Music of the Tigers

Today, I spent a total of 5 hours rehearsing among the Chorus, with the Orchestra, soloists, and children’s choir.  It’s usually a fairly big adjustment to move into the hall where we’ll performing.  The space is far larger than our usual rehearsal space.  So the ways of singing that work for a  smaller space aren’t quite right for larger one.

Even more, the conductor is now farther away.  So, the issue of coordination become much more evident.  It’s a bad habit of amateur singers to listen to the accompaniment [usually piano] rather than to follow the conductor.  In the larger hall, with the conductor much farther away, it was a real problem.  It wasn’t until we really focused on the baton rather than on the echo of the sound from the hall that the music really started coming together.

The orchestra for the Orff contains two pianos, a huge amount of percussion, as well as the usual strings, woodwinds, and brass.  Given the size of the orchestra, it would take a chorus of 200 to provide the appropriate balance of sound levels when they’re going full blast.  But, we’re only 100 or so, so there are times when we just can’t produce the volume of sound necessary.  So there was a significant amount of time spent on adjusting the orchestra to what we could do or, contraiwise, encouraging us to sing out–when asking the orchestra to quieten would significantly change the character of the music.

One additional problem was that the stage is a traditional proscenium.  So, in some ways, it seems like we’re singing from the back of a cave. 

But, as our chorus motto explains: “Whatever happens, we planned it that way.”

I sing with an amateur chorus, but one that occasionally performs with professional orchestras.  It’s quite an honor; one that we try to live up to. 

The process of rehearsing for a concert with an orchestra is a bit unusual–compared to other kinds of music making.  We spend a long time rehearsing with chorus director.  That’s where we’re working on ensemble, diction,  expression–trying to get the general shape of the piece pulled together.

Then, we’re turned over to the orchestra conductor, usually for a final rehearsal or two just before the concert.  We hope that the conductor and the chorus director have been communicating, because there isn’t a lot of time to make major changes.

At one point in the past, at the first rehearsal with the conductor, we spent over an hour on the first five pages of the music [out of almost 200].  I came away a bit shocked by the difference in what he wanted from how our director had prepared us. We talked about it afterward, and all of us were really astonished.

But that was then.

This week, we’ve had two rehearsals with the orchestra conductor, as we’re headed for a performance of Karl Orff’s Carmina Burana.  It’s a tremendously exciting piece to hear–though occasionally a bit repetative.  It’s based on a series of medieval poems about Fate, Spring, Eating and Drinking, and Love.  The music is quite twentieth century–interesting rythyms and pungent harmonies–while still trying to suggest medieval music.

Fortunately, the conductor and the chorus director seem to have been communicating effectively.  So there were only a few tweaks in pronounciation and expression from these rehearsal.  And the chorus has a good idea of how he conducts in those spots where the music shifts gears–those are the places where wrecks can happen.

Today is rehearsal with orchestra; then performance tomorrow.  It’s an exciting time.

For the past year or so, I’ve been going to the wine tasting that the local wine shop has every weekend.  [Schedule].  As a way of focusing my attention, I’ve started to write tasting notes for myself–partly so that I can remember what it was that I tasted, and partly to really pay attention to the wine.

Along the way, the guys at the shop have been very helpful with my efforts.  They usually have the descriptions of the wines that the vintners have produced.  Over the months, I’ve come to notice that all the words that “experts” use to describe wines are, in fact, similes–it tastes like black current, it smells like hay.  As I’ve been working on this, I’ve noticed that English really has remarkably few words for smells and tastes–at least appealing ones–that don’t have metaphor packaged inside.

By contrast, the vocabulary for the visual spectrum is quite large.  There is hardly a shade of color that doesn’t have it’s own word, and I don’t hear them as metaphors–what’s a mauve, or a teal [well, OK, there’s a duck, but they’re not this color], or an ecru.  I’ll admit that I’ve had my fair share of conversations along the line of “What would you call that green over there?”…[or blue]  Somehow the colors in that part of the spectrum elicit both the finest distinctions and the most argument about what the color actually is.  In your mind, how green is turquoise?

On the other hand, the words for smells and tastes don’t come to mind as readily.  Back a few months, I was tasting a pinot noir [Wild Hog, 2006, to be precise] and I perceived that there was some herbal note that I just couldn’t put a word to.  I was really struggling, and expressing my frustration, when one of the guys asked me if it was OK with me to suggest a word.  I said yes [and thanked him for asking, since I’m trying to develop a personal vocabulary for my perceptions] and then he said “dill”.  I said–effectively–eureka!–or I would have said whatever the Greek for “You’ve got it!” is.

