13 Aug 11

The time—1:16 PM.

The place—Copamarina Resort and Spa, Road 333, Guánica, Puerto Rico.

Weather—86 degree Fahrenheit, fair skies with partial cloud cover, humidity at 76%.

In fact, I have made all these data up about the weather, since what seems most pertinent is not the time or the place, still less the numbers to which we have such easy access.  Yes, I could google it, and give you the precise numbers.  But would you know?  Would you care?

I certainly don’t.  It’s hot enough for me now to be sweating, writing as I am on the patio outside my hotel room.  The sun is so dazzling that I barely see the words I write on my laptop screen.  I have a headache and lower back pain from a herpes infection brought on by the blazing sun of Southwestern Puerto Rico.

And I am thinking of another time, a time when men had fewer facts and greater certainty.

I am thinking of Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, who was born in 1685 and died (I believe) in 1750.  And who dedicated his entire body of work to God—to the greater glory of God.  AMDG—he was said to have written on each one of his manuscripts.  Ad majoram dei gloriam.

However great his certainty was, or however great it was that he was certain, doesn’t much matter to me.  What matters is that I am always playing Bach.  Not at the cello, though I spent years playing the Six Suites and later the Gamba Sonatas.  Not on the CD player, although he crops up through there, too.

No, I am playing Bach internally, in my head.  It’s involuntary, though variable.  One day it may be a difficult snippet from the fourth movement of the D Major Sonata.  Another day it may be the beautiful bass aria from the b minor Mass.  Yesterday, hearing Bach on the CD player in the car travelling to Guánica, it was the joyful cello solo from the Marriage Cantata.

Bach—I have spent all of my adult life internally playing and hearing Bach—while teaching, while eating, even while—sorry Raf—making love.

Yes, I have strayed, often without my volition.  I spent a week once with Ravel’s Bolero, which nearly drove me insane.  The Germans have a word for music that invades you, sinks its claws into your cerebrum, and refuses to depart.  For them, it’s an ear worm, and like the tape worm, only the most pernicious medicine can dislodge it.

And there have been others, as well--guests more welcome.  Brahms, of course—what cellist wouldn’t hear Brahms?  In fact, when people asked me who my favorite composer was, the only truthful answer could be “the composer I’m working on at the moment.”

But Bach is the constant, the default option, the screen saver.  Now, almost four years have passed since I have seriously played the cello, and it is Bach who has settled in to accompany me in a long trek through a very arid desert—the desert that awaits a musician who no longer plays.

Because for a musician, or perhaps at least for me, playing music is not a hobby—something I do for the fun of it, or to meet people, or to challenge myself with a different activity.  It was, in the early years, a torment, an anguish, and yes, a compulsion.  There was nothing fun about it—it was a fierce struggle, trying hour after hour to get the awful sounds I was producing at the cello to match the glorious sounds I heard in my head. 

I screamed at myself, I cursed myself, for some years, I would bite my left forearm, almost to the point of drawing blood.  Jack and Franny, my parents, seeing the bruising on my arms, would become alarmed, and counsel me to exercise control, to calm down.

It was impossible.  It was imperative to make those sounds real, to make the music real, and I was so far away!  I was depressed, I was frustrated, I was angry.

Why had I been given the music, internally, when I wasn’t given the ability to produce them externally?  I looked at my comrades in the cello section, and saw nothing of the dream and fury that possessed me.  They were complacent, of average ability; their mistakes and failures were forgivable.

Not for me.  With every wrong note, for every phrase that fell flat when in my head it was arching, soaring—I grew more and more furious.

Nor could I stop.

Why not, you ask?  And indeed, I wonder at that myself, and wonder that I’ve never asked myself that question until now.

Why didn’t I put down the cello, all those years ago, when it brought me nothing seemingly but pain and frustration?  Why did I keep on?

For a simple reason.  There were also moments, and then hours, when the playing went well.  Perhaps it only came after the famous 10, 000 hours or work that Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, talks about.  It takes, he argues, 10, 000 hours to attain mastery at anything—a tennis serve, computer programming, the cello.

