A particularly special oddity

Just a bit of German, although I wish it were more. And 130 is true. Daniel Denvir, in the 23 Mar 2010 Philadelphia Weekly, his description of a stroll through the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Central branch, where they’ve let me work, lo, these… how many years?!:

We re-emerge to find ourselves in the Fleisher Collection, a particularly special oddity. The room contains more than 21,000 full musical scores and performance materials, the largest such collection on earth. The Free Library is the top lender of these materials to orchestras worldwide including some of the estimated 130 orchestras in the Philadelphia metro region. Curator Kile Smith has worked here 29 years, and every day he fields long-distance calls from music directors. “I got a call once and a guy said, ‘I am in Tokyo, do you speak German?’” recalls Smith, who fortunately does speak a bit of German.

Mason Jones

mason-jonesSomeone from the Philadelphia Orchestra let me know last week of the passing of the great hornist Mason Jones. The obituary by Daniel Webster in the Philadelphia Inquirer captures the magnitude of his influence, and the International Horn Society also remembers him here. I met him only twice, but the first meeting in the Fleisher Collection was (for me) memorable.

Mr. Jones walked in one day (probably 20 years ago now), wanting to look at some score or other. He did not identify himself, but I immediately knew who he was. Well, yes: I knew, but no: not immediately. I am not always the best with names. He looked familiar, but I did not know why. I couldn’t place him, in the second or two before he spoke and while I said something like, “Oh, yes! [As if I knew exactly who he was.] May I help you?” But then he spoke.

Now, I have a recording of the Hindemith Sonata for E-flat Horn and Piano. The players are supposed to recite a poem before the last movement, and they do on this recording. So, the instant he spoke I recognized his voice from the poem. So I knew who he was, but I still couldn’t come up with his name, not for the life of me. Famous horn player…many years principal in Philadelphia…recorded that Hindemith with Glenn Gould (I’d recognize his voice, too) that I have, uh, uh, begins with…

So I nonchalantly said that I loved his recording of the Hindemith E-flat (which was true), and that I played it often (also true). He could not have been kinder or more self-effacing, something confirmed to me by the experience of many others. When he left I breathed a huge sigh…and then remembered his name.

A wonderful man, a great player and teacher, and I am told that he was good with names. May he rest in peace.

Happy 80th, Mom!

Dear Mom,
My memories of you are many, but seem always to revolve around your patience. I never told you that I always admired how good in math you were, for instance, but your patience hovers over everything. You taught me to drive. On a stick. 1897, I think it was. You took me to the big hill, coming up from the trestle to Walnut and Bethel at the stop sign. You put it in neutral, put the parking brake on, and I got in the driver’s seat and had to take the brake off, put it into first, give it gas, and let out the clutch. I was petrified—to say nothing of the line of cars behind us—but you never lost your cool. Actually, I
don’t know what you were thinking because you didn’t get back into the car, you just walked home. I drove by there not too long ago, and I see it’s hardly a hill at all. How tall was I back then, eight inches? A foot? And then you drove me over to Center City Philadelphia and made me drive back. Why did you scare me like that? What is wrong with you, woman? A one-foot tall kid driving on Vine Street, the Ben Franklin, and Route 130 with lanes that are about 36 inches wide? (I just drove there, and they still are.) But we made it back to Cedar Avenue somehow, and now I’m a confident, carefree driver. Those are not the words Jackie would use, so I’d just like to tell her that it’s all due to you. Not that I inherited any of that patience—no, you don’t catch me teaching Priscilla how to drive. You’ve just given me this impossible model, this bright, shining example of what a loving person should be, something I can never live up to, thank you, thank you so much. I’m already older than you were when you taught me to drive, but your model of patience gives me something to shoot for when I’m 80, and if I’ve got the math right, you’ll be 320. Love, Kile

10,000

chinesenewYou know there’s an article on 10,000 in Wikipedia? That’s right, 10,000. The number. I didn’t know you could have an article on a number. They say it’s between 9,999 and 10,001. They really say that.

Didn’t check all the other numbers.

I remember hearing long ago that in China, there’s a symbol for 10,000, but what it really means is a huge, indefinitely large number. And look at that, it says so right there in Wikipedia. I’m sure the banks in China have a very definite meaning for 10,000 but maybe that huge, indefinite idea is holding its ground where they don’t have banks. Now the Greeks, they even have a name for 10,000: Myriad. How about that, I did not know you could name a number, other than, you know, its name (George Carlin once invented a number—Bleen he called it—and said it was somewhere between six and seven), but those Greeks, darned if they didn’t go ahead and name a number for real. Myriad, who knew it was an actual number?

