Teaching Literature: The Light and the Wind

It is heartbreaking to teach literature sometimes. Very rewarding, but often heartbreaking. I teach a lower-level group of high school juniors this year -- nice bunch of kids and many of them way smarter than their work habits show. We are studying American literature and, believe it or not, I insist on teaching them Moby Dick. How do you study the foundations of American lit. without Melville's greatest work?

No, I don't have them read the while book. (I didn't read it until grad school.) We read selections and we watch the movie with Patrick Stewart as Ahab. It is a pretty good Cliff's Notes version that manages to keep many of the themes intact; it also remains faithful to a lot of the book's dialogue. And, the kids like it.

What's heartbreaking is teaching sections like the St. Elmo's fire scene and being (every time) chilled to the bone by the profundity of it; being ignited with my own internal fire of appreciation for the lofty heights that the human animal can achieve in seeing Melville's brilliance in action.

How do you teach that? How do you impart the soul-deep fulfillment -- the actual "high" -- that rises up in you when, for instance, Mr. Starbuck, brought to his lowest of lows, seeing Captain Ahab posing with the aid of a natural phenomenon like static electricity as a God figure, utters the phrase, "Forbear, old man -- God has turned his back on thee. This light is not thine. This light is not thine..."

Literature and music have always been to me as is wind to Coleridge's Aeolian harp; the strings vibrate into feelings of wonder and beauty. Forgive the purple prose, but...how else can one say these things? No wonder the Romantics were poets.

I know it is probably something one can't teach; the strings are either there or they are not, I suppose. I just wish.

All the World is a Stage, Until...

As a boy, I knew, for sure, what I wanted to be.

As a young man, I began to feel an internal wrestling match: What I wanted to be versus what I wanted to be perceived as. 

We could very well want to be something because we want to impress people. There are doctors who live for the wonders of medicine; who deeply feel a calling to help others. But I am sure there are also doctors who wanted to be doctors so that they could be seen as doctors.

Sometimes we want to be a thing because that thing is respected or because it carries with it the trappings of "image" that we covet, but if that thing is not what we truly want to be -- or, more accurately, to do -- can we be happy? 

I actually never had any dreams of being a teacher. It sort of happened by accident; however, I love teaching. I always wanted to be a full-time musician, but when I started doing it, I realized I loved music too much to enslave it. I sure did like the idea, though, of telling people "I am a musician" when they asked what I did for a living. 

I had a friend who was, as a profession, "a writer." I felt some jealousy about this. Why, I don't know, because he wrote medical texts, and I would rather rub my face on stucco than write about medicine. Or, rather, I do know: I was tempted by the desire to be able to tell people "I am a writer." Like, really. Like, for a living. 

Well, I am a writer and a musician and, now, it is enough to know that...and to just do it. It's sad that we need to make life decisions when we are young -- when we still feel as if leaving the house is like stepping onto a stage. All hail happy accidents. 

Dancing with Catherine, Again

I remember sitting in a classroom at Rutgers University, in a class with my teaching hero and most inspiring professor, Robert Ryan, an expert on and a deep lover of British Romanticism. Sadly, this is not a reference to his brilliant teaching, but to a simple statement that he made, in passing, one day, that has stuck with me ever since. He simply said, "I have been teaching for twenty-five years, and..."

I remember thinking: "Imagine, having done something for as long as I have been alive..." I was in my twenties. I had been in existence for less time than Dr. Ryan had been teaching at the college level. It seemed impossible. It seemed...so far away.

With the release of my recent collection of piano music, American Sketches [No, I am not ashamed to promote it, even when promotion is not the purpose of a blog post! CD version is available HERE.] I mentioned that it is comprised of music written over the last three decades.

What the hell happened?

The oldest piece was written at Penn State in 1987. I remember lamenting my state; a young man -- as I saw it -- who wanted to be a composer but who was being forced to get a non-musical degree by his musician parents. I'd walk, at night, through "the quad" of the Mont Alto campus under outrageously beautiful night skies so full of stars it looked like a movie effect.

Not even sure who took this, but there I am,
bottom right, blue shirt
with white sleeves, Mont Alto, 1987...distant
and still so close, thanks to that piece of music,
written only months before this.

On some nights, I would walk into the old, empty Science Building, and the auditorium would be silent and the piano would be free: a beautiful Bosendorfer grand piano. Other nights, some other misplaced artist would be at the piano. On those nights, I would stomp angrily back to my room. But on the nights I got the piano, I'd sit there for hours, enjoying the solitude and enjoying the atmosphere of the old theater, writing piano piece after piano piece. That's when "Dancing with Catherine" was written.

It almost didn't make it onto the CD. In my mind, I had labeled it as immature -- a piece from my late teens that I had outgrown, harmonically and compositionally. But my wife remembers it from our early days -- when I would play it for her. I was twenty-four, then; she was nineteen. She has always loved it and she convinced me to put it on the CD. So, I did include it, smack up against one of my newest and most ambitious pieces, the "mini-symphony," "The Widow's Walk." I like it there. I like the contrast; I like the truth of it. (A composer simply cannot lie when he writes music; to write instrumental music is to open the living room curtains wide...)

I like that the early me and the current me are contrasted; innocence and experience, if you will. But what really moves me when I hear it is the "time machine" aspect of it: there, in "Dancing with Catherine," is an exact record of my nineteen-year-old mind; its feelings and thoughts; its frustrations and ambitions; its dreams... It is a record of uncountable truths.

