the prequel:  Traitor Joe’s

from SLO New Times

It may be of interest to readers who shop at Trader Joe’s that the company has agreed to shift all its seafood purchases to sustainable sources by December 12, 2012. This decision came after a campaign called “Traitor Joe’s,” mounted by Greenpeace, pressured the company to abide by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “red list” of species to avoid.

Trader Joe’s had refused to do that and didn’t reply to e-mails from customers back in February, but I just discovered an update on their website stating the intention to “address customer concerns including the issues of over fishing, destructive catch or production methods, and the importance of marine reserves.” Hooray for Greenpeace, for Trader Joe’s, and for its customers.

I˜m ready to move on to another late quartet.  On the drive to pick up Ian from school in A.G. I listen to Opus 132, quartet #15.  The third movement Adagio is unlike anything I’ve ever heard. The exaggeratedly slow opening tempo that slows even further, the notes’ uniformity of length, and the alien sequence of low pitches add up to what seems like several minutes of formless, unconnected sounds.  They’re followed by a wild flurry of ecstatic dance music, then a slightly more active modification of the slow section, then another exultant interlude, and a finally a complicated set of variations of the opening that combine both slow and fast sections. Beethoven called this “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesen an die Gottheit,” A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Gratitude to the Divine.

My reading reveals that though I’d never heard of it, this piece is one of Beethoven’s greatest hits. Produced while he was suffering from a combination of painful abdominal ailments from which he feared he wouldn’t recover, he wrote to his doctor afterwards that the notes helped to cure him.  I listen to an online lecture by musicologist and composer Jeffrey Kapilow to an audience at the Stanford Medical School that provides a lucid and enthusiastic explication of the piece’s unique structure and style.  I can follow the lecture the third time around with the score in front of me, except for the part about the last little section. Sitting in front of the shrine in my study that contains my parents’ cremated remains, I imagine the opening preludes and chorales as two alternating voices: one invoking the dead the other their replies.

audio [opens in new window]

You who came before us now speak
Here still at rest we stay and watch

Comforting, you offer witness
Life no longer can disturb us

Lying, sitting standing you gaze
And our repose remains complete

Held in effortless suspension
At last we know our final state

May you grant us understanding
All we can pass to you is love.

Slideshow

This is a win for San Luis Obispo. Jan will serve effectively and humanely. She has the talent, the experience and the dedication to do an excellent job as mayor, leading and representing the City”which according to last month’s newspapers is both the most desirable place to live in America and is about to fall off a cliff. Either way, it will benefit from her leadership.

It’s a win for her, because it provides the opportunity to fulfill not an ambition, but an ongoing mission of public service and leadership. When I first met her 44 years ago as a junior at Stanford, she organized a campaign to get women equal rights with men to live off campus at much cheaper rents than those in the dormitory. This involved facing down the President of the University who wasn’t eager to lose the revenue provided by the policy of protecting female purity.

When we lived in the wilds of British Columbia during the 1970’s, she helped found a satellite campus of a community college and became its first director. When we moved back to California, she got a job as Director of Graduate Student Housing at Stanford and devised a network of neighborhood coordinators”now called Community Associates–which still remains vital.
While attending Law School, she organized the mature returning students and then took a part-time job as a law clerk involving the preparation of a landmark Supreme Court case assuring equal opportunity for women in the workplace.

When we moved to San Luis Obispo 22 years ago, she immediately embarked on a course of public service that led to appointment to the County Parks and City Planning Commissions and to her election to City Council in 1998 and again 2008. All of her political and humanitarian work in this place has been volunteer or for minimal pay, for she’s been able to make her living as an attorney.

The mayor’s job will allow her to use and expand abilities cultivated over a lifetime.

It’s a win for me, not only for the reflected glory”imagine the pleasure I’ve taken in knocking on thousands of doors and telling whoever opens them about the virtues of the woman I love, and in posting hundreds of signs of tribute to her all over town. But also imagine what it would be like to live with someone this energetic and smart whose time was not occupied being in charge of a whole city.

So here’s to our new mayor, and to this fleeting moment of triumph, and to all of you who contributed in one way or another to make it happen.

At the Mayoral Candidates Forum, I run into Craig R. the composer. I ask him about the fingering of the Opus 127 Adagio.  He says everyone has to figure it out for themselves.  Depends on your hands.  One “rule of thumb”: keep thumbs off the black keys.  When Chad drops by to pick up a precinct, I ask him to look at the fingering I’m working on.  He’s a good pianist but he’s stumped.  After two more days of trial and error, I arrive at a sequence my fingers can follow. I see where the strains within the melody begin and end, where they repeat and vary, where they accelerate and retard, rise and fall, build up and trail off.  The words click into place.

Audio [new window]

If we could find¦
The key to unlock beauty’s hidden clue
Then¦we might learn to reach
The love of life we sometime knew.
Then we might escape
Our lonely shell
We might arise out of our hell
Grow wings to fly into the air
And float free from care

But there’s no chance
That such release will ever
Be felt while we are here
Unless we can recall
From whence we came

Yet I am hopeful
(And so are we)
I’m truly hopeful
(And we are too)
I hope our lives
Can be the way
We want
The way we want
The way they truly should have been
Once more
Once more
Once more

In order to really understand the 127 Adagio, I’ve got to come up with some lyrics. But I cant do that in my head. The melodic curve is too long. It must be hammered out on an instrument. The four-flats key signature and the full two-octave pitch range rule out my playing it on the recorder.  I need a keyboard.  I search Craigslist and find one for sale by a student in Laguna for $35.  It takes a week to track down the missing power supply. Now I will enter the dark world of the black keys that scared me away from piano lessons in grade 5.

