A change in the culture

I remember when it was normal to drive when you had had a few (or more); you may not have been falling down, but you were impaired. Due to a successful public awareness campaign, our culture around driving while impaired has changed. Yes, there are still a few die-hards (some of them friends of mine) who still indulge in this dangerous habit, but for the most part, we, as a society, view it as a bad idea, and don't do it. 

In the same way, there is an acceptance of same-sex relationships and fluid sexuality, which is something unimaginable to my teenage self. In the sheltered world I grew up in, it wasn't even talked about. Now, it is 20 years past the date of the first same-sex marriage, in the modern era, at least. (It was, naturally, practised in the ancient world long before Judeo-Christian dogma completely infested Western culture.) This cultural shift of happened so quickly as to infuriate a segment of North American society: the God-fearing "traditional" religious person. 

We are still in a period when change is inevitable, and those among us who have learned to be flexible (or at least polite) in the face of radical social change have done relatively well. It's easy to criticize those who have not, from the lofty perch of our well-intentioned and well-fed liberalism, but it has been hard on the religious person. At the same time, though, I wonder if it's wise to cater to those whose ideas and traditions (mostly the latter, for if religious people were serious thinkers, they would have questioned their beliefs and dumped them long ago) prevent them from appreciating, understanding and accepting the many fundamental changes Western society is undergoing. The train has left the station; you are no longer in Witchita, and no-one really knows where the train is heading. 

The religious person, if he is polite, seeks to persuade, cajole, influence, either through his words or his example, those who have left the path. Other religious persons seek to clamp down on, suppress and even destroy the person who is embracing a new culture. They are two sides of a strange coin, for whose business is it to change someone's mind, or to try to make them stop doing what you disapprove of?

 Just as God is changeable: from the aggressive, capricious murderous one of the Old testament to the loving, but still pretty inflexible, God of the New, so is human society. There is no constant but change (so far).

A place apart

 Heading into quasi-retirement is never as easy as you think, even when you are a person with many interests, and an atypical working life like I have had. I say atypical, but I only compare that to those who work in an office, or a job that has strict hours. My career, until 10 years ago when the Université de Montréal hired me to teach trombone and ensembles, was uncertain. I counted myself as one of the "chronically under-employed", even though there periods when I was working 7 days a week for months on end.

I don't miss those times. Even though it's nice to be popular and in demand, it's also nice to not have any demands on your time. With the advent of my 40th year as a professional musician, I am ready to slow down, all the while not having a clear idea of where to put my energies, and how much time I want to devote to a career that was enough to keep body and soul together (with lots of help from my wife, Vivian Lee, whose full-time OSM work kept the ship afloat through some lean years). 

 

I am sitting in a library, and it's quiet. I have waited months for this moment, one that I always will cherish: a time set apart to reflect, to read, to write a letter to a friend, to be alone and unencumbered. And it's available to anyone with an ID card. If you want to do this in a café, it will only cost you a cup of coffee, but it's just about as satisfying. When you are at home, there is always someone or something that can draw you away; here, you have no such demands and distractions, and I count that a blessing. 

Stage Fright

 I've basically always had stage fright, and it's not something that we musicians often discuss amongst ourselves. As a teacher, it has come up often, and I have often advised students on how to visualise, to prepare assiduously, but a thought occurred to me tonight, and it is one that I wish my teachers had shared with me. 

My recent recitals, which I do for fun (for even skilled performers, unless very well known, never really get paid for recitals), have had better results than in the past for one basic reason; I have  been far more focused on the desire to share music with my audience, to get caught up in the song, to be a conduit for the muses.

Early on in my career as a nervous performer I became aware that stage fright is a sort of egoism; an excessive concern for your desired outcome, and worse than that, your concern for being thought a failure when you go wrong. Perhaps I am being too harsh on we nervous nellies, and our failure to play with confidence arises from a natural disposition, and maybe a heightened sensitivity. I am sure that all these things are true. In addition, a creative person naturally imagines scenarios in their mind, the more dramatic the better. It may be an enigma never to be solved, but my insights about performers and their role as interpreters of other's music have taken a radical turn: I believe we are meant to be servants of music, and vessels for the divine inspiration that comes from opening oneself to the spirit of music.

