Bookish Gardener

I'll see your Barth and raise you a Tillich

Holy theological aesthetics, Batman...Robert the Llama Butcher has a great post on church, music, church music, and spirituality in music, inspired by the occasion of having had Mozart's Missa Brevis in C incorporated into a recent Sunday church service. I especially appreciated the excerpts of Karl Barth on Mozart (having squeaked through my one-year div school masters without having read nearly as much Barth as I should've, these were all new to me). But when Barth says "But neither did there exist this 'demoniac Mozart' whom our century wanted to substitute", is this a dig against Kierkegaard's take on Don Giovanni in Either/Or? This article from Richard John Neuhaus seems to point in that direction. And while Barth might consider the spiritual message of Mozart's music to be self-evident, I'm mindful of this caution from Paul Tillich, in a footnote to Systematic Theology: "Every public performance of Bach’s Passion of St. Matthew carries with it the risk of making the gospel story more meaningless for people who admire the great art of Bach’s music without being grasped by its infinite meaning."

Now. As for whether Beethoven is "The Music of the Spheres" or "The Music of the Ego": I'm not so sure that that's a fight that needs to be picked. True, Beethoven's music is all him—joyful, stormy, playful, profound, and, yes, sometimes clumsy and intemperate, too—but I don't think it's all about him. When I hear Beethoven, I know that I'm in the presence of great music, never mind the musicological explanations why. That Beethoven's flaws and struggles, overtly expressed, are of a piece with such music, is its own revelation of grace.

I never know when to expect the music of the spheres, but the heavens seem to part to rain it down regularly. In the spirit of Billie Holiday's rendition of "I Hear Music" and Frank Loesser's lyrical laundry list ("The murmur of a morning breeze up there/ The rattle of the milkman on the stair/ Sure that's music/ Mighty fine music/ The singing of a sparrow in the sky/ The perking of the coffee right nearby"), here's my list (some churchly, some not): Kit Taylor playing the Goldberg Variations; the noon church bells in the Meadowood neighborhood chiming "Rock of Ages"; the Schubert Sanctus (although there are parishioners going hungry in the Diocese of Minnesota, where the Bishop Visitation guidelines say: "Please do not use the Schubert Sanctus (S130) unless the congregation really knows how to sing it."); and the music of the "Sphere"—that is, Thelonious Sphere Monk, when Hank Jones plays "'Round About Midnight".

Perception colored

Dog days already. The peonies went from lush to louche in less than a fortnight. These days, all I need for my impression of Albert Brooks in Broadcast News is to step outside and stand stockstill.

Just before the sun sets, the duskglow of the garden takes on a sepia-toned cast from the sodden, humid air, like a historical flashback in an artsy movie, or a fugue state. Pinks, yellows, reds, grays and blues buzz through the haze like old neon light fixtures.

The other night, my husband was out in a stretch of the back border sequenced in jewel-toned 'Caradonna' salvia, yellow coreopsis, purple-bronze sedum, red-to-yellow blanketflower, magenta petunia, lemon yellow 'Happy Returns' daylily, pale blue catmint, this meadow buttercup, sunshine orange calendula, and blue-purple 'May Night' salvia. He was stopped at one spot, looking at the buttercup, and then the salvia, and then back and forth again. Look, he said. See how the blue looks after you stare at the yellow. He was right. In daylight, 'May Night' is pretty much a plain blue salvia, without the pizzazz of 'Caradonna' or the subtlety of 'Blue Hill', but it turned electric in that light with our little gaze-shifting exercise.

Which all brings to mind this from Gertrude Jekyll, the first and last word on color in the garden:

Each portion now becomes a picture in itself, and every one is of such a colouring that it best prepares the eye, in accordance with natural law, for what is to follow. Standing for a few moments before the end-most region of grey and blue, and saturating the eye to its utmost capacity with these colours, it passes with extraordinary avidity to the succeeding yellows. These intermingle in a pleasant harmony with the reds and scarlets, blood-reds and clarets, and then lead again to yellows. Now the eye has again become saturated, this time with the rich colouring, and has therefore, by the law of complementary colour, acquired a strong appetite for the greys and purples. These therefore assume an appearance of brilliancy that they would not have had without the preparation provided by their recently received complementary colour.

Gertrude Jekyll, The Gardener's Essential Gertrude Jekyll (selected and with an introduction by Elizabeth Lawrence). David R. Godine, 2000. ISBN 0-87923-599-3.

