My father's students

I have been getting emails full of praise for my father from his former students.  They are eloquent in their grief and in their recounting of the worlds of great literature that my father introduced them to.  They were as deeply affected by his charm and kindness as by his erudition.  It's good to know that he transmitted his excitement and enthusiasm for knowledge to so many people.  We all have a wider influence than we know upon the lives of others. 

As a teacher myself, I am acutely aware of the responsibility I have to nurture the gifts of my students and to mentor them.  I have viewed their successes with satisfaction, knowing the important role I played in their development as artists.  I remember my father's pride at being the advisor to such writers as Anne Beattie and Elaine Scarry.  He must have felt a pang of envy at times, because the one thing he was unable to accomplish was writing a book.  I believe that he was paralyzed by the inability to write a first draft--he was a perfectionist and wanted his work to spring fully formed from his mind like Athena from the head of Zeus.

After writing my first book, I realized that I had accomplished what my father failed to do.
Somehow, I overcame my fear of failure and worked doggedly at draft after draft, occasionally reluctant to include the suggestions of my editor.  I spent every spare moment of 2011 writing.  Whenever I am tempted by the idea of writing a second book on improvisation, I remind myself that the amount of work required would take me the better part of a year to complete.  Though maybe the second book is easier, like giving birth to the second baby.  Sometimes I want to quit performing entirely and devote myself to composition and writing about music.

Dad's work required a certain type of performance--some teachers (and I am not one of them) take the stage as they address their classes.  They challenge, bait, provoke, pontificate.  They are very much like the conductor of an orchestra.  These are the born teachers.  My father was one.  I am not.  I had teaching thrust upon me with no formal training in it.  I had no advanced degrees.  Fortunately, I had a long performing career by the time I applied to Berklee, which trumped my lack of formal academic credentials.

An impatient person by nature, I had to cultivate patience for years.  It is my firm belief that no teaching can be effective without patience.  And so I am loath to give up on any student, even one who does not practice and skips class.  I have seen many students respond to my approach.  The courses I teach are generally not inspirational--I have more success with teaching lessons one on one.  My manner is not flamboyant, but I convey my love of music to each student.

I wonder if the ability to teach is inborn.  Not everyone is a good teacher.  I think I inherited some of my father's teaching genius, but I am not in his league.  To this day, students from 30 years ago and more remember him and mourn his loss.  This is a major achievement.  He never boasted about it, and I suspect he did not value it.  He once told me he felt fraudulent because he never wrote "the book" and because he got his PhD from Columbia without taking his oral exam (he did write a thesis, which I have been unable to find among his papers.)  He was so nervous that he developed severe stomach trouble (ulcers?) and since he was so highly regarded by  his professors he was excused from orals.  But this hardly constitutes fraud.  After all, it was they who made the decision.
He had to live in the shadow of Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun, his teachers.  Even so, he was universally regarded as brilliant and as a star teacher.  But like Leonard Bernstein, who did not value his greatest achievement, West Side Story, because it isn't "serious" music (and he wanted to be another Mahler) my father never realized that being a great teacher is just as great an achievement as writing a book.

My piano teacher, Charlie Banacos, was a brilliant jazz player and prodigy who gave up performing while still young and devoted his life entirely to teaching.  He never wrote a book, but his many students became his disciples and used his teaching methods, keeping the tradition alive.  He said he didn't have to "prove" anything to anyone, and refused every plea to perform in a concert or at a club.  Charlie was a genius and he probably knew it, though he never acted conceited and certainly never boasted about his teaching.
I wish Dad had been more like Charlie--proud of his status as a great teacher.

I hope Dad didn't feel like a fraud when he died.  The nature of his final decline was such that I was unable to discuss serious matters with him.  I told him many times that not only wasn't he a fraud,  he was an exceptional teacher whose students will never forget him.

Ophelia?

