music | The Casual Blog

March 25, 2018

By Yates Mill Pond, and some quartets and symphonies

Yates Mill Pond, March 24, 2018

On Saturday, the forecast was for rain, but it was dry when I went out early to Yates Mill Pond, though chilly. It seemed like winter left last month, and then came back. There were few other humans, but lots of birds, including honking Canada geese, trilling Carolina wrens, and a quiet pair of hooded merganser ducks.

On Saturday night, we went over to Durham for the sixth concert of the Duke Chamber Music series, where we heard the Jerusalem Quartet. I’m aware that many people think of string quartet music as per se boring, which is too bad. At its best, a string quartet is an extraordinary being: a four-person virtuoso, an entity with the sensitivity of one and the knowledge of many. And some of the greatest music in the western classical tradition is written for this ensemble.

The Jerusalem Quartet was amazing. These four serious-looking young men were absolute masters of their instruments, and 100 percent committed. They took a questing, energized approach to the music, and convinced me that the Beethoven op. 95 should be considered a late, rather than a middle, quartet. Their Debussy was a sonic marvel.

I wasn’t familiar with the Shostakovich second quartet, and liked it less than other Shostakovich quartets, but it was worth hearing. Composed near the end of WWII in Stalin’s Soviet Union, it raises the question of the role of music in a world of bloody war in a society led by a murderous psychopath. The answer seemed to be — a tenuous, strained, painful beauty.

For the last few weeks we’ve been getting to know the seven symphonies of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). These symphonies are essentially romantic, but full of moods and questions, restless and heroic. There are numerous excellent versions available for free or almost on Spotify. Our favorites are number two and number five, but all seven have wonderful moments.

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October 1, 2017

A short brag, some bluegrass music, some brass, and a moving Cold Mountain opera

I’ve been trying to think of a way to share this without seeming to brag — and cannot. So I’ll just brag: I’ve been doing really well in my recent spin (stationary bike) classes at Flywheel. Their computers and software reveal how the spinners do relative to each other, which tends to make me try harder. And I’ve come in first in the class in three of the last four Friday 6:00 a.m. classes, and number two in the fourth. The average age of my fellow spinners was about half my own. My final score this Friday, 315, was not a record, but I was happy enough, and tired enough.

It was a good start to another active arts weekend in piedmont North Carolina. The annual IMBA bluegrass music festival took over downtown Raleigh, with pedestrians only on Fayetteville Street and connecting side streets, and several blocks worth of crafts and snacks pedlars. After work on Friday, we had some fine Mexican food at Centro, then strolled about, and listened to music at the free venues. For me, a little of the old-school, three-chord foot-stomping-type bluegrass music goes a long way. But we heard a couple of groups that used the traditional instruments but went well beyond that traditional model, and especially enjoyed them.

On Saturday evening we drove over to Durham, ate some great Italian food at Mothers and Sons, and went to the first concert of the season of the Duke Chamber Series. The performance was by the American Brass Quintet. They did a program of mostly sixteenth century and modern works (Hillborg, Tower, Ewazen), plus some music from nineteenth century Russia. These guys are good! Back in college days, I played with a brass quintet, with great enjoyment of the brass sounds and the repertoire. Hearing a chamber brass performance at this high level was a treat.

On Sunday afternoon we drove over to Chapel Hill for the N.C. Opera’s production of a new opera, Cold Mountain, with music by Jennifer Higdon and libretto by Gene Scheer. I’ve enjoyed Higdon’s music, but this was her first opera, and we didn’t know what to expect. On the whole, the production was a great success. It deftly created a universe, with quirky characters and settings, and the story was well told — highly dramatic but very human.

The sets, lighting, and costumes all were imaginative and well executed, and the singers and orchestra sounded great. At first I found the vocal writing a bit meandering, but in the second act it started to work for me. I found the climax very moving. The near sell out audience gave an enthusiastic standing ovation. It was cheering to see a large crowd come to a brand new opera with such enjoyment. There’s still hope for the future of opera.

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September 3, 2017

Our new floor, Liszt, and some ants

At Raulston Arboretum, September 3, 2017

They finished installing our new wood floor, and so we said so long to the Hampton Inn and moved back home on Friday. There’s still a lot of unpacking, reconnecting, and rearranging yet to do, but the worst is behind us. The new flooring is American walnut in wider planks and a more textured surface, and we really like it.