But even before the ten thousand hours, there were many moments of what some would call bliss, or perhaps epiphany, but what I called grace.

And I called it grace even before I knew the technical meaning of the word: grace is the state of being allowed into presence of God.

At least, that’s what I think it is.

And this is my blog, so there—that’s what grace is!

I worry that you will think me mystic, or still worse Christian.  No, I, and every other musician I know, am as far away from mystic as possible.  The musicians I knew ate a lot and drank a lot and smoked a lot and told dirty stories.  They farted loudly, as Ben Franklin used to say.

What I’m trying to say is that when the music was going well, when the sounds reasonably approached what I heard in my head, I left the surface and untrue world, and entered the deep true world.  And nothing was more real.  Nothing was more joyful.  After playing, once, for a blissful hour, I went rushing off to attend a nursing class in the University.  I remember noting the trees, and the shadows, and seeing them for the first time, and seeing, as well, the faces of the people I was passing.

Faces looking at me with astonishment—seeing a possessed man, surging with life and happiness, consumed with music, jetting past them.

‘What was he on,’ they must have been thinking.

‘…and where can we get some…’

But it has been four or five years, now, since I have been given grace.  For you do not attain it, for all the work and effort you do.  Rather, it is a gift that is given to you, entirely without merit.

Mother Teresa, it is said, spent the last decades of her life unable to feel the presence of God….

And now, I have done the difficult work of seeing my old mother out of this world, and weeping and mourning her.  Only to find, at the end of this process, a new conundrum. 

“He’d just like to hear you play a few notes,” said Moises.

Moises?  A new brother in law—a guy who has married Lianny, Raf’s sister.

A very nice guy—a guy who comes with a son, a fourth grader attending the most prestigious and expensive school in Puerto Rico.  A kid who plays, and would like to hear me play…

The cello.

  

18 Aug 11

Whatever else Bach was, he was a success.  Think of it—he’s at the top of the list in every genre in the Baroque era except for one.  Actually, he brings the whole Baroque age to a climax, after which everybody else says, ‘forget about it, let’s do classicism instead….’

So what didn’t he do?   Opera, which probably isn’t too surprising. 

For one thing, opera was for the most part an Italian genre, and there Bach was, a German guy who didn’t get around that much.  Unlike Handel, another German who owns Baroque opera, and who spent over a decade in London—where the form was much more assessable.

Or maybe it was resources.  Opera consumes money on, well, a grand scale.  And he was a church musician, cranking out the cantatas and the motets as needed for the church season.  Why bother?

Or maybe it was temperament.  Here he is, below—and nothing about that stolid, industrious German suggests a flare for the histrionic art of opera….

                               

OK—so a definite success.  Except that what we all think about when we think of Bach are the compositions—and nobody much knew about them or cared about them when he was alive.  In his lifetime, he was valued as an organist, and for his ability to improvise.

Or so I used to think.  Confession time—most of my music history, despite having studied it in the University, comes from record liners I absorbed in my childhood.  And that was picture—the good industrious Bach, toiling away in his little church, gestating his masterpieces in obscurity.

The truth, as it so often is, may be different.

Wikipedia—which, come to think of it, may be this generation’s equivalent of record jackets—tells a different tale.  An orphan at age ten, he grew up with his uncle, Willem Christoph Bach, whose compositions are still occasionally played today.  And the whole family was musical, so much so that Bach put together a musical genealogy of his family when he was a teenager.

He travelled by foot or coach—citations lacking in Wikipedia—to a famous German music school in Luneburg (don’t ask me the name of the school—it’s German, I’ve forgotten, and my Internet connection has now disappeared….rain in the mountains!)

He probably played the famous Bohm organ at Luneburg, and may have studied with Bohm himself.  He achieved fame as an organist, and got a job as a court musician for seven months in Weimar.  He left, and went to a new gig at Arnstadt.  He had a fine new organ, light duties, and good money…

And then he took a hike.  Not happy with the quality of singers in the choir, he set off on foot for 250 miles to go see the preeminent organist / composer of the day—Buxtehude.   He did well there, and was offered the position Buxtehude held, only saying no because he didn’t want to marry Buxtehude’s daughter—which was part of the deal.