In a moment of short-sightedness, I gave away my set of Shakespeare's plays.  I don't know what kind of madness or idiocy possessed me to do it.  If there is anything a literate person ought to own, it is a complete set of Shakespeare.  It's probable that there is more than one edition somewhere in the plethora of books in Dad's study, so I will bring them home with me after my next trip to the house.  The plan was to go to the house in Connecticut this Sunday and Monday, but a super-collider perfect storm of historical proportions is said to be bearing down on the entire Eastern seaboard.  Sandy, as she is called, is currently a hurricane moving north after destroying parts of Cuba and Florida.  She may be downgraded (we can only hope) to tropical storm status by the time she reaches New England.  The prospect of yet another tree limb falling on my father's car or roof is not one I care to contemplate.  My first and automatic reaction to the weather news was, What about Dad? Do I need to go and get him if the power goes out, as it always does in Mansfield/Storrs during a hurricane?  But then I remembered that Dad was no more, and instead of feeling relief, I felt pain at the loss of him.

To return to Shakespeare:  After my father's death I found myself trying to remember Ophelia's speech upon discovering that her father had been slain.  I could only remember the last few words, so I am about to look it up on Google.

He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
At his heels a stone.
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 29-32)

White his shroud as the mountain snow.
Larded with sweet flowers;
which bewept to the grave did go
which true-love showers.
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 37-39)

They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
And on his grave rains many a tear,-
Fare you well, my dove!
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 164-166)

And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead,
Go to thy death-bed,
He never will come again.

His beard as white as snow,
All flaxen with his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha’ mercy on his soul!
(Act IV Sc. V, Lines 23-26)

As it turns out, it is not a speech, but a series of songs that the grief-maddened Ophelia sings.  Some of them are (strangely) bawdy, describing a maid who loses her virginity.  (This may be a reference to Hamlet's rejection of her love.)

But most of the songs she sings refer to the death of her father, the foolish old man Polonius,  the object of Hamlet's contempt, but whom he never intends to kill.  Believing that his uncle was concealed as he was listening behind a curtain,  Hamlet runs his sword into the interloper, only to find out that it is Polonius he has killed.

I am not going mad with grief,  but I am not in my right mind.  At times I wish I didn't have to go on living.  Teaching has become an almost impossible task, and practicing is sporadic at best.  I have the feeling that I might blow away in the breeze, similar to Holden Caulfield's fear that he would step off the curb to cross the street and disappear.  My therapist, whom I saw this morning, assured me that there is no pathology in my behavior.  It's simply normal grief.  My anxieties are not likely to convert to mania, as I have been fearing. 

My father's image (as he used to look, fortunately) repeatedly springs to mind, as does his voice, speaking remembered phrases such as, 

I am working on my Magnum Opus, which, sadly, was never completed.  He was a thinker, a talker, and a gifted teacher, but he was not a writer.  At least, not a writer of books.  He wrote extensive notes in the margins of books, on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper, and in blue examination books--I found a foot-high stack of them under his desk, and more still thrust between books on the shelves.  I collected all of these notes in case someone wanted to put them all together in a volume called The Literary and Philosophical Genius of Jack Davis, or something of the sort.  Jerry Shaffer would be the obvious choice to put together the observations and ruminations of my father.  But he took one look at the rapidly mounting stack of my father's papers and demurred.  Still, they must be saved for posterity.  The task of editing and publishing them will not fall to me, as I have my own writing to nurture.

"The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, the first sentence of Anna Karenina, and the first paragraphs of À la recherche du temps perdu are among the greatest in literary history." They are as follows: 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

For a long time, I went to bed early.

My father loved to read aloud--he was a frustrated actor and would use different voices and accents, especially when reading Dickens, as he did to my brother and me as children, and to my mother, to whom he also read the complete works of Proust, Trollope, and Colette. When I was about ten years old he began to read Jane Austen, George Eliot, and other classics such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Way of All Flesh, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Vanity Fair, and Madame Bovary in translation (I read it in French years later in college as a French major.)  He also read aloud the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Shakespeare (sonnets and plays) Auden, Yeats, e e cummings, T.S. Eliot, and Emily Dickinson.  All of these readings were accompanied by explanations of the text, which more often than not contained concepts foreign and difficult to a child, as well as vocabulary words not found on my fifth-grade spelling tests.

