Music Blooms on Mother's Day

            We told guitarist Robert Bekkers that his playing made us cry when he performed  the "Concierto de Aranjuez" during his recital on Mother's Day last weekend. Being moved to tears is for me a kind of gold standard for live concert music, and Rodrigo's great work for guitar and orchestra is one of my favorite pieces of music.

            I was introduced to it decades ago, or to a portion of it, when jazz composer Gil Evans arranged the hauntingly beautiful theme in the adagio for Miles Davis to play on his trumpet. It was a long time before I learned the the theme Evans and Davis made the leitmotif of their "Sketches of Spain" album was taken from that rare thing, a concerto for guitar and orchestra.

            Needing to put together a small orchestra for his Doctor of Musical Arts degree recital, Bekkers -- a student of Eliot Fisk at New England Conservatory -- turned to an online fundraiser called gofundme.com. A good number of donors ponied up to a level that earned them "hugs from the conductor," Kristo Kondakci. The rest of us chipped in a little, and got a lot in return. I'm not sure who Robert was hugging after his recital -- possibly himself following a fabulous performance.

            The Rodrigo concerto is almost unique. We have major violin concertos; piano concertos; concertos for cello and for almost every other instrument in the symphony orchestra. Mozart wrote a flute concerto and an amazing clarinet concerto and twenty-something piano concertos. Does anyone know how many violin concertos Vivaldi wrote?

            But the guitar, as Bekkers pointed out when we heard him perform last fall with pianist Ellyses Kuan, had fallen out of favor by the 19th century.... even though a virtuoso on the instrument, Mauro Giuliani, was contemporary and collaborator with Beethoven, Hummel, Paganini and Rossini. The last of these, impressed by Giuliani's playing and composing, said 'go take my opera music and arrange some tunes for yourself on guitar.' Since Rossini's work was the Beatles music of his age, Giuliani leapt at the opportunity and composed six "Rossiniane," medleys of tunes from the operas.

            Bekkers played the first of these at his recital, a work based on music form "Otello", "L'Italiana in Algeri" and "Armida" -- a delightful work, brilliantly played.

            Sitting in the second row of a relatively small room, the conservatory's Williams Hall, Anne and I indulged in one of life's great pleasure: getting up close and personal with great music, "Concierto de Aranjuez." Bekkers gave a strong, lyrical and passionate performance. The orchestra matched it. We were moved and inspired; I think everybody was.

            Rodrigo's great work for guitar and orchestra falls into the class of works that make me believe that music is one of our principal answers to death and despair. It keeps the heart soft, and the soul from freezing up.

Maybe May After All

            The photos from a year ago in May look, by comparison, like a rain forest. By comparison, that is, to the retrograde status of the green and any other color showing in this year's perennial flower garden.

            It has been hard to find much to cheer about this spring until the last week or so. I've been more aware of what isn't there -- a bleeding heart that's been with us for about five or six years; the remains of the purplish-leaved Aceana groundcover, a New Zealand native that I've been nursing through the last five declining seasons (just utterly gonzo). All four butterfly bushes, reduced at present to mere collections of sticks, a few leaves struggling out of mostly bare branches. Great bare spots in backyard beds that to the best of my recollection were all pretty full of foliage this time last year.

            Happily, after last weekend, and a lot of hands-on attention, I can go back to celebrating life once again when I walk through the gardens. At least I have some views to look at now, something to see, so I don't dwell on whats been lost.

            I'm pretty much focusing on the return of the little guys these days.

            One of the expanding floral nations of the back garden, those portions given over largely to groundcovers, is the Ajuga shown in flower in the top left photo. Both the foliage and the flowers have more of a purple tint than this image captures. You can also see the tiny white flowers of the Sweet Woodruff. That's a plant that once dominated this area but is now in retreat. Expansion, and collapse: Waves of succession in the free-for-all of a garden habitat where plantations are allowed to roam, with some interference from me, as they do in nature. I think I like the waves of purple more than the unified field of white.

            Vinca Minor is the strongest of them all. It's everywhere and I will have to take steps to corral it. Here (in the second photo) you see it, in flower, pushing out to the brick walk and shoving up against the yellow two-toned leaves of a low Euonymus.

            You can see some of the blue blossoms of the Speedwell in the third photo. Speedwell is another happy May bloomer. Its flowers range from a beautiful sky blue to pale blue, maybe depending on the mineral content of the soil. In the back you can see Sweet Woodruff filling into this area, but I won't let it take over.