...thirty years ago. Astounding.

American Sketches

Many apologies for being pretty inconsistent with posting recently. Life. Such a bother.

At any rate, I thought I would post to tell you about my new musical project, American Sketches. It has been mentioned here before as a work-in-progress thing and I have even posted some rough versions of the pieces. I am happy to say that the project is complete.

It is a CD of piano pieces that are all, thematically, tied to my own version of the "American experience." The best way to describe the music is that it is "impressionistic." Each piece is entitled with a place or scene and the music is meant to recall my own experience with that scene -- the feelings and...well...impressions.

The music, I think, is a little more sinewy than the kind of impressionism we tend to think of as related to the French Impressionism masters Ravel and Debussy, but it is composed for the same purpose as that of the work  of all impressionists, so I can't think of a better way to label it...

Of course, I like to think that there is a great deal of "me" in my music, but I do think that the influence of my favorite American composers (Barber, Harris, Copeland, etc.) is present -- but there are probably some Ravel moments as well... (I spent the years between the ages of, say, seventeen and twenty listening to just about no other composer.)

I wanted to make an actual CD, even though that is going out of fashion, for two reasons. 1) CDs sound better than MP3 downloads and (2) I wanted to create a cool package, because I miss the days of listening to music and either reading album liner-notes or flipping through a CD booklet. My sister, Gina Matarazzo a professional designer and artist, who now does books but who designed CD packages for many years, did the work. The beautiful photography on the CD is by my lovely and talented wife, Karen (who also designed this site for me), and Gina used computer magic to turn the images into "sketches."

We created a package that reflects the pieces in quite a literal way. (I have always liked that, for some reason. I think of Rush's covers for, say, Moving Pictures [movers actually...moving pictures] or Permanent Waves [pictorial representations of each song].)

The cover is a photographic "sketch" of my son, Will, seven years ago, on the baseball field. In looking for images, I found this in some photos that Karen, had taken over the years. This one struck me as timeless looking and it was the perfect reference to the piece "Little Boy, Right Field."

The back of the box contains the track listings, but, also, a picture of the moon in the morning sky, a reference to the piece "The Morning Moon," which is based on something my father never finished composing before he died two years ago. I finished it for him, because I had always loved it.

The booklet insert contains the back-stories to each of the pieces on the CD, as well as internal illustrations of some of the pieces. The photo on the outside is of Widow Harding Pond, on Cape Cod -- the pond that gives the title (and mood) to the piece that is its namesake. The inside of the CD box contains the "thanks yous" and credits as well as an illustration of a whaler's wife on a "Widow's Walk" waiting for her husband's ship to come home...a reference to the "miniature symphony," "The Widow's Walk."

The pieces on the CD were written over the course of almost thirty years. (The liner notes say "fifteen," but Karen convinced me to put a piece on there that I wrote when I was nineteen because she has always loved it. It's called "Dancing with Catherine." I like it too.) Nothing is virtuosic -- I'm not a concert pianist -- but everything is more meant to be more like orchestral pieces on the piano; sort of a score to some of my life's experiences. There is almost an hour and twenty minutes of music, so a lot of "bang for the buck" as they say...

It's not available in CD just yet, but downloads are available on Amazon, iTunes and CDBaby. I will stress, though ,that the CD is worth it, if you still have a player and like interesting and artistic packaging...

Thanks to everyone who reads for their continued support. I'm very proud of this one.

On Celebrity Deaths

I hope no one sees this as a critique of their emotional ractions, because it is not meant to be. If anything, maybe it is a critique of my own. Perhaps I'm insensitive...

But, with the passing of David Bowie, I am once again reminded that I really don't get very upset when celebrities die. I hear people talking about being "heartbroken" by the loss of a celebrity -- a lot of this went around with Robin Williams -- and I feel a bit callous.

Sure, I always have a moment of "oh, what a shame..." Then, I continue eating my sandwich. I don't drag through the day.

I had a lot of respect for Bowie. I was never a big fan, but I always respected his artistic integrity and even his sense of humor. He seemed like a good guy. I guess if he were one of my musical heroes, it might have hit me harder...

No sarcasm intended: one of my
favorite acting performances by Bowie.
He voiced the character on the steps.
(Note the different-colored eyes.)

I have to admit that when Arthur Miller died in 2005, I was driving and I felt upset enough to pull over to the side of the road for a minute. I suppose that when John Williams, the composer, dies, I will have a similar reaction. But these people contributed to my growth as a musician and as a writer. They affected me directly and deeply. That feels a bit different than if, say, an actor I really like dies.

Maybe I am underestimating the power of art. Maybe I am being something of an artsy elitist. I am questioning the connection of the artist to the common audience and chalking that connection up to something less than the connection of an artist to an artist. I probably shouldn't do that.

Still, I remain skeptical that there is a lot of hyperbole out there on the social media sites... I'm not saying everyone is overdoing it, because, surely, many people really loved Bowie (and maybe even Alan Rickman) but, there has to be a little over-dramatizing going on out there.

All I know (all any of us really knows) is the world inside my own head, and, in there, the losses of celebrities who haven't profoundly affected me are simply not that deeply felt, no matter how much I liked them.