there have been
matters more important than literature?

And then of course I wonder
about you and me—about all of our tribe,
whom Montaigne identified
without contempt as la gent écrivassière,
secreted so managably,
as luck would have it, in this apprehensive
and inadvertent city—
whether it is something of the same kind
that, every dreaming midnight
and every waking dawn, glows (glowers) for us
like the radium on our clocks:
matters more important than literature.

What are days for?

Hours disappear each day, slipping through my fingers, rolling down the stairs.

I've planned Albert's memorial concert at Juilliard (and it will be quite wonderful), tomorrow is the opening Symposium of the Helicon season, next week is the Rihm concert at Miller Theater, tonight I sight-read principal oboe in Carmen with the NYCO, and tomorrow morning I play the funeral of another friend who's taken his leave this fall.

A thousand details attended to does not balance the scales. Grief is neither measurable nor containable. Loss is only and always loss and nothing can take the place of the missing.

My phone feels heavy in my pocket these days, dead weight waiting for a call. Incoming, outgoing, there is so much left I wanted to say—so much I hoped to hear.

The unaswered question is simply, "How are you?"

•

Days by Philip Larkin

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

The Helicon Foundation's 23 Season

This October, The Helicon Foundation opens its twenty-third season. Three themes unite our Symposiums next year: Music in Culture, The Development of the Keyboard, and The Voice of the Violin.

We explore music’s relationship to the wider culture through its influences in the other arts and technology. Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which Pedja Muzijevic plays in December, is an obvious example. Inspired by the drawings and watercolors of Victor Hartmann, Mussorgsky created a moving tribute to their friendship within a musical portrait of the artist. The natural world and the contemplative inner workings of religious faith influenced the music of Heinrich Biber in his Sonata Representiva, and The Mystery Sonatas, which Colin Jacobsen performs in February. Poetry is the inspiration for Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), which closes our season. In this first instance of a tone poem in chamber music, Schoenberg vividly represents the narrative of the two lovers in Richard Dehmel’s poem of the same name. Our opening Symposium features one of Europe’s greatest pre-electronic technological triumphs, the fortepiano. In this case, musical needs influenced technology, as musicians and composers pushed builders for increasingly sophisticated instruments and an expanded sonic palette. The music on this program was written around 1800, and ushered in a century of rapid evolution in piano development, leading to its dominant position in Western art music.

This season features five different keyboard instruments. In the music of Biber, we will hear both the harpsichord and organ. Our own amazingly versatile, Pedja Muzijevic will play the fortepiano in the first Symposium and the modern grand piano for “Pictures.” I am excited to announce a Helicon Special Event that takes the theme of keyboard instruments to its grandest heights. Robert McCormick, the young organ virtuoso and Music Director of St. Mary the Virgin here in New York City, has agreed to give Helicon Members a private concert on what is one of the finest organs in America. He will introduce the various registers of this king of instruments, and then play pieces showcasing its remarkable powers.

Finally, we look at the voice of the violin through its expressive evolution over three centuries of music. Each of our four violinists this season, Mark Steinberg, Jennifer Frautschi, Colin Jacobsen, and Vera Beths is an artist possessing a strong, individual personality, and an important voice in the music world today. In works of Mozart, Beethoven, Prokofiev, Biber, Brahms, and Schoenberg, we will hear the distinctive voices of the violin in its widely expressive potential.

Helicon Members enjoy proximity to virtuoso performances, insightful programs, vibrant social interaction, and immersion in music’s most intimate world. If you’d like to be a part of this exciting season, please email heliconnyc@aol.com or write to: The Helicon Foundation, Inc., 27 West 67th Street, New York, NY 10023, and we will send you Membership materials.

Tapping and Clapping — Mozart Dances

One of the special sounds musicians who play for dancers know is the fast tapping of feet on the stage. It’s a remarkable sound, a quick, purposeful thumping that represents great potential energy. At first this “addition” to the score is surprising, but gradually you begin to look forward to it. One of my favorites occurrences is in the third movement of Balanchine's "Stravinsky Violin Concerto" right before the coda. Like a sudden downpour of rain, ballerina toe shoes tap out a message to the musicians: "you are not alone." (We do get lonely down there . . . ) Last season I played the work in concert, and I missed the thumping, terribly.