How to finger those notes scored for the first violin?  I google “four flat scale” and find it’s A Flat major and come up with several different recommendations for fingering it.  I try them all, writing and erasing numbers above the first few measures.  None tells me which finger to use when the melody skips successive notes or makes its breathtaking leaps.

Health is returning.

Piano Concerto #4 now playing”the last movement’s opening theme:

Bump ba da bump ba ba bump/bump bump bump/
bump bad a bump bump bump/
bump bad a bump bump bump/.

Audio [opens in new window]

I search for words that could correlate with the notes, lyrics to enable my weak memory to recall the tune.

While Ian was at Karate yesterday, I walked around the parking lot listening to the Waldstein sonata. As the wind swept through the tops of the eucalyptus trees by the creek, I imagined hearing it in the opening of the third movement.

Audio [opens in a new window]

Wikipedia calls it “a sweet and consoling tune.”

Today driving around putting up “Elect Jan Marx” signs, words for the first phrase pop into my head: “Sing sing the wind is blowing.” At home I play with rhymes.

Sing, sing, the wind is blowing
Dance dance the fluttering leaves
Ring ring the bells are tolling
Earth now new life conceives

I check the performance and the score:

My last line ignores the shift from a simple repeat to an extended variation in the third and fourth lines of the stanza.

I look in the top line of the score for the theme and cant locate it.  Then I notice that the treble and bass clef have been deviously reversed to indicate right and left hands being crossed.  I correct the lyrics:

Sing, sing, the wind is blowing
Dance dance the fluttering leaves
Ring ring the bells are tolling
With news that earth receives, conceives, believes
And having heard no longer sighs and grieves

I don’t care that they don’t make much verbal sense; they help me remember the strain that shapes the later wild variations.

I’m sick in bed with a recurrent sinus infection. I listen to the quartet, watch movies– “Eternal Beloved” and  “In Search of Beethoven””and study the criticism.  I’m frustrated by the incomprehensible music theory but the scholars’ descriptive language helps me grasp the elusive central theme of the Adagio.  Lewis Lockwood calls it a “long and winding melody,” Michael Steinberg “a rapt and expansive melody,” Joseph Kerman “a famous miracle of beauty.”  Awakened last night by a violent cough, I sat up on the couch and for the first time recognized bits of the core theme in the six subsequent variations. I thought of Beethoven’s struggle with disease, deafness, isolation, and self-loathing.  His creativity transformed his suffering into beauty. It saved him from suicide.

I’m not scheduled to teach this quarter or next, and I hope renewing an engagement with classical music will complement my service to grandchildren and to Jan’s mayoral campaign. Larry and I have agreed to lecture on The Kreutzer Sonata“both the violin-piano sonata by Beethoven and the novella by Tolstoy–next Spring in the course we’re collaborating on.* We arrange to meet with Jim C., mutual friend, colleague and musical savant to discuss the piece, since Larry and I are hardly literate in this area.

Tolstoy’s unreliable narrator says this about the first movement:

How can that first presto be played in a drawing-room among ladies in low-necked dresses? To hear that played, to clap a little, and then to eat ices and talk of the latest scandal? Such things should only be played on certain important significant occasions, and then only when certain actions answering to such music are wanted.

As I listen to the sonata in preparation for our meeting I think I hear what evokes that reaction: a sensuous and violent mating dance between violin and piano: courtship, chase, capture, resistance, yielding and consummation.

Spurred on by this encounter, I venture into more challenging musical territory. I  purchase the 3 CD set of the Emerson Quartet’s performances of Beethoven’s “late quartets.”  Since adolescence I’ve heard them referred to as one of humanity’s supreme artistic achievements, but I’ve been intimidated by their reputation for inaccessability. I copy the first of them, Opus 127, to my ipod nano, along with the Kreutzer and some more familiar pieces in my itunes collection: the Archduke Trio, Waldstein Sonata, and Piano Concerto #4 and listen to them during my daily hours of precinct walking. I’m intrigued by the billowing, elongated melody of the quartet’s slow second movement. I download the score and order books of music criticism through interlibrary loan.

When the three of us get together in our living room, Jim moves the furniture to place the speakers in optimum positions. We compare his different recordings of the Kreutzer and Opus 127. The music and talk are loud, and at 1:00 A.M. Jan asks us to end the party because she cant sleep.

*Materials for that class

The title of Bill McKibben’s latest book, Eaarth, sounds like the cry of someone falling off a cliff. McKibben has been writing about climate change since he published The End of Nature twenty years ago, always mixing a prophetic pessimism about the magnitude of the danger with an activist’s optimism about how disaster could be avoided. In the two years since the publication of his last book, Deep Economy, the option of avoidance has disappeared. Eaarth is McKibben’s name for the less friendly and predictable planet humans now inhabit. Two years ago, people were still quaintly worried about the effect of climate change on their grandchildren. Today its consequences are already upon us. “Eaarth,” he concludes starkly, “represents the deepest of human failures.”

This book is worth reading now because it fully takes into account three recent catastrophes: the acceleration of geophysical climate changes, the near collapse of the global economic system, and the failure of the U.N. Copenhagen Climate conference to arrive at any meaningful international agreement. McKibben’s prescriptions for dealing with our predicament are consistent with what he and many others have been advocating since 1970: recognizing limits to growth, promoting localism and decentralization, and affirming that conservation and satisfaction of basic needs must replace our excesses of consumerism and greed.

During the years he was working on this book McKibben was remarkably successful in organizing two grassroots worldwide movements largely driven by young people, Step-It-Up and 350.org. Despite their inability to produce the kind of changes needed, his recommendations for adaptation to our reduced circumstances could allow us to face them “lightly, carefully, gracefully.”

my notes and comments on Deep Economy (Word doc)