Gioachino Rossini: Overture to Semiramide

Even though I had changed my major from computer science to English literature, Purdue University still required me to take a course in the hard sciences. To make it easier on us liberal arts “thickies” they offered a number of science courses designed with a humanistic slant.

I had done pretty well in high school biology–getting an A by doing a meticulous insect collection–so at Purdue I signed up for the biology course, entitled “Man and The Biological World.” The course was taught by an enthusiastic professor of genetics by the name of Alfred Chiscon, who was one of the most broad minded and galvanizing speakers I’ve ever seen. He constantly challenged our beliefs and assumptions from a scientific stand point. In this class I learned that there was no such scientific term as “race,” since all humans had the same number of chromosomes and could interbreed and produce fertile offspring. That painted more clearly than anything else for me why racism was purely a political construct, used by the powerful (by whatever accident of fate made them so) to oppress others. One book we read said that if people were forced to interbreed, in just one or two generations everyone on the planet would have the same skin color, which would do away with racism. Of course, we’d probably find something else to use as a basis of discrimination–eye color for example.

In another class, he told the story of a young man who went blind for some mysterious reason. It turned out that he was overly reactive to cyanide. Cyanide, for some reason, concentrates in and destroys the optic nerve. Seems like no problem, since we don’t normally come in contact with cyanide. However, the young man had a roommate who smoked, and since cigarette smoke has large concentrations of cyanide in it, there was the cause of the blindness. After that, I had no objection to laws trying to outlaw smoking in public.

I was absolutely riveted by his classes and I sat in the first row of the lecture hall which sat about 500 students. One day after class, the teacher singled me out and asked me to come to his office to talk with him. I was a bit hesitant, but he was very friendly. He listened to me as I explained my dreams, ideas, and dissatisfaction with Purdue. Then he told me that I had to look really hard into myself to find my true desires and then follow them. “You’ve got to stand bare-assed naked in front of a mirror and just look at yourself.”

As we neared the end of the semester, I got a card in the mail from him inviting me to a party at his house. I arrive and he greeted me at the door and welcomed me and introduced me to his wife and gave me a tour. He and his wife had just adopted an African-American child, who was just learning to walk. I was so amazed at what a wonderfully nurturing and open-minded person he was, and I’ve put him into my personal Pantheon of role models, who have had an impact on and even changed my life. For I did look deep into myself and realize I had to leave Purdue. I applied to Indiana University and got accepted.

To remember Al today, I chose a fun overture to Rossini’s opera, Semiramide. This opera is a tale of intrigue about the Queen of Babylon, who is conflicted by her duty to choose a successor and the desires of her heart. What I particularly like about this piece is how Rossini manages to tell an entire story through different instruments, melodies, and rhythms. As in many of his overtures he starts out with an explosive blast, full of pomp and pageantry. The piece then stops and starts off in an entirely different vein, playing a slow beautiful melody in the horns. He soon abruptly changes again, bringing in one of his trademark “storm” interludes, which really gets your blood pumping. After the storm subside, Rossini slows it down again, using oboes and pizzicato violins to lull us into complacency. He alternates several more times between the storm and slow movements, before introducing, after eight stylistic changes, a wonderfully happy, Italian melody. That is the melody that I really love the best among all of Rossini’s uplifting works. Before finishing the nearly 12-minute overture, he changes to a tumultuous section and back to the happy melody several more times.

This is a good piece to represent Al Chiscon. If anyone was full of gusto for life it was Al. He advocated embracing life full-on: looking at the good and the bad, with a focused intellect, while at the same time never losing sight of the passion of what it means to be a human being. Knowing a bit about Rossini’s gusto for life, and the supreme intellect required to bring such a work into the light of day, the choice of Semiramide seems fitting for Al.

Thanks Al, wherever you are.

Rossini Biography

Buy CD or Download MP3 from Amazon

Beethoven String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.131

As I said in an earlier post, in the first semester of my freshman year in college I lived in place called Gemini House, which was full of science majors, with whom I had little in common. There was one exception–an upper classman named Truell West. Truell had too much on the ball to be labeled a “hippie,” but he had a full beard and long hair and didn’t quite fit the mold of the rest of the guys in the house. He was well versed in classical music and he even had a violin, which he said he had studied for a number of years. He was quite personable, and I used to hang out in his room, talking about music, art and literature. I suppose I thought of him as a potential mentor, but we never really clicked that way.

The previous summer, I had bought a second-hand violin in a pawn shop for $50. So I tried to get Truell to teach me how to play it. He showed me some fingering, but as anyone knows who’s taken lessons, the violin is very hard to play, and I soon abandoned my attempts. I think Truell was relieved. Who needs an pimply-faced geek hanging around when you’re about to graduate?