We had a special sound absorbent underlayer put under the floor, in consideration of the neighbors situated under my Fazioli 228 grand piano. The instrument can put out a lot of sound, which I hope isn’t too annoying for them. I was very happy to be able to play it again.

The new floor under the Fazioli

Among other things, I’ve been working on one of Liszt’s songs for piano, Oh! Quand Je Dors, from the second Buch der Lieder fur Piano Allein. It’s so beautiful! At times it feels a bit lonely caring about Liszt, since my friends generally don’t seem to like him nearly as much as I do. I suppose loneliness often comes along with a passion, since caring intensely about something will separate you from others. Of course, it also connects you to others, but they may not be close by, and may even belong to generations long gone.

My teacher lent me a book by one of Liszt’s piano students, August Gollerich, which consists of diary notes of master classes Liszt conducted in 1884-86, the last two years of his life. The format of Liszt’s master classes was just like those today, with a series of students playing works, and then getting critical comments from the master. Liszt was very direct about what he liked and didn’t like, but he also had a sense of humor. He mixed practical instruction on tempo and volume with notes on the animating emotions, and frequently played to demonstrate his points. How daunting and amazing it must have been to play Liszt for Liszt! For his part, the master, nearing the end, seemed happy to be surrounded by adoring students, and still passionate about music.

Speaking of lonely passions, I heard a radio interview with Eleanor Spicer Rice, an entomologist who truly loves ants. She pointed up their under-appreciated contributions to the environment and some wonderfully quirky behaviors. She was so sweet and excited about these tiny creatures that I ordered and started reading her book, Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Ants. For each species, she writes three or four pages about their habits, customs, and talents, and her enthusiasm is infectious.

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April 30, 2017

A PB spin, Goode piano, Sapiens and science, and an operatic pearl

Blooming this week at Raulston Arboretum

I had an epic personal best spin class at Flywheel on Friday morning, with a score of 360. That’s big! The second place finisher’s score, 342, would also have been a PB. It was like expecting to run a 10k in 43 minutes and finishing in 33. I’d like to thank my teacher Matt, and the other fine spin teachers over the years (Vashni, Heather, Jen, Will) who helped me along the way.

I wish I knew for sure what produced all that energy, so I could bottle it. It might have been a good dinner the night before (Sally’s Blue Apron Thai cauliflower rice). It might have helped that I woke up early and did some pre-class foam rolling to loosen the muscles. Doing more interval work recently at the gym probably contributed. Also, there were several pretty girls in the class, which tends to increase peppiness. And it’s possible I drew a recently serviced and well-oiled bike. In any event, I will not be sharing the number of that bike, as I hope to get it next week.

That night we went over to Duke’s Baldwin Auditorium for a concert by master pianist Richard Goode. He performed Bach’s sixth partita and three late Beethoven sonatas (Ops. 101, 109, and 110). These works are well known to aficionados, but they’re also deep and mysterious. Even after two centuries, the interpreter can still find new things, and bring new life. Goode communicated the power and cohesiveness of the rich musical ideas, and also sang — literally! This was musicianship of the highest order, and I felt privileged to share the experience.

At the gym, I’ve been listening to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari challenges a lot of widely shared assumptions about our origins, such as the notion that we were the sole human species on earth when we arose some 200,000 years ago. What happened to the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other non-sapien human cousins? There are various theories, including the possibility that our ancestors exterminated them, as they killed off most of the existing species of large animals.

Harari points up that homo sapiens’ ruthless success as a species is attributable to our brilliance at social organization, and he accounts for this in part by our use of religious, economic, and other social myths. This is thought-provoking stuff, though Harari doesn’t always distinguish between matters of wide scientific consensus and ideas that are much more speculative.

I wouldn’t expect Harari to get everything right, since no one ever does. A recent edition of the You Are Not so Smart podcast (not yet posted at the web site) noted that medical students are now taught that half of what they learn in medical school will eventually turn out to be wrong. Science is always a work in progress. Fortunately, the scientific system is built for testing and error correction.