            The fourth photo is "Spring Vetch." I think it's in the pea family (it's also called "Spring Pea"); the genus is Vicia. It only flowers for a couple of weeks, but its little pink-purple blossoms are charming.

            The fifth photo shows a patch of common violets, they're all over the property this year. This is my favorite blossom variety, a blue so pale it's almost white, with darker spots in the petals. The bright light in this photos appears to have overwhelmed the dark spots.

            The sixth is a gathering of pale violets, contrasted with the darker foliage of the Labrador violet, some spikes of a star-flower that hasn't blossomed yet and the background of dusty-gray Artemisia.

            The last photo here shows the return of the Mazus. I was afraid for a while they weren't coming back; it took a few warm days to induce the blossoms. This is what I wrote about them last year:

            "The Mazus probably give us more brightly flowering color per unit measure than any other groundcover we have planted, but their colonies consist of completely separate very small plants with remarkably thin and shallow roots. You can pull up individual Mazus plants, especially when you don't want to, just by looking at them. Their roots are mere threads. So when you pull up the intruders in their midst-- violets,for instance, and any number of those nameless of 'weed' varieties whose appearance and MO I am all too familiar with -- you're more than likely to get a few of the Mazus as well, no matter how carefully and surgically you manage these removals. Then you mutter to yourself, displeased with your effort, over the waste of pretty flowers."

            Can't say fairer than that.

Syrian refugees reach out to us

The Boston Globe posted my opinion piece on Syrian refugees on its 'Podium' online page.... About a million Syrian refugees -- civilians fleeing the fighting -- are seeking refuge in neighboring Lebanon, a small country with limited resources, while the rest of the world continues to ignore the humanitarian crisis brought by a conflict in which the government routinely bombs civilian areas.... 

 Please take a look at the piece and pass it on to anyone you think would be interested.

Here's the link to the Globe online page:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/07/syrian-refugees-are-reaching-out/WE9w5HzxPzQ3kSkhmQWCJM/story.html


            Posted on 5/10/14:

            After reading the piece on the Globe site, some people have asked me (naturally enough) what I think should be done to end the fighting and make it possible for the refugees to go home.

            Also not surprisingly, I will admit I can't offer a simple, practical solution. Any international approach to ending the violence would have been much easier to attempt three years ago at the start of the armed conflict. As someone who opposed invading Iraq and questioned the extent and length our military intervention in Afghanistan, I am likewise opposed to sending ground troops, ours or anyone else's, to fight a war in Syria. I do, however, believe we should have taken the stance we did in Libya, using air power to ground and destroy a dictator's air force once it became clear the dictator intended to bomb cities held by the rebels. Our stated reason for acting in Libya was that the hated ruler of a police state attacked peaceful demonstrators and dropped bombs on people's homes. The same situation obtained in Syria, and still does.

            We put together a coalition then and I don't know why we can't do that again. The UN is useless in these crises since its rules allow a member of the Security Council -- a group of privileged big power governments some of which are perfectly willing to murder dissenters and commit genocide in their own country -- to veto any international action. In the Security Council the very governments that have used killing force without restraint on their own citizens are the ones preventing the UN to take action against a totalitarian regime, Assad's Syria, for seeking to exterminate any citizens who express opposition to its rule. These opponents are branded with the Orwellian libel of "terrorists," a term that is repeated daily by news media. Many media accounts routinely fail to explain that what the Syrian government calls terrorists are actually freedom-fighters. King George III had as much right to call the American rebels "terrorists," though his advisers failed to think up this term.

            We need an international body of democratic governments whose express mission is to combat state terror and prevent genocides. Russia, China, Iran and Sudan need not apply.

            After using air power to ground the Syrian air force and break up concentrations of tanks and heavy weapons wherever possible, the alliance of democratic governments should demand a ceasefire and establish humanitarian corridors, areas where aid, food and medicine can safely enter the country and reach those in need. One corridor from Turkey on one side of the country and another probably from Lebanon on the other side. International troops will be needed here to establish the supply routes and protect them.

            The coalition should also demand that foreign governments stop sending arms and munitions to fuel the killing. They should stop and board a few Russian ships to make the point. What are the Russians going to do? Invade Ukraine? They can do that whenever they want anyway. We should demand Israel's assistance in this border control effort (they owe us for all that aid), since Israel has shown it's good at boarding ships.

            In the end some sort of power-sharing arrangement must be worked out, with international forces remaining to protect religious minorities so that Alawites and Christians feel safe in a Sunni-dominated state. We cannot of course "impose" a peace on Syria or any other country. People have to work out their own fate. But we can significantly lower the level of violence and deny a terrorist state the means to enact a piece-by-piece, city-by-city Rwanda-level genocide. 