There are two parts to this: One is that you must have within yourself a song that wants to come out. If you don't have that desire, then leave your instrument in the case. Janos Starker once told me: "we do this because we must do this". A few years ago, while at a pianist friend's house, I played some well-known repertoire with her, and was stunned at the music that was pouring forth, and how right and necessary it felt: I became aware that there was music in me that just had to be let out. 

The second became clearer during my time as a conducting student with Raffi Armenian, and later in my own teaching: the attempt to understand what the composer wants in phrasing, and the architecture of a piece of music: where is the high point of a phrase, what is the high point of the piece, what is the emotion that the composer wants to convey? Searching these answers out is a joy, and the performance of a piece, without having done this important work, is a waste of time. I have heard musicians with important jobs who had no conception of how a piece ought to go. Questions of taste enter here, and of course all things are subjective. But a performer needs to find the interpretation, their interpretation, and that is done by inquiry, not imposition. Beethoven says it best: the score contains everything except the music.

 

In former times, musicians wore servant's dress, and though a return to that practise would be silly, a return to the idea of serving the muse has been a welcome idea for me. And therein lies my possible solution for stage fright. If my teachers even knew how nervous I was (they probably didn't), they might have said to me: "This music is more important than your nerves, your concern for making a good showing. You are entrusted with making this music come alive; you need to be alive to its meaning, and alive to the spirit that makes music through you. There is no time for your feelings now, there will be time for them later; you are here to serve the muse; get to work!"

"Eyes Open"

 It's funny how you get a great idea, a life-changing idea, and then it just slips away into the ether. For all the talk of the complexity of the human brain, it's a pretty crappy computer. Beethoven walked around with a sketchbook so that he wouldn't let that happen to any of his musical ideas. I have done the same, from time to time: gotten out of bed to scratch out an idea that "appeared to me in a dream", but just as often I have fallen back asleep, figuring it will catch up to me later when it's more convenient. 

One such idea came to me last week, and I have endeavoured to hold on to it, to treasure it. It came to me while being massaged. I won't tell you the name of this wondrous person, because I don't want her to get too busy, and not have time for me. Here is what happened: the ministrations of my massotherapist were made in such a loving way, that they made me feel loved, and that sense of being cared for, of needs being met in a deep way, inspired me to feel, well, there is no way to truly describe that feeling, but it made me want to be a better person. After all, when one feels his needs met, one has enough to share with others. 

I am feeling a lot like that lately, ensconced in my bourgeois life, with a roof over my head...etc... I have enough, and I have time and the willingness to share my time, my concern, with other people. And I am doing it in a small way. This is not the sort of "if I give you some attention, then you will give me some in return", rather a sense of being able to give someone some of my attention without desire for reciprocity. Now, I'm not saying I'm living any kind of Saintly Life; I have my limits,  and am very quick to anger and too quick to judge, and judge harshly. But with age has come some knowledge of those limits, and a desire to be of use, and to feel more often the joy of making a difference in someone's life.

I celebrate this partly because the ability to actively encourage, listen to, and care for others is not something I am doing because of my religion; I have none. Nor am I doing it for brownie points with anyone, my Dear Reader included. Rather, it is something that has, I think, naturally unfolded with the passage of time, and the amount of ease that slowly has come my way as retirement begins. I am not religious, neither do I love atheism, because, of course, it is a religion too. Nor am I agnostic; rather, I keep my eyes open and judge for myself. This reminds me of something my dear friend Mike said to me, concerning the church in which he was raised: "I had pretty much made up my mind at the age of 10 that this was a load of B.S."

The phrase "Eyes open!" graces my twitter page. I don't remember where I heard it, maybe it was from the TV series "Kobra Kai", but these two words are rich in meaning, and as important as ever in the age in which we find ourselves. In Don Miguel Ruiz's "The Four Agreements" which I perused earlier this year, the author makes some very valid points about "living in the dream": living with a set of assumptions about the world, about other people, about our place in the world and other people's attitudes toward us. "Eyes Open" reminds me to try to see someone clearly; not as I want them to be, and maybe not even as they see themselves, (although that would be mighty helpful), but as they really are. 

Anyone who is "bored of life" might take up this practise, to try and see others, and of course yourself, as they and as you really are. To get out of the story, the dream, and into something approaching truth.

What dreams do you find yourself falling into these days? Do you feel there are moments when you think  you might be seeing yourself and others as they really are, and not through a filter of stories about them, or a religion or an ideology?