Not so long ago, I’d have thought the value of science was self evident and not in need of advocacy. Was I ever wrong! I expect that, barring nuclear catastrophe, science and reasonableness will prevail in the long run, but at the moment, we’re in trouble, with unreason ascendant on urgent questions of the environment, health, and social issues.

Raulston viewed from the Tiller quadcopter

On Sunday afternoon we went to the N.C. Opera’s production of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. It was a new opera for us, and we found the melodies very beautiful. The principal singers were excellent, as usual, and the chorus was particularly strong. The orchestra had a rich sonority and tonal variety. Conductor Timothy Myers is a brilliant musician, and also a wizard, to conjure all this in little ole Raleigh, NC. We’re really sorry he’s leaving us for bigger things next year. It was touching when, in the final curtain call, the company threw roses at him.

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March 12, 2017

A family visit, defending against motivated reasoning, Mozart’s Figaro, and swimming

Sally’s flowers, with snow falling on Sunday morning

The weather in Raleigh was sunny and mild this week, and the trees started to leaf in. I was looking forward to some outdoor activities for the weekend, but the temperature dropped into the thirties on Saturday, and on Sunday there was light snow.

Jocelyn came down from New York to visit us this weekend, along with her friend Kyle. Gabe and our granddog, Mowgli, also stopped by. We had some of Sally’s good cooking and some lively conversation. Among other topics, we considered what’s happening to journalism, including fake news, imaginary fake news, and partisan attacks on media, and how it is possible to be both highly intelligent and deeply deluded.

Jocelyn, ready for dinner

I told them about a podcast by Julia Galef called Rationally Speaking in which Galef talks with intellectuals about their ideas. She likes a good argument, and keeps things popping along. I find her openness to new ideas and curiosity to be really cheering and inspiring.

Kyle, ready for dinner

This week I came upon a talk Galef did last year at a Tedx conference titled Why You Think You’re Right, Even When You’re Wrong, in which she gives a good way of thinking about motivated reasoning and how to do less of it. She analogizes different thought habits to two types of army soldiers: regular fighters and scouts.

She summed up the idea here:

Our judgment is strongly influenced, unconsciously, by which side we want to win. And this is ubiquitous. This shapes how we think about our health, our relationships, how we decide how to vote, what we consider fair or ethical. What’s most scary to me about motivated reasoning or soldier mindset, is how unconscious it is. We can think we’re being objective and fair-minded and still wind up ruining the life of an innocent man. …

So . . . what I call “scout mindset” [is] the drive not to make one idea win or another lose, but just to see what’s really there as honestly and accurately as you can, even if it’s not pretty or convenient or pleasant. This mindset is what I’m personally passionate about. And I’ve spent the last few years examining and trying to figure out what causes scout mindset. Why are some people, sometimes at least, able to cut through their own prejudices and biases and motivations and just try to see the facts and the evidence as objectively as they can?

And the answer is emotional. So, just as soldier mindset is rooted in emotions like defensiveness or tribalism, scout mindset is, too. It’s just rooted in different emotions.For example, scouts are curious. They’re more likely to say they feel pleasure when they learn new information or an itch to solve a puzzle. They’re more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations. Scouts also have different values. They’re more likely to say they think it’s virtuous to test your own beliefs,and they’re less likely to say that someone who changes his mind seems weak. And above all, scouts are grounded, which means their self-worth as a person isn’t tied to how right or wrong they are about any particular topic. So they can believe that capital punishment works. If studies come out showing that it doesn’t, they can say, “Huh. Looks like I might be wrong. Doesn’t mean I’m bad or stupid.”

Galef comes at some of these same issues from a different direction in a short (5:41) YouTube talk titled How to Want to Change Your Mind. Here again, she proposes looking at reasoning as having an emotional component that needs to be addressed in the interest of better thinking. We tend to get defensive and closed off when we feel threatened, and Galef has some helpful tips for counteracting that tendency. For example, she suggests picturing your opinion as separate from your self. She also notes that it’s possible to get comfortable and even pleased to discover your belief is mistaken — because you’ve just gotten wiser!