Tonight was opening night for Mark Morris' "Mozart Dances" and like the Stravinsky Violin Concerto, the music is utterly engaging. Emanuel Ax plays with such poetic lyricism. I was thinking about it tonight on the M104 coming home. What are the qualities that make his playing so remarkable? Wordsworth came to mind. It requires great skill to express something important in simple and eloquent words. This is the genius of Mozart and Manny engages the music on those terms: simple, eloquent, poetic, and profound, with poise and without fuss.

"I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind."

from "lines Written in Early Spring" by Wordsworth

It is easy—either overeagerly or nonchalantly—to mishandle a Mozart phrase. Manny never does. He lets the music exhale and inhale and step out to the audience at its own pace. For me, the highlight of the evening is the slow movement of Mozart’s 11th Piano Concerto, K. 413. (Mozart published a version for fortepiano and string quintet, which I would love Pedja Muzijevic to play at Helicon in 2008-2009.) Manny’s version is so full of honest sentiment and rhetorical refinement, that one easily imagines there are words to this little scena.

Every few years, I end up playing in the pit for a Mark Morris dance. I know a dancer in the company, John Higginbotham, we were at Juilliard together. (I think I was his R.A. in the dorm.) At the dress rehearsal yesterday, I stood on my chair during the bows to see if he was there. Sure enough, John was stage left, tall, handsome, with his easy smile. My bald head rising above the lip of the stage caught his eye. It was great to catch up at the reception tonight. John choreographed a rock opera currently playing at The International New York Fringe Festival. It’s called “Champ: A Space Odyssey.”

He couldn’t say enough nice things about the orchestra. “In fact, tonight on stage, I lost my concentration a couple of times, because the sounds from the pit were so beautiful.” In the pit we worry that an error might cause a dancer to miss a step or worse, trip. We usually don’t think that beauty might be a distraction.

It makes me think of a passage from Horace: “It is not enough that poetry be noble: it should impart delight, and transport the listener as it likes. As people’s faces respond with laughter to those who laugh, so do they cry in response to those who cry. If you want me to cry, you must first cry yourself.” When performing we must keep some distance between the material and our response it. You can’t dance (or play the oboe) if you’re really laughing or really crying. That’s left for the audience. We hope they do both . . .

Bellicose company

My friend, the scultptor Ryo Toyonaga, says he's not a verbal person. Alas, I am. Here is my latest poetic attempt.


Awakened

Making hasty escape, sleep’s
bellicose company slips
through prattling windows
on wafts and whiffs of wintry air.

Why is it so cold this spring?
Bedside, a fire-red alarm clock
ferociously devours seconds.
Its alarm is set, trigger cocked,

but I did not wind the crimson
beast before bed. Sometime,
it will silently stop timing time,
and there will be no sound.

Saratoga Dispatch—or—The Pleasures of Balanchine

“These pleasures, Melancholy, give;
And I with thee will choose to live.”
------------John Milton, from “Il Penseroso” (1633)

“The Four Temperaments,” Balanchine’s 1946 masterpiece, is an essential ballet. Whereas Robbin’s “Dances at a Gathering” creates an “eloquent vernacular,” this work speaks in heightened poetry of breathtaking originality. Feeling both ancient and beyond its (our) time, this plotless ballet is about the nature of meaning itself. The dancers' movements are so beautiful, so innovative, so finely crafted, the viewer feels they must mean something specific. But what? Is this a calligraphic dance limning characters of a language we no longer can read? Though no one could move like that on their own, who wouldn’t wish their human relationships imbued with such meaningful lyricism? Balanchine understands something about space and the way bodies inhabit it that makes movement profound.

We look and look, our eyes ravenous for what Balanchine will next offer, and realize we could look the rest of our lives. The meaning of meaning is the mystery of life, but in the thirty minutes of “The Four Temperaments” we feel it almost within our grasp.