Bookish Gardener

Songs in the Key of Jackson

My head's still spinning from the whirlwind discussion of key signatures in music as seen in the Fredösphere and elsewhere in the musical blögôstråtŏsphère. So let me put my pen down, turning briefly away from my opus-with-naught-but-a-title "The Song of Janus: Wittgensteinian Aspect-Change and Major/Minor Modulation from Schubert to Strayhorn", and take this moment to examine the personalities of different keys in the oeuvre of The Jackson 5 and Michael Jackson (before he mutilated his face and mutilated his soul). (Those who listened to the Osmonds instead [shudder] or weren't, like, born yet [sigh] can hit the snooze button now.)

G major: "Wholesome" says Fred. Yes, "The Love You Save" fits that bill quite nicely.

F major: "It barks" says Fred. Funny, that's just what Jackson Browne said about the Jackson 5's cover of "Doctor My Eyes". Also, Michael Jackson's "Ben" is in this key, but it skittered and squeaked instead.

A flat major: "Elegant" says Fred. And the millions of teenagers who turned "ABC", "I Want You Back", and "Mama's Pearl" into solid-gold hits agree!

B flat minor: "Romantic". Hmm...the Jackson 5 hit "Going Back to Indiana"?

B major: "Frenetic". This is a bull's-eye: "Don't Stop 'Till You Get Enough."

C sharp/D flat major: "Gorgeous, complex". Yes: "Rock With You"—the hit from Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall" album, penned by the great Rod Temperton—more than earns this accolade.

D sharp minor: "Who the heck writes music in D sharp minor?" That would be the genius who composed "Dancing Machine", the official Jackson 5 jump-the-shark single.

There could be more, but in D minor ("on the sadness scale, this one goes to eleven"), we have the Jackson 5 single "[You Better Make Way for the] Young Folks"...which I will take as my cue to get off this bus. (On the eeuuww scale, this one goes to twelve.)

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Only five days left...

...in the "Twelve Days of Vreeland", that is...the feature at Nothing to Declare that has already become (in its second year) one of my favorite holiday traditions. Start with the first day and keep a-going!

This is where I be-log

One morning last month, I was in a convention hall filled with high schoolers. They were there to take part in a two-day business start-up simulation exercise, and I was there, along with a dozen other grizzled veterans adult "advisors", to help coach them on the finer points of manufacturing, pricing and selling widgets. A marketing professor from a local college was brought in to give a talk on self-presentation and marketing. He was energetic and entertaining, but I did a bit of a double take (or its aural equivalent) when, in speaking of different ways in which people "market" and "present" themselves, he said: "And some people even use the internet to talk about themselves on their 'B'-Logs". "'B'-Log"? I wondered. Was this a new computer programming language, following on Fortran, COBOL, or C++? And then I realized he was referring to blogs. I almost started into a derisive chortle, shame on me, before being struck by the possibilities of the word. Be-log. That's how I'd like to think of these moments in time and cyberspace. Life should unfold as time passes, but as lived it often feels like an accelerating, crumpling, imploding blur. So let this be the log of randomly planted flags: I was here. This is what was on my mind and in my heart, in this hour and on this day.

Mea maxima culpa

I made it out to the garden, for the first time in over a month, to get some last things done before the Siberian freeze hits tonight. Ach, I've been a woeful caretaker of the garden this fall. I've succumbed to excuse after excuse for leaving things undone. I walked through the garden, reciting my litanies of couldawouldashoulda, and turned my mind to all the ways in which I bring the seven deadly sins into my gardening:

Lust: You mean there are reactions to seeing a desirable plant other than: "How do I get that into my (garden) bed?"
Gluttony: Two words: seed catalogs.
Avarice: Sharing beats hoarding...I should try it sometime.
Sloth: Oh, should I have dug up the dahlias two months ago?
Anger: Bunnies...Floppy. Hoppy. Bunnies.
Envy: I don't really envy those who can, say, fill their gardens with full-price designer perennials with a flick of the checkbook. I do envy those with sprawling space, with room for garden room upon garden room, and nooks and vistas...and water.
Pride: Because every time a bloom opens to perfection, it is so all about me.

