Who Else Likes the Music of Sir Michael Tippett?

Glowing reviews of a posthumous recording of Sir Michael Tippett's final composition The Rose Lake called it a radiant, accessible piece, crowning the career of a venerable maverick composer whose imagination seemed to grow more fertile with age.  But then Sir Michael Tippett disappeared from discourse.  Even in 2005, centennial of his birth, all I saw of note on the internet were a staging of his oratorio A Child of Our Time and a sneering article warning us to avoid any celebration of the composer whose music is best forgotten. 

How could he fall so suddenly?  I'd received a Tippett newsletter for years, telling of planned concerts and productions of his operas.  I'd been to Houston Grand Opera for the premiere of his opera New Year, where the excited little lady who gave the pre-show talk promised that anyone disenchanted with recent HGO premieres by minimalist composers Adams and Glass would be delighted by Tippett, a "maximalist."  I'd read an issue of Musical America devoted to his works, and two of at least three books about him published in the 80s and 90s.  Atlanta's premier classical record store brought in the first two CDs of a projected series of Tippett's complete works -- but the series did not continue after his death.

How could he have been so fascinating and important one decade, passé the next?  It seems reasonable to think that either we were all wrong before, or the world is missing something now.

The truth, I'm afraid, may be found in the offhand judgment of a musician friend.  Tenor McCarrell Ayers told me that he'd sung Tippett for church (probably the Magnificat).  "It was all right," he said, his voice trailing off a bit, "but in the end, it just was more trouble than it was worth." 

[Photo:Double Concerto my intro to MT, still my favorite]

I know what McCarrell meant by Tippett's "trouble."  I bought the score for his 1965 cantata Vision of St. Augustine to play it myself because no recordings were available.   But I gave up after page one.  Triplets are okay, but doublets? quintuplets?  Tied?  With dotted rhythms?  Grouped across the bars?  When a recording came out at last, I listened eagerly, but couldn't follow the music in the score.

Other snippets of Tippett's music printed in Ian Kemp's biography Tippett: The Composer and His Music (Oxford Press, 1987) look almost as daunting, but I know the sounds, and they are worth the trouble.  Here are a few favorites:

Tippett's second symphony begins as a classical head-banger, an ominous double-bass chugging along under the importunate chatter of high strings -- before we lift off into spacious meditation.  (I like the first symphony, too, a friendlier piece.)

His biggest hit is A Child of Our Time, an abstracted retelling of the event we remember as Kristallnacht.  When Tippett wrote the piece, Hitler's regime was spreading its influence across the channel.  The text combines Jungian theory ("The world has turned to its dark side... I must embrace my shadow") with the structure of a Bach oratorio.  Where Bach would insert his arrangement of a familiar Lutheran hymn to sum up a segment of the story, Tippett used Negro Spirituals.  It's a great idea, though it means that we have a chorus of German Jews singing "Nobody knows the trouble I seen, Lord, nobody knows like Jesus."  Excerpts are viewable on YouTube.

The Concerto for Double String Orchestra begins with a jaunty theme, interlaced with counter themes and inversions.  As many times as I've heard it, I'm still surprised at any given point in the piece by what I hear in the layers of the texture.  The slow movement, sweet and melancholy, also takes us to some surprising places of arid, stringent dissonance before coming home.  The finale feels joyous without losing that tinge of melancholy.  Just before the piece ends, a new theme rises up out of the mix and plays like a benediction over all.  (By the way, in all my years of symphony-going and public-radio- listening, this is the only piece of Tippett's that I've ever heard outside my own home, and that was just last year.)  I find many postings of this piece on YouTube.

My composition teacher Dr. James Sclater, who introduced me to Tippett's music,  admired Tippett's brazenness.  "He does just whatever he wants to!" In his copy of the score for Tippett's Concerto for Orchestra, Dr. Sclater had marked more than a dozen musical "gestures" in the first movement, each in a different tempo, for a different subgrouping of instruments, to see how Tippett mixed and matched those in a kind of mosaic.  Instead of building to a big finale, the movement simply stopped mid-line.  Dr. Sclater was amused and amazed.  I enjoy the effect, too.

That mosaic effect was something Tippett developed for his great opera King Priam.  In the first new article about Tippett that I've seen in years, Tippett's longtime partner and musical champion Meirion Bowen writes in The Guardian  "How King Priam Saved Michael Tippett."  Tippett's reputation had been that of a fuzzy-headed intellectual and musical dilettante, until the success of Priam in 1963.  