This blog went up almost two years ago, and I see that it just broke through 10,000 hits. That is a huge, indefinitely large number to me. It may be on the small side as far as blogs go, or large for the average blog, I don’t know, I don’t keep track of those things, but a myriad of hits (see? use it yourself in a sentence!) seems like a lot to me.

I kept a website for a while mainly as a way for me to track down my own things. Program notes, the instrumentation I can never remember of a five-year-old piece, an updated bio: I was always scrambling to find information, so I began the site to keep everything in one place. But as more people played my music, and more people asked about it, the website evolved into this.

The M 10000

The M 10000

The shift was gradual; at first I simply kept a calendar, and added events ad hoc. Then, as I learned more about what I was doing, I grew it into some established pages (those are listed on the right) and added posts about various activities. I started using the blog, in other words, as a blog.

I’ve never wanted this to become a place where I was just spouting off on anything that occurred to me; there are enough blogs like that already. I have expanded it beyond the “my piece is being played tonight, come on out” to various musings, but I’ve restricted them, I trust, to my immediate musical activities: compositions and performances, the radio shows, CD reviews and such. If I talk about good barbeque in Nashville, it’s a by-the-way involving my participation at a music conference there. If I mention Levi Stubbs, it’s only because I wanted to make a point about the ophicleide. No, wait, reverse that. Anyway, you get the idea.

It remains a fairly simple blog. There are bits about my music, audio samples, links to places of interest and those YouTube clips, and some thoughts on various things musical. A myriad of you (as of this writing, 49 over a myriad) have dropped in, and for that I’m very grateful. Thank you.

About the photo

It’s John Wesley Pinckney (1861–1919), a great-grandfather of Jackie’s, in, we think, Nebraska or Iowa. The “Grandpa Pinckney” written along the bottom looks to be the handwriting of Jackie’s maternal grandmother, Lillian Fay Buckley Pinckney, perhaps as a keepsake for her daughter Violet. Lillian married John Joseph Pinckney, John Wesley’s son.

I was fortunate to meet John Joseph Pinckney and Lillian in 1977 at their farm in Smyrna, N.Y., where he had raised Red Polls. This was two years before Jackie and I were married. This was also the same day I first met Aunt Violet, Uncle LeRoy (“That what they teach you in college, to put your coat on to walk from the car to the house?”: his very first words to me), and cousin Dale, over at their dairy farm not too far away in Sherburne. So, then, why is this photo here?

It’s simply my favorite picture. It encapsulates the ancient virtue of perseverance, of staying with it, of getting rid of dead wood. It looks exactly like composing (or at least orchestrating) to me. In this wash of a snapshot, the left foot is just about to alight, the right arm is slightly akimbo, just enough to balance the load on that broad Scottish shoulder. To the left, the merest hint of a simple clapboard house. The photo is taken just as he clears the out-buildings—from above, the log frames them. In a step or two the front of the log would be hidden. It is stunningly parallel with what looks to be a garden-border on the ground. He is just left of center, driving the motion out of the frame, but amazingly, the log is perfectly centered between the right and left borders of the picture, cut off bluntly in front, trailing a dramatically decaying comet’s wake behind. He not only bears his burden but is obscured by it. He and it make the sign of the cross.

This photo, this one-in-a-million, transfixes me.

Writing a bio

Click here to learn more than anyone would ever care to know about me. You know, I’ve tried, but I think I despair of ever achieving that balance of bravado, humility, gravitas, and laconic squinting-into-the-distance-with-a-leathery-façade-over-an-obvious-to-everyone-but-me-aching vulnerability that is essential to the successful bio. Maybe I try too hard.

And we all know what Yoda said about try, don’t we.*

He really meant it, too, because he sighs and his ears lower like they do when he really, really means something. Like when he’s about to have a lightsaber fight. Or move a spaceship with his mind. Or take a nap. But he was being tough on Luke, don’t you think?, because the kid was so darned vulnerable right then, I mean, c’mon, he was opening his heart to Yoda.

No, you’re right, he was pretty much just whining.

If you’ve actually read this far, then you might as well click here. That will tell you about the picture in the masthead, and hardly anything at all about me… well, some things, but you’ll have to read between the lines, what with my leathery façade and all.

*OK, maybe we don’t. “Do or do not. There is no try.” My daughters like to hear me say that in Yoda’s voice. Well, they used to.