Dad also insisted that I learn Latin, starting me out at twelve with Latin grammar, followed by Latin class in junior high right up to my junior year in high school, by which time I had read Cicero, Ovid, Catullus, and Virgil's Aeneid.  He also supervised my study of French and Italian, the latter language prior to our family trip to Italy in 1967.  You could say, as my brother observed at the memorial last week, that we were both home schooled.  It's true that certain subjects such as math, science, and social studies were neglected in favor of art, music, literature, foreign languages, and some history.  At the time (especially during my teen years) I was less than thrilled and grateful for this intensive education, but as an adult I realize how unusual and valuable it was.

Thank you, Dad. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Requiem for my father: Jack M. Davis, 1924-2012

Last Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, at the age of 88, my father expired after a brief illness.

I use the word "expired" because I hate the expressions "passed away" or "passed on," and I cannot bring myself to say "died."  I don't know what it is about that four-letter word that sounds so rude and abrupt.  "Expired," however, cannot be used in everyday conversation without the speaker sounding hopelessly pretentious.

I sat beside my father's sickbed for five days as the life gradually withdrew from his poor wasted body, fragile and small like a baby bird.  Stage four lung cancer ravages the body.  Only two weeks before, he had been walking around, thin, gray, but communicative and alert.  Then, two weeks ago, he couldn't breathe one morning and called 911.  He was kept in the hospital for a couple of days after they drained the fluid from his lung.  Then he was released to come home to hospice care and a 24/7 nurse's aide whose job it was to turn him, deal with his incontinence, feed him, and administer morphine, sedatives, and oxygen.  Thanks to this care, he was comfortable, not in pain or suffering from fear and anxiety.

Dad's doctor, who is also head of the hospice in his area, assured me that he would suffer no pain.  She advocated for him to be released to hospice instead of a nursing home, for which we were all grateful.  A hospital bed was moved into the front room, a cheerful, sunny room with a picture window framing the bright autumn leaves on the trees outside.
He lay there surrounded by his books and music, in his sanctuary, as his visiting nurse put it, where he felt safe and comforted by the familiar.

Once I became used to Dad's dramatically changed appearance, I was able to read to him and listen to music with him.  I also spoke to him with the assumption that he heard and understood.  I was determined that there would be no further assaults on his dignity--having to rely on Depends was bad enough--and as long as he was still alive I was going to speak to him as if he was a human being.  I read Wordsworth and Blake to him, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, one of the first poems he read to me as a child.  Not only did he read it (he always said that poetry was meant to be read aloud) but he also explained why the language was so great.  I read Jabberwocky and the chapter in Alice in which Humpty Dumpty declares that words mean what he wants them to mean, and goes on to define the silly words in Jabberwocky with even more ridiculous definitions.  Dad loved this chapter.  He also loved Pride and Prejudice and Emma (the latter, he said, was Jane Austen's greatest work, containing the deepest moral profundity, but I could never choose between P & P and Emma.)  He read all of Jane Austen to me and all of Dickens.  And lying in a morphine-induced haze, he was still able to move his lips along with poems by Delmore Schwartz as my brother recited them.

I read the first chapter of P &P to him, then closed the book. "The Bingleys move in next door," I heard him mumble.  This, in fact, is the next occurrence in the book.  When his friend Jerry came to visit one day and asked, Jack, do you know who I am? he answered, "An eminent philosopher."  Close enough.  At another time, he had a hallucination of "a woman's leg coming out of Jerry's mouth."