Gabe with beer

The Marriage of Figaro

Last week we saw and heard The Marriage of Figaro by W.A. Mozart and G. de Ponti in a performance by the N.C. Opera. It was sublime. The music all by itself is brilliant, well worth listening to even without benefit of story. The story is essentially a comedy of love, but a unique and strange one — startlingly dark and cynical by moments, but also poignant by moments.

The leads all sang beautifully, and just as important, created believably human characters with their acting. Jennifer Cherrest as Susanna brought wry saucy humor along with her tonal strength and range. She had good chemistry with Figaro, her betrothed, the very fine Tyler Simpson. Other standouts included D’Ana Lombard as Countess Almaviva, who had a lovely voice and musicality. Cherubino (Jennifer Panara) was wonderfully comic.

Swimming again

Earlier in the week, I added back some lap swimming to my exercise regime. I’d gotten out of the habit when the Pullen Park pool closed for repairs and then quit having morning hours. The gym I joined earlier this year has a small lap pool, but I found it hard to get motivated to head toward the water in the early hours, when it’s cold and dark. But once back in, I quickly remembered what I like about swimming. The water feels good on your skin. There’s a rhythm to it, and quietness.

Our granddog, Mowgli

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March 6, 2017

Guilty pleasures, my new grand piano, and understanding mass delusions

Daffodils at Fletcher Park, March 4, 2017

It’s been pleasantly mild in Raleigh this week, bringing out the early spring flowers, though it got colder this weekend. I’ve been in good spirits, which is hard to explain. With so many big things to worry about, I’ve felt a little guilty about this happiness. But what can you do?

On Friday I had a successful spinning class with Matt at Flywheel. Despite a couple of weeks off, I finished with the first place score, with 320 points. Almost everyone (or everyone) in the class was considerably younger than me. It’s invigorating to try to keep up with younger people, and especially fun to go faster than them!

Gabe and I had lunch this week at the Remedy Diner, and talked about the possibility of his becoming a partner in a new print-jobbing and graphic design firm. He’s already doing web site design and related print design work, and the new business could be a good platform. I’m excited for him, and enjoyed kicking around some of the practical aspects, like finding clients, office space, legal services, accounting, and insurance.

My new Fazioli F228

This week I figured out how to work forScore, an app for reading piano music on my tablet device. There’s a massive amount of great music in the public domain and available for free on sites like IMSLP.org, but it’s cumbersome to work with unbound paper copies. Just as my tablet has become my primary tool for reading books, it might become that for music. Another plus is solving the problem of page turning. In prior generations, pianists needed two hands to play the instrument and a third hand to turn pages, but I’m getting a little wireless foot pedal that should do the job.

I’m in love with my new grand piano, a Fazioli F228. The sound is amazing! It is truly a joy to play. It’s a 2003 instrument that I acquired from a businessman in Greenwich, Connecticut, who’d got it for his young son to learn on. Since then, it’s been lovingly tended to by an experienced technician, but barely used. It will certainly be used by me. I’ve been delving into my favorite music of Chopin, Liszt, and Debussy, and discovering beautiful new prospects. I’m selling my Steinway A, a 2004 instrument with a really lovely tone, if you know anyone who might be interested.

Being of such good cheer, I’d planned to abstain from political discussions this week. But I can’t resist sharing links to a couple of articles with very intriguing ideas about a big question: are we losing our grip on reality? The White House’s attacks on the media, the justice system, scientific consensus, and other institutions initially seemed to me so bizarre and ridiculous that I assumed no one would take them seriously. But some people are.

Alexander George in the NY Times compared the situation to a famous forger of Vermeer’s work who succeeded by temporarily changing, through his own fake paintings, the understanding of what qualified as a Vermeer. George points up that we judge the validity of new information based on our current knowledge base, including the concepts we’ve developed as to what sources are reliable. If someone were to convince us that we could no longer trust scientists or journalists, our existing knowledge base would be undermined. Rationality would be seriously impaired, as would political organization and action. Query, is this the Bannon plan?

Also in the sad, failing, fake news Times, Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman wrote a piece entitled Why We Believe Obvious Untruths, which centers on an idea that is both simple and profound. The answer, they say, is not lack of intelligence. Fernbach and Sloman point out that human knowledge is essentially collective — dependent on knowledge of other humans. The things we think we know are for the most part actually things we’re confident somebody else knows. While this system of collective intelligence allows for the large and long collaborations necessary for the greatest human achievements, it also accounts for our susceptibility to mass delusions.