Newly blooming: Ratibida columnaris (Mexican hat), Alcea rosea (pastel hollyhocks), David Austin rose 'Bibi Maizoon', Monarda didyma 'Jacob Kline', Hemerocallis 'Happy Returns' (daylily), Clarkia unguiculata (mountain garland), Linum grandiflorum (red flax, self-sown), Zinnia tenuifolia 'Red Spider' (self-sown), Nicotiana langsdorfii (green flowering tobacco, self-sown), Phlox paniculata (pink and 'Bright Eyes'), Asclepias tuberosa (white butterfly milkweed), Cichorium intybus (chicory), Aconitum (white monkshood), Heliopsis helanthiodes (false sunflower), Echinacea purpurea (white coneflower), Prunella grandiflora (selfheal).

Hearing Hank Jones

Hank Jones was recently interviewed by Terry Gross on "Fresh Air", in a segment that aired yesterday and which is archived here. I'd had no idea about the interview (I rarely listen to non-music programming on public radio), but—bless his heart—my husband phoned me from work to alert me that it was on (he'd heard about it from a colleague, whose wife had phoned him to let him know it was on, bless her heart). Did I say I'd had no idea? Strangely enough, earlier in the day I'd given a first listen to Steal Away, the album of traditional hymns and spirituals that Hank Jones made with Charlie Haden in 1995. "Go Down, Moses" from that album is excerpted in the interview, along with a generous sampling of recordings spanning the last half-century. Hank Jones turns 87 on July 31 and still actively plays and records (and practices his scales!). Disciplined and devout in how he lives, thoughtful and inventive in how he plays—Hank Jones is simply inspiring. I'm eager to hear his latest, For My Father, particularly for the Strayhorn ("Lotus Blossom" and "Johnny Come Lately") and for his take on Monk's "Bemsha Swing"; I love Monk, but most of all when he is played by Mr. Jones.

Newly blooming: Salvia verticillata 'Purple Rain', Clematis texensis 'Duchess of Albany', asiatic lilies (burnt orange and pink-tinged orange), Heliotropium arborescens (purple heliotrope), Phlox paniculata, Salvia viridis (annual clary sage, self-sown), Tanacetum parthenium (feverfew), Echinacea purpurea (coneflower), Aconitum napellus (purple monkshood), Sidalcea x 'Party Girl' (miniature hollyhock), Gilia tricolor (bird's-eye gilia), Alcea rosea 'Nigra' (black hollyhock), Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle', Hydrangea 'Endless Summer', Coreopsis verticillata 'Zagreb' and 'Moonbeam' (tickseed), Astilbe arendsii x 'Bressingham Beauty', thornless blackberries.

Dog; tricks.

My 12-year-old stood agape, eyes as big as saucers, as they say. She'd just heard Dad say: "Mom's going to be taking piano lessons". Each of my children has been yoked to involuntary servitude at the piano bench; she finds it incomprehensible that anyone would willingly choose such a fate.

Well, it has been a long time between drinks. I started with a couple of years of lessons in Korea (around the time Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon), but stopped when family circumstances (too many moves, too little money) made it difficult to continue.  I kept at it on my own until leaving for college, but didn't get a piano in living quarters again until we bought our Yamaha upright when our first child began her lessons several years ago. Surprisingly, I found that my fingers still worked, and, oddly enough, that my ability to read music had actually improved. About five years ago, I took a stab at starting lessons again, but the combination of infant in the house + dawn-past-dusk job precluded being able to get in a lick of practice, and I gave it up after a few months.

In the past couple of years, I've been able to make more time to feed this obsession that's burned like a lifelong, low-grade fever. There's not one iota of the performer in me, so I don't try to play for others or look to playing as a means of outward expression. Instead, I use it as a way of "close listening", to try to understand why or how a piece manages to push my buttons, whether it's a bit from Schubert's "little" A major sonata:

or from Beethoven's sonata no. 24 (op. 78 in F sharp major; my favorite, although I can play only a few fragments of it):

On the plus side, when the synapses in the brain fire, the fingers listen (aided, no doubt, by decades of daily contact with the typewriter keyboard), and (as a little-known beneficial side effect of years of training and practice in the law) I read music well. On the minus side, I don't play fast or with power; when I play softly, it's watery; and, like an aging actress who insists on the Vaseline-coated camera lens, I tend to leadfoot the pedal to gauze over my lack of legato.

