Archives for June 2014

“In 1703, his Ode on Music was performed at Stationers’ Hall; and he wrote afterwards six cantatas, which were set to music by the greatest master of that time, and seemed intended to oppose or exclude the Italian opera, an exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.”

Samuel Johnson, “Hughes” (in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets)

From the 1937 feature film Moonlight Sonata, Ignacy Jan Paderewski performs Chopin’s Polonaise in A-Flat Major, Op. 53. He was born in 1860, served as Poland’s first Prime Minister in 1919, made his final recordings in the year that Moonlight Sonata was released, and died in 1941:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.”

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

From 2004:

Since I’m both a musician and an intellectual, I’ve scrutinized my tastes closely and analytically enough to have isolated certain musical “tricks” that I find especially appealing. I know exactly what it is that I like about, say, Gabriel Fauré’s bass lines, or the harmonies in the songs of Jimmy Van Heusen. To be sure, I can’t tell you why these devices tickle my fancy. I can only apply Eddie Condon’s empirical test of musical quality: “As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?” (Philip Larkin, who when not writing great poetry was also a part-time jazz critic, swore by Condon’s Law.) But at least I know what I like, and I have enough scientific knowledge to suspect that it will someday be possible to move in certain cases from what to why….

Read the whole thing here.

“But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition of vigour. The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it seemed marvellous to see the people sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger, or fear. Heyst averted his gaze from the unnatural spectacle of their indifference.”

Joseph Conrad, Victory (courtesy of Christopher Strawn)

Mrs. T and I drove up to Barrington Stage Company on Sunday for the opening night of its new production of Kiss Me, Kate, which has inspired me to repost my 2011 rewrite of “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”:

Turn off your cellphone,
Start powering it down.
Turn off your cellphone
Or your fellow men will frown.
If it rings at the end of The Crucible,
All the ushers will treat you as gooseable.
If you chat when you ought to be si-o-lent,
Then assume that your date will get violent.
We’re all sick of the buzzing and ringing
That detracts from the acting and singing.
Turn off your cellphone
Or get out of town.

In 1997 my brother and I celebrated our parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary by planting a tree in their honor by the side of the road that runs through Smalltown’s Veterans’ Park. Ever since then, David has watched over that tree as though it were an adopted child, and he redoubled his vigilance when a terrible ice storm tore through southeast Missouri in 2009 and destroyed the maple tree that once stood in the front yard of our childhood home.

A few days ago he e-mailed me a snapshot of our parents’ tree, which is now a memorial to them. What started out as a scrawny little sapling has become something splendidly and spectacularly leafy, a tree whose best years are doubtless ahead of it but which already looks just the way it should. Magnificent it isn’t, not quite yet, but I’m willing to bet that it’ll be pretty imposing one of these days.

Both of my parents were on my mind this past weekend. Not only was Sunday Father’s Day, but Saturday—Flag Day—was my mother’s birthday. Alas, my father died mere months after we planted the tree, but my mother spent the last fifteen years of her life watching it grow. Even in its youth, she was immensely proud of “her” tree, and I took her to see it whenever I came to Smalltown. I can’t do that anymore, but I can still visit the tree in Veterans’ Park, and think about the man and woman whom it honors, and the unborn generations of men and women who, with a little bit of luck, will someday bask in its shade.

To plant a tree is by definition to invest in other people’s futures. Unless you do it when you’re very young, you almost certainly won’t live to see it reach full growth. You plant it as an act of love—and of faith. We planted that tree, and David looked after it, not merely to pay homage to our beloved parents but because both of us also love our home town, which was founded in 1860, a century and a half ago.

That’s a long time by human standards, but not by the infinite yardstick of history. As Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager observes in Our Town:

Y’know—Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts…and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney,—same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.

So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us—more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight.

That’s what my parents’ tree is: a simple fact. And if Smalltown is still around in 2060, perhaps one of its future residents will read the plaque on the ground beneath the tree and ask, Who were Bert and Evelyn Teachout, anyway? Somebody must have cared very much about them, to have planted this beautiful tree all those years ago.

Somebody—two somebodies—did. And do.

From the 1987 Tony Awards telecast, James Earl Jones and Courtney B. Vance perform a scene from the original Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)