For better and for worse, we largely rely on our communities for knowledge, and our tools for detecting when our communities go awry are not so good. As others have noted, we have a tendency to believe new information that fits with whatever we (and our community) already believe and ignore and suppress everything else, which has an error magnification effect. Social media serves for many as news fast food that compounds the echo chamber problem.

Thus it turns out to be easy for groups to come to strong agreement in support of ideas overwhelmingly at odds with the weight of the evidence. QED: climate change is a hoax, immigrants are threatening us with terrorism, our military is too weak, etc.

On a cheerier note, speaking of intelligence, there was a report this week of experiments showing that insects have a lot more mental capacity than previously thought. They aren’t just automatons operating on pure instinct, but can learn and solve problems. Scientists at the Queen Mary University in London taught bumblebees to roll a little ball across a platform in exchange for a reward. Amazing!

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January 8, 2017

Ice, dark matter, Photoshop, AlphaGo, and Haydn

The forecast on Friday called for major snow, but in downtown Raleigh we only got a couple of inches. Still, the roads got very icy and temperatures went down into the teens. We stayed home, cozy and warm, and caught up on backlogged magazines and Netflix.

One of the New Year’s thoughts I saw recently was a tough one: a wish for lots of failure in 2017. The idea is, if you’re operating outside your comfort zone and trying new things, you’ll be doing some stumbling and falling. Failure doesn’t usually feel good, but it can be a sign that you’re going somewhere. On the other hand, if you aren’t having any failures, either you’re the luckiest human in history or you’re stuck.

One way to assure a level of failure is to try keeping up with contemporary physics. I’d thought it was reasonably well settled that a quarter or so of the universe was made up of so-far undetected dark matter. But the BBC reported last week that after recent failures of big experiments to verify the theory, some reputable scientists are reconsidering. It sometimes seems that there is so much human knowledge you could never get to the bottom of it, but there is still so much we do not understand.

Anyhow, I’m looking forward to plenty of failures in the coming year. In photography, I’ve been struggling to get a thorough working knowledge of the relevant tools in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. They’re wonderful, but far from intuitive, and at times intensely frustrating.

This week I made up my mind to get a level of competence at using Photoshop layers to combine images. Being iced in gave me a chance to practice, and I discovered many methods that do not work before getting on the right path.

As one of my colleagues recently noted, if you need to know something, you should always try asking Google. Whatever you need to know, there’s usually already a video or a blog post with an answer on the internet. This is certainly generally true for Lightroom and Photoshop, though it took several tries to find the necessary guide post for my layers problem.

Speaking of Google, a word of congratulations to the AI researchers at its DeepMind unit for the latest advances of AlphaGo. Go, which is more complex than chess, was until recently well beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. No more. AlphaGo, which beat a famous Go master a few months ago, last week took on the world’s top player and other distinguished masters and beat them all, 60 games to nil.

In the Wall Street Journal’s report, the vanquished masters seemed stunned by the unconventional and varied style of AlphaGo. It seemed to have absorbed all existing human Go experience and wisdom, and gone far beyond. This is exciting, but also scary. The singularity may be closer than we thought.

To stay calm and balanced, I recommend listening to some Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). Perhaps because of so many unsettling current events, I’ve been spending time with his piano trios and string quartets, of which there are many. This is really charming classical music, which tends to get overshadowed by Mozart. There are many fine recordings easily available on Spotify.

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October 2, 2016

Trump and Hitler

Lake Lynn, October 1, 2016

When I left work on Friday, the weather was pleasant, and I was thinking of hitting a few golf balls on the practice range, but I had an almost flat tire. Fortunately, Murray’s Tires was still open. I love those guys! As soon as I parked, before I could get out of the car, one of them was beside me asking if he could help. He had in stock a sporty used Continental Extreme Contact for a very reasonable price, and 20 minutes later I was back in business.