I had wanted to read Proust to him in French and English, but there wasn't time.
Company tired him out quickly.  I had the sense that he was waiting for his son to arrive, and sure enough, he was much more aware after Joe arrived.  He asked for ice cream twice and fed it to himself.  I have no doubt that he knew who we both were.

Yesterday (Sat.) and today (Sun.) my father appeared energized.  I believe that it was the anticipation of seeing my brother Joe that caused my father to gather his faltering life energy and begin to talk and eat again.  He even fed himself.  He talked to his visiting friends.

Today he was not as talkative and was confused at times, asking me if he was in his own bed, saying he wanted to go home, hallucinating ("There is a woman's limb coming out of Jerry's mouth") and attempting to get out of bed.  He said he was "going upstairs" to find a poetry book.  We searched in vain for a book of poems by Thomas Moore because he wanted to hear me read a certain poem.  I ended up reading him some other poems, asking if he remembered reading them to me when I was very young.  He seemed pleased by my reading of "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  We also listened to Tristan und Isolde.  I'm not sure how much of his mind is still operating.  I suspect that it comes and goes like the sun appearing and then disappearing behind the clouds, as it was doing all day today.

Amazingly, he is still sharp as a tack at identifying poets.  Joe was testing him by reading poems at random from the Norton Anthology.  He got it right every time.  His love and vast knowledge of poetry still shines through the increasing fogginess of his other mental capacities.

I am going to stay another day and will revisit him tomorrow.  I am afraid to leave lest he die after I go.  Joe will stay with him indefinitely, which may keep him going for a while.
Meanwhile, my aunt Joan has a fever of 102 and won't go to the hospital.  Uncle Buddy is also unwell and I worry that no one is caring for them.  They are in Florida and I can't intervene.

Getting old, ill, and dying are inevitable and part of life, but I can't get used to it.
The one exception to the law of the excluded middle in logic is that we are all simultaneously living and dying.  My father is still living, although he is also dying.  Even people on the brink of sixty like myself and my brother are heading slowly toward death, though no one would describe us as dying.  It's not meant to be understood.  It just is.

It's October and the year is slowly dying.  So is my father, the victim of lung cancer at 88 after a lifetime of smoking. He is at home, visited by hospice nurses, with a 24/7 home health care aide named Ted who is from Poland and has a nearly unintelligible accent.  He seems to be a nice enough fellow.

The day began with a sun shower, with light raindrops like tears falling from a blue sky with absurdly puffy white clouds.  Orange and yellow leaves were falling everywhere.
The rain stopped, and the weather became extremely cold.  Curtiss and I arrived at Dad's house a little before 4 pm.

The sofa had been moved to the opposite side of the room and in its place was a hospital bed in which my father lay like a fragile broken doll.  He had shrunk to half the size he'd been only two weeks ago.  Lying on his back, he had a tube running from his nose to an oxygen tank which quietly whooshed, the only sound in a dark and silent room.  His eyes were barely open, closing to narrow slits.  His breath was labored when we arrived, but became quieter and more even.  His upper dentures had been removed, and in combination with the morphine and tranquilizers he was getting made it impossible for him to speak.  He was able to nod or shake his head in response to yes or no questions.  He tried to embrace me once and seemed glad that I was there (though unsmiling)  At times he seemed to be making an attempt to smile, as when Jerry told a "philosopher's joke."


Curtiss put some Bach on the stereo, Gould playing the WTC, and later some Haydn.  I wanted Dad to hear some of the music he loved.  Music also alleviated the unbearable silence of the room.  I tried to speak normally to Dad but found myself referring to him in the third person and apologizing--when someone is semi-conscious, you naturally fall into talking about him rather than to him.  I was sad for Jerry, his faithful friend who discussed philosophy with Dad every evening, and who now sat in quiet grief in a chair across the room, as if he couldn't bear to sit close to his dying friend.  I was sad for Joe Cary and later for Bill Moynihan, who were both trying unsuccessfully to hide their grief.

