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Tunnelin’

 When I was a kid and my mother’s family still lived in the Pittsburgh area, we would obviously go to visit on occasion, which meant a lot of driving through that city. If you’ve never been to Pittsburgh, it’s a very hilly place, and when it came time to build expressways through the region, this involved the construction of tunnels, some of which are quite long indeed. There are two very well-known tunnels around Pittsburgh, one through the Fort Pitt hill and another through Squirrel Hill. The video below takes you from the Fort Pitt Tunnel all the way to the Squirrel Hill one.

We made this drive a lot when I was young. My grandmother and my uncle lived in one of the eastern suburbs, which made this stretch of road a necessary jaunt when we went downtown and back again. Later, when my sister was in college in Pittsburgh, we’d still make this drive occasionally. Those tunnels were always very exciting. We drove through the Squirrel Hill tunnel a lot more often than we did the Fort Pitt one, but that Fort Pitt Tunnel is very exciting if you’re northbound, because as soon as you emerge from the tunnel and into the light, there before you is the entire city of Pittsburgh, just across the Monongahela River. Then, if you’re on your way to Monroeville and points east, you cross the river and turn right, following the Monongahela a bit longer before the river turns away to the south. Eventually you get to the tunnel under Squirrel Hill.

Pittsburgh is an exciting town to drive through, as this video shows. I like that there are videos like this! I’ve no idea when I’ll get to Pittsburgh again, but for now, this video brings up some happy memories.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

 There’s a quote by composer Gustav Holst that strongly resonates with me:

If nobody likes your work, you have to go on just for the sake of the work. And you’re in no danger of letting the public make you repeat yourself. Every artist ought to pray that he may not be ‘a success’. If he’s a failure he stands a good chance of concentrating upon the best work of which he’s capable.

Those words come to mind as I consider the work of American Modernist composer Charles Ives. For much of his life his music was completely ignored, and thus he was able to toil on his own, following his own interests and go where his own ears took him. By the time his work began to gain some renown, Ives had produced some of the more shockingly original music of the 20th century, all by following his own guiding light. Ives lived to the age of 79, but he stopped composing almost entirely in his early 50s, for reasons that have led to much speculation. He did live long enough to see his work gain acceptance, though, as he finished out his working career not as a musician but as an insurance agent.

Ives is always an interesting listen, though he unquestioningly, unhesitatingly, and unapologetically puts unusual demands on the listener. This was very much a part of his character. He once said “I don’t write music for sissy ears,” and he responded to another audience member’s distaste for a dissonant work with a caustic rejoinder: “Stop being such a goddamned sissy! Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?”

I haven’t heard a great deal of Ives, but he is always fascinating and, indeed, moving. His work stands outside most of the traditions of his time: he is certainly not a jazzman, though he does incorporate popular songs here and there, nor is he exactly an atonalist, though he does experiment with alternate tonalities and things like quartertones.

The piece I feature here is a chamber work called Central Park in the Dark, and it’s one of Ives’s early works, written when he was just thirty-two. It starts as an atmospheric piece of tone-painting, but it becomes more and more raucous to the point of sheer cacophony, and we hear snatches of popular song and general noise. Of this piece, Ives himself wrote:

This piece purports to be a picture-in-sounds of the sounds of nature and of happenings that men would hear some thirty or so years ago (before the combustion engine and radio monopolized the earth and air), when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night….The strings represent the night sounds and silent darkness – interrupted by sounds from the Casino over the pond – of street singers coming up from the Circle singing, in spots, the tunes of those days – of some “night owls” from Healy’s whistling the latest of the Freshman March – the “occasional elevated”, a street parade, or a “break-down” in the distance – of newsboys crying “uxtries” – of pianolas having a ragtime war in the apartment house “over the garden wall”, a street car and a street band join in the chorus – a fire engine, a cab horse runs away, lands “over the fence and out”, the wayfarers shout – again the darkness is heard – an echo over the pond – and we walk home.

This is what Charles Ives was composing in 1906. By way of context, George Gershwin was only eight years old at this point, and Igor Stravinsky was still seven years away from premiering the work of his that would hit the musical world like a lightning bolt of intense Modernism, The Rite of Spring.

Here is Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives.

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Seven Four Twenty One

 As another Independence Day arrives, I find myself increasingly unable to really understand what’s happening in America. I find myself these days oddly optimistic about the future of humanity, but a good deal less so about my country.