Oh, and while there, he managed to get himself into a brawl….

(OK, he was provoked—but Bach?  Good Herr Bach?)

And then there was the little matter of the fact that he was AWOL—or at least he extended his visit by several months.  Which got him sacked when he eventually DID return to Arnstadt…where he probably quarreled with his patron before then taking off for another post, and then still later to Weimar, which offered him generous pay, and a group of well trained professional musicians to work with.

Was he happy?  Apparently not, because he stirred the pot enough for his new patron, Duke Johann Ernst, to put him…

…in jail for three weeks.

That was after the Duke had canned him, and Bach was disputing the terms.

Dear me—not quite the boy we thought we knew…

The majority of his life—some 26 years—was spent in Leipzig, which was hardly a backwater.  There, Bach became well known, managed to get himself appointed Royal Court Composer to the King of Poland, Augustus III (Saxony being one of the king’s possessions at the time), and to play for the King of Prussia.

He died in 1750, a victim of a botched eye operation to restore his nearly completely failed sight.

So there he is, our man Bach.  Not an uncomplicated character, nor did he live a sedate life.

It’s better, perhaps, not to know too much.  It would be nice to think of him, alone and toiling in his church, just above penury, but going home to the 13 of the 20 children he sired with his two wives.   Going home to a simple meal of meat and potatoes, hearty German beer, and comfortable feather bed.

But enough men have done all that.  What Bach did was incomparably greater.  He became the greatest composer of this or any other age.

29 Aug 11

“He became the greatest composer of this or any other age.”

What pompous son-of-a-bitch wrote that?

Me.  Which is surprising, since I don’t usually go in for statements like that.

Who am I to say?  Who am I even to evaluate the experts who might say a thing like that?  Isn’t it enough to say that, for me, Bach is like no other?

Oh, so you like the BeeGees?  Or Daddy Yankee?  Hey, they’re great too!  It’s all good….

OK, I have spent a LOT of time at the cello, and in listening to classical music.  In fact, I had to correct myself, just now, as I wrote the term “classical music.” My first instinct was to write “good music,” and I deleted the pejorative implication that some music is good and other music bad.

There’s a lot of political correctness in music, and in culture in general.  But I’d like to argue, just now, for a little incorrectness.

Let me start by saying it’s hard for me to imagine music being “bad” in a moral sense, although about even that I can find an exception.  Six months ago, I was jarred by hearing a rap song as it slowly came down the street, being blasted by a car stereo with horrible bass distortion.  Worse, every single line in the song ended with the snarled word “mother fucker.”  It seemed an incitement to riot.

OK, so what about the meaning of “good” as “of inferior quality?”

Not sure about that, either.  Maybe there are standards in pop music or in rap that are just as exacting as in classical music.  I’m quite sure there are in jazz, which, by the way, I just don’t like.  But I don’t dismiss jazz, or label it less good.

What I would argue is that most, if not all, popular music is limited.

How so?

Most of our life is spent doing stupid stuff—shaving, driving to work, erasing the nonsense email that clutters our day.  But there are moments when life jerks you down to the real world, which we define as unreal.

You go home one ordinary day, take a look at your wife, and see without needing to be told…you’re going to have your first child.  She’s pregnant.

“It’s Alzheimer’s,” says the doctor.

Your boss calls a Friday, 4 PM meeting, you enter the room…and there’s a manila envelope with your name on it….

These are the moments when life stops—or begins—and nothing will be quite the same afterwards.   The focus changes; you are now in a wide world.  Time slows down.  All of a sudden, you’re in transcendence, in wide time.

A time all of the mystics try to write about or describe, and can’t.  Like pornography, you know it when you see it.

Or feel it.

So call it “wide time,” this time we all of us have had.  It seems simple—life suddenly reduced to essentials—because time and experience have expanded and slowed.  But it’s paradoxically an enormously complicated time.