Truell kept on top of the schedules of performing arts at Purdue and told me when there was something good coming up that he thought I would enjoy. Once, he and I climbed into his old Volkswagen beetle and went to the local Catholic church to participate in a sing-in of Handel’s Messiah. Another time, he told me that a famous string quartet was coming and we got tickets. It turned out to be the Guarneri Quartet, who played on instruments made by the Guarneri family, which like the Stradivari and Amati families, came from Cremona. It turns that this quartet is based at the University of Maryland, near where I now live.

The evening I saw the Guarneri Quartet, they played Beethoven’s String Quartet in C sharp minor, Op.131, of which Stravinsky said “Everything in this masterpiece is perfect, inevitable, unalterable.” Until then I don’t believe I’d ever listened to a string quartet, let alone seen one perform. Oh perhaps I did see some television show or movie which had a string quartet sawing away in a corner at a ball, but the Guarneri performance had nothing to do with that. As you probably know by now, I am given to hyperbole and have used the word “galvanize” to describe my emotion before just about every piece I’ve written about so far. If any piece of music ever galvanized me, however, it was this quartet.

With seven movements, it is by far the longest of Beethoven’s quartets, but don’t let its length daunt you. Beethoven wrote this the year before he died and three years after his Symphony Number 9. Since he was only 57 at the time, we can say he was at the height of his powers. I seem to recall reading somewhere that Beethoven regarded the string quartet as the greatest form, even more expressive than symphonies. Once, at a performance of the Third Symphony I saw that Beethoven would start a melody in the first violins, move it to the seconds, then to the violas and finally to the cellos. Those four instruments, of course, comprise the string quartet, but the tight playing of the Opus 131 quartet could not be achieved in the symphonic form. Indeed where you tend to be carried along majestically in many symphonies supported by the lush melodies, in a string quartet you’re rushing along at 1000 miles an hour in the nose cone of a missile. (Oops. Hyperbole again.) But listen to the presto movement, if you don’t believe me. I found the sheet music to the quartet in a garage sale once and followed along. It was exciting: the notes seemed to fly off the page.

After that semester, I lost touch with Truell. Though he did not become my mentor, he did me a great favor by turning me on to this piece. This quartet is not melodious in the sense that it has few “hum-able” tunes in it, but it contains beautifully lyrical passages that transport you with their depth of feeling. I cannot recommend any more highly this piece to anyone wanting to listen to a great piece of classical music.

Wikipedia entry on this Quartet

Download CD or the Quartet or Buy CD from Amazon

Dimitri Shostakovich: Cello Concerto Number 1

One of the nicest things about going to college was being on the circuit for performing arts. Though Purdue University had earned its reputation in the hard sciences, during the fall semester of 1973, I saw a staggering number of “soft” cultural events there. Just running my mind back over them now astounds me, because I saw the Guarneri String Quartet, a sing-in of Handel’s Messiah, a dramatic reading of selected works of Hemingway, a performance of Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Mstislav Rostropovich perform today’s piece.

My friend, Eric Tollar, and I went to see the Shostakovich, and I was overwhelmed. Never had I seen a concerto for solo instrument performed by a world-class performer backed by a world-class orchestra. I watched in awe as Rostropovich did things with a the cello that I had no idea could be done. I remember saying to someone afterwards, “He played on two strings at once,” which I later learned watching my daughter take violin lessons, was called “double stops.” Rostropovich played so dramatically that I sat on the edge of the chair during the whole piece. This was in 1974, before, I think, Rostropovich defected from the Soviet Union, and during the midst of the Cold War. Before this, I had not heard any modern Soviet music, and had heard it was all dull socialist realist crap. But this music was dynamic and alive.

The first movement has a dramatic, galloping rhythm that carries you along. After the concert, I asked my friend Eric Tollar what he thought of the concerto. He immediately repeated this rhythm, making fun of it as if it were out of a Hollywood action movie–like when the cavalry charges in to rescue the day. I was dumbfounded, for he had pretty impeccable tastes in music, and I couldn’t understand how he could have remained unmoved by this piece.

Shostakovich Biography

Download MP3 or buy CD on Amazon

Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Overture

In the fall of 1973, I left for college. Like my three older brothers, I entered Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana. Looking back on it now, it seems like I didn’t have a choice in the matter. My father just expected it and I don’t remember applying to any other school. I believe I might have suggested Indiana University, which had a better liberal arts program, but it was also known as a “party” school and my parents wouldn’t entertain the idea of me going there.