There was an odd smell, not pleasant, probably an antiseptic.  The smell of dying.  I still have it in my nostrils and clinging to my clothes.  It's hard to bear this odor--it's not overpowering, and I can't identify it, but I know that it will linger in that room after my father is gone, and it will pierce my heart with relentless persistence.

Tasha is devastated.  We embraced when I went to the store.  This young woman has a close friendship with my father and is finding his illness unbearable.  She's not sure she will be able to sleep in the house after he is gone, but mournfully observes that she has nowhere else to go.  We have appointed Tasha the steward of Dad's house--we are grateful for the loving care she provided until hospice took over.  She is an exceptional young woman and I am glad to be able to provide her with a rent-free place to live.

Aunt Joan is supporting me over the phone and saying that I am the "greatest" for handling everything.  I have power of attorney, and I often wish that my father had not bestowed it upon me because of the sheer amount of onerous responsibility it entails.
I have been hearing Joan's voice in my head all day telling me what to do next--it's almost like telepathy.  On the phone, she advises me to go outside and take a walk, get some fresh air.  She apologizes for not being there with me--it's only because her doctor has said that she is not allowed to fly.  She is not one to show her pain to others--I know she needs to talk to me, which is how she grieves.  We have always understood one another without having to say a word: two Aquarian women, very alike in many ways, as an aunt is like her niece, even physically, but very unlike in others--still, we know each others' minds and always have.

Curtiss has been crying from time to time and is ashamed; I told him that crying is appropriate and he should cry all he needs to without worrying about incurring my displeasure (I am a no-crying-in-baseball person, unfortunately, and I tend to regard tears as a sign of weakness even though they are not.) I cannot normally cry in the presence of others, but today a tear slipped down my nose as I held my father's pinched hand, blue from broken veins where many IVs had been inserted.

When I went outdoors for a walk around the grounds,  I sought out a tree that I used to climb as a child.  It still stands with its huge branches like arms extended, alongside the moss-covered ancient stone wall.  I climbed onto the wall, put my arms around the branches, and allowed some tears to fall where there was no one to see but the birds and the neighbor's barking dog.

It seems very cruel of Nature to produce such a beautiful fall day with its slanting late afternoon sunlight, just as though my father were not on his deathbed.  It seems strange that life around me continues as usual, unaware that another old man is about to leave this world.  There are, after all, thousands of old men the world over dying at this very moment.  There are thousands of daughters going through the agony I am now experiencing.  The experience of dying and of being a survivor is universal, and of course this thought provides no comfort.  No thoughts are providing comfort.  Deathbed scenes from literature keep flashing into my mind: little Nell from Old Curiosity Shop, Barkis ("Barkis is willin'") from David Copperfield, little Paul from Dombey and Son (Dickens was a master of the deathbed scene) and of course Beth from Little Women.  Deathbed scenes in books are, as it turns out, quite unreal.  There are no heroics, no inspiring last words.  Only the gasps of a soul struggling to keep a failing body alive.

I believe that my father is trying to stay alive until after my brother Joe arrives tomorrow.
I have heard it said many times that a dying person will wait until all the grieving survivors leave his bedside, and then let go with relief, as though dying can only be safely accomplished when one is alone.  Crying alone, dying alone: connected, perhaps.

It would be lovely to be cared for right now.  To be getting a massage, somewhere far away from my father's sickbed, to be annointed with fragrant oil, to be wrapped in sweet-smelling warm blankets, to be served tea and scones on a silver tray.  Lovely to be in bed with my cat lying next to me, silently faithful like a dog.  I must allow people to care for me, but I am not good at allowing this.  I am not good at allowing anything.  I want to control, take charge of everything, even death.  I want to command the angel of death to leave my father's house until my brother has said farewell.  But there is nothing like death to remind us how powerless we really are.

Postscript

Oddly, today is Bloomsday (June 16) Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were married intentionally on this date in 1956 to pay tribute to Joyce.  I didn't know this until just now reading about Ted Hughes in Wikipedia.