And here’s where classical music excels. Because of its complexity—of form, of harmony, of rhythm—classical music mirrors states of being that pop music cannot.

Am I wrong?

Maybe.  It’s just a hunch, an idea I play with.  But my mood today, after a period of high stress and low energy, is frankly depleted.  In fact, I am quite literally depleted, having gone through a nasty several days of diarrhea.  And so today I turned to—who else?—Bach.  And here it is—the et in terra pax section of the b minor Mass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH5ojVCxGig&playnext=1&list=PLC3B6AA065A4E75BB

21 Aug 11

Her name is Irene, and she’s a monster.

In meteorological terms.  Though actually she’s not—at this point, she’s “only” a tropical storm, with winds of 50 miles per hour, headed west-northwest at twenty miles per hour, and with the coordinates of 17.5 and 63.8.  (We are 18.3 and 66.0.)

This data, unlike last week, I am not making up.

Schools are closed tomorrow, the government is officially not working (as opposed to functionally not working, which we’ve all come to expect), and shelters are opening across the island.  The worry is that the storm may be intensifying—has indeed intensified in a short time—and is over very warm Caribbean waters.  Conditions, therefore, are favorable for development; the National Hurricane Center will issue more information and coordinates in half an hour.

And what, you vast horde of blog readers daily awaiting my droppings, does this have to do with the cello?

Not a thing.

Oh, except that my palms are sweaty, my mouth is dry, my stomach is unsettled, and I am drinking too much coffee.

Gee, am I supposed to be doing an audition today?

‘Cause that’s how it was, all those days when I woke up and immediately thought, ‘oh shit, it’s today!’  And then went into a glacial downward spiral.  Taking the cab to the audition.  Checking in.  Seeing the other guys talking, joking, warming up. 

And waiting, endlessly waiting.  The auditions are called for ten, but first the violinists are heard, then the violists.  Cellists are next.

And the judges decide to break for lunch.  It will be two before I’m heard.

I am number four of five.  Five guys for whom I have, frankly, no respect.  I’ve heard them play, I’ve played gigs with them, I could and do play rings around them.

Not a problem, right?

Wrong.  Notice that I said five guys, above—shouldn’t that be four guys, including me?

No, because I, the fifth guy, have lost all self-respect as well, as have the other four for me. 

Because I choke.

Not that I have a word for this—choke—since, in the mid 90’s, when I was doing my auditioning, either the word hadn’t been popularized, or I was off in Puerto Rico, where internet and libraries didn’t exist.  (The libraries still don’t…)

What I thought I had was stage-fright, but that didn’t help much.

I darkly suspected it was a character flaw—a weakness in me that could be, had to be, attacked with sheer, implacable determination.  It had to be weeded out.  More practice.  Meditation.  Focus.  Concentrate on the bow, on the string, on the mechanics of playing. 

Technique!

A little silly, I would think, because I was prepared.  Jesus, was I prepared.  I had practiced the orchestral excerpts fiendishly—I had memorized the entire cello part for Don Juan—Strauss, and the sixth page is, every cellist admits, unplayable.  Nor does it really matter—since the orchestra is going wild anyway, and you could play variation of Tea for Two without anyone really noticing.

But I knew it cold.  I knew the opening movement of the Dvorak Concerto cold.  I had practiced for hours on end.

Alone.

Now, as I read the book Choke, I see where I went all wrong.

First, it’s an irony but true—the highest performers are most susceptible to choking.

Strike one.

Second, we were all victims of “icing”—being made to wait when we were psychologically ready to play.

Strike two.

Third, the last thing that a cellist, or any athlete should do is focus on technique.  I knew, intuitively, at the time that it made no sense.  How can you pinpoint the intricate, delicate working of so many minute muscles and movements without fatally stumbling over yourself?  It’s called in sports paralysis by analysis and it’s…

Strike three.

There were other things as well—a recurrent, at times fulminating, depression, which I stupidly didn’t recognize or want to treat.  (Wasn’t I an old psychiatric nurse?  Shouldn’t I have known?)  This led to constant rumination, and overall worry, which is…

Strike four.