My major also seems to have been predetermined for me-computer science. My best friend Gary Endicott was transferring from the local community college to Purdue and that was what he chose. Plus my father kept saying to me that “computers are the wave of the future.” I felt a bit like Benjamin in the movie The Graduate when Mrs. Robinson’s husband says to him: “I’ve got just one word to say to you: Plastics. ”

To compound matters, it was also decided that I would live in a place called Gemini House. Purdue had dormitories, fraternities, and then this third category called co-op houses, of which Gemini was one. Fraternities were where the smart rich kids went. Co-op houses were kind of a low-cost alternative. Most of the guys in the house were the sons of farmers and majored in veterinary science, agriculture, chemistry or biology. You can image we had a lot to talk about!

The worst thing about the house is that it pretended it was a fraternity, and you had to pledge it. That meant being rousted out of bed in the middle of the night and being forced to do humiliating things like stand at attention, shine people’s shoes, and clean toilets. My brother, Ken, was a senior in the house, and I felt a bit estranged from him. How could he have gone through this and not told me about it, I thought.

Let’s see, what were some of the other charms of Gemini House? Everyone, had to sleep in a “dorm,” which was the a large room with bunk beds. Because of state fire laws, the windows had to remain open at all times-rain or snow, hot or cold, fall, spring, or winter. This is really the way to sleep-in a sub-arctic room full of snoring men. This was the early 1970s remember, and some of the guys were busy burning their minds out on drugs. One aeronautical engineering student named Scott, who had long hair and talked like a Hippie, often used to fall into bed in a stupor. His bed was right under one of the windows, and I remember waking up one morning to find that it had snowed, because about an inch of snow had amassed on his chest over night.

We “pledges” also had the honor of taking it in turn to wake the upper classmen in the morning. That meant we had to get up before everyone else, read the list of who wanted to get up when, and then sneak in, and wake those people without disturbing anyone else. Most of the time, that wasn’t too bad, but there was one guy, who slept like the dead. It was bad enough that you had to yell in his ear, shake him vigorously, and throw off his blankets. But the worst thing was that when he finally did regain consciousness, he would leap up screaming, arms a-flailing!

The one bit of privacy we had–sorry the toilets were communal troughs–was our study rooms, which you couldn’t sleep in, but you could put your own stamp on it. There I put up my Picasso and Renoir posters, carefully arranged my classical music collection on my book case, and tinkered with my stereo. To ensure that my time in Gemini house was even more pleasant, the powers that be gave me a roommate who was in ROTC. He was one of the most narrowly focused, emotionally shut-down, conservative geeks I’d ever met, and he drove me to desperation. Once his family visited and I was horrified to see he had a twin brother!

The computer science program had a set course of studies that emphasized the hard sciences. I had to take calculus, chemistry, biology, and of course a programming class. The day I went to chemistry, it became apparent I didn’t belong there. The room was an amphitheater-style lecture hall that seated about 700 students. You needed binoculars just to see the instructor. The first assignment saw us trying to calculate the surface area of a one centimeter cube that had been broken down into one Angstrom cubes! I was so disheartened that I went to the guidance counselor and switched my major from Computer Science to English. I took psychology, speech, English composition, ethics, biology, French-a total of about 22 hours! It was wonderful-I felt my mind opening up and expanding into new directions. I especially liked the ethics course since we read Plato’s Symposium and Kant’s Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. That was where I wanted to be.

And of course, classical music also helped me cope with what I perceived as a hostile environment. I had bought a copy of a collection of famous Russian pieces to have a copy of The 1812 Overture.. The same album also had a recording of Borodin’sPolvetsian Dances, Moussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, and Rimsky-Korsakov’sRussian Easter Overture. This was a great album, and I particularly liked the Russian Easter Overture. It is one of those pieces that takes you on a roller coaster ride and just when you think it’s over, it launches off into the melody again, maybe this time in a different key. It starts out in with a huge majestic blast of brass, which states the theme. A violin comes in, so light and angelic by comparison and weaves a beautiful melody out of the them, embellishing it. It’s almost spiritual. Then the piece takes off sounding so Russian, with that characteristic hint of orientalism, sleigh bells and the driving rhythm of a troika. Perhaps a bit of a cliché, but mind you this was the model for what someone else later turned into clichés.

It always puzzled me why someone would write an overture to Easter. But I think I read somewhere that Rimsky-Korsakov was trying to capture the pomp and ceremony of the Easter celebration in the Russian Orthodox Church. Having been to an Orthodox wedding years later, I could see what all the fuss was about. Unlike the Catholics, which I was raised as, who after Vatican II let many of the mysterious traditions fall by the way side, the Orthodox held on and focused on the magic and wonder of Christ’s coming back from the dead. And since I was spending a fair amount of time in Purgatory at this time of my life, cliché Russian Easter Overture must have just resonated with me.