And then the garden worked its grace, as my thoughts quieted enough to take in the sound of shears cutting burlap, the scent of scrapings from the bayberries turned white from blue, and the sight of the bare trees against the low haze of cloud cover.

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

"Simple Gifts", Shaker traditional, 1848.

(The sins are presented in reverse order of their sequence in Henry Fairlie's The Seven Deadly Sins Today, which is worth your while if you, like me, tend to suffer from recurrent, highly deliberate amnesia about these things.)

Willy-nilly silly

My twenty-five cent copy of Richard Armour's Punctured Poems: Famous First and Infamous Second Lines is doing a fine job of tickling my verrah sophisticated sense of humah. As you might gather from the title, Armour has taken first lines from some well-known poems and paired them with new second lines of his own creation. (My favorite, adapting Blake's "The Tiger": "Tiger! Tiger! burning bright,/ What has caused you to ignite?") The collection even includes these garden-themed couplets:

    I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
    I've stood in the sun, with a hose, for hours.
         (from Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Cloud")

    A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot,
    But only if God wotters it a lot.
         (from Thomas Edward Brown, "My Garden")

    There is a garden in her face;
    She uses every inch of space.
         (from Thomas Campion, "Cherry-Ripe")

(If this blog be adjudged too silly, and this award misled in decision, I must acquiesce in its rescission, à la Milli Vanilli.)

Madtown Sounds: Thomas Trotter, Pleasant Rowland Concert Organ, Overture Hall

(Hey, where ya been? I've been deluged with the stuff that puts bread on the table, and don't get me wrong...let it rain, let it rain, I say, but thanks for your patience during the extended break.)

Overture Hall was sold out the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving for a solo organ recital by Thomas Trotter. Somehow, I managed to get a seat four rows from the stage. I'd been in Overture Hall before, up in the mezzanine, but this was my first (and probably only) chance to get a full view of the new hall from the main floor, looking up, back and around. I gawked; it's gorgeous. It's distinctly modern (clean lines, blond wood, metallic highlights) without being chilly or austere, and the well-padded seats generously accommodate...well-padded seats.

The recital was the culmination of a series of performances highlighting the crown jewel of the new hall, the Pleasant Rowland Concert Organ. It's quite a sight too. The pipes (4,040 of 'em) occupy the entire width of the concert stage, arrayed in sound-wave sine curves that form their own work of art even without emitting a single sound. The organ's received a lot of well-deserved publicity and soberly intonated accolades, but I love that it was borne of the fruits of a business started by an enterpreneur when she was forty-five years old.

The recital program covered a wide range of styles and sounds. (And it's left me with a yearning to hear the John Lanius "Switched-On Buxtehude" performed in Overture Hall someday.) Thomas Trotter has a commanding presence while performing, but was utterly personable and charming as he gave introductions to each of the pieces during the performance. (Also impressively athletic, swinging himself onto the organ bench, lithe and spry as a gymnast, before the start of each piece.)

The music from the organ is almost indescribable when, yes, all the stops are pulled out. The sound floods the senses, shuts down the left brain, and levitates you into another world. (Think Robert De Niro in the opium den in the final scene of Once Upon a Time in America, director's cut.) I think I need another fix...soon.

The concert ended with two crowd-pleasing encores. The first was an arrangement of Flight of the Bumblebee with the melody performed on footpedal. When Trotter came out to perform the second encore, he told the audience that, unlike the other pieces in the program, he would not be announcing the title of the final piece but would leave it to us to recognize. Yes, it was familiar to me; it was the Widor Toccata. The last time I'd heard it performed live was almost fourteen years ago, when Thomas Weisflog played it as the recessional for my wedding...O happy day.