On Saturday evening, Sally and I walked over to Fayetteville Street, which was closed to traffic and lined with craft stands and food trucks, and sampled the free performances at the IBMA bluegrass festival. There were many talented fiddlers, banjo pickers, mandolin strummers, dobro sliders etc. making bouncy music. At The Haymaker, a new cocktail bar, I tried the Fabuloso, with vodka, mezcal, and lavender syrup, which was profoundly flavorful. For dinner we did The Remedy Diner, a casual veggie-friendly spot with a rock-and-roll vibe, where I had the tasty Tempeh Tantrum sandwich. We discussed the difficult question of how a lot of otherwise normal people can support Donald Trump.

Godwin’s Law has it that the longer and more vigorously an internet dispute continues, the likelier it is that one of the arguing parties will compare another to Hitler. This is a clever reminder of the evils of emotional hyperbole and the value of civility. The comparison is almost always over the top.

There was, however, a review by Michiko Kakutani of a new Hitler biography by Volker Ullrich in the NY Times that seemed startlingly relevant to our present moment. I was struck enough to pay for the ebook, which is now waiting on my iPad to be read when I do my trip to southern Utah next week. Check out these excerpts, and see if you too think that Hitler’s personality and methods sound disturbingly like someone we all have been watching with stunned amazement:

Hitler was often described as an egomaniac who “only loved himself” — a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization and what Mr. Ullrich calls a “characteristic fondness for superlatives.” His manic speeches and penchant for taking all-or-nothing risks raised questions about his capacity for self-control, even his sanity.
. . . .

Hitler was known, among colleagues, for a “bottomless mendacity” . . . . A former finance minister wrote that Hitler “was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth” . . . .
. . . .

Hitler was an effective orator and actor, Mr. Ullrich reminds readers, adept at assuming various masks and feeding off the energy of his audiences. . . . “Hitler adapted the content of his speeches to suit the tastes of his lower-middle-class, nationalist-conservative, ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic listeners,” Mr. Ullrich writes. He peppered his speeches with coarse phrases and put-downs of hecklers. Even as he fomented chaos by playing to crowds’ fears and resentments, he offered himself as the visionary leader who could restore law and order.
. . . .

He often harked back to a golden age for the country, Mr. Ullrich says, the better “to paint the present day in hues that were all the darker. Everywhere you looked now, there was only decline and decay.”
. . . .

Hitler’s repertoire of topics, Mr. Ullrich notes, was limited, and reading his speeches in retrospect, “it seems amazing that he attracted larger and larger audiences” with “repeated mantralike phrases” consisting largely of “accusations, vows of revenge and promises for the future.”
. . . .
He benefited from a “constellation of crises that he was able to exploit cleverly and unscrupulously” — in addition to economic woes and unemployment, there was an “erosion of the political center” and a growing resentment of the elites. The unwillingness of Germany’s political parties to compromise had contributed to a perception of government dysfunction, Mr. Ullrich suggests, and the belief of Hitler supporters that the country needed “a man of iron” who could shake things up. “Why not give the National Socialists a chance?” a prominent banker said of the Nazis. “They seem pretty gutsy to me.”
. . . .
Hitler’s ascension was aided and abetted by the naïveté of domestic adversaries who failed to appreciate his ruthlessness and tenacity . . . . Early on, revulsion at Hitler’s style and appearance, Mr. Ullrich writes, led some critics to underestimate the man and his popularity, while others dismissed him as a celebrity, a repellent but fascinating “evening’s entertainment.”

It’s nice to think that if you and I had been Germans in 1933, we would not have been among those who were seduced by him. Also, it may be we wouldn’t have been among those who dismissed him as merely a pathetic clown and ignored him. Perhaps we’d have been very brave, even when things started to get dangerous.

With reasonable luck, we won’t have to put ourselves to that dire test. That fellow whose personality defects and rabid style might remind you of Hitler continues to shoot himself first in one foot, and then the other, and the mainstream press is finally treating him less as a joke and more as a menace.

The WSJ had a good piece about his Atlantic City casino business that pretty well put stake through the heart of the fable that he was a brilliant business success. The story compared his casinos to others there, and found that they earned much less and fired many more employees, while going through multiple bankruptcies. The only person who made money out of the financial debacle was – guess who?