Rimsky-Korsakov Biography

Buy CD or Download MP3 of the Overture on Amazon

Camille Saint-Saens: “Danse Bacchanale” from Samson and Delilah

Today, I continue writing about my factory experience, and this time it has a direct relation to the featured piece of music. In the summer of 1973, my father told me that his factory was hiring summer help and that I should apply. They paid an unprecedented $3.56 an hour and if you worked on an assembly line you could get what they called incentive. That is, you got an extra few cents for every piece you produced over a certain base number. This factory was called Dodge and made pulleys, gears, and gear boxes for industrial applications like conveyor belts and huge machinery. They did everything. In a huge, dirty, hellishly hot foundry, they poured aluminum and steel. Another building housed a heat treatment plant where they hardened the gears. In the milling plant, long rows of huge chucking machines turned out gears, pulleys, levers and spindles.

How my father came to work in this factory was a story in itself. He had worked for Studebaker’s for 29 years, one of the most successful and innovative car manufacturers in the States until General Motors, Chrysler and Ford forced them out of business. In 1963 the company moved to Canada to avoid going out of business. They laid off all the employees and did not pay any pension benefits to them. So at the age of 48, my father had to find another job and began working to create a pension for his retirement. Dodges hired him straightway, but put him to work as a machine operator-even though at Studebaker’s he had risen to a managerial position.

By the time I graduated from high school, my dad was now working in shipping, which, being even more hyperactive than I, he loved. They first hired me into packing, where I was given what many of the workers thought of as a good job-putting pulleys in boxes. It was a good job because you could get incentive for it. In the morning a guy would wheel around a bin containing hundreds of parts. I had to get a pile of small collapsed cardboard boxes, fold them into shape put a pulley into each one, insert a set of instructions, close the box and stick a label on each box. You can not imagine how mind numbingly boring this job was! It was so tedious and repetitive that I would fall into bed in the evenings and much to my horror, I would dream about putting parts in boxes. To relieve the tedium, I tried bringing a book in, propping it up at eye-level and read while I worked. The foreman called me into his office one day; he was very angry. I just wasn’t productive enough. Every job had been timed and you were expected to meet a certain quota a day. I had missed mine by a mile. That was not OK, because that brought the average down for everyone working there and that made the foreman look bad.

There was another problem as well. I refused to pay my union dues. I figured that since I was only a summer hire and did not get any of the benefits of the union–like collective bargaining–I shouldn’t have to pay. But the other union guys said they would not work if I didn’t join. I was a scab. Had they explained to me that the high wages I got and the various grievance procedures and other protection I enjoyed was the result of their efforts, I wouldn’t have protested in the first place.

The foreman decided I wasn’t working out, so he got me transferred to a stock mover’s job. I was one of the guys who hoicked the various bins of parts around. I was detailed to a crew of consisting of a college guy a couple of years older than me and a middle aged guy who’d been in the Navy during the Korean war. The college kid smoked Kools and bragged about his drinking and sexual exploits continuously. The Navy guy was pretty laid-back and actually talked poetically some time about having piloted ships and what a thrill it was to dock or rendez-vous at sea with another vessel. It wasn’t a bad crew to be on.

There was one other guy in the division who used to come over and hang out with us during the break. He was a nice guy named Jim Boehlein and was a friend of my father’s. Jim worked on the packing line that I got expelled from. He’d found the way to be both productive and keep from going brain dead, and he actually liked to talk about philosophy, art, politics and even classical music. One day I told him about the local classical station and he came in the following Monday and said he had caught the request show. They had played a piece that he really liked. It “had an oboe or something and sounded kind of like, you know, the music you see hear in movies when they show an Arab market.” I knew the piece he meant but not the name. I had listened to the show, too, but missed hearing the announcer give its name.

That was nearly forty years ago, and over the years the same thing happened a number of times. I would turn to a classical music station and hear a part of this piece and miss the title. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I finally learned its name. One evening when I went to pick my daughter up from her orchestral rehearsal, I arrived a bit early and was astonished to hear them playing it! When it was over I hurried to ask her its name and she showed me the music: it was an excerpt from Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saens, who lived from 1835 until 1921.

Best known for this Carnival of the Animals, Saint-Saens wrote prolifically, producing over 160 works in his life time. The web sites I visited while researching this piece bemoan the fact that Saint-Saens is only known for the Carnival and a few other works. He wrote several piano concertos and an organ symphony as well as many songs. He had a fairly cushy life, which earned him the nick-name of “The French Mendelssohn”, though he lived considerably longer. He was recognized for his talent at an early age and became a well respected conductor, composer, and author of books on music during his 86 years on Earth.

It was a nice surprise the way in which I finally discoverd the name of this piece. Nice, too, was remembering one of the bright spots at the factory, a kindly avuncular type, who made my time there bearable.