Sylvia had it right even before Betty Friedan

The victim of an unrelenting summer cold, I sit propped on pillows in bed re-reading The Bell Jar. I am too exhausted to practice the piano (my scolding brain chastises me with, if Chopin could compose and play with tuberculosis, then you should be able to also) Before picking up my ancient paperback copy of The Bell Jar I had made a brief stab at reading the poems of Philip Larkin and a formidable book by George Perle called Serial Composition and Atonality. I realized that I just could not focus on anything difficult. Curtiss and I had been having a conversation and suddenly the idea of revisiting the original Girl, Interrupted came to me. My copy of BJ had come from the Newton recycling center's book swap shed--it looks as though it had survived a fire, the covers are motheaten, and someone's pink highlighter and red pen have invaded the text here and there.

This autobiographical novel, written in the Mad Men era before Plath took her own life in 1963, is even darker than Mad Men (and that's difficult to achieve)  It contains some beautiful descriptive writing indicative of the great poet she was.  It is unmistakably the product of a depressed mind, a lost soul, a self-aware and self-conscious genius who had the misfortune to be born a woman in an era when women were taken even less seriously than we are today.  Her insights on the "private, totalitarian state" of marriage do not refer solely to her own dismal marriage to Ted Hughes in 1957.

I have not yet reached the famous shock therapy part of the novel.  When I first read the book in college,  this resonated with me because I had my own "schizo-affective" breakdown at age 18 resulting in a brief hospitalization.  Although I was never given electroconvulsive therapy, there were patients on the ward who had been.  They were like zombies, drifting around in a fog of lost memory, and I dreaded that I might be the next to join them.  I did undergo an electroencephalogram (EEG) which all entering patients had to take.  I will never forget the science-fiction creepiness of a dozen electrodes clipped to various parts of my scalp.  It was never explained to me what this procedure was for.  I could have written my own book about my experiences in Thompkins One Ward at Yale-New Haven Hospital in the summer of 1971, and indeed I chronicled this experience in my journals which have since disappeared.  I have never been able to rid myself of the fear that someday this episode will be used against me, and I have no doubt that it exists to this day in some dossier or dossiers held by some sinister government agency.

But I digress.

In 1963, the same year as Sylvia's suicide, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was published, widely regarded as the seminal tome of the women's liberation movement.
"The problem that has no name" was soon to have a name: sexism, or its vaguely synonymous "male chauvinism." The following are quotes from Plath and Friedan:

I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband...it would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.  This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's...   Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

...I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers
so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines...By noon I'm ready for a padded cell.  Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

It should be noted that Friedan is quoting a woman with a PhD in anthropology who became "a Nebraska housewife with three children."  And that Sylvia Plath, the girl with fifteen years of straight A's, became one of our greatest poets but ended up a housewife married to another lesser poet.  And then ended up with her head in a gas oven, finally a successful suicide after two failed attempts.

For some reason, the name on her tombstone reads "Sylvia Plath Hughes" and is subject to constant attempts by feminists to scrape off the "Hughes." Ted Hughes presumably made the decision to append his own name to hers, as though her being his wife was more important than her status as a poet.  This is why I kept my maiden (father's!) name when I married my ex-husband.  Women don't own their own names.  Still.

It has become fashionable to demean the work of Sylvia Plath, but reading her poetry proves that she deserves her laurels.  Perhaps nothing could have dissuaded her from taking her life, even though I like to think that if she had not been in the gilded cage of mid-century middle-class womanhood, she might eventually have gained the desire to live.  I myself have contemplated that dark place and stood upon the edge of the abyss.  
Yet even though the world remains hostile or indifferent to women of genius, I will not go to that place again.  I made the decision to live for art's sake and for the sake of those I love.

What is music? what does it contain?