Maybe what I’m really complaining about is that I’ve never taken the time to develop the ability to put smells and tastes into words, in the way that I can with sights or sounds.  On the other hand, if we all didn’t struggle with this vocabulary, I don’t think that there would be all these courses for people to help develop their wine-tasting skills.

A few years ago, Jeremy and I were in the Amador county [California] and we went wine-tasting at Renwood Winery.   The winery produces some very tasty zinfandel.  In order to help people perceive the various elements that are present in their wines, they had set up a “smelling bar” of wine glasses with various fragrant things that might be characteristic of a good zin…raspberries, cherry jam, chocolate, tobacco, pepper, and, from here, I think that I’m remembering something green…maybe mint?….  By going around this bar, I was able to get a noseful of the pure scent, so it was easier for me to catch a hint of it when I was smelling a glass of wine.  But this comes back precisely to my point…here, the metaphor is being made concrete.  The wine smells like chocolate literally.   First, I’m smelling the chocolate; next, I’m smelling the wine–the same scent is echoed in both. 

Many years ago now, I was taking a long car trip with a woman friend, and we were having one of those “car conversations”–those long discussions that one has on a long trip, at least in part because everyone understands that there is the time that it takes to talk about something complicated.  At the time I was single, and she asked me about my erotic life–she knew I’m gay, and she also knew that I was sexually active. 

So I explained that there are a whole variety of places where gay men can go to connect for sex.  I explained that, depending on the venue, it’s quite uncommon to know very much about one’s partner-of-the-moment.  She couldn’t believe that it would be possible to do this.  After a while trying to puzzle out what the confusion was for her, it became clear that the thing that makes these places work is that everyone understands that “yes” means yes and “no” means no.  So it’s possible to engage in some activity on the briefest of acquaintance without worrying too much about the activity becoming something that is unpleasant, or worse.  Usually, it’s enough to say “This isn’t working for me” to extricate myself from a situation.  And part of that freedom is that everyone knows that there are plenty of other guys around–so if this one didn’t turn out so great, I can try someone else.

On the other hand, I met some real friends and lovers at sex clubs.  When I was living in Massachusetts, I would occasionally go to the bathhouse.  Once, I met a guy, and we went back to his “room” for some great sex.  And that was that.  A month of so later, we crossed paths again at the bathhouse, and we wanted to connect again, but neither of us had a room yet.  So we sat around and started talking about who we are.  It quickly became clear that we had a lot in common.  After a while, he got a room, and we adjourned for some more sex.  He invited me to stay over at his place, so that I could drive home in the morning–it was a bit of a way.

The next morning, a Sunday, he asked me to drop him off at the Quaker meeting.  At that point, we started to understand just how few “degrees of separation” there were between us.  I asked if he knew my first boyfriend, who was active in the Friends for Gay and Lesbian concerns–and of course he did.  He found out the college where I was teaching, and he told me that his best friend from high school was one of my colleagues–in the same department.  Later I told her about meeting him, she said that she wondered if we would run across each other, because we were “the smartest and sleaziest people she knew”.  I took that as a compliment.

To return to the friend on the car trip, she explained that, in general, relations between men and women are not characterized by this kind of straightforward communication.  And it does seem that there are a lot of messages telling men to believe that when a woman says “No” it means maybe, and when she says “maybe” it means yes. 

I suppose that the best way to tie this up is to refer to “What part of No don’t you understand?“

I think that the standard answer to the question: What’s a good choice for a first opera to see?–is usually either La Boheme or Madame Butterfly, both by Puccini.  They’re both fine examples, full of gorgeous melody, and definitely evoke an emotional response.  But really, the characters are kids–it’s easy to imagine that if it were being composed this decade, La Boheme would have ended up with a title like “Slackerz”, or, I suppose to be literal, “Slacker Girl”.  And Butterfly is supposed to be fourteen at the start of the opera!  Not that any fourteen-year-old in the world could sing the role.  And the problems of the operas are the problems of young people–first love and loss.  It’s not that they don’t move me, but–to the extent that I’m identifying with the characters–I’m looking back at a stage of my life that’s long gone.