Download MP3 or buy CD of Danse Bacchanale on Amazon

Biography

Jean Sibelius: Finlandia

In my last entry, I wrote about my first factory job. It was horribly paid, and I was too young to operate the big machinery. That is why, when my friend Ed Wendel told me about an opening in the factory where he worked, I jumped at the opportunity.

The place, whose name I forget, repaired and refurbished industrial machinery. They specialized in reconditioning used chuckers. A chucker is an automated metal lathe that churns out standardized parts like gears at a fast pace. My father had run one of these for a while.

A chucker is an impressive piece of work, and they come in all sizes, from ones the size of a large sewing machine all the way up to behemoths–about as big as a semi truck.

Usually the chucker sits in a big, water-proof tub. In order to make the cutting smooth, a constant stream of water and oil spray onto the part and the cutting edge. The shavings fall down into the trough. The operator was supposed to clean the bin periodically, but after several years, they’d get so gunked up that they’d have to be disassembled and cleaned. That is when they were sent to our shop. We would shovel out the shavings and spray on industrial solvents to dissolve the grease and paint. Next, we would take out the removable parts and then spray paint and shellac the whole structure. Finally, the machines would go to the mechanics and tool and die guys, who’d put restore them to working order.

There were two reasons I wanted to work at this place. One was because of the stories that Ed would tell about his boss, Frank Testo. The second was because Ed’s best friend, Eric worked there, and I wanted to get to know him better. Eric was a kind of rival to my friend Paul Mankowski. Mankowski was good at literature, languages and biology. Eric excelled in math and physics. I was convinced both Eric and Paul were geniuses, and since Paul had gone off to Chicago and chosen not to come back home in the summers, I needed a new role model.

We were an interesting crew. Wendel was probably the most well-read person I ever met. He would devour any book set before him, be it a classic of English literature, history, science fiction, or a book on arc welding. He was an absolute encyclopedia of knowledge, but without any snobbishness. Everything fascinated him, especially anything that could be taken apart. Tollar had a blinding, savage wit, a disdain for the common man, and a massive ego. I was somewhere in between. Frank the boss, was an incredibly naïve, horny and crass buffoon. A bit like Rigoletto.

Frank could only relate to the world in terms of automobiles and machines. Once we showed him a book full of drawings and etchings by M.C. Escher. Frank furrowed his brows. He could not relate to any of it; he had no point of reference. That was until we found a picture of a pangolin-type animal rolling itself up into a protective, scaly ball. “An alternator,” Frank yelled, relieved. “It looks like an alternator. Hey, this guy made a million drawing pictures of alternators? What am I doing here?” Eric would pull practical jokes on Frank; one day Eric shellacked Frank’s sugar frosted cookies, for example.

Despite Eric’s caustic manner, I did end up becoming very good friends with him. We discovered that we both enjoyed classical music, and we would discuss our latest finds. One piece I discovered around this time was Jean Sibelius’ “Finlandia.” This is a stirring, nationalistic hymn, written for Sibelius’ homeland. It starts out with ominous trumpet blasts punctuated by crashes of cymbals and tympanis. It then moves into a dark, melodic orchestral section which gives a few hints of lyrical beauty. Next, the trumpet start playing a fast tune that sounds like a military charge. It sounds as if Sibelius might be depicting a battle, which ends in shortly on an upbeat feeling, indicating victory. The music then turns into a kind of hymn, perhaps a thanks to God or a commemoration of fallen heroes. Some recordings add a choir during the hymn. At the end, Sibelius brings back the upbeat horns and closes with a majestic finale.

Working at that factory really was filthy, dirty work, but we enjoyed it. It was nice to see a machine after it had been cleaned, taken apart and put back together. And the mechanics in the shop were generally interesting. They all had the demeanor of Swiss watchmakers, fascinated by pulling apart, putting together and figuring out how to repair these great three–dimensional puzzles. One guy was named Shorty and he always put salt and pepper on his bananas at lunch. “Makes them taste like watermelon,” would say. There was the obligatory southern guy with Elvis sideburns and, a pack of Camels rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve, and a perennial sunburn. But even he was nice and a wizard when it came to machines. After I left the factory for a better paying job, I was upset to learn that he had been electrocuted and died after touching a live wire in the factory.

Working at that place actually was one of the best jobs I ever had. Of course, I shudder now to think of all the toxic fumes I breathed and poisonous chemicals I absorbed trans-dermally. But something about that place appealed to me, and I look back on it now fondly. My father collected junk motors and had a basement and garage full of tools. As a child, I spent many a long hour tearing things apart to see how they worked. So it presented challenges and mental stimulation.