What are my hopes? I'd like to improve technically and to play more expressively, but most of all, I'd like to be able to play without causing the contents of a grave or two in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof to heave and spin.

My first lesson is later today. Will I crash and burn from the anxiety of playing for someone whose job it is, after all, to observe, judge and (constructively) criticize? Will I finally be brought to confront the limits of my skills in the harsh light of day? Will I have acquired more self-taught bad habits than I can unlearn? Is it too late for this old dog to be taught new tricks? Stay tuned.

Literary gardens

Looks like Prairie Tide and I have a book in common in our garden libraries: The Literary Garden: Recreating Literature's Most Beautiful Gardens in Your Own Backyard. This book combines garden-related excerpts from classic literary works with illustrations, history and how-to information for the plants, flowers and garden creatures featured in the works. I picked up this book about a year ago (in the bargain section of the very same bookstore chain mentioned in Laurie's post) and have enjoyed it too. You can open this book to almost any page and be fascinated by the words of Proust, Fitzgerald, Cather, or Turgenev, just to name a few...but I have a quirky fancy for L. Frank Baum, whose The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is excerpted for the scene where Dorothy, Toto and the Lion are felled by the sweet scent of a vast field of scarlet poppies.

There's another literary garden on the web these days at ever so humble, where you'll find photos, quotes and impressions artfully spotlighting some of our favorite garden friends. Enjoy a leisurely stroll and pick yourself a bouquet of honeysuckle, blue flag iris, daisies, chives, and phlox.

The Literary Garden: Recreating Literature's Most Beautiful Gardens In Your Own Backyard. Duncan Brine (introduction), Lea Richardson and Jesse Kaplan (illustrations). Berkley Books, 2001. ISBN 0-425-18341-6.

Newly blooming: David Austin English rose 'Graham Thomas'; Anagallis arvensis (pimpernel—Baroness Emmuska Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel is featured in The Literary Garden, although what I'm growing is a blue-flowered variety); Papaver somniferum (breadseed poppy—Surrender Dorothy!).

School's out for summer

Photo credit: Jessamyn Roll

Newly blooming: Polyantha roses 'The Fairy' and 'Red Fairy'; David Austin English rose 'Othello'; Nigella damascena (love-in-a-mist); Lychnis coronaria (rose campion); hosta (green with gold edge, unknown cultivar); Erigeron annuus (daisy fleabane); Gaillardia aristata (blanketflower); purple Dutch iris; Papaver rhoeas (corn poppy); lavatera (rose mallow, unknown cultivar); tradescantia (spiderwort, unknown cultivar); Stachys byzantina (lambs' ear); Valeriana officinalis (garden heliotrope); Oenothera tetragona (sundrops); Oenothera macrocarpa (Missouri evening primrose); Hemerocallis 'Double Cutie' and 'Black-eyed Stella' daylilies; Digitalis ambigua (yellow foxglove); Campanula glomerata (clustered bellflower); Veronica austriaca ssp. teucrium 'Crater Lake Blue' (creeping speedwell).

I came, I saw, I smelled

...the newly blooming Titan Arum "Big Bucky" yesterday. Human Flower Project has my report about the visit. Many thanks to Julie Ardery for including my post, and for her very kind words about this blog.

Rose to the occasion

Time to stop and smell the roses. It's that all too brief moment in the season when they're fresh, flush, and as yet unmolested by descending hordes of Japanese beetles. The rose pictured above, the David Austin rose 'Redouté', is perfection in a punchy pale pink. It survived last winter without any protection and suffered only inches, if that, of winterkill on its stems. If last season's performance is any indication, it'll rebloom heavily into autumn.

For someone who's never drawn up a garden plan with a rose in it, I've ended up with a lot of them: besides 'Redouté', there's 'Bibi Maizoon', 'Othello', and 'Graham Thomas' of the David Austin line; polyanthas 'Fairy' and 'Red Fairy'; rugosa roses 'Roseraie de l'Haÿ' and 'Blanc Double de Coubert'; and native Rosa carolina. But I still don't think of myself as the rose "type". I picture the quintessential rose gardener as someone who wafts gracefully and charmingly through rows of perfect pampered specimens. And so it seems to be in Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden by the writer-naturalist-poet-pilot-gardener Diane Ackerman:

The first roses of the season have unfurled—two pink spicy-smelling Paris de Yves Saint Laurent. "Mes roses," I say as I cut them, echoing Cocteau's rose-adoring, sensitive beast in the film La Belle et la Bête.

