1. Wednesday night, starting around 8 o'clock, the winds wanted to be heard. They whistled. They howled. Sometimes they imitated the sound of a freight train, rumbling and roaring outside our house.
At 10:00, the inevitable occurred. The house plunged into darkness and the furnace clicked off.
But, then, about an hour later, Avista restored our power.
I fell asleep and around 2:30 a.m. my cell phone alerted me to a notification, and I read an alert that our power was out again.
Our kitchen stove runs on gas, so I knew I could do whatever I wanted to on the stovetop.
I boiled water for coffee.
I put a Dutch oven almost filled with water on our most powerful burner and brought it to a boil and did the same with a smaller pot on another burner.
I created steam.
The steam helped keep the kitchen comfortable and the heat floated a little bit into the living room.
I fixed oatmeal.
I cooked a chicken vegetable soup.
2. I put on my wireless earbuds and listened for the second time to two Great Courses lectures by Robert Greenberg that I'd had trouble concentrating on the first time around.
Today I had little to distract me and I understood and appreciated these lectures on Hector Berlioz and his groundbreaking composition the Symphonie Fantastique. In fact, the lecture helped me mightily come to a fuller understanding of the differences between the Classical and Romantic periods of classical music and I loved learning that Shakespeare was very much admired by the Romantic composers and I have a pretty solid understanding of why.
The Romantic composers, by and large, were guided by expression of feelings and created form from feeling. The Classicists were guided by compositional forms out of which their expression of emotion arose.
Prof. Greenberg credits Beethoven with having put what he had to express ahead of being guided by form in such a dramatic way that it inspired the Romantic composers who came after him.
3. Cue up Led Zeppelin's "Ramble On". That's what I'm going to do now for a while. I hope you'll stick around and read where my rambling goes.
I think I'll start with Harry Chapin. After hearing him perform with a small group of musicians at the Spokane Opera House, possibly in 1977, I bought his live album, Greatest Stories Live. It included a live version of a song he released on his 1973 album, Short Stores, called "Mr. Tanner".
The title character of the song works as a launderer in Toledo, OH and while he was hanging clothes and pressing tails he sang in a stirring baritone voice and sometimes, he sang in local shows. There's more to Mr. Tanner's story as a singer, but if you don't know the song, I'm not going to spoil the rest of the story. You can listen to the song, here.
The chorus of Harry Chapin's song fits with a focus I've zeroed in on in my last few blog posts.
Mr. Tanner's is a story about a person who is not privileged. Like the mother who plays Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, and others on her piano once she's done with her housework and like the mother in the poem I've posted below who listens to Bach in the kitchen while preparing for her daughter's birthday, Mr. Tanner is not a person of high culture. Chapin's song and the two mother poems illustrate how the music they love is for everyone. It's accessible. It can move all who give themselves over to it.
For Mr. Tanner, his experience with the power of singing comes to us in the song's chorus. In response that he should give up laundering and become a singer, we learn:
But music was his life, it was not his livelihood
And it made him feel so happy, and it made him feel so good
He sang from his heart and he sang from his soul
He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole.
In the poem I've typed out below, in the midst of baking, ironing, sweeping the floor, remembering her daughter's birth, arranging flowers, finding a blue candle, and remembering people she (and others) met on the Scottish isle of Westray, and knowing she still has presents to wrap, the Bach Mass moves this mother out of her body "close to godliness". Her sense of place and time dissolves. All that divides us falls away. In her kitchen as she kneads dough, she suddenly realizes "everything's connected" and that "we are all/drops of water in this enormous breaking wave."
Playing music makes the mother with sponged curlers and safety pins and rick-rack hanging from her hem be elegant.
Mr. Tanner sings and feels whole.
Bach moves the mother in the kitchen close to godliness and to seeing the connectedness of all things.
These poems are encouraging all of us to understand that being moved by beauty, feeling whole, feeling close to godliness is a human experience that all of us can experience.
Does the source of ecstatic experience have to come from Bach or Schubert or Beethoven? Does it have to come from classical music?
No.
I admit, yes, I'm writing these blog posts encouraging anyone who reads them not to be wary or anxious about listening to classical music and, yes, I admit that I am also trying to make a case for the accessibility of most poetry, hoping you've read the poems I've posted and found them, like Harry Chapin's lyric, clear and understandable.
But back to being moved by music that is not classical.
Immediately, I think of three experiences I've had with feeling time and place dissolve, feeling what divides us fall away, and feeling everything's connected.
I've had others, but these three come immediately to mind.
I went to WOW Hall in Eugene in early 1988 to hear the Washington, DC bluegrass band, Seldom Scene. Until that night, I'd spent very little time listening to bluegrass music and was amazed that these musicians transported me the way they did. What was it? The virtuosity of the musicians? The beauty of the lonesome high tenor combined with the tight vocal harmonies? Yes. Yes.