But that job also gave me some insight into my working class-background. It taught me not to disdain working class people as Eric did. My co-workers accepted me. They did not make disparaging jokes about college egg-heads. They were hardworking, kind, generous and wanted what most everyone wanted–to have a job so they could provide for a family and build a better life for their kids. And yes, they sometimes even lay down their lives.

Download MP3 of Finlandia or Buy CD from Amazon

Sibelius Biography on Wikipedia

Biography

Robert Schumann: Piano Concerto in A Minor

If anyone has a child who is hesitating about whether they should go to college, the parents should definitely encourage the child to get a summer job in a factory. After a few days around a blast furnace, putting pulleys into boxes, or sweeping floors, even a career in oral hygiene would start to look good. I know; I’ve been there. But truth be told, I got after school and summer jobs in factories in high school and college because I wanted to. Call it “nostalgie de la boue,” call it slumming, call it trying to get in touch with the lumpen proletariat; there was something alluring about working in a factory.

It started when a couple of guys on the swim team, my mentor Paul Mankowsi included, got part time jobs at a small factory in an industrial park. They came to school telling fantastic stories about the characters that worked there and the amazing level of incompetence among the management and owners. There was also the excitement of danger–this particular factory, called Mayron, had huge punch presses. They also paid much better than Baskin Robbins, where I was currently working scooping ice cream for overweight spoiled brats, so I went along and applied.

Mayron made its money by taking huge rolls of steel, about two inches in width, and running them through punch presses that bored and bent them into brackets used in the auto industry. A rag-tag crew of hillbillies, alcoholics, gypsies, and immigrants–some speaking little or no English–worked there. This was around the time I was trying to study Russian by listening to audio tapes I checked out from the library. One of the workers I especially liked was an ancient, wiry old man with a handlebar moustache. He looked like a Cossack straight off his horse on the Steppes. It turned out that he was the Russian father-in-law of one of the high school dropouts who worked there. I would try to speak Russian to him, and he would chuckle and wonder off pushing a broom. One day, he came in and had shaved off his beautiful moustache. He was proud, but I was depressed, because I thought he was trying to become more American.

The older guys from the swim team got to run the punch presses. I ran a little hydraulic pull cart. I would transport bins back and forth between the machine that would cut the steel to length and the punch presses where my friends worked. It was a messy job, because the parts were covered with thick machine oil which protected them from the elements. Sometimes they’d cut too many pieces and store the rest outside in the rain, so the bins were sometimes full of a foul smelling oil and water mixture, and I would have to unload the piece out of this goo and throw them into my friends’ bins.

My friends loved working the punch presses, though they were incredibly dangerous. They would pick up a piece from the bin, place it on the die inside the press, pull their hands out, and press on a pedal to send about 10,000 pounds of pressure down onto the piece of steel. They wore gloves that were attached by cable to a safety device that would pull their hands away before the top have of the die would come down. These were mandated by OSHA, but there were a few old guys walking around from the good old days who were missing a finger or two.

We worked the night shift after school and management had usually left by that time. Once the owners son drove his brand new Porsche onto the factory floor. He got out and was this huge, grub-like boy-man who’d obviously never gotten his fingers dirty. But most of the evenings, management was nowhere to be seen and we sometimes got into dirty rags fights or would throw chunks of steel at the bin of someone who was concentrating very hard on not getting their finger cut off so as to scare the hell out of them.

One Friday evening we got a call. One of the trucks that delivered steel had overturned on the bypass south of town. The boss came in and detailed one of the more seasoned guys, a guy who said he was a gypsy and me to go and help clean up the mess. We hopped into this guy’s pick-up truck and took off. The first guy–let’s call him Lance–was a real southerner with a truck-driver mouth. He had a lean, athletic build and an Elvis hairdo. I think he was even wearing a no sleeve T-shirt and chewed on a toothpick. Until I met him, I thought I had heard some explicit locker-room talk. Lance, however, talked a blue-and I do mean “blue”-streak all the way there and back. The gypsy, who was about 6 feet 5 inches tall, two-hundred and fifty pounds, joined in the conversation, bragging of his own sexual exploits and laughing along at some colorful turn of phrase, which I definitely cannot repeat here. The gypsy wore an old, greasy set of army fatigues which had an indescribably awful smell–almost like morbid flesh. Despite this un-sentimental education, I still maintain a certain fondness for the people who work in a factory. I didn’t find them to be vicious and back stabbing in the ways that I have since seen “educated” people behave.

Still, after working in the factory on Friday nights and weekends, there was no doubt in my mind that I needed to study hard so I could get into college. In the evenings after school I would retire to my room, slap on a classical LP and study my physics, chemistry, economics and English. And though I continued working in factories throughout college, I knew that was not what I wanted to do with my life.