I've seen the opera on video, and I've listened many times to David Atherton's hit recording, and I can attest to the interesting effect Tippett achieves by fragmenting the orchestra into subgroups, each assigned to a different character.  Two moments stand out.   At the end of Act One, after Hector's slaying of the Greek hero Patroclus, Troy's exultant victory anthem is interrupted by a spine-tingling war-cry from the Greek camp offstage, led by the voice of Achilles.  I was lucky to see Tippett's handwritten score under glass in the British museum, opened to that exact moment.  The other beautiful moment is accompanied just by guitar.  King Priam, disguised as a beggar, enters the tent of Achilles to beg for the body of his slain son Hector, and both of the men sing for their lost loved ones. 

Some other pieces I'm fond of, even while I shake my head a la Ronald Reagan ("There he goes again!").  My mentor Frank Boggs sang Tippett's spirituals under Robert Shaw, and tells how the composer spoke to the chorale during a rehearsal.  "He spoke half an hour," Frank says. "We had no idea what he was talking about."  That's how Tippett was in some of his writings, all about archetypes and collective unconscious.  Along those lines, there's his first opera Midsummer Marriage with its allusions to Shakespeare and Mendelsohn.  Besides the wedding couple, there's a mechanic, a businessman, and a secretary, who encounter "Elders" (read "fairies").    The libretto loses me long before the wedding couple complete separate allegorical journeys on symbolic staircases up into intellect and down into feeling before they're "married" in one personality with something involving a Hindu god.  Someone gets shot.  I've never made it awake to that part of the recording.

Tippett's massive Mask of Time purports to take us from creation (Genesis and Big Bang) to annihilation (nuclear explosion) with texts by scientists and poets.  The booklet with the CD contains a picture of a little Latin American Indian child looking askance at the wild-haired Tippett crouching a few feet away from her, evidently trying to engage her in conversation.  I enjoy many parts of it, and I enjoy the variety in it, and I just have to smile at the composer's chutzpah.

I had mixed feelings when I saw the premiere of New Year.   Though the libretto takes us in a space ship to another planet, the central action takes place in a single-room apartment in a slum in an unnamed American city where a white social worker, half-sister to a black delinquent, is afraid to step outside to face the neediness of her violent society. The space ship, the time travel, the duet at a crystal fountain on another planet, all serve to give her the courage to open that door.   I remember her one-room apartment open like a dollhouse on rollers center stage, and I remember her hand on the door.  I remember how lovely the garden music was on that other planet.  And I remember one man saying to his neighbor at intermission,  "You know, my company's paying for this s--t."

Ice Break and Knot Garden, two of Tippett's other operas, are both intriguing in outline, but harsh.  Still, the orchestral gesture for the ice breaking on a Russian river -- and metaphorical ice breaking to free up our spiritual lives -- is etched in my memory still, many years after I last heard it.

Is Tippett's music, in the end, "more trouble than it's worth?"  Interviewed for a BBC tribute to Tippett in the week after the composer's death. pianist Paul Crossley admitted that the sonatas were highly idiomatic and hard to learn, but also "fresh and original."   A young composer tells how Tippett helped him when his own father told him "you haven't the talent" for composing. Tippett told the young man, "You do something because you want to, not because you're good at it."  Sir Peter Hall applauded Tippett's underrated "sense of dramatic space."  Asked once about his harmony, Tippett replied, "But there isn't any."   

Since Tippett is often compared unfavorably to his friend Benjamin Britten, I'm interested in this summation from a page that I tore out of The New Yorker sometime in the late 80s: While Britten composed "with sovereign economy," Tippett's work is "boundless with waste motion, with a wildness of search and frequent frustration.  But his is the larger -- the much deeper -- venture."  Both composers were gay in a time when laws forbade openness, but Tippett wasn't one to hide.  (He was a pacifist during World War II, and went to jail for it.)   This author relates the personal backstory to their music:

To put it crassly, until the death-haunted salutation of [Britten's final opera Death in Venice], what Britten knew and told of love retained a cautionary, feline guardedness.  Out of the same homoerotic source Tippett has harvested an utter liberality of defenseless love, and it is exactly that impassioned vulnerability which makes A Child of Our Time a thing so much finer than [Britten's] War Requiem.

We don't have to devalue Britten to appreciate Tippett's positive qualities of "utter liberality of defenseless love" and his willingness to think big. 