Here’s a piece I just saw for the first time this morning. It was written last September, before the election, but you don’t have to change many words to make it relevant for this day, today, this morning.

From “A New American Manifesto”:

From the People of the United States of America: From time to time in human societies, things get so bad with the governments that we set up that we have to take a step back, stop being citizens of that government and just be basic humans again, loyal only to the primary needs of humanity. This is one of those times and it’s only fair if we are going to take such a drastic step, that we first explain why. We owe everybody that.

First of all, we start by taking for granted that nobody’s life should matter more than anyone else’s. Everyone should have the right to live their life without people oppressing them. At minimum everyone should have the right to live. Nobody should be prevented from moving around freely or doing whatever they want as long as they are not causing harm to someone else. More than that, every human has the right to seek out things that bring them joy.

These are basic things that humans need.

The whole reason we create governments is so that communities can come together and agree among themselves to set up structures that make sure that ALL the humans among them have access to these fundamental needs. If the structure that they set up stops functioning properly, if it becomes corrupted, if it stops serving the needs of the people, then it is critical that those humans be allowed to dismantle that structure in order to build one that does a better job. They need to be allowed to create new structures that are better at keeping them safe and happy.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Not unlike a similar missive, written in ink on parchment, and signed two hundred and forty-five years ago by a gathering of wealthy white men in Philadelphia. Later, some of those same men would gather to bang out some ideas for how to go about forming a more perfect union. Imperfect men, imperfectly representative of their new nation, doing incomplete work in forming a nation that somehow always feels…incomplete.

Well, that’s America, and we do still have it in ourselves to make a more perfect union. 

This is a harder and harder country to love, but hope still flickers. A little, anyway.

Flicker on, America. Flicker on….

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Something for Thursday (Friday edition)

 Maybe I should just start calling this feature “Something for Friday”…but then I’ll start screwing it up and it’ll just become “Something for Friday (Saturday edition)”, so why not stick with what’s kinda-sorta working…

…anyway, here’s a song by Taylor Swift, because I think Taylor Swift is awesome and so should you. This is a recording of one of my favorite songs of hers, and one of her first big mega-hits, though this particular version is the newer version that she re-recorded this year in her ongoing bid to reclaim control of the rights to her own music. (It’s all a mess, but apparently some other schlub owns the rights to her first bunch of albums, but as she is the singer-songwriter of the songs, she retains recording and performance rights for the songs themselves, so she’s hit on the elegant solution of simply re-recording all her old material anew.)

Here’s “Love Story (Taylor’s Version)” by Taylor Swift.

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“I’d rather die living”

 I suspect these little controversies have been erupting all over the United States over the last few months, as the COVID-19 vaccines have rolled out. My local version had a prominent member of the Buffalo Bills, a wide receiver named Cole Beasley (who is quite a good player indeed) opining quite loudly that he will not be getting vaccinated, because of, well, reasons. As his reasons are almost entirely transparently goofy anti-science BS, his entire position ended up boiling down to amorphous concepts like “Freedom!” and “Personal choice!” and “Respect my opinion!” and, in one very strange utterance, “I’d rather die living.”

I’m not going to prosecute the scientific case against the vaccinations, because in my estimation there simply is no such case and I’m not going to pretend there is just for the sake of balance. (And if you intend to use my comments section to make your own anti-vaccine arguments, don’t bother. Moderation is on and no such comments will be published, nor even read past the point it takes me to recognize the game.) I am, however, interested in this notion of “I’d rather die living”, because it represents a deeply strange way of looking at life.

I’ve heard various versions of this sentiment all throughout the pandemic, and in some contexts, even farther back than that. A particularly weird individual, an Ayn Rand-loving Objectivist, with whom I occasionally crossed swords on a particular geeky forum before I realized how far out the dude was and stopped engaging entirely. But at one point he was holding forth on the “metaphysical consequences” for not thinking logically (i.e., conceding the superiority of every one of his opinions), though he could never exactly say what those “metaphysical consequences” might be. I do recall him quoting a line from the movie Braveheart, in which our hero, on the eve of his public execution, says “Every man dies, but not every man really lives.” Seems to me the same kind of notion as Beasley’s “I’d rather die living”.

Here’s my question: I got vaccinated, just as soon as I was eligible to do so. Does this mean that I’m not “living”, in Beasley’s head?

Seriously, what does that mean?!

The idea seems to be an expression of a particularly annoying brand of American individualism. I’ve seen a lot of the past 18 months in America as yet another in a lifelong (and longer, actually) sequence of events illustrating just how spectacularly bad Americans are at thinking collectively, in terms of being a part of a community and the idea that a society has moving parts, and those moving parts are people. The very notion of doing any one thing that you might not want to do, on the basis that by doing so you will assist others, is anathema to a great number of people in this country. I mean, sure, they’ll do voluntary stuff, because that makes them feel good. They’ll donate to charities and attend the Basket Raffles to benefit some cancer victim, but suggest that we all contribute via our taxes to a nationally-administered health program that meets the healthcare needs of the people at significantly less cost per capita and ends the possibility of bankruptcy for people who get sick? Well, that is unacceptable.

We’ve seen this all over the place in the last year: You can’t tell me not to go to a packed theater! I’m an American! I have freedom!

You can’t tell me not to eat at a packed restaurant or get takeout only! I’m an American! I have freedom!

You can’t tell me not to go to a baseball game with forty thousand other people! I’m an American! I have freedom!

You can’t tell me not to wear a mask! I’m an American! I have freedom!

And now?

You can’t tell me to get a vaccine! I’m an American! I have freedom!

Just imagine that: thinking that your freedom to refuse a vaccine to beat a pandemic that has killed more than 600,000 of your fellow citizens as of this writing is somehow more important than protecting the lives of those people in the first place.

To me, this represents a pretty sick version of freedom, and it’s pretty clear to me that there are limits beyond which protecting life is a finer goal than preserving certain “freedoms” that aren’t exactly existential in nature. In fact, I believe the ways that life might be made better through collective action greatly outweigh the benefit of any abstract “freedoms”.

I don’t mind giving up my freedom to drive my car 90mph whenever I want.

I don’t mind giving up my freedom to drink a bottle of scotch and then go out driving.

And those are just the obvious examples. I don’t mind giving up my “freedom” to quit my job tomorrow, because the benefit of showing up to work and doing a good job far outweighs the exercise of my “freedom”.

And you know what? I’m still living, in every sense that matters.

By choosing to accept wearing a mask and by getting vaccinated against COVID-19, I wasn’t choosing to not live. I think I was choosing to live more than Beasley is: I’m choosing to do my part in squashing this pandemic, and hopefully bring about the ability to do the things I love all the sooner. And while doing those things, it’s not like I was sitting in some sort of ascetic withdrawal from society. We went out, we went for walks in the woods, we went on long drives, we got takeout food from favorite restaurants. We watched movies, had fires in the backyard, read books, walked dogs. We adopted two cats. We listened to music. We lived.

For Cole Beasley’s “I’d rather die living” notion to be true, then the converse would also have to be true: By choosing the mask and social distancing and vaccination, I chose not to live. Beasley thinks his existence is somehow richer than mine, simply because he’s taken the ignorant path against vaccination. And I find that notion…stupid and insulting.

You know what I’ve been doing, Cole Beasley? I’ve been living. And part of that has been helping to ensure that other people live, and that the people who need me and rely on me will still have me.

I’ve been living. And I’d rather continue living.

Because show me a person who died living, and I’ll show you a dead person.

I’ll get there soon enough, I guess. But for now, I’m not going to elevate it in some weird way.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

 Returning to the work of Black American composer William Grant Still today, and yet another work by a Black composer that makes me think, “Why have I never heard that before?” It’s a work of American Impressionism called Kaintuck, and from what I’ve read it’s intended to express Still’s own feelings and impressions of mist-covered blue grass meadows of Kentucky. It’s not a long work, but it packs a lot of thoughtful lyricism and introspection into its roughly ten minutes. We open with the solo piano playing a motif of leaping intervals, and then the orchestra comes in and meanders thoughtfully with the soloist before fading out with just the soloist again. It’s quite an evocative, wonderful work. So, why have I never heard this before?

As with most such cases, I’m afraid I have a pretty good idea what the answer is…or at least, what it partly involves.

Here’s Kaintuck by William Grant Still.

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Recent Reading!

 It’s been a while since I posted an update on books I’ve been reading, so here’s a bit of catch-up!