For younger newcomers, however, they’re right on the money.  I’m going to indulge in an opera queen moment.  [Don’t worry, it’s mostly a pose for me; for the real thing, try Parterre Box.]  When I first moved to San Francisco and started going to San Francisco Opera, I saw a performance of Madame Butterfly with Catherine Malfitano as Butterfly.  My friend and I were sitting next to a couple of thirtysomethings, who said that this was their first opera.  They were very dressed up, and appeared to have begun the evening with a nice dinner.  By intermission, they were hooked.  And, at the end, I was crying, my friend was crying, and the young woman was crying hard enough that mascara was running down her cheeks.  But that night, mascara was running down all our cheeks.  The point is, in part, that she didn’t have to look like a young girl, but she had to be able to act a young girl.

And that acting is largely through the voice, rather than through the body.  Or, perhaps I should say, that the voice is ahead of the body.  There’s an Italian expression about opera: primo la voce–first, the voice.  We’ve come away from the notion that only the voice matters; but opera companies can still make the news when they base casting decisions on how a singer looks.  On the other hand, some roles, like Salome–who has to be able to do something with the dance of the seven veils–and even Billy Budd–he needs to have some of that doe-eyed innocence–seem to require certain physical types.  But anyone who can respond to the singing of Billy Holliday or Edith Piaf or k.d. lang–to name three–knows how singing can convey emotion.

So, you want to invite a friend to their first opera.  They’re old enough to have experienced love, rejection and betrayal, success and failure, hope, despair, and [let’s say] at least five of the seven deadly sins.  In other words, they’re an adult. I have two recommendations: Puccini’s Tosca and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.  Why?  First the Mozart.  It’s a comedy, in the old fashioned sense of ending with the marriage of Figaro [the Count’s factotum] and Susanna [the Countess’s maid].  But the central characters of the opera are the Count and Countess Almaviva.  They’re already married.  Indeed, someone said that they’re the only married lovers in opera.  But, at the start, the Count has fallen out of love with the Countess, and he’s trying his best to seduce Susanna.  She’s more than a match for him.  And she knows that the Countess hasn’t fallen out of love with the Count.  Indeed, we all know that–the aria where she tells us is ravishing [Here’s Kiri Te Kanawa, Dove sono].  Skipping over various subplots, Susanna writes to the Count, telling him to meet her in the garden at night, then Susanna and the Countess exchange clothes, so the Count ends up trying to seduce his wife.  He realizes that he’s been tricked, but more than that, that he does love his wife [and we all think that she’s worth a dozen of him].  He apologizes in an aria that some people say is the real “end” of the opera; but then there are subplots to tie up and the wedding of Figaro and Susanna to celebrate.  All this is just to say that this is a bittersweet comedy, and as such, is suitable for mature audiences.

Now for the tragedy.  In Tosca, the main characters are adult professionals, who all have work to do–indeed, we meet Mario Cavaradossi [a painter] at work in a church where he’s been commissioned to paint a portrait of the Madonna.  An old friend and escaped political prisoner [Angelotti] set the plot in motion–Mario tells him to hide at Mario’s villa.  But Floria Tosca bangs on the door as the men are working out the details, and she thinks that Mario is having an assignation with another woman.  Tosca is jealous!  She’s also the premier diva of Rome, where the opera is set.  The Baron Scarpia, head of the secret police and villain extraordinaire, sets a trap that catches all of them.  I’ve seen productions where Scarpia is played as a sadistic slimeball; but it’s much more effective if his surface is completely urbane, sophisticated, witty [and evil].  Think Sean Connery instead of Karl Rove–not that I’m saying that either of them is evil.  Scarpia knows that Cavaradossi is sheltering Angelotti, so arrests him.  Things go from bad to worse.  By torturing Mario, Scarpia gets Tosca to agree to give herself to him, the thought of which she abhors.  That evening, having gotten Scarpia to write out a safe conduct for her and Mario, Tosca stabs and kills Scarpia rather than giving in.  She races to the prison to tell Mario–Scarpia said that he needed to stage a fake execution at dawn and then Mario and Tosca will escape.  But Scarpia has double-crossed them, the execution is real.  Tosca leaps to her death from the parapet rather than being taken by the police.  On top of this almost grand guignol plot, there is incredible music, including two of my favorite arias.  One, when Tosca is having dinner with Scarpia, and bemoaning her fate…Vissi d’arte — I lived for Art [Here’s Maria Callas].  And the other is Cavaradossi in prison, thinking back to the nights that he and Tosca had spent in love…E lucevan le stelle — The stars shone [Here’s Placido Domingo.]   The legendary canard hurled at this opera is that it’s a “shabby little shocker”.  But, frankly, it’s one of a small handful of operas that I’ll go see, just about wherever and whenever.