Stefan Zweig and the art of appreciation

 Reading Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday" right now, and I'm almost finished. It is part biography, although the subject reveals virtually no details of his private life, much as Chaplin did in his own biography, and partly a cultural history of Europe from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the second world war.  In this absorbing work, we gain a flavour of Austria at the time of Zweig's bildung, and a very clear look at the ideas and guiding principles of the author. 

Zweig also gives us a glance at his artistic process; how he first "puts no stops on his pen", and then, after the first draft is done, goes over it once, twice and three times to remove anything that is extraneous, anything that doesn't move the story along. I was personally comforted to hear that he was an easily distracted reader himself, and boring passages in others' works were difficult for him, and that this drove him to never want to bore his readers. Perhaps this explains why he became one of the world's best-selling authors. It also made me remember the first pages of Egdon Heath by Thomas Hardy, which I could not get past. I just wanted someone to tell me a story, not describe a gloomy landscape for interminable pages.

I say he says little of his private life, but at the same time, one gains a view of his mental processes and attitudes. His dream of a unified Europe, for example, is a key concept, as is the active appreciation of the work of others. He celebrates those by translating them, and celebrates other notable lives by writing biographies. As well, he is a poet and novelist, and in one important instance, an opera librettist. His collaborator for that project was Richard Strauss, and the window he opens on the great composer's work was new to me. The Strauss Zweig shows us is fully aware of his own shortcomings, and able to criticise his own work, even ruthlessly. As one who is sometimes creative, I know it is difficult to frankly assess one's own output.  Like Pygmalion, I sometimes fall in love with my own notes, and have been devastated when it has been cut, or otherwise messed about with by another.

I love artists who know how to appreciate the work of others. When Zweig rhapsodises about a particular poet or novelist or musician, the praise is effusive, "pressed down, shaken together, and running over". It reminded me of Gunther Schuller's great book on the Swing Era; when there is something he likes, he really lets you know it. It is an antidote to what we usually hear; devastating and withering criticism, whether in print or speech.  

I sometimes sigh inwardly when I think about the meeting of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, each of whom detested the other's work, and wished they had somehow "gotten along". But artists love what they love, and so often, work that is foreign to their aesthetic is hated on a fundamental level. It is wonderful to read one giant appreciate another sincerely. Here are Zweig's words on Hugo von Hoffmansthal:

The appearance of the young Hofmannsthal is and remains notable as one of the greatest miracles of accomplishment early in life; in world literature, except for Keats and Rimbaud, I know no other youthful example of a similar impeccability in the mastering of language, no such breadth of spiritual buoyancy, nothing more permeated with poetic substance even in the most casual lines, than in this magnificent genius, who already in his sixteenth and seventeenth year had inscribed himself in the eternal annals of the German language with unextinguishable verses and prose which today has still not been surpassed. His sudden beginning and simultaneous completion was a phenomenon that hardly occurs more than once in a generation.

 That Zweig doesn't give us the "nitty gritty" on his personal life makes me think of  Montaigne, who seems to take the exact opposite tack: “And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.” Zweig instead, puts you in the shoes of his young set growing up in the Austria of the 1880s and 90s, or invites you into the homes and salons of his famous contemporaries and friends, he lets you in on the mood of the time, the concerns of the people at large. His portrait of himself is made in the portrait of a generation.

It has been an absorbing comparison to quite another book I read last summer concerning roughly the same time period: William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". Hitler casts a long shadow over both books, and they give off an uncomfortable resonance with the period we are currently living through, where madmen and fools have hoodwinked millions of credulous people into giving in to their worst impulses.  I won't get into politics here, (of course many things desperately need changing right now), but we are in a similar period of upset, flux and uncertainty. 

Let us hope we are heading towards a brighter future.

Twitter thoughts

 "It's amazing, 10 years ago, I really didn't hate people like I do now. Never wished bad things to happen, but that has changed and it's sad." -@sinnndy1, on Twitter

 I can't help but think that we, as a society have gone terribly wrong somewhere. Look at what I do for a large part of my day: reading twitter posts and sometimes engaging with friendly and not so friendly people. Outrage is everywhere, as is the put-down, the burn, the denunciation. One part of my training as an adult was the Dale Carnegie method to become a good public speaker, and an expert in human relations. His first rule is: "Don't criticise, condemn, or complain". Fine, especially if you are selling something, or just trying to get along or get ahead in business. There are days however, and many of them lately, where my discourse is replete with just these three things.