::  Edge of Sundown is a noir-mystery set in Chicago, by indie writer Jennifer Worrell. A writer who was once a fixture on the bestseller lists for his genre potboilers has spent the better part of a decade in the creative doldrums, until he starts writing what is a marked departure for him: a dystopian thriller in which alien beings are ridding the city streets of “undesirable” elements. But when real-world events start to mirror those in his novel, our hero starts to wonder where the boundary between fiction and reality lies…and that boundary blurs even more when the murders start.

I don’t often read this sort of thing, so I was surprised how compelling it was. There is a palpable sense of dread hanging over the story, even as the climax nears, and Worrell really creates a sense of dark place as she explores Chicago’s seedy underbelly. Highly enjoyable!

::  For my ongoing project of listening to (and writing about) the music of Jean Sibelius, I figured I should bone up on the composer’s life and times. I got a book out of the library, called Finlandia: The Story of Sibelius, by Elliott Arnold. This is an older book, published in 1941 while the composer was still very much alive (and, in fact, Sibelius himself appears to have had input into Arnold’s book). As such, the writing style is very much a throwback, and the tone of the book is one of somewhat relentless praise. If you are looking for a critical study of Sibelius and his music, you won’t find that here. But I just wanted a readable treatment of the composer’s life and times, and this is certainly that. In fact, I found the book valuable for its descriptions of the historical events in Sibelius’s homeland, Finland, a country which wasn’t even an independent nation when Sibelius was born. Sibelius was a highly nationalistic composer (even if he denied ever using actual Finnish folk material in his works), so this book gives a good sense of the events that shaped Sibelius’s attitudes and patriotic fervor.

::  Two rival sea-faring clans try to put their long feud behind them by marrying their two youngest nobles in Daughter of the Deep, a fantasy novel by Lina C. Amarego. The problem is that our heroine, Keira Branwen, is convinced that her new husband, Ronan Mathonwy, is the one who murdered her father. She is expected to push those feelings aside in the name of peace on the seas, but obviously that isn’t about to happen, and Ronan relentlessly insists on his own innocence. There’s no way that peace between the Branwens and the Mathonwys is going to be easily attained by any marriage, and so unfolds a novel full of character and conflict. I enjoyed this one immensely! Daughter of the Deep is the first volume of a duology called The Children of Lyr, and I absolutely intend to read the follow-up. Recommended!

::  For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening by Michael Steinberg and Larry Rothe is a collection of essays that ran in the magazine of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, along with that magazine’s shorter program notes for specific concerts. As such, the book can be dipped into at will, which I recommend doing. There are chapters on Erich Wolfgang Korngold and on Sergei Rachmaninov and the great Chicago impresario Theodore Thomas, along with many more. The essays are often personal reflections on the part of Steinberg and Rothe, informed by many years of love of and listening to classical music. It’s an excellent collection of recent classical music writing.

::  A sadly necessary book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the state of science today, in this time of climate change and the threats it poses to the natural world and to human civilization in general. This is not a general look at climate change, but rather an examination of a number of “case studies” in which scientists are working on very specific environmental issues, such as preserving a fish that only lives in tiny pools in caves in the Mojave Desert. In another example, Australian researchers are trying to engineer a coral that can thrive in the hotter oceans to come, hoping to somehow preserve the Great Barrier Reef. She ultimately arrives at the folks who are studying the possibilities of direct geoengineering to combat the ongoing warming of our planet, in such ways as dispersing huge quantities of reflective aeresols into the upper atmosphere, hopefully increasing the planet’s albedo in hopes of putting the brakes on continued absorption of solar heat. Who knows if that will work, but the fact that it’s being more seriously analyzed is itself an indictment of humanity’s utter failure to take any major steps to alleviate the problem. Under a White Sky isn’t an optimistic book, that’s for sure…but oddly, it’s not exactly pessimistic, either. My overwhelming feeling is that we’ll just keep not making things exactly better, but just continuing to make things different and figure out how to live with it down the road.

More reading notes to come!

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Something for Thursday

 Two selections from the vocal group VOCES8: One is “May It Be”, from the score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and the other is a setting of a piece called “Nyepi” by Icelandic musician Olafur Arnalds.

I like VOCES8 a great deal. There’s a purity to their sound that elevates just about anything.

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