It should be clear now, that I’m out.  What I cannot tell you, good with words that I might be, was what that “out” sounded like, there behind the curtain of the stage (the curtain  there to “eliminate” the possibility of the judges seeing us and voting preferentially for one of us.)

For it wasn’t an under-performance.  That could have been acceptable, written off to stress, nerves.  It was a sonic train wreck—scratching, poor intonation, shaky tone.  Sounds, in short, that I hadn’t made since I was a fifth grader, learning the rudiments of the instrument.

And it led to emotional devastation.

The day my mother called to say my father had died?

The day my mother herself died, as I watched by her bedside?

Those were nothing, compared to the deadening feeling of catching another cab, going home to Raf and my friends, and reporting that….

….I had failed again.    

   

23 Aug 11

It was, frankly, the kind of storm I just hate.

I had gone to bed at about ten; at 2:41, when I glanced at the clock, the winds were already howling, doors were banging, and there was a persistent roar of the ocean five blocks away—the first time we have heard the ocean in this apartment.

In cases like these, Raf likes to cuddle.  I, on the other hand, cannot bear to be touched.  We ended up all the way to the edge of my side of the bed—it was cuddling or a fall to the floor.

“State Capitols!” I announced.  “Capitol of Georgia!”

“Atlanta,” Raf said, sleepily rubbing my belly.

“Wrong—Augustus,” I retorted.

“Augusta,” he corrected.

“OK—Augusta,” I said, “though I can hardly be expected to keep track of every damn capitol….”

“Well, weren’t you the one….”

“Push-ups!” I proclaimed.  “I intend to arise immediately and do fifty push-ups!  I’d very much advise you to do the same!”

“You’ve never done fifty push-ups in your life,” said Raf, trying to kiss my ear.

“Ridiculous—of course I have.  I rigorously do fifty push-ups every morning before going to work….”

“Nonsense,” said Raf, “let’s just stay here and…”

“I’m getting up,” I said.  “I prefer vertical panic….”

At this point, the winds were howling harder than ever.

“I’m hungry,” announced Raf. 

“Hey, there’s champagne!” said I.

So we settled into to eat cold chicken and vegetables at the dining room.  Which meant, of course, the classic white Wedgwood, and the crystal champagne flutes.  Mr. Fernández does not lower standards in emergencies.

A charming scene, yes?  Two men of a certain age dining formally in their large, Victorian dining room, lit only by candlelight, as the storm rages around them.

No.

Because the storm, however good or bad it is, is the least of it.  It’s the next day, rising without electricity, that’s the worst.

There has been no serious damage.  Our cats, our possessions, and we ourselves are all right.

My stomach is not.  Nor is my body, which aches senselessly.  I cannot stand without getting dizzy.  Worse, I am utterly fatigued, and can only twitch when I try to lie down.

“Wal-Mart,” said the bored voice when I called at noon.

I wanted to kill her.

“Her” being Jaythel, a woman whose emotional range varies from profound boredom to a smug disdain.  She is a woman as defended against any excitement as a bag of cement.  A rain-soaked and now hardened bag of cement.

And I want to be just like her.

‘Why?’ I think.  ‘Why do I have to be so damned sensitive?  Why does absolutely everything get to me?  The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly—I’m tired of it!  I want to be a robot, just like her, and live my life as a constant, monotonous hum!”

Instead, I am pacing and tired, irritable, sleepy and ratcheted up. 

And worse, the storm left—apparently—little damage.  We have gone, therefore, through all of this for nothing.  There will be work tomorrow—unlike a real hurricane where one can reasonably linger about for a couple of days, inventing excuses to tell the boss.  There will be no federal aid, which will shoot sales up at Wal-Mart and almost inevitably assure a year-end bonus.  There will be no hanging around people’s desks, exchanging horror stories.

There will be, instead, four long days of work, with no sympathy for my frazzled nerves.  There will be thirty or forty orchids to be put back on the balcony, and the dirt and mud to be cleaned up.  There will be the rugs to be placed back, the furniture to be repositioned, the mess that inevitably follows a storm.