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September 11, 2016

Music therapy, and looking for new bugs

My work days are often nonstop meetings, calls, and electronic documents about new technologies and difficult problems, and for several hours my left brain is going at full throttle. I like the intensity, but there are a lot of stress hormones. Without a dose of classical music after work, I’d likely redline and blow up. Playing the piano, even for just a half hour, is like a warm, soothing bath.

One of the pieces back on my musical workbench is Liszt’s famous Benediction de Dieu dans la Solitude. (There’s also some Schubert, Chopin, and Debussy.) I’ve been infatuated by the Liszt piece for a long time, but discouraged from committing to it by two things. First, it has some daunting technical demands, including reaches and stretches that are awkward and even painful. Olga, my teacher, suggested a (to me) non-obvious way of refingering to avoid the worst stretches, and I’ve been working out the details of the new approach.

The other blocker is the length. Most of the piano music I try to master and embody is on the short side by classical standards – under 6 minutes, which I view as pushing the limits of attention spans for most non-specialists. Benediction comes in at around 16 minutes. But what minutes! It’s very lyrical, elaborated by Liszt’s rich harmonies, and conceived with the piano’s singing qualities in mind. Here’s a couple of good and interestingly different performances from YouTube here and here

We’ve been particularly enjoying listening to music since we had our stereo system reworked last week. This was not entirely optional. Our former system involved in-wall and under-floor connections, which ceased working properly after our new floors were installed. Dr. Video, who installed the system, advised that fixing it would be quite expensive. We eventually decided to reposition the speakers on the large bookshelf, and powered them with a Yamaha R-700 receiver tucked in an adjacent closet. The speakers – two NHT Class Threes and a subwoofer – sounded good before, but with the new position and more power, they sound excellent.

We inaugurated the new sound set up with Harmonielehre, a piece for orchestra by the contemporary American composer John Adams. This is one of my favorite orchestral pieces of all time, and that’s including all the symphonies of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler. It manages to cover an enormous emotional range, from a bouncy and cheery to fiery and fierce to wistful and contemplative. The harmonic language is mostly tonal, but with piquant dissonances, and the rhythm manages to seem propulsive and natural, though it is anything but simple. It takes you on the journey of discovery, much as Mahler does. I have the version by the City of Birmingham Symphony, but various other are available on Youtube and Spotify. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

Another great stress reliever is a walk through the woods and around a lake. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, I went to Umstead and Lake Crabtree parks and moved slowly, looking closely in the grasses and bushes for interesting insects. Most of the little creatures I saw did not hang around long enough to have their pictures taken, but I got a few shots I liked.

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August 14, 2016

Enjoying the Olympics, a short scuba trip, and a piano lesson

We can go literally for years without any special yearning to watch gymnastics, swimming, or beach volleyball. Yet every four years, like a periodic cicada, our inner fan emerges, and we are rapt before the summer Olympics. Of course, it is annoying to watch the same advertisements over and over, and listen to the commentators’ unhelpful hype and drivel. But the athletes are stupendous! It makes you proud to be part of the same species. All that drive and dedication, for years and years, and then the ultimate mastery at the decisive moment. It makes you wonder how much more each of us might be capable of.

These photos are from our diving trip last week out of Wrightsville on the wrecks of the Gill and the Hyde. The water was murky — only 10 feet of visibility in places. But we still saw a lot of life, including sand tiger sharks, barracuda, and lots of little fish. On the Hyde, about 80 feet down, I lost Sally and Gabe near the end of the dive, as can so easily happen in poor visibility. Then I couldn’t find the anchor line, which was the planned route back to the boat. My air was getting low, and it occurred to me that things might turn out really badly. But I surfaced in an orderly manner and found the boat close by, and family safely aboard.

Last week I had my last piano lesson with Olga for a while, since her baby is soon to arrive. We worked on Liszt’s Sospiro and Chopin’s first Intermezzo. As usual, she made me listen more closely, and think about new musical possibilities. And as always, there were little technical issues to address. For a long time now, she’s been trying to make me practice each hand separately. The idea is to get out in the open the little rough spots, and also to allow for the hands to have separate personalities. I’ve quietly resisted this kind of practice, because it just isn’t that much fun. I’ve decided, though, to make a point of it. I like getting better.

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Category: music