Vienna after Midnight: Virtual Bike Tour Continues

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Scott Smoot at Vienna's State Opera House, virtually, with the ghost of its former director.

Sometime after midnight, my friend Mark Millkey put Mahler's Titan Symphony on his record player and asked me to be patient: "This composer's a little long-winded." I had time, although it was a week night, because Mom had lifted my curfew for the last quarter of high school.

Mark and I had passed the hours after class talking literature, faith, and music. Now he let me discover for myself that Mahler's solemn funeral march was a nursery tune, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous? ("are you sleeping, Brother John?"). I got the gallows humor.

That's what makes Vienna one of "the places I've lived or loved," enough so that I've covered 184 miles on bike trails around Atlanta just to make the side trip from Salzburg. Mahler conducted there, Mark visited there, and, driving home that night around 2:30 am, I felt that I, at 17, had reached the pinnacle of maturity and spiritual depth.

To the extent that I really had grown up, Mark had a lot to do with it.  Being so modest, he probably didn't know it. Freshman year, he'd been just a regular guy. After straining his voice in his job at a summer camp, Mark couldn't speak during our sophomore year. Abstaining from gossip and chatter, he learned to listen. He became a model of empathy and tact. When Mark could speak again, he asked about things that mattered; he was everyone's best friend and confidant.

Many of us were evangelicals; he was our only Roman Catholic. When he expressed mild amusement about a prayer he'd heard, "Lord, just tell me, can I run a stop sign at a deserted intersection?" (something I, too, was torn up about), I took a new look at my belief system. We joined Mark for Christmas at the church designed by Mark's late father, architect Herbert Millkey, where the priest fed us in the rectory after midnight Mass. Another Christmas, as Mark and I exchanged wrapped gifts, we knew by heft we'd both received the collected letters of Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor. I ended up much closer in outlook to Mark and Flannery than to the Moral Majority.

I was honored when Mark invited me with Joe A. and Matt H. to hike the north Georgia mountains for three days in the week after AP exams. Because of heavy rain, we pushed hard to finish in half that time; when tempers flared, Mark made peace. As Flannery wrote in a story, "I'm glad I've went once; I ain't never goin' again."

I used Mark's story to teach generations of middle schoolers about asking questions and really listening to the answers. At my best, I'm still emulating him. And I still love Mahler.

Miles YTD 458 || 2nd World Tour Total 13,993 beginning June 2020 || Next Stop: Warsaw

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"Lightning Strike" and "Fox Creek": W. K. Krueger's Series 18 and 19

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Fox River

A man hires part-time detective Cork O'Connor to find his beautiful wife Dolores who ran off with a lover. So far, so noir, author William Kent Krueger channeling Chandler. It's so classic, it's a stereotype. Then we learn the identity of The Other Man. I laughed out loud.

Still, Fox Creek is full of suspense, ordeals, and moral dilemmas. As Krueger himself notes in an interview at the back of my signed hardback edition, beloved characters of the series have suffered and died. Because we can't assume they'll be okay, he can generate some genuine suspense.

But among the great joys of this series is the building up of community around Cork. His friends and family are all involved in the search for Dolores, even after Cork's wife Rainy and mentor Henry Meloux become targets. His son Stephen, whom longtime fans remember as a vulnerable little boy, now shares with his father the responsibility of being an action hero. It's a delight to see Stephen fall in love with a suitably courageous and smart woman named Belle who seems to feel the same about him.

We find another joy on the border between standard detective novel and wilderness adventure, as the action crosses from Cork's small Minnesota town into Canada.

As always, Krueger also explores the boundary between the material world and spirituality, whether that's Ojibwe or Christian. Stephen's vision and the wisdom of Henry figure in the story.

While Henry leads Dolores and Rainy through woods he's known 100 years, he misleads a tribal hunter working for the bad guys. Through the hunt, Henry and the hunter known as LeLoux ("the Wolf") come to respect each other. Their relationship becomes the heart of the novel long before they ever meet.

Lightning Strike

The book before that is Lightning Strike, set in the summer of Cork's 12th year. With two buddies, he discovers the body of a revered Indian man hanging in a secluded spot where the friends like to camp and canoe. Cork's father Liam, the town's sheriff, investigates. The death at first seems to be a suicide, then a murder staged to look like suicide. The victim's Indian half-brother is implicated, but so is the town's white millionaire. No matter which way the evidence takes Liam, he's making enemies.

To see the father-son relationship with Cork in the child's place is instantly rich with resonances to the other books and rewarding. Many of my favorite moments happen when Cork slips out of his bedroom onto the roof of the porch where he can think -- and sometimes hear his parents' low voices when they discuss the crime and their parenting of him.

While the setting is 1963, the novel resonates with the upheaval and uncertainty of the year of its copyright, 2020. Liam is a white cop, married to an Ojibwe woman, hearing anger and mistrust from both the reservation and the white townspeople. Young Cork feels afraid: "The world seemed to be changing in front of his eyes, and he couldn't figure out if it was him -- that he'd simply been blind before -- or if the world was, indeed, shifting, becoming unstable under his feet" (207). Later, he confesses to his mom, "Everthing's different. It all feels broken. Here and on the rez" (271). I know that feeling. His mother has no answers.