One of the albums I listened to was Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. Schumann, if you read his biographies, was plagued by depression, committing himself to an insane asylum in his later years. His short, turbulent life, however, had a few bright spots. These came after fighting in court the father of Clara Wieck, who was opposed to his daughter marrying the composer. Schumann won the court case, however, and this gave rise to a burst of creative energy which saw his creation of four symphonies and the first movement of what was to become his piano concert. He wrote the first movement in a week and his wife, Clara, who was an accomplished pianist performed it in Leipzig. Two weeks later, Clara gave birth to the first of their eight children. Four years later, Schumann added the two additional movements in about five weeks and premiered it on New Year’s Day, 1846 with Clara performing and Felix Mendelssohn conducting.

The concerto is a very lyrical and pleasing piece. Unlike some of the big concertos in which is sounds like the piano plays against the orchestra, Schumann wonderfully put the soloist on the same team and the solos flow into the orchestral passages and out again. All three movements are a joy to listen to. The first strikes a nice balance between exuberance and thoughtfulness. The second has knee-weakening sensuousness and lyricism. The finale is full of joy. You really can’t find any fault in it, and it was the perfect antidote to my apprenticeship as a drudge in the steel factory.

Schumann Biography
Download MP3 or Buy CD from Amazon Here

Maurice Ravel: Rhapsodie Espagnole

Ravel has absolutely nothing to do with William Faulkner, but in my mind the two are linked through today’s work. It happened this way. After meeting the various members of the Mankowski family (see here), I decided that I wanted to be as cultured as they. Indeed, my life’s mission became to turn myself into an intellectual. My plan was simple: to read great books, listen to great music, and pour over the works of great visual artists.

My older brother, Bob, supported my interests, and once told me about a book he had read in college by William Faulkner. It was “As I Lay Dying,” written in 1930, and he had read it in a college English course. He loaned me his copy to read, which I still have.

Anyone who has read this book knows how different it is from anything else. The plot centers around a poor family somewhere on a plantation in Mississippi. The mother, Addie Bundren, has died and the father and children are preparing to transport her in her coffin on a horse-drawn wagon to the family “plot” in “Jefferson.” The children have colorful names like Jewel, Darl, and Cash. And Pa is some sort of emasculated old coot. In short, it’s a sins-of-the father kind of allegory of a severely dysfunctional Southern family. Long before the self-help movement and the “inner-child” gurus on the PBS pledge circuit, people wrote works of literature to try to make sense of these issues.

What makes this book so special, however, was how Faulkner wrote it in stream-of-consciousness, and each chapter was told in the voice of a different character. Faulkner really pushed the limits here, at one point having the old dead lady narrate. Reading this was a real challenge for me, but since Faulkner had won the Nobel prize, I figured it was worth the trouble-it would make me “deep.” This reminds me of a funny story I heard when I lived in Naples, Italy and taught English. A friend told me that in the university of Naples, the English department, knowing that James Joyce was the greatest English novelist, had assigned Ulysses as the required reading for the first year English language courses.

Musicians know that you have to study and master techniques that have been developed through centuries of trial and error before you can become a proficient performer. Serious composers also see themselves not as breaking with the traditions of Western music, but building upon it. They study music theory. This is the way. Those who try to shortcut discipline and technique are doomed to an ephemeral popularity. Who draws a larger crowd these days: Johannes Vermeer or Andy Warhol? So for me to start my study of western literature with Faulkner was a bit of a waste. Still, this book did make an impact on me, and later, after having learned about narrative structure and stream-of-consciousness, it now makes sense.

The reason I associate it with Ravel’s Rhapsodie Espagnole is because I had checked an album of the composer’s works out of the library during the period I was reading As I Lay Dying.

I used to play classical music when I read up in an old blue mohair comfy chair in my room. At one point in the book, there is a very vivid description of how the characters struggle with moving the wagon across a shallow, swift-moving river at a ford. It just so happened that the first movement of the Rhapsodie Espagnole started at that point, and it just seemed to fit the scene so well.

The Rhapsodie Espagnole is in four sections. The first, “Prelude to Night,” begins with a four-note descending motif of F, E,D, C played over and over again by the violins. To me that sounded like water, the dark roiling waters of a swift moving stream. Ravel’s music, of course, with Debussy’s was labeled as “Impressionistic.” The subtle oriental sound, the focus on tonal color rather than melody, all of these convey the impressions created by nature. The middle two movements of the Rhapsodie Espagnole are “Malaguena” and “Habanera,” two Spanish dances that captured Ravel’s interest and which he captured using percussive instruments like castanets and tambourines-kind of revolutionary for the time. The last movement is called “Fiera”, which means “festival” and captures the excitement and passion of a festival at night.