Whether your choice is comedy or tragedy, I don’t think that you can go wrong with these two.

I learned how to knit from my mom, when I was a kid.  I got a fair number of comments along the lines of “Boys don’t do that”, but that’s another story.  I ended up puttng my needles down for thirty years or so.  About five years ago, I picked them up again, and started knitting much more consistently.  I seem to choose large-scale projects.  Indeed, like most male knitters, I think that I am motivated by the eventual result–the sweater, or blanket, or shawl.

But the process also brings me up against issues from my life that I’m still working on.  The first thing that I have to confront is my doubt about my technical ability.  More than not, I’m making something for someone else, so I tend to want to try things that look “interesting”, and that usually means that it’s something that I’m not entirely sure that I know how to do.  But usually I fall in love with the idea before I resolve my doubts, and I end up going ahead.

Another part of leaping into projects is the way in which the love of the yarn urges me forward.  Yarn stores are a weakness of mine.  And I’ve had to learn discipline about buying yarn that I don’t know how I’m going to use.  And that in itself continues to be a difficult lesson for me.  To go into a yarn store, and to allow myself to feel just how wonderful some yarn is, just how much I want to buy it, and yet, to not do so.  That holding the desire as absolutely real and genuine, and still not acting on it, continues to be a challenge for me.

I’m usually eager to get started on something new, so I do a test run with a bit of spare yarn to work out any of the complications of the pattern, and then I get started.  I love this part.  And it’s wonderful to see the new project starting to take shape on the needles.  Then comes the next challenge.  A sweater, a blanket, even a pair of socks, represent a serious time commitment.  I just finished a lap blanket that, when I stopped to calculate, contains over 50,000 individual stitches.  And there was a blanket that I knit as a wedding present some years ago that contains over 100,000 stitches.  So the knitting takes time.  Lots of time.  I come up against my impatience with how slowly I’m going.  In the case of the wedding present, I also had to finish it in time for the wedding, so I put my quota for each day on my calendar–if I recall, it was about three rows a day, and that turned out to be a significant time commitment.  And the knitting took about five months, working as consistently as I could.

But once I’m well into a project, I come up against my desire for something new.  Even really complicated patterns are based on smaller units, and after a while, the whole pattern has become “routine”.  It’s not that I want the particular object to be different, but I’m impatient with doing the same things over and over.  It’s a weakness, I know.

On the other hand, one of the reasons that I came back to knitting was to relieve some of the stress in my life.  It can be a moment of quiet and calm amid the busyness of urban life.  Precisely because it is repetative that knitting helps me unwind at the end of the day.  After an hour of knitting, I can drop off to sleep easily.  Some people use reading to unwind, but I’ve stayed up until all hours too many times reading something that I couldn’t bear to put down.

Sometimes I put down projects for a bit, but eventually I come back to them, and, finally, I reach the end of the knitting.  That’s a time of elation.  Finally–done!–and look how it turned out!–  But there is one last thing.  Most of the things that I make take multiple balls of yarn, so there are ends to weave in.  It’s a separate task, and one that I find particularly tiresome.  There’s one scarf that I’m working on where the knitting is done, but the technique has left me with 200 ends to weave in.  I’ve been resisting for several months.  But it feels like it’s time to get on with it.

Some of my trouble with really “finishing” has to do with knowing that I’ll be giving the object to its intended recipient.  The old presence of the internal Judge stares out at me, even when I know that there’s hardly anyone who doesn’t appreciate something hand-knitted.  In some ways, knitting is the easiest place for me to really look the Judge in the face and say to stop getting in my way.

     I just finished Dog Years, and once again found myself in tears reading this author.  This memoir is largely focused on his life with two dogs: Arden, a black part-Labrador, part-Newfoundland, part-who-knows-what mutt, and Beau, a golden retriever.  And, given the shorter lifespans of dogs, on his grief at their deaths.

He writes:

One of the unspoken truths of American life is how deeply people grieve over the animals who live and die with them, how real that emptiness is, how profound the silence is these creatures leave in their wake.  Our culture expects us not only to bear these losses alone, but to be ashamed of how deeply we feel them.

And he describes the pleasures of having a dog in his life.  Throughout the book, he tries very hard to express what’s going on for the dogs–he believes, as do I, that dogs have emotions–without resorting to anthropomorphic language.  That, as he points out, is the great divide between their lives and ours.  Along this line, he talks about the way the relationship between a person and their doctor differs from the relationship between a dog and their vet.  The latter is, in fact, a three-way relationship, with all the complexities that entails.  Moreover, one of the participants can’t express their wishes in language–even if barks, growls and tail-wags can get the point across. 

His memoirs [and the other two: Heaven’s Coast and Firebird are equally wonderful, though about quite differnt topics, on the surface anyway] are a joy to read.  And the new paperback edition of Dog Years has a bit of interview with him at the end.  In particular, about writing a memoir he says:

A defining structure is crucial to memoir because memory is basically infinite–it just keeps branching out, including more and more.  The structure of a memoir helps you to know what to leave out.  Once I have that structure in mind, I work in a very concentrated, intense way, and write a memoir more or less straight through from beginning to end.  I can’t do anything else while I’m working on one; I need to just stay with it till I make it to the end.

He contrasts this way of working with his way of working on poetry, which is more subject to the vagaries of inspiration.  He also has a great web site.  He’s one of the authors whose work I’ve followed for a long time, and whose books I eagerly await.

   I’ve been pondering this question: What changes and what stays the same?   I don’t know that I have any answers, but I saw an exhibit of photographs that seemed to address the issue profoundly.  The exhibit has been collected into a book, Golden Gate, by Richard Misrach.

   This work is very much worth checking out, but I think I can describe some aspects of it well enough for you to resonate. 

   The photographer has a house up in the hills that looks directly toward the Golden Gate Bridge.  He marked the spots on his porch for his tripod, and, over a period of several years, set up the camera at the same spot and took pictures.  Each one is identified with the date and time, or time interval, of the exposure.  The composition has the bridge occupying a span of about the middle third of the horizontal distance, but it’s only about one-eighth of the way up from the bottom.  In other words, these are pictures of the sky.  Think Constable.

The weather in the San Francisco Bay area is extremely changeable.  Crystal clear to thick fog in a matter of hours, sometimes minutes.  Some of these exposures are series of two or three, taken only minutes apart, yet completely different one from another.

Others are long exposures at night, with the winking of an airplane’s lights creating a dotted line across the page.  Or, in the exposure of 8.26.99 5:47-6:15 AM, only the black sky and the streak of the moon setting, fading from clear yellow to orange then red and on to black.

I find that I keep coming back to this book of images, precisely because the “what doesn’t change” is so tightly controlled.  Yet the images themselves suggest that, even so, the end result is a wild profusion of complexity and variety.  And beauty, of course, beauty.

A Display of Mackerel

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

.

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

.

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

. 

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

. 

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

. 

distinguished from the other

–nothing about them

of individuality.  Instead

. 

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

. 

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence.  As if,

after a lifetime arriving

. 

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

. 

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

. 

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer–would you want

. 

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost?  They’d prefer,

. 

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous.  Even now

the seem to be bolting

. 

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

. 

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

. 

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

. 

or every one is.  How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

             –From “Atlantis”, published in 1995

The title is a quotation from one section of Edward Espe Brown’s book Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings.  I’ll be talking about radishes in a bit, but first some words about the author and about the book in general.  Edward Espe Brown was the head chef at the San Francisco vegetarian restaurant Greens.  In addition, he is also the author of the Tassajara Bread Book and Tassajara Cooking.  And he has been associated for many years with the San Francisco Zen Center. 

The book, Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, is nominally a vegetarian cookbook.  But it is at least as much a guide to mindfulness as it is a cookbook.  As an example, there is a wonderful section called Eating Just One Potato Chip.  Fortunately for all of us, it has been published on the web with permission.

Another spot in the book, he describes being invited for dinner at the home of another gourmet chef.  The appetizers turn out to be a plate of radishes, with dishes of sweet butter and salt on the side.  He reports that his reaction, rather than being one of “Is this all there is?” was one of recognizing just how joyful the radishes were.   Then came the tasting.  He reports that it was in fact four separate dishes: radish solo, radish with butter, radish with salt, and radish with butter and salt.  In his “recipe”, he suggests that the most important thing is that the radishes be radiant [in my words].

Last weekend at the farmers market, I came upon some truly astounding radishes, bunches in an assortment of varieties.  I recalled the Radish Lesson, and decided that this would be a great time to try it out for myself.  I can only report that he didn’t prepare me for  just how different the four dishes are.  In particular, if you’re one of those people who find radishes too spicy, you might give radishes with butter a try.  The butter really calms down the fire of the radish.  And this is a great exercise for those of us who tend to eat quickly.  Each separate bite was so wonderful that I found myself taking a lot of time just to savor.  Now that’s a radish!