          Syria may end up looking like some version of Iraq, though the country will have been spared the trauma of a foreign power's invasion and  occupation. We do have a chance to create conditions that will allow the refugees to go home and take part in rebuilding their country.

            Or we can wait for some deus ex machine to fly onto the stage, snap his fingers and make everything better. Or do nothing until the government turns the majority of of Syrians into refugees, forced to live on international aid outside the borders of their homeland. They can ask the Palestinians to show them the ropes.

The Garden of Song: 'Silver Dagger'

            "It's never old and it was never young... and it's a folk song."

            That was the definition of "folk music" offered by a coffeehouse performer at the start of the Coen Brothers' movie "Inside Llewyn Davis."

             The use of a particularly moving folk song on a TV detective program set in the middle sixties recently brought the question up for me again. It wasn't really the question of what do we mean by folk music that got to me, frankly. It was more like, 'why can't I get this song out of my head for the last three days?'

            The song went through me with a startling intensity -- like a "silver dagger" -- which, not coincidentally, is the song's name, or at least the name it went by when people recorded it in the sixties. Coming across it without warning in the course of a murder mystery (a BBC crime series titled "George Gently") set in the north of England during that time of change felt like a voice calling out of the past, a fever dream in the memory.

            It was easy enough to find "Silver Dagger" on line. The actress who sang it on the show in what looked like classic "coffeehouse concert" -- the locals sitting in a big circle in a pub; nodding, smiling -- looked and sounded a little like Joan Baez. Her character in the show stood for change, hope, freedom, a new beginning.  

            Sure enough the song is "associated," as one source put it, with Joan Baez. As far as I can make out, "Silver Dagger" is the first cut on her first album. Baez sings it in her pure soprano with her famously "sad" interpretation of the haunting ballads that record some of humanity's collective traumas. Maybe these ballads, this powerful current in the stream of the folk repertoire -- songs of unhappy love, lost love, undeserved death, human disaster -- particularly called out to her.

            My theory is they call out to all of us. They are our repressed memories of what people went through to get us this far.

            And that's why certain songs stay with us forever. I could not have told you that this one was rattling around in my brain. I couldn't have "accessed" it. When I played it online, my memory said 'oh yes, of course.' I recognized a whole lot of other songs, and recalled Baez's treatment of them, on this debut album.

            It's an interesting paradox that stories of loss, disappointment, tragic fate, and crimes of passion call out to youthful, hopeful minds -- as they did in the early to mid-sixties. Maybe (more speculation on my part) acknowledging the bitter truths that are part of life is a necessary step in personal growth. In the sixties, a sudden flare-up in the desire to grow -- as opposed, say, to simply surviving, getting by, starting a career, putting a nest egg by -- manifested itself both in the US and worldwide.

            It was the fruit perhaps of a period of unusual prosperity. Hope, change, optimism, personal and social freedom were the new cultural currency.

            But ah, says "folk music," not so fast. Remember who we are and where we come from.

            In the "George Gently" story, the young folk singer stands for new possibilities. She encourages others to take the steps she's taken, but -- the world being what it is -- she doesn't make it out of the episode alive. In the abbreviated version of "Silver Dagger" she sings on screen, the first verse goes:

           

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand is a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.
            The speaker is a young woman; that silver dagger is a warning: keep away. Her mother has told her that men are false, that her own father betrayed countless women to their sorrow, and that she's determined to protect her innocent daughter from a similar fate. In the last verse the singer accepts her mother's advice: "I've been warned, and I've decided/ To sleep alone all through my life."

            It's a song in which the tragedy of a loveless fate is the direct result of the faithlessness of men.

            But the show changes the emphasis. The singer who stands for change and possibility sings it to the poor little rich boy in the show who is being suffocated by his aristocratic mother's unrealistic demands. She wants him to become some sort of traditional "great man." Among the problems he has with this idea is that he's gay. The singer tells him to leave his mother, go to London and be himself. His mother's "dagger" in this version doesn't protect her young, but threatens his identity.

            That is just so sixties.

            When the son chickens out on the London plan, she stand beneath the window of his mansion and sings, "Your mother has a silver dagger." Things go downhill from there.

            However it happened, the pessimistic TV story -- crime shows tend to be pessimistic; we watch them anyway -- sent me back to revisit a peculiarly haunting strain of folk wisdom. As the Coen Brothers movie's fictional Llewyn Davis says, these songs are forever. It may be that Baez's beautiful intensity in performing them is also forever. When you're cut by the silver dagger, the mark remains.