But I thought about the Seldom Scene and other bluegrass groups on Sunday as I listened to the Spokane String Quartet. I love this same quality in orchestras, but the unity of the quartet, the way they moved themes and motifs from one instrument to another, the sense of an almost democratic ethic at work made me think how much the egalitarian quality of bluegrass music moves me. I love, whether it's a string quartet or a string band, when it's time to go around the horn, giving each instrument the spotlight.
Especially in a bluegrass band like Seldom Scene, during a breakout, each musician, each instrument has an energetic solo to play and when the band comes back together it really does give me that feeling that Elizabeth Burns (in the poem below) calls godliness. The individuals are terrific, but it's the band as a whole, playing and singing together, that moved me in ways I didn't dream I'd experience when I entered the hall that night.
In 1990, I was in the midst of a period of abstinence from alcohol that started in January of 1985. I never have ingested hallucinatory drugs, so when I went to hear the Grateful Dead in Eugene's Autzen Stadium on June 23, 1990, I was sober.
My experience with connectedness and feeling close to godliness, of feeling the division of time and place and everything else dissolve occurred in the band's second set.
They played an inspired and moving "Looks Like Rain" followed by "Crazy Fingers". I think the elation I felt hearing "Looks Like Rain" erased "Crazy Fingers" from my memory. But then the band launched into a magnificent "Playing in the Band" that raised the joy and elation in the stadium higher and higher and that elation peaked when the band played the opening bars of "Uncle John's Band".
As one commenter wrote "everyone in the stadium was jumping up and down and howling with delight thru "Uncle John's Band".
I kid you not, I felt myself seem to leave my physical body and I felt like every one of the tens of thousands of people present were my brothers and sisters and I felt a bursting of love, love for shirtless whirly dancers on the stadium floor, for the former hippies who were now attorneys and accountants dressed in crisp new tie-dyed T-shirts and left all professional pretense behind and joined in the howling, for the first aid crews out helping those who'd overdone their stimulants and needed hydration or some time in a first aid tent, and for the whole blessed scene, for these moments of feeling close to godliness.
My third experience also happened in Eugene. I was in town for Louise LeClair Jackson Harrison's celebration of life ceremony and the night before the ceremony, I wandered into the Whitaker neighborhood.
It was one of those perfect golden September evenings I'd come to love over the years in Eugene, but I hadn't experienced one since Debbie and I moved to Maryland four years earlier.
I ate a superb dinner at Izakaya Meiji Company, without alcohol, but ordered a whiskey ginger to top off my meal.
I was staying at an airbnb in the Whitaker neighborhood and started to walk back to it when out of an apartment on Van Buren I suddenly heard Richard Wright's keyboard prelude to Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" floating out of a second story window, playing loud enough that I could hear every note from across the street.
Instantly, the sound of that song transfixed me.
I steadied myself against a fence and bowed my head.
Time disappeared. So did space. Over the course of the song I was seated at Atlas Brewing in DC's Ivy City neighborhood drinking a flight of beers when "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" came on. Richard Wright's prelude turned that tasting room into a sacred place - it felt like church. On this
golden evening, I began to long for companionship. I was having a wish you were here moment, wishing Debbie and I were sharing this moment and I longed to be with the Troxstar and my friends at Billy Mac's and as David Gilmore's mournful guitar slipped into the mix, I longed to be back teaching World Lit, reading and discussing Rumi, and listening to Coleman Barks talk with Bill Moyers about the soul's many longings.
I could go on, but I'll close my rambling.
I hope you'll read the following poem. I hope you'll find it accessible and see how the world of everyday tasks like sweeping and looking for candles exists side by side, in the same moment, with hearing music that takes one out of this world, makes one feel whole.
Here's the poem:
Listening to Bach's B Minor Mass in the kitchen
Finally, I'm done the phone calls and everything else
and when I switch on the radio if feels like lying in salt water --
all I need to do is breathe. Bach will keep me afloat.
I'm mixing yeast into flour, making rolls for my daughter's
birthday breakfast in the morning, kneading and kneading
the dough then setting it to rise; arranging in the glass
the last of the tiny pink roses with a sprig of green,
finding the blue candles and ironing the tablecloth,
the one my granny embroidered, sweeping the floor,
thinking about the hot August night of the birth,
and about the people we met on Westray last week,
and the presents I still need to wrap, and Bach himself
who is like a mountain covered in wildflowers,
and the singers in Albert Hall who, the conductor says,
get close to godliness through this performance,
and I'm wondering, as all those voices fill my kitchen
with the Mass, if this is what he means: the sense
of time and place dissolving, so what divides us
from the past and elsewhere, and from each other,
falls away, and everything's connected and we are all
drops of water in this enormous breaking wave.
-- Elizabeth Burns