Spies with Heart: A Most Wanted Man

Reflection on A Most Wanted Man, directed by Anton Corbijn, based on the novel by John LeCarre. 

The "most wanted man" in the title of this spy thriller is Issa Karpov, Chechin rebel, escapee from Russian jail, heir to millions of dollars if he can get them from a bank in Hamburg, and devout Muslim.  Played by Russian actor Grigory Dobrygin, he is quiet, wary, and gentle.  The paunchy, gruff spy manager Gunther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman) speaks the essential truth about Issa to the refugee's advocate Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams):  "You and I both know, he's innocent."

The movie begins when Issa painfully lifts himself out of Hamburg's harbor.  Within hours, intrigue swirls around him.  He is the center of attention first for Bachmann's band of domestic spies, then for American diplomats (played by Robin Wright) German security officials, and an Islamic charity organization that may fund Islamist militants.  Richter tries to help him, once she has recoiled from  the scars that establish his refugee credibility.   Meanwhile, he waits. 

The director Anton Corbijn gives us striking visuals to set the witty banter among powerful people who don't trust each other.  We see sharp edges and gleaming surfaces where Bachmann meets officials, banker William DaFoe.  But Bachmann and his associates meet in grimy bars, lonely wharfs, and a subterranean warren of offices where desks are piled high and the bulletin board is layered with photos and clippings. 


Some of the visuals suggest the subtext of scenes, as banker William DaFoe, shaken by a demand to take courageous action, goes home to a glass house that seems a metaphor for both his vulnerability and the coldness of his marriage.  Ice cubes hurled to the flagstones punctuate the scene.   Richter puts up Karpov in her brother's spacious unfinished apartment.  Sheets of plastic hang to mark where rooms will be, making a maze of semi-transparent barriers through which the two of them gradually find each other in a relationship of trust on the border of love.

As my friend Susan observed early on, "It's Le Carre, so you know it's not going to end well for anybody."  Still, as the plot unwinds, we see the pieces of Gunther Bachmann's intricate plan fall into place. I've been left cold by other spy movies, where it was all about the plan.   Here, we're rooting for the innocent man and a whole community of people risking their lives to help him.   

Hell and the Kingdom of Heaven: Meditations by Fr. Frank Wade

[Responses to meditations by Frank Wade, priest and interim dean at the Episcopal National Cathedral, printed in the May-June-July 2014 issue of Forward Day by Day.]

"The kingdom of heaven," concludes Fr. Frank Wade, "is as real as our next conversation, as fleeting as our last one" (Forward 90).  Wade's meditation takes off from similes for the kingdom in Matthew 13: "It expands like a mustard seed or yeast. It is valuable like treasure or a pearl.  It is as diverse as a net full of fish...."  But is it a place on earth, or a place that we reach after death?  "My personal experience tells me that it is not about geography," Wade writes, but about "the relationship in which God rules." He explains:

I have felt its expansive joy, its treasure, and its scope when I let what I know of God rule me.  I have seen it melt away like mist when I have grabbed the crown and plopped myself onto the throne.

His other meditations align with this one to point us away from speculations about afterlife, as not unimportant, only not our current business. 

Wade considers the parable of the king's wedding feast (Mt 22:11).  For the king to reject the A-listed guests and to welcome lower-classes was reassuring to early Christians who "saw themselves replacing the Jews in God's favor" (66).  But, with the one guest improperly robed, the parable "takes a nasty turn."  Wade admits that the passage defies easy interpretation, but concludes, "God's generous inclusion does not reduce God's expectations or the consequences attached to them."

For Wade, the question of the widow's seven husbands (Mt 22:28) is "cynical coming from the Sadducees, who do not think there will be marriage or anything after death."  Wade admits that "those of us who not only believe in but also rely on life after death" want to know the answer, and he hasn't got one. But "the key is not information, as the Sadducees implied.  It is trust, as Jesus' less than complete answer implies."  The kicker for this meditation, though, is this lovely thought: "We dwell on the edge of mystery as surely as the unborn." 

Wade asks, if we could just "bask in the promise" of faith, then what "yoke" is Jesus laying on us (Mt 11:29)?  Wade distinguishes "belief" from "faith."  He cites the context of John the Baptist who spoke to the failure of the studious religious to recognize God's presence, and a passage about childlike faith, concluding,  "The experience of God is not usually found outside of belief, and belief is not usually entered through scholarly inquiry.  We trust God and then experience God.  That is the yoke" (69).