You can’t get much further apart in culture than Faulkner and Ravel. Ravel always appeared impeccably dressed and critics describe his music as being meticulous. Faulkner’s characters are harsh, uneducated, and rooted to the earth. Yet Faulkner wrote about them in the narrative style developed by James Joyce and showed the complex human emotions that we all share. What an impression that made.

 

Maurice Ravel: Piano Concerto in D Major

Young people can do some astoundingly cruel things. From an early age, I had enjoyed telling jokes. When I got to middle school, one of my favorite subjects was English, because our teacher exposed us to a wide range of comedic genres-satire, parody, sarcasm, wit, and irony. That expanded my repertoire and I loved the Marx brothers, James Thurber, S.J. Perlmann, and Robert Benchley. Television shows in 1960s were full of social satire and pushed the envelope of good taste. Shows like “Laugh-In” poked fun at conservative sexual mores, racism, and the military industrial complex. All in all, this was pretty healthy humor.

In high school, however, I quickly developed a cruel, vicious sense of humor. Nothing can turn a person into a vicious, thoughtless, hurtful beast faster than peer pressure. And that is what happened to me.

My mates on the swim team tested the limits of bad taste constantly. It started out innocently enough-making fun of the rich snobs on the basketball team and the greedy, conservative adults behind them. Once somebody made fun of a couple of kids that died in a car accident, and from then on nothing was sacred, as one person tried to best another, do more daring acts, and become top of the heap. At a party, for example, on of the guys on the swim team made a prank call to the house of a girl, whose brother had been electrocuted while flying a kite too close to power lines. As a parent of two daughters now, I shudder at how the parents must have felt.

But I didn’t learn my lesson until I had a summer job in the factory where my father worked the summer I graduated from high school. One day, I bumped into the father of one of the girls who had died in the car crash that year. He was a kindly old man, about my father’s age, who drove the sweeping truck. I got talking to him one day and when I told him what high school I had gone to, he asked me if I had known his daughter. I had known her from about the second grade, but I hadn’t been very close friends with her. She hadn’t done that well academically and ran with a wild crowd. But when he asked me if I had known her, I saw in his eyes that he was looking for some kind of validation-that she had been a good girl, that he had done all he could as a parent, that her life hadn’t been in vain. I reassured him, and from that day on, I never could tolerate jokes made at people’s expense.

That summer I was listening to a lot of piano concertos, and became fascinated with Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand. The reason for such a concerto arose from another not very funny event-World War I. Paul Wittgenstein, the brother of the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, had been a successful concert pianist in Germany before the war. In the “War to End All Wars,” everyone had to serve-there were no deferments for artists, intellectuals, teachers, writers, or politicians’ sons. So Paul went and had his arm blown off. After the war, he commissioned a number of composers to write concertos for him, so that he could recapture something of his career. It is ironic that he asked Ravel, who fought on the opposite side during the war. And Ravel delivered Concerto for the Left Hand, which was written in tandem with his other concerto in the same year. the Concerto for the Left Hand was quickly adopted into the standard repertory and is still quite popular.

Ravel wrote the piece in one long movement, though it does have three distinct phases. It begins with a brooding dark melody played low in the basses and trombones. It has the climbing, roiling feeling of the opening to Wagner’s Das Rheingold before the piano bursts in with a flourish, which in feeling has a bit of the oriental in it reminiscent of Debussy’sPagodes. The piano then quiets down with a restatement of the theme, before launching into an energetic yet seething solo. After another orchestral interlude, the piano comes back to play another solo, full of tenderness, perhaps conveying the loss of innocence. In the second section, marked allegro, the piano launches into a 6/8 rhythm at a brisk tempo. The melody that it then takes up is a wonderfully playful and meticulous piece of writing so typical of Ravel, who was himself a virtuoso pianist. The whole movement just sparkles, and is full of that great Impressionist orchestration that he and Debussy created. Ravel keeps up the pace of a march as he weaves in bassoons, trombones, trumpets, piccolos together into a kind of grand fugue. We’ve somehow moved into the third movement and he brings back the theme of the opening, but this time with much more grandeur and a positive feeling. He does go back and ruminate a bit in the cadenza but there is a driving forward energy to it now. There is great beauty still. Despite the horrors of the war and the loss, one has survived.

In one of my musical reference books, it says that Wittgenstein did not like some of the concertos that composers wrote for him. It doesn’t say anything about Ravel’s. Back in high school, when I heard that, I thought, “what a jerk; he should be thankful they wrote anything for him.” It was my learned, adolescent cruelty coming through again. Why blame the victim? My reference book has countless stories of the virtuosos throughout the ages who rejected works by Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikowsky-works that later gained great popularity. Why should it have been any different for Wittgenstein? And Ravel? He got in a car accident, and fell victim of an unsuccessful brain operation. There is nothing funny in that.

Download MP3 or buy CD on Amazon