Human beings are the only animals who compose and perform music (an animal such as an ape which has been trained to "perform" is merely mimicking and responding to training.) Only a human being can imbue music with meaning in its performance and in the experience of listening to it. Birdsong is musical in the sense of having ordered pitches but it is not music. When we hear a great piece of music, it makes us feel an emotion or emotions the catalyst of which is already inherent in the music itself. This process is independent of any lyrics the music may have. I have chosen some examples of my favorite music to illustrate this point. There are those who insist that the experience of listening to and feeling music is entirely subjective; a piece that thrills one listener may leave another indifferent. This may be true, but just because a person is unmoved by a piece of music does not mean that the emotional catalysts are not there.

 KEYS
I seem to have a preference for the key of G minor. Mozart is said to have preferred either G major or G minor to other keys. This may or may not be related to absolute pitch, which unfortunately is the only thing shared by Mozart and myself. Keys remain an utter mystery after playing and studying piano my entire life. As a composer, I am aware that the same music sounds different when played in different keys.  

Classical  The Bach Keyboard Concerto in Fm contains all of human emotion in its three movements. This is true whether it is played on the harpsichord or the piano. The piano, being an infinitely more expressive instrument than the harpsichord, delineates these emotions profoundly. The hands, heart, and mind of Glenn Gould makes this all the more profound, together with a great orchestra and conductor. While most music can be moving even when played by performers who are less than virtuosi, any music is more powerful when played by a genius. Bach Goldberg Variations #25 and #21 (both in G minor) are quite different in tone from the other variations. Emotional intensity is created by intense chromaticism. #25 also foreshadows stylistically in its harmonies* the classical and romantic periods in Western music: if one listens carefully as one plays it, Wagner's unresolved half diminished appears followed by a Mozartian phrase.

 *created by the contrapuntal lines

 Chopin G minor Ballade
 [Note: I continue to struggle with this piece: my technique is barely adequate to execute it, even though I have the soul to express it!] From the age of 5 I grew up hearing this piece played by Artur Rubinstein. I came to love all of the Ballades, which are magnificent works and arguably Chopin's crowning achievement. For reasons I cannot explain, the theme of the G minor is one of the most beautiful I have ever heard. And the way it morphs into passionate cascades of sound is thrilling.

Mozart Symphony #40 in G minor    
Mozart Piano Concerto in D minor
Two other early favorites.

 Beethoven Pathetique Sonata (C minor) I played this in college when studying piano with Phyllis Moss.

Beethoven Symphony #9
 Bach The Art of the Fugue both keyboard version (Glenn Gould, organ, and Charles Rosen, piano) and orchestra version  

Jazz examples (after all, I am a jazz pianist) John Coltrane: Moment's Notice, I'm Old Fashioned, Giant Steps Miles Davis: My Funny Valentine, Someday My Prince Will Come, So What, Seven Steps to Heaven Bill Evans Trio: You Must Believe in Spring, B minor Waltz

Even atonal and microtonal music has the potential to move us (listen to Glenn Gould playing Schoenberg) Music with lyrics is specifically intended to move us. Sometimes, as in Bob Dylan's work, the lyrics stand alone as poetry, but they are given added power and dimension by the music. Lyrics are understood by a different part of the brain. The intellectual and the emotional are continually mixed in any music, with lyrics or not.  

Music is the sound that numbers make. The inherent mathematical structure of music can deceive us into regarding it as a product of the intellect alone. Some composers do indeed write music "by the numbers." But most of us compose music more intuitively. Part of the beauty and power of music is its symmetrical and mathematical underlying structure: there are 3 different diminished seventh chords, each with 4 inversions, to total 12 keys, and two whole tone scales (6 + 6) But music is so much more than its structure alone. (To be continued)

Remembering Lou Colombo

I have not written a post in some time, but there has been a tragedy. Lou Colombo was killed in a car accident. As I write these words, I still can't wrap my brain around it. I have been thinking about it all day and I keep waiting to wake up from the nightmare.

