1. Rita Hennessy and I began our work together as team teachers in the fall of 1993 and whether we were co-teaching or simply working together in the Learning Community Rita had formed, we continued our collaborations until Rita retired -- was that at the end of fall term of 1999?
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Rita for countless ways she influenced my work and for our long lasting friendship.
Lately, one particular class session has been on my mind.
Rita was committed to slowing down our students, to giving them time and a place to be quiet, to gather their thoughts, to write, read, and do other kinds of projects unhurriedly and often in silence.
One day, while students were working on something, she got out a cassette player and popped in a tape of Glenn Gould playing J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. I don't remember if she played Gould's exuberant recording made in 1955 or his 1981 recording, a much more meditative and soulful version, made near the time of his death.
What I do know is that Rita's exercise introduced me to both Glenn Gould and to The Goldberg Variations.
That day moved me to rent a movie I'd never heard of entitled Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
The movie does cinematically with Glenn Gould's life what Bach did in composing the Goldberg Variations. Bach established a theme to open the piece and then he composed thirty variations upon that theme and in the 32nd segment, returns to the original theme again.
Bach composed relatively short variations and that's what the movie presents: thirty-two different short films, each titled, exploring the theme of Glenn Gould.
2. The memories of Rita and the movie came bubbling up today when SiriusXM's channel Symphony Hall played Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.
As the composition developed, I realized that I should have included it in the short list of compositions I mentioned in yesterday's post in which my sense of myself and the state of my soul reside.
The second short film in Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould introduced me to Wagner's masterpiece. In that short film, the actor playing Glenn Gould, through a voice over, tells about his (Glenn Gould's) boyhood days in the family's summer cottage on Lake Simcoe in the Canadian province of Ontario.
The film could have been entitled "Portrait of an Artist as a Young Boy". Set in the Edenic world of Lake Simcoe, with sublime Tristan and Isolde swells up as we see the lake, the mist, hear the gulls, watch a passage of Glenn Gould's mother teaching him to play the piano. This just over four minute film ends with Glenn Gould as a young adolescent seated next to a radio. Secretly his mother and father watch him as he listens to Tristan and Isolde, transfixed, almost pained by the beauty of the music. Tritan and Isolde is touching and shaping him.
I watched the short film "Lake Simcoe" on YouTube and I realized that while I don't have words for what happens when a piece of music reveals to me, through feeling, my sense of myself (my best self) and the state of my soul, I know what it's like to have a piece of music seem to stop my world, to take me at once deep into myself and outside myself, to stare into some great beyond, to have tears stream down my face, to feel as if I'm one with my love for family and friends, the beauty of the natural world, the splendor and vitality of my fondest memories, and more.
This experience happened when I heard Tristan and Isolde last night. It happened again an hour or two ago when I was thinking about this blog post and over the radio came the stirring sounds of Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations.
3. Debbie called me unexpectedly this evening and we talked for nearly an hour. Much of what we discussed is confidential, but I can report that Jack had a good first day of high school and is busy with all kinds of studies and activities. I can report that Ellie is home all this week and will spend that time with Debbie. Yesterday they made pesto! I can also report that Debbie's timeline continues to be open-ended and that we hardly discussed when she might return.
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