Being more oaf than diva, "mes D'ohs" is more like what you'll find me saying in the garden (ask me about the rusty whiskey-barrel-band metal shard I managed to jam deep underneath my fingernail a few weeks ago). I've also tended toward a knee-jerk contrarian reaction against the overdone romantic symbolism of the rose, ever since getting two dozen long-stems in my youth from a would-be beau with stalker tendencies. (A hat, on the other hand...now that's romantic.) But there's no reason to begrudge my roses their involuntary baggage. Taken for what they are, there's no other flower with petals as soft and scent as sweet. I'm happy to have them.

Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden by Diane Ackerman. Perennial, 2002 (paperback). ISBN 0060505362.

Newly blooming: Allium nigrum; Allium caeruleum; yellow Dutch iris; Lamium maculatum 'White Nancy'; self-sown Borago officinalis (borage); Cynoglossum amabile (Chinese forget-me-not); Agastache neomexicana (New Mexico hummingbird mint); peonies 'Alberta Kelsey' (Kelsey, 1937), 'Sarah Bernhardt' (Lemoine, 1906), and 'Ann Cousins' (Cousins, 1946); Cotinus coggygria (smokebush); and clematis 'Comtesse du Bouchard' and 'Rhapsody'.

Reading and writing (and chatting): You Grow Girl

My interview of YouGrowGirl's Gayla Trail is featured this week at Saucy, where you'll also find my review of You Grow Girl, the book.

Newly blooming: Lavandula angustifolia (lavender), Knautia macedonia (crimson scabious), and Cerastium tomentosum (snow-in-summer).
 

Are You Experienced?

BBC Radio 3's "The Beethoven Experience" began today, launching six days of all Beethoven, all the time, featuring every work that Beethoven composed. The temptation to give up family, work and sleep in order to immerse myself in this marathon is overwhelming, but I'm being regretfully sensible, and "tuning in" via the live web feed, catch as catch can, as time permits. Lots of good bits today, including the Fifth Symphony with Antal Dorati conducting and the Seventh Symphony with Carlos Kleiber conducting (both excellent choices, although it might have worked even better to have the Kleiber Fifth and the Dorati Seventh). BBC3 is also including in-studio performances as well as recordings as part of the "Experience", which is a terrific idea, and I was bowled over by a remarkable and vivid live performance by Alice Neary and Gretel Dowdeswell of Beethoven's fourth cello sonata. I've enjoyed all the lieder and other vocal works that seem to be interspersed throughout the programming, but particularly favor the chamber pieces. I was happy to have caught the seminal recording of the C sharp minor string quartet (Op. 131) from the '50s by the Hungarian Quartet, which brought back fond memories of hearing the Takács Quartet's energized performance of this same piece last fall here in Madison. I didn't get to hear as many of the piano sonatas today as I would have liked, but made sure I led myself back to the computer in time to hear Alfred Brendel discuss the final three sonatas, leading into his recordings of them. Brendel isn't my favorite Beethoven interpreter; I find myself often bickering with his tempo choices ("too fast, Brendel! too slow, Brendel!"), but his work on the late sonatas is very satisfying. (All the more disappointing that he had to cancel his recital in Madison a few months ago due to illness, but I'm hoping that his participation in this program means that he's been on the mend.) And now, the Kreutzer sonata with Sandor Vegh and Andras Schiff. I'll even stay up past my bedtime for another Seventh, this time with Otto Klemperer conducting. Hmm...can't I go AWOL for the next five days? Laptop, headphones, high-speed internet connection, room service and NoDoz? Sounds like a plan.

Newly blooming: Roses (Rosa carolina, rugosa rose 'Roseraie de l'Haÿ, David Austin rose 'Redouté'), peonies ('James Pillow' [Pillow, 1936], 'Lillian Gumm' [Gumm, 1921], 'Bev' [Krekler, 1975], 'Dai jo kuhan' [Millet, year unknown], and 'Festiva Maxima' [Mielles, 1851]), Viburnum dentatum (arrowwood viburnum), Physocarpus opulifolius 'Dart's Gold' (ninebark), Salvia x superba 'Mainacht' (May Night salvia), Alchemilla mollis (lady's mantle), Anchusa azurea 'Dropmore' (Italian bugloss), and Allium christophii (Star of Persia).