There’s only one thing we’ve been spared.  A mile away, so reports El Nuevo Día, residents abutting a mangrove swamp awoke to find their patios completely filled with…

…iguanas!

Yes, my old literary friends!  They had fallen from the tree—didn’t I tell you they did?—or found themselves flooded, and decided to rest for a bit in the patios of a well-heeled apartment complex.  Before anyone could report them to the pertinent government agency (which is anyway closed, I’m sure), in  fact, before anyone could do anything at all about them, they had picked themselves and headed back to the swamp.

As I, too, will go to work tomorrow.

The storm is over—everywhere but in my mind and body.   

Oh, and by the way—Atlanta is the capital of Georgia, but there’s no reason to tell Mr. Fernández that….

  

24 Aug 11

It’s a situation that calls for a plow horse, and I am…

…a thorough bred?

All right, that brought the first smile of the day.  And that’s a good thing, because the news is a little grim.  This is what the island looks like, today, more than 48 hours after the hurricane passed.

                         

Yup, trouble in paradise.

Jack would know what to do.  Among the talents he possessed was a great facility for nursing the always temperamental chain saw into life.  And having mixed the gasoline and the oil into just the right proportions, and having done an experimental pull of the rope to start the beast, he’d sit back and study the situation.

“We take her on the down side, and she’ll probably drop to the left, get hung on that maple there.  Better get her on the up side, and then do a little counter cut under her….”

Or words to that effect.  We’d be somewhere up in the woods, surveying a tree that had half fallen, and needed to be felled.  Jack would be doing the physics—calculating gravity and weight and counter balance.  He had an eye.

“Could make a hell of a widow-maker, we get her the wrong way…”

Widow-maker—a part of the childhood terminology, like undertow.

“Happens on the quietest day, still, no breeze.  You got a fork of a tree hung up there on another tree, been there years.  You walk under it all the time—maybe you know ‘bout it, maybe you don’t.  Then one, there’s not a breeze in the sky, and that thing decides to come down.  Down she comes, just like that.  And if you’re under it….”

A widow-maker.

Ahem, Jack, the 54 year-old Marc now asks—was this a good thing to say to a kid?  That no sunny day is safe, that no stroll through the ocean shore is not potentially fatal?  That disaster, in short, is only a second away?

Maybe it is.  Maybe it’s true.  Another story from the family lore.

North Dakota, the 30’s, the dust bowl.  But it wasn’t the dust that came that day, but the hail.  Huge balls of it, pelting from the sky, onto the field where the young shoots of wheat were a foot high.  In twenty minutes, the crop was gone.

As was the income for the next year.

Jack’s father strode out into the field, gathered the hail, went to the barn and found the ice cream maker. 

“Sat on the porch, there, and looked at the field, watched the hail melt, and ate ice cream,” said Jack.  “Best I ever tasted….”

Ice cream makers and chain saws.  Two tools, two generations of Newhouses.

Alas, the third generation is not doing too well.  After striking Puerto Rico early Monday morning, Irene went her way, leaving us all to assume it was over, the damage—relatively little—done.  Yesterday, I went back to work.

Only to realize that the tail of this storm was gigantic, and carried seemingly inexhaustible amounts of water.  Which fell, yesterday, in one the hardest rains I’ve seen on this tropical island.  It is, in fact, a fifty year rain, which is, I now read in the papers, a meteorological term.  It denotes an event that may be unique, not just limited to fifty years.  It’s a different breed of horse, not the same mare with a different collar.

I saw the rain for forty minutes while waiting for a bus that never came, some twenty miles from my home.  I admired it, in fact I liked it.  Finally, a colleague scooped me up, and drove me to the train station.

I saw flooding where I had never seen flooding, I saw a Smart car delicately pushing its way through a huge field of water, I saw rivers where there had been streets.

And I seem not to have a chain saw at hand, or if I do, not to recognize it.  My nerves are shot, my stomach is churning, my mouth dry.

Just as I felt, those days after the auditions….