I can't say that I knew him well, but I knew him well enough to love him. Everyone did. He was in his eighties, still playing trumpet like a master. I only played one gig with him, a memorable one because I had broken my shoulder right before driving to the Cape for the gig, and trouper that I am, I played a three hour gig with him at a private function--just the two of us--playing bass lines on the keyboard with my uninjured left arm while Lou worked the room, intermittently playing and chatting.

Lou never hired me again, but not because I didn't do a great job. It's just that I was not on his radar screen: after all, he was friends with Tony Bennett and a host of other jazz celebrities. And there are several good local Cape pianists who were in his band at the Road House, his son David's restaurant on Main St. in Hyannis. Lou was king of the stage at the Road House, a larger-than-life personality, expansive, controlling (not to say bossy)but above all charming, funny, gregarious.

Lou's daughter Lori and I are close friends. I met her at the Oyster Company, a restaurant in Dennis where I played with Bart Weisman for a few years during the season. I had been told about her ahead of time, but had never seen a photo of her and thus had no idea what she looked like. When a strikingly beautiful dark-haired woman wearing a broad-brimmed hat came through the door, I had a strange psychic feeling that I had to meet her. On my break, Bart introduced me to Lori Colombo, who had just moved back to her hometown to try to make it as a jazz vocalist after spending many years in Ohai, California working as a Reiki and massage therapist.

Well, Lori turned out to be a kindred spirit. We soon found out that besides being fellow Aquarians (I have an uncanny ability to detect them) we shared a lot of common interests and viewpoints. We ended up playing many gigs together. She and Fay Whittaker are the two best singers I have ever worked with. Lori has great time, pitch, feeling, and creativity in choosing repertoire. In addition to music, we spent many hours talking about Reiki (because of her, I took Reiki 1 and will take Reiki 2 this year) and other natural healing methods. She gave Curtiss and me a Reiki treatment on the table she kept at her parents' house.

Through Lori, I came to know about Lou Colombo--his amazing career, the musicians he played with, how her mother devoted her life to him. Sometimes Lori and Lou locked horns--both were passionate and strong-willed. Lori began by performing with her father's band, but soon made the artistic decision to go on her own.

I spent some happy hours around the kitchen table talking to Noel Colombo, Lou's wife, and occasionally Lou would come in to joke and chat after mowing the lawn or doing some heavy yard work. He had the vitality and physical strength of a much younger man. The trumpet is a very difficult instrument to play--I can barely blow a note on it using all my strength--so it was extraordinary to see this man in his eighties playing as vigorously as ever.

Lou insisted on driving despite the protests of his children. At this point, I don't know the details of the accident--all I know is what Lori told me today, that the police came to her door in the middle of the night to inform her that her father had been killed in an accident. He was pulling out of a parking lot after a gig and a car hit his car. I can't help but think that it must have been a speeding car--how else could a fatal accident be caused? Lou Colombo might have lived for another 10 years--he was in excellent health, which makes this tragedy doubly cruel.

Unfortunately, I learned of Lou's death when I looked at my Facebook page this morning. Bart Weisman had thoughtlessly posted a photo of Lou saying he would be missed. (I wonder how he knew so quickly? Lori was the first to be told, in the middle of the night.) Thoughtless and presumptuous because, as Lori said, she has family members who are on Facebook all the time, and what a terrible way to learn of Lou's death. I wept along with Lori on the phone, and I wanted to drop my plans for the day and drive straightaway to the Cape to be with her, but she convinced me not to because her family was gathering to get a flight to Florida as soon as possible.

I considered calling her again this evening, but decided not to intrude on her grief when she was with her family. I was unable to stop thinking about Lou and Lori all day. I lost my appetite and finally had to drink a glass of wine in an attempt to stop the pain. The shock is terrible, and I can only imagine the grief and shock that Noel is going through--she is not in good health and it will be very hard for her to endure. I am praying to the protective spirits who watch over us to sustain the Colombo family in the wake of this tragedy.