The Big Stereo

On Saturday morning, my wife and I were talking about music. The boys were away on a school ski trip, so I figured I would fire up the "big stereo" in the living room. It has surround sound and a big, fat bass cabinet. 

After some Ravel, I thought I would give my own classical piano CD a listen on that system; I'd only listened in the car. How a CD sounds on various stereos is, in deed, partly a result of the composition, recording and mixing of the music, but it mostly has to do with the "mastering," which is done in a by a person who specializes in that step. Without it, any recording will sound unprofessional. 

I played a piano piece and then I wanted to try our the lone track with a full orchestration and a vocal. It's my arrangement of the traditional folk song, "Oh, Shenandoah." I loved the way it sounded; the basses (four pizzicato basses in the orchestral section and one jazz-style upright bass layered in for some more sustain) shook the neighborhood and my wife commented that she was blown away -- she'd never heard them like that before. 

She mentioned that because she hears me working on my music all of the time, upstairs, that she sometimes thinks she has really heard the pieces. This listening made her realize that she really hasn't -- not in their most powerfully sonic form. 

And there it is. How we see life depends on the "speakers" we "hear" it on, doesn't it? Dynamic range is everything. We may think we know a thing, but if we don't see it with all of its colors or hear it with its complete sonic qualities, our evaluations and decisions are, unavoidably, ill-informed. Our reactions may be the wrong ones; our impressions incomplete.

Some people, by nature, simply don't possess the proper equipment, either because of deficiency or circumstance. Others won't put the metaphoric CD into a different player and hear is on different speakers. Too much work. 

It can all lead to a lifetime of incomplete impact and half-fueled judgements. 

On a literal level, my musical intentions are made clear on the big stereo. I'm glad to have given Karen the full picture. Her excellent ear deserves the best sound. 

Reaching High for Heroes

Loosely-related anecdote: I was watching the Kennedy Center honors performances in honor of Sting on You Tube the other day and Lady Gaga performed one of my favorite tunes from the man: "If I Ever Lose My Faith in You." The only way I can sum up her performance is to say that it was embarrassing. Talk about a performance with absolutely no sense of restraint or style. This was all capped with her ridiculous idea to keep screaming, all through the chorus, "It stings..." (oh, that's clever) while reaching so hard with her eyes and upper body toward Sting in the upper balcony that I thought she was going to fall into the tuxedoed laps in the front row. Deperate and chaotically loud is no way to go through life.

Be that as it may, Sting has always been one of my musical, lyrical and artistic role models since my teenaged years. (I think, i ntime, his lyrics, at least, will survive.) It all got me to thinking about the role models we pick and it got me wondering why some people reach high and some reach low for their role models.

In my case, I have always picked "great" people to look up to. My father was my biggest role model, but it can also be argued that he was an exceptional person, not just from my point of view as a son, but from an objective point of view. But we can leave parents out of the discussion...

...because, beyond my dad, it was always people who were the best at what they did that I looked up to. It was never coaches or teachers; it was always artists, poets, musicians of the highest caliber. As a kid, I had posters of both Ted Williams and Shakespeare on my wall (I still have a framed poster of the first folio frontispiece in my living room). The impetus was never to show off or to be pretentious, but to remind myself of how great a person can become at what he does; maybe there was a hope that I could climb three rungs on Shakespeare's ten-thousand rung ladder... However it is read by those on the outside, the sentiment was sincere.

My heroes have always been the standouts in world history.

I am curious as to how that happens; whether it was an accident; how I can encourage my kids to reach toward the greats and not toward the flavor of the day.

One thing I know is that to watch that Lady Gaga's performance of one of the most delicately balanced, lyrically compelling pop songs of all time; watching her turn it into a literal, three minute vomiting of desperate pleas for acceptance sure give us a good scale for separating the wheat from the chaff.

I hope my sons reach as high as I always did. (Which means higher than they are likely to reach.) That's all.

Wind for a Dead Calm: Ravel's "Adagio assai," from the Concerto in G

People make a lot of melodramatic statements about music; they will even be heard to say that a piece of music "saved their life..."

I can't go that far, as sappy and emotional as I am. My life has never been in danger that way; that way that implies a death of the soul that leads to the ultimate end...

But I have been a ship in a dead calm, sitting still in waters of various emotional hues: sadness, fear, depression, anxiety...

What is needed in those cases is a breath of wind. So, while I cannot claim this piece has ever "saved my life" I can say that, time and again, it has been that wind to push me out of the dead calm; the thing that showed me that there is more in life than death, taxes, conflict and the mundane clockworks of the daily routine; that hope is somewhere, even when it seems to be hiding from us...

Ravel's "Adagio assai" movement from his Piano Concerto in G, has been that piece for me, for more than twenty thirty years. It's always there when I need it, and I have needed it lately.

Here it is, in case you need some fresh air, too:

Of Marriage and Broken Beams

Good relationships can take some damage; this applies to friendships and romantic relationships as well. And it certainly can (and must) apply to marriages.

I see deep, time-grown relationships like this:

This bridge is made entirely of wooden beams, many of them redundant. If one cracks or rots, the structure will say intact. In fact, the functionality of the bridge will most likely not suffer at all. (I'm no engineer, but stick with my metaphoric physics, if you will.) And if, especially back when a bridge like this was built, the beam was unreachable, things would have to just go on as they were -- which they could safely do.

Too many relationships fail because of an event or a statement. Or even an action, Sure, one can simply set fire to the bridge (a spouse commits infidelity or becomes abusive, for instance) and it can all burn down. But disappointments -- even very big ones -- in the actions or words of our friend or lover or spouse, while they may permanently break one or two of the beams, need not necessarily compromise the whole structure.

I think it is okay to have unmendable breaks in a relationship. Just because there is something within that can never be fixed, it doesn't mean that the numerous other good components can't take the stress until death do we part. And it doesn't mean we can't walk life's walk happily, together.

The Forgotten Offensiveness

You know what increasingly angers me? People who post disturbing images on social media. I find it funny that we're so worried about “offending” people with our opinions, but that we have no concern whatever about offending their sensibilities.

I just saw a picture (calling for the old like=prayer thing) of a small, naked child lying in its own blood as a result of some problem he or she has – it looked like a hideous skin condition, his skin thick and red as a hard candy.  It actually made me a little nauseous, just at a glance, and I had to scroll away from it.

At other times, people have posted articles about medical marvels and issues, accompanied by pictures of innards and organs laid bare in a stainless steel tray.

What’s the problem? Does no one get disgusted by graphic gore anymore? Or is it that people need to be shocked in order to care? Maybe it is a combination of both, but whatever it is, it seems to me to amount to a decline in the ascent of man to a higher form. We should be able to care about the stench of human suffering without having to have our noses shoved in it. We should be interested in the wonders of modern science, conceptually, without having to be elbow deep in dissection gore. (Thank goodness some people are able to be elbow-deep in dissection gore, or we would have no advances – but that is not the average person.)

Every night, I offer a prayer for the suffering, especially children. Seeing a scene of the graphic suffering of a child is not going to change me, except to disturb me. It might motivate me to weep, but nothing changes: I still care about children and I still want to help, whether with prayer or charity.
 

You know what? It is okay for us to avoid discomfort in the face of suffering, so long as we are doing the right things to alleviate that suffering. I don’t need someone, either purposefully or in total disregard for my sensibilities, to determine what I should be tricked into seeing. 

And, so, the waters of the social media age flood in, through the cracks in the fortress of privacy.