What else do we learn about the kingdom of heaven in terms of relationships on earth?  Jesus tells the Pharisees that they have neglected not just the "weightier" matters of law, but also "the others" (Mt 23:23).  Those weighty matters are justice, mercy, and faith.  The "others," Wade says, are those little things in community that make faith easier: hospitality and integration of faith with actions.  "The Pharisees," Wade writes, "made converts as petty as themselves" with their "self-serving" theology (71).

The end of the world comes up in readings for July 11 and 12, and Wade again refuses to speculate about it, wisely asking instead, "Why do we care so much?"  We long, he says, for "the end of the nagging doubt that distinguishes faith from certainty" and we look for "vindication, if not revenge" on those who've hurt us.  But life insurance and pension plans have taken the edge off our anticipation of the end of times, and now we are more likely to dread it.  Wade also asks why the gospel's writer(s) and editor(s) retained the saying, so obviously out of date, that "this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place" (Mt 24:34).  Wade takes this as sign of Matthew's good faith not to "filter" his writing.  Wade's kicker:  "Scripture both pre- and postdates us. The parts that seem awkward to us must be kept before us" (75).

When Wade gets to the saying about sheep and goats (Mt 25:32), he's uneasy.   The separation is "difficult to reconcile" with other things we know about God.  If we are to be judged "pass / fail" in the afterlife, does that mean that any good deeds of the "failures" will be forgotten?  That goes against other sayings of Jesus, such as the one that "the kindness of a cup of cool water won't be overlooked" (Mt 10:42).  Wade prefers St. Paul's image of life "as a building that is tried by fire," burning away the weak parts and leaving what's good (1 Cor 3:15).  But Wade concludes, "With or without my comfort, judgment is a reality.  What we do now matters later. What we do today matters into eternity" (79).

In the next two readings, Wade finds good in one bad guy, and shares the blame with another!  Caiaphas, he notes, was doing the best he knew how to do (Mt 26:3-4), caught between the rebellious Jews and domineering Romans, trying to tamp down the revolution.  He was right to do so; Jews' revolt in 70 CE failed, and their temple was destroyed.  About Judas (Mt 26-21), Wade observes that he was no different from the rest of us.  "The opportunities for betrayal of our Lord" are "numerous": 

Words spoken or not spoken; unwillingness to see doors the Spirit opens for us or refusal to go through the ones we do see; forgiveness denied or hope trivialized; anger unleashed or grace restrained.  Jesus could have said "Truly all of you will betray me."

He warns us to remember that we are loved by God "in spite of" more than "because of" (81).

In the end, then, Wade has returned to the thought with which he first introduced the theme of judgment and faith:  Whatever the kingdom of heaven may be after death, our relationship to God begins here, in our relationships to others around us.

Georgia Landmark takes me Back

[Top Photo: Approach to the Power family's cabin]

[Photo: from storage shed, left of the cabin]

[Photo: view of the cedar tree shading the cabin]

Pace Cabin and Hyde Farm, Cobb County
With other teachers, I toured an amazing place nestled in the woods in the vicinity of Powers Ferry Road.  I've known that road since 1970 as a place of suburban sprawl, all subdivisions and shopping malls.

But behind all that, the cabin built by Mr. Power and his family in 1845 remains.  Our guide has lived in this cabin since 1971, and has marshaled support from Cobb County Landmarks and Historical Society, county commissioners, and the National Park Service to preserve the area. 

We got some sense of her life there.  We felt the cool water freshly drawn from the well; we stood in the shade of the vast cedar tree behind the cabin; we walked half a mile to get to the neighbor's farm.

Good Fences Make Good Stories
Our guide, whose given name is Morning, waved to the place where the Hyde farm and the Pace farm met, where the two families worked together to construct a fence.

My literature-soaked mind skipped past Robert Frost straight to the wonderful stories of Wendell Berry.  He can be bitter about how we've traded independence and "brotherhood" in farm communities for debt and dependence on the grid.  One story in his collection That Distant Land comes to mind, telling how old Mat Feltner takes his annual walk around the perimeter of his property, a ritual meant for noting things that will need attention. For this last tour, every landmark reminds Mat of someone and something he loved -- and has lost.   Besides the emotional effect, though, we also get a strong sense of the daily and seasonal work needed to keep up a farm.  In Berry's vision, it's not just work for one's own comfort and security, but stewardship of land, a responsibility both solemn and joyful.


Morning herself mentioned "stewardship" several times.  She described some repairs she made to the roof, the limbs sawed off the cedar, the time she climbed down the well, her competition with numerous deer for the fruits of her garden, and the process of washing clothes and hanging them in the sunlight. I thought how her to-do list would compare to mine, which nowadays is likely to be shaped by email messages, calendar reminders, and impersonal interactions with people behind counters and steering wheels.

As Berry said, there are lots of trade-offs.  I don't suppose Morning gets to put up her heels with a martini in hand and Ravel playing in the background.   Still, when I got back into traffic and opened my mail and got word of two more meetings to go to next week, it was refreshing to think: it doesn't have to be this way.

(I edited and expanded this article for Cobb Landmark's fall newsletter, and posted it on this blog:  What "Talking Walls" Told a Teacher.) 

Learning from Harold Prince: A Director's Journey

Responding to Harold Prince: A Director's Journey by Carol Ilson (New York: Limelight editions, 2000).

[Photo: Prince & Sondheim rehearse Merrily We Roll Along, 1981

Directing a musical, even for a middle school teacher, feels like coordinating ships in a dance:  Songs, accompaniment, scenes, costumes, sets, props, sound, light, publicity -- these all take weeks or even months to prepare, but they must fall in line at the same time.  Add supervision of ticket sales, contracts, budgets. What it must have been for Harold Prince from his years of apprenticeship in the early 1950s to 2000, I can sense from reading Carol Ilson's study Harold Prince: A Director's Journey. 

No matter what kind of reviews he had after opening night, Hal Prince kept a level head.  He made it his habit to meet with a creative team the next day to discuss the next project.  Without a project, he feels restless.

It's fitting that Harold Prince's last big Broadway show (as of this book's publication in 2000) is Showboat.  Written in 1928, it was the first "serious" musical.  Showboat covered social changes over decades of US history, with songs by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein III that included the anthem of black endurance, "Old Man River."   Thirty years later, people with short memories would comment on the novelty of serious themes in West Side Story, which Prince co-produced, and in others he directed, including Cabaret, Zorba, Follies, and Kiss of the Spider Woman. 

Yet being "serious" was never his aim.  He has, however, insisted on finding some "real" in a show -- often something broadly political -- that he can latch onto.  His collaboration with Stephen Sondheim and George Furth on Company was "all about" his own decision to marry.  After Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler wrote the intimate thriller Sweeney Todd, Prince set it in a vast factory to emphasize the dehumanization of all its characters during the industrial revolution.  Prince's supreme success, Phantom of the Opera, took shape for him when he connected the misshapen Phantom to a documentary about the erotic yearnings of people with physical deformities.


But "real" and "realism" are not the same.  Prince wants to break scripts free of "realism."  He says that poetry is found in abstraction (315).  He learned this during a visit to a theatre in Russia, where V. Meyerhold's innovations were on display: cubes replaced furniture, curtains replaced walls, and light could isolate a portion of action on a busy stage (143).  Thus he transformed a prosaic murder mystery called The Girls Upstairs into Follies, a surreal clash between middle-aged couples and ghosts of their past selves.

Along the same lines, Prince abstracts a central metaphor in each production.  The cabaret itself became an image for German society's blithe acceptance of the Nazi Party.  Prince implied a connection between that and apathy regarding the suppression of black civil rights in America.  For Company, the metaphor was Manhattan, an island where "you meet at parties through the friends of friends who you never know," as Sondheim put it in one of the songs that grew from the metaphor, "Another Hundred People."  Boris Aronson's set expressed the metaphor from another angle:  He saw cubism in the city's structure.

Everyone in the book who worked with Prince says the same few things:  He's so enthusiastic during rehearsals.  He never tells the actors what to think or feel, expecting them to do that work on their own.  He is clearly "winging it" during rehearsals, trying one idea after another, or occasionally giving up and leaving the direction to his assistants.  He expects people to conform to a vision he has, yet he also likes to be surprised by his actors and collaborators. 

That bit about Prince's "winging it" is a surprise.  I knew from other sources how many hours he spent with Sondheim and other collaborators discussing things, and I know how he had to watch his budgets.  There must have been tons of planning.  But the minute-by-minute progress of the show was free to develop within the larger framework.

I'm also struck by how many of the shows were flops.  Even some of the famous ones lost money, most notably Follies.

He exuded confidence for his collaborators, but he admits to feeling panic when rehearsal is about to begin.

Near the end, two negatives emerge.  Prince's innovations, such as his use of lighting and mobile scenery to achieve the film effects of close-ups and cross-fades