Henry Meloux does. 50 years before he's the elder we know, he's already wise. "Nothing is broken," he tells young Cork. "It is just that we see only in part" (272). Again, "Fear is not a bad thing in itself....It is what we do with our fear that matters."

Cork does some investigation on his own, and takes his buddies out to the wilderness to snoop around. The action ramps up fast.

There's a theme of empathy, here. Cork imagines the last minutes in the life of a tribal girl who drowned and understands in a flash of insight what really happened. He feels it deeply: "She'd been just a victim before. Now, she was a person and Cork felt a genuine sorrow, one he wanted to talk about but could not" (350). Liam is chagrined to see himself as his son must see him. "Even to himself he looked like a stranger, a man who could frighten children" (256). He goes to talk to his son, but Cork's asleep, and the father keeps his feelings to himself.

No spoiler alert, needed, here: Longtime fans know from the 10th book Vermilion Drift that Liam O'Connor will die estranged from his son later that summer. That subtext adds emotional substance to the entire novel.

[Find a list of links to my appreciations of other Krueger novels on my Crime Fiction page]

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New Poems at "First Verse"

At my blog First Verse, I've posted six new poems since Christmas, with images by Susan Rouse.

• On Track| Literally, the first thing I remember; allegorically, the rest of my life.
• Expiration Date| The apocalypse, at a Publix.
• We Thank You for the Gift of Water| Puppies are involved.
• Conspiracy Theory| The great balloon panic of 2023.
• Day after Valentine's| Happy Singles Awareness Day.
• Bike, Snake| Spoiler alert: he wasn't hurt.

I hope you'll check these, and more, at First Verse. If you do, leave a comment. Feedback keeps me scratching away at my legal pad each morning.

The NEW New Music at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

The composer of a piece premiered by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Saturday night hadn't been born when minimalism was an audacious new music that inspired me to want to compose. [See my page The Minimalist Zone.] Curiosity about the new new music drew me to Woodruff Arts Center for the first time since the pandemic.

Jerry Hou conducted with joy and shared evident rapport with his players. During bows, he ran among them to draw attention to soloists and sections.

Hou, center; from top left: Tower, Montgomery, Bartok, Pratt

This was the premiere for Rounds, a piece for piano and strings by young composer Jamie Montgomery. Her program note alerted us that the form was a rondo, and that the first movement was a rondo within a rondo -- hence the title, a translation of "Rondos." But we also heard material played by the pianist echoed by the strings in the manner of what in English we call a round.

Piano soloist Awadagin Pratt and I are 20 years older than when I saw him play a recital at Georgia Tech. Back then he was a young lion with a thick mane of dredlocks. While he played, he snarled "Don't do that!" at a reporter snapping his picture and glared at the house when people applauded at inappropriate moments. He was a big guy who sat on a teeny little bench and raised his hands above his chest to reach the keyboard. Aside from the theatrics, he also made clear the middle voices of a Bach piece -- a revelation for me, and a miracle of technique, I thought.

He has mellowed. Saturday, he was professorial, with thinned hair, a gray beard, and smiles. The bench was only marginally lower than we're used to seeing. But he was sensitive as ever playing a cascade of notes tenderly one moment, beating block chords another.

The concert opened with 1920/2019 by eminent composer Joan Tower, commemorating women's right to vote and the #MeToo movement.

The new music, different as the pieces were, shared a few characteristics.

There was a great variety of textures and colors, from full ensemble sound to just a soloist or a duet, sections playing in tandem or going up against each other. Pratt startled us when he stood up to reach inside the piano to pluck and strum the strings.

Then, the composers played more with modules or gestures than with anything we could call a melody. Ascending scales in Tower's piece (not quite do-re-mi -- a couple of tones were augmented) weren't a tune but a suggestion of upward movement -- and a ceiling to break through. Montgomery gave the piano a spray of delicately arpeggiated notes (think "Rustles of Spring"), a lovely and quiet gesture that she slid up and down the keyboard and contrasted with harsh explosive chords.

Taking a long view, I think that the minimalists I loved had some influence on what I heard Saturday. Before them, the concert composer's pride was in their ingenuity developing and varying themes. Even 12-tone music was rigorously focused on what you do with a given sequence of notes. But the minimalists thinned out melody to just a module of two or three notes repeated over a pulse, drawing our attention instead to the processes of imitative counterpoint, gradually shifting harmony, and instrumental colors.

In Tower's piece, I heard the wood block's tok-tok-tok that John Adams patented in his big hit "Short Ride on a Fast Machine" ca. 1986; the repetition of a single bass note was a feature throughout the movements of her piece, sometimes slow and regular, sometimes fast, whether puffed, plucked, or pounded. Whatever the composers might say about minimalism, they would surely agree that their pieces are not about melody.

After their pieces, I picked up some of the same qualities in Bartok. In the five movements of his concerto, I recognize several gestures that make a strong impression every time we hear them. They're repeated, imitated, varied a little, but none is a tune you could hum for more than a couple of bars -- except the annoying one by Shostakovitch (or maybe Lehar) that Bartok ends with a fart from the low brass. The colors and the contrasts take me by surprise even now, more than 40 years after I first fell in love with it through an LP.

It was a joyous welcome back. The hall was nearly full, with an audience diverse in age, ethnicity, and dress. I saw a lot of young couples. All appeared to be enthusiastic. Keep the tradition alive, people, and keep the new music coming.