 Nonetheless, peace-making is in my makeup; I believe all people ought to be reconciled one to the other. When there are so many who are dismissive, angry hard-liners it seems a hopeless case. But still I believe in it; and that is one indelible feature of the age: belief. Hundreds of years into the "Age of Reason", we are still believers. I will, in absence of any evidence to the contrary, continue to believe in the power of people to get along, to see in each other a common humanity and a common worth. 

There are those who believe in God, there are those who believe that the last US Presidential election "was stolen", there are even those who believe (and we are told about this every single day on the news), that the Democratic Party in the US is a child-sex and murder ring. I cherish some beliefs, like mine in our shared worth as human beings, and reject others, like the two I have just mentioned. Does that make me a better person? A Bible verse from my childhood comes to mind. (Matthew, chapter 7, 15-17)

"Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit." 

I will let the reader judge for herself the fruits of the actions of the zealots of our generation.

Daily routine

A daily routine is one thing I had never had, but one has begun to coalesce around me the last 3 years, and has intensified since covid. I enjoy having a certain order of things I want to do before the day properly starts. Even when there is some urgency to the task that I must perform, (which was decidedly the case today), I stuck to my guns, and spent the first hour and a half doing the first things I always do.

For my entire adult life until I found self-hypnosis, and meditation, I was one of those people who just sprang out of bed. Nowadays, I spend at least 20 minutes trying (in vain) to meditate, (it is futile, but I presist), then I get up, make a coffee and settle down for 3 pages of long-hand. These, I must do now, and even though I used to think such a thing was silly (hence the springing out of bed), I revel in it, I look forward to it. How often lately do I say to my wife: "I can't wait to get up in the morning!"

Once that is over with, I am ready to face the day. 

Waking up, is of course the most beautiful part of any day, whether from a nap or from a night's sleep. In that magic time, life seems mellow and sweet. Then, after a moment or two, the regrets and despair of the previous days, weeks and months settle back on you and crush your sweetness. And then you begin to put back on your personality, like a well-worn coat, and all is lost. 

Yet we persist; and the day brings much joy, much sorrow, much chagrin, much delight. 

Since I am at this point, essentially retired,  I divide my time into little segments, as to give some time to each of the pursuits that interest me. I have a feeling that this list will evolve; how could it not? We evolve over time; indeed, after 6 or so years, every single cell in our bodies has been replaced. We are no longer the same person we were 7 years ago, literally. 

These days, I try to cover these areas:

30 minutes Spanish

60 minutes classical trombone 

30 minutes tuba

30 minutes jazz trombone

30 minutes piano improv

60 minutes composing music

60 minutes writing words.

 

These keep the days full, and the idea after that is to walk about 10k, or at least 10,000 steps. This of course, has proven to be not accomplishable; I have yet to do all of them, but I am often 90%  there. What's the point of all this? My wife says it's to make her feel bad, but I'm sure I have other reasons too...

The thing I often like to do the most is just sit there and watch American politics. That kaleidoscope of crappiness will never tire me. A combination of "whew, I'm glad it's not my country" and "Wow, I'm so much better than those idiots". Talk about your shameful joy! There is a part of me who wants to feel for everyone, even the poor sick president. And there is a part of me who cries "burn baby, burn". As Walt Whitman says: "I am large, I contain multitudes".

Whitman's verse I find hard to take; he is often so clunky and stilted; sort of a like a drunken King James bible prophet who is plugged into the "kosmic soul". But he felt and observed keenly. Not a fighter, he chose to tend the wounded and dying during the civil war. Who knows what horrors he saw and felt. Stefan Zweig, whose memoir I am currently reading was a big fan, and there is no doubt that Walt Whitman fell like a thunder-clap on the world of literature. He sure has his moments. And it's useless to judge art, in a sense; art is so much bigger than you or I, and it's so personal that no-one can truly understand it, even the artist at times. 

And now, after all my callow criticism,  here I am with tears in my eyes, reading one of his elegies to Lincoln:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

                         But O heart! heart! heart!

                            O the bleeding drops of red,

                               Where on the deck my Captain lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

                         Here Captain! dear father!

                            This arm beneath your head!

                               It is some dream that on the deck,

                                 You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

                            But I with mournful tread,

                               Walk the deck my Captain lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead.