Carpe Diem, Carpe Musica

Okay I’ll admit it. I haven’t sung with a choir since I was in high school, and that was a very long time ago. But here, in this spacious rehearsal room at Strathmore, a center for the arts, I get to do it again – carefully pick out my part in the sheet music, then blend my voice with the sopranos on either side of me. I love that leaning-in moment when two singers are listening to one other, and I love that surround-sound feeling of many voices – nearly 100 in this case – striking full-on harmony.

It is the third rehearsal of Carpe Diem, the ad hoc chorus I wrote about here. The music is lovely – Malcolm Dalglish’s Song of the Earth, with fluid, undulating harmonies and rippling rhythms evocative of flowing rivers and breezes blown through leafy trees. It will be sung, appropriately enough, for Earth Day.

But I think I’m enjoying the comradery of singing just as much as the music itself. Just as it did in high school, the music transcends the other things that define us as individuals. In school, chorus was the one time I stepped out of tracked honors classes like chemistry and English, and into a more diverse group of kids, where we thought about voices, not grades. In this adult chorus -- with a few teens sprinkled in – singers are more interested in musical experience and tone than who’s working what job and for how much salary.

Still, I do know that the woman next to me teaches young primary schoolers music – I asked if she sang professionally, as her strong voice was nailing that high A pretty well, and she admitted her job did keep her tuned in, so to speak. On my other side is a woman I know from my neighborhood, a minister mom I run into occasionally at yoga class. Last rehearsal I met a professional story teller. My carpool buddies include a psychotherapist, and I know there’s at least one doctor in the mix, plus a midwife, a land conservationist and a landscaper.

Here, though, we categorize ourselves not by profession but by voice: soprano, alto, tenor, bass. And then by height, so the director can hear each of us, and we can each see her. That feels like another throwback to school days – tall, lanky folks in the back, so they inevitably feel gawky and awkward; short ones up front, where they can feel stumpy and small. You would think we’d have grown past all that as adults but I can see by the way people shuffle themselves around that we’re not quite over it. No matter. The music does transcend – body image¸ age, profession, all of it.

I’m looking forward to the next rehearsal – last time, our director admonished us that we must do our homework, and I’ve been dutifully sitting at the piano, practicing. And here’s an improvement over high school days: I can listen to a CD of the music and sing along or I can use an MP3 player or my computer to hear an explanation of dynamics from the composer, Malcolm Dalglish. Yes, a few things have changed – but the inspiration of the music remains.

Carpe Diem will be performing April 23 – for more info see the web site.
(Image from Oolitic Music)

The Chopins: Bringing Music and Literature Together

This week my daughter, Clara, came home from school and announced she likes Chopin. Both Kate Chopin, whose book, The Awakening, she is reading for high school English, and Frederic Chopin, the 19th century composer. Clara’s fabulous English teacher (thanks, Mr. Anderson!) had the students listen to Chopin, to see if the piece referenced in the book matches the mood of the story. Talk about value added. I love this class.

So as Clara played Chopin through Pandora (do you know about this? Tell the web site what music you like and it will play it, plus music like it, for hours), I recalled how I once played Chopin on the piano, myself. I don’t play much anymore, but, inspired, I took out the old music books.

Playing a piano is a little like riding a bike – once you’ve done it, it comes back quickly. But if you’ve been away for long, there’s a whole lot more wobbling, and if you could fall down on a piano, there would be a lot of pileups and scraped knuckles on the keyboard. The muscle memory in my fingers allows me to run pretty accurately over grace notes and trills and magically land (some of) the right chords, but precision and consistency are long gone. And if I start to actually think about the individual notes, they leave me stumbling.

Still, going through my old piano books and trying some of these pieces was a little like going through an old photo album. Things are familiar in an “oh, yeah, I remember this!” way. I was amazed at how much I could play – and so very grateful to my parents for giving me lessons (and enforcing practice time) for so many years.

These occasional forays into reviving my piano playing always bring to mind the salons of the 19th century, when instead of turning on the television, people would play music for one another in the parlor. I get the feeling that most people (of a certain stature) learned music of some sort. And I often wind up thinking about how much more beautiful our world would be, if we chucked the t.v. and instead played music and read novels and poetry to one another each evening (a little needlework, anyone?)

On our Chopin night, Clara wound up turning off Pandora and I played for her (and, admittedly, myself) while she did her homework. Turns out that in addition to Chopin, she likes Mozart, too. Later, she dug up “Bastien Piano Basics, Primer Level,” and reviewed what she’d learned at around age 11, when I (briefly) sat her down on the piano bench and gave her lessons. And yesterday, she came home from school and made a beeline for the piano to play some more. I can’t tell you how lovely it was to sit in my office and hear I’m a Little Teapot, Skip to My Lou and Scarborough Fair drifting up the stairs.

First blossoms, all over again

It has been a long winter. The longest in memory for me and my Maryland neighbors – but perhaps that’s just the way it feels in the wake of weeks of snow and ice, followed by an uplifting but too-brief peak of sun, then bone-chilling dampness and rain for days. Cold, again? Yes. So the garden gloves go back on the shelf and we pull on our sweaters and wait it out.

And, in this grey landscape, we cherish the bright spots: like the first daffodils! I saw them just days ago. They were still tight in their buds, but like a lesson learned over and over again, I knew they would emerge, and today, here they are, open to the first sun we've had in a what seems like a very long time. Spring, I think, is the very origin of faith.

Other signs whisper of warmth and color to come: patches of purple crocuses (does anyone ever plant these, or do they just come up on their own every year?), an early spray of yellow forsythia down the block, a sprinkling of snow drops in my own front yard.

Last week (in that brief sunny period) I watched as my neighbor crouched in his curbside garden with his two young daughters (ages 2 and 4), showing them how to draw a line in the soil and sprinkle lettuce seeds in a (relatively) straight line, then gently cover them up. When the tender leaves emerge, and the girls taste what they’ve planted, it will be an epiphany – look at what we did! Even though I have sprinkled lettuce seeds year after year in my own garden, when the babies appear like green fuzz on the soil, it still seems like a miracle. And it is.

The twist to this lesson in faith: Planting a garden only underscores the promise of spring. The earth will come around, whether we believe in it or not.

Play It Again

Yesterday I slid a CD into the player and selected my favorite track and just as it began to play, was filled up with missing my son, it was like he’d gotten in the car after a long time away and we were both grinning over the opening riff of a Dave Matthews song, and then that piercing vocal interval, and the lyric, “I’d like to show you what’s inside, but I sure don’t care if you do or you don’t like it.”

What do I miss about Tyler, as he travels the world? I could tell you I miss his creativity, his fearlessness and disregard for convention. But words don’t quite get at the way we miss our loved ones. Thank God, then, for music.

There’s another tune running around in my head that brings me back to when the children were slippery fish in the bath tub, and I was a young mama singing to them: “You’re my little potato... my sweet potato, dug you up, you come from underground.” I thought it was just a quirky tune from a children’s cassette but now I realize that (of course) someone wrote it and arranged it and, imagine this, will be performing it April 23 at the grand Music Hall at Strathmore. And – surprise! -- I’ll be singing it there, too.

As a member of Carpe Diem, an ad hoc chorus pulled together to perform at specific events, I’ll be singing with Malcolm Dalglish, the very man who wrote “Little Potato” – and a plethora of other songs for dulcimer, drums and voice. The event celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, so while I may have visions of bathtime, most of the music will evoke the rhythms and beauty of the natural world – another grand subject difficult to capture with just words.

The potato song goes on -- “The world is big, so big, so very big – it’s new to you, it’s new to you.” Its bounce and upbeat melody convey the simple joy of discovery – or rediscovery, the privilege of parents everywhere who see the world anew when they look through the eyes of their children. Happy travels, Tyler. Happy Earth Day, all.

Rising ambition

I have had this recipe for 7-grain bread for too many years to count. It was tucked into the wooden recipe box I inherited from my mom – the kind sized for the little “recipe cards” we used to exchange, before the days of Cooking Light and Epicurious.com. You remember them: variations on index cards, with cute pictures in the margins and a little spot that says, “From the Kitchen of. . .” where you fill in your name. I have plain ones, too, with my grandmother’s handwriting (meatloaf, apple cake), the neighbors’ (Scotch shortbread, spiced nuts), and my mother’s (too many to list).

This recipe – on one of the fancy cards -- is in my sister Jean’s hand, so as I gather ingredients I picture her pantry, always stocked full of grains and beans and home-canned fruits and vegetables. I don’t know what her pantry looks like anymore – she lives several states away, and the last time I saw her food shelves was years ago. I know without looking, though, that her shelves are always well stocked, and that is a comfort to me.

I use a breadmaker for the first time on this bread, a breadmaker unearthed after 25 years of storage from my friend’s pile of things-untouched-for-years. I’m sure it has its own memories and people attached to it, but I don’t ask much about that. I am busy adjusting my attitude toward mechanized bread making.

Breadmakers have always felt a little like cheating, which is why, when my mother sent me money years ago to buy one for myself, I bought a juicer instead. Maybe it’s because I still love the feel of silky dough between my fingers, and I don’t mind the 10 minutes of kneading – it is a quiet break in an otherwise hectic life. I love to punch down the pillow of dough after its first rise, losing my fist in its yeasty ambition, knowing it will overcome this small act of aggression and rise all over again.

But I’ve also heard enough converts point out that, if you can make bread in less time, with less effort, it’s more likely you’ll make your own instead of caving in to the $5 loaves at the farmer’s market (which, in fact was the inspiration for this bread making session). So I give the breadmaker a whirl:

Pour all the ingredients into the machine, yeast first, lukewarm water last. Flip a switch, and watch it gyrate into what becomes a blob of living dough. Take a nap on the couch. Four hours later, gently extract an enormous, cylindrical loaf of seven grain bread your sister would be proud of.

Wow, was that ever easy. I am already picking out the next recipe to try.

In Love with the Downbeat

You can do it in a honky tonk with sticky floors and bad acoustics, in a bar called the Rock and Roll Hotel, in an elegant, velvet-draped music hall or in a church meeting room. You can do it in your living room, or in your friend’s shed, or on the front porch or in the back yard. Wherever you are, when the beat is called out – uh-one…two...one-two-three-four -- and someone lays into an infectious groove, I’m hooked.

I’m lucky – I get to hear live music in all of those places. Last week, I heard Mark Wenner, the driving force behind the area’s venerable Nighthawks, along with a slew of blues and roots musicians (the Akousticats) who first made me feel inadequately educated about the origins of some of our most familiar tunes, but more importantly (and lastingly) made me grin ‘til my cheeks hurt, listening to their tight sound and the wail of Wenner’s harmonica (what is it about its piercing music that reaches right into my chest and squeezes my heart?). They hit the “stage” at St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church, home to the Institute of Musical Traditions (IMT) weekly concerts; the audience sat on folding chairs and ate homemade cookies and drank tea, listening to music more evocative of a smoky roadhouse than a church service. They loved it.

I also caught Mark O’Connor and Dorado Schmitt recently at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theatre, an intimate space tucked into the second story that I’d somehow missed in 27 years of living in the D.C. area. The concert, a tribute to the late Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, was another grin-fest. These musicians were phenomenal: O’Connor on jazz violin, so comfortable in the music it was like a second skin; Schmitt playing gypsy strings so fast it took my breath away; the guitar duo Frank Vignola and Julian Lage like kids, trading licks, giddy with how perfectly it all fit together. At one point the bass players – one from O’Connor’s band, the other from Schmitt’s -- took turns on one instrument, each completing the other’s bar, barely missing a beat.

Then there was D.C.'s Rock N Roll Hotel -- really -- where we got to hear the great and uber-danceable Afrofunk band, Chopteeth, all percussion and brass and deep rhythm, calling out to a crowd that included aging hippies, Peace Corps-looking 20-somethings, and plenty of in-between. The bonus was an upstairs disco complete with lights and music that might have sounded retro to the younger crowd that dominated the dance floor, but sounded like yesterday to me.

These are just three examples of local music venues, but there are plenty more. IMT recently found a second location, so there will be concerts in Takoma Park beginning next month, at Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange on Maple Avenue. (The first concert is Laura Cortese and Jefferson Hamer -- traditional and modern folk and pop – and since it’s a “concert and jam,” you can bring your own instrument and stay to join the performers if you like). These shows are so affordable -- $10-20 in advance – it’s hard to make an excuse to miss them. A similar organization, Focus Rockville, presents weekly at the Unitarian Church in Rockville.

There are, of course, free street festivals featuring loads of local music when the weather gets warmer. Meanwhile, Takoma Park hosts the annual Folklore Society of Washington Midwinter Festival at the Middle School, Feb. 6, with live music and dance lessons (two of my favorite things in the world).

If you go to hear any live music in the area – and you really should – look for me. I’ll be the one in the middle of the room, wearing a big grin.

Why I Have a Dog

Recently we had one of the most frigid days of the season, the kind of day when I wonder why I left the Florida town where I grew up, the kind of day more conducive to baking bread and making stew than to long walks in the park. But you never know where whimsy – or your dog – will take you.

That’s why I love having a dog. She gets me out of the house when nothing else will, and on days like this icy January morning that can mean unexpected pleasure.

I must admit, one of the keys to enjoying the weather – even when it is icy cold -- is gear. I learned just a couple of years ago what a difference good cold weather clothes can make. Layered up in snow pants and parka, scarf, hat and gloves with two sweaters underneath, I was Warm Enough and once I got walking I was Toasty.

So Nala the dog led me off to Sligo Creek Park, my favorite dog walk when I have the luxury of an hour or so to walk her. There were few other walkers out – though I was impressed to see my die-hard neighbor running (Go, Peter!). Fewer people meant fewer dogs, and fewer yanks on the leash. Even the squirrels seemed scarce.

Actually, we had the park to ourselves – if you don’t count he myriad previous visitors Nala picked up as she sniffed what remained of their scents. The creek was beginning to freeze, so it was still along the banks and had a narrow thread of moving water down its center. Lacy platforms of ice were forming like the brims of hats perched on grey boulders. Branches, bare of leaves, stood dark, etched sharp against the gray sky. The world was all ours – like a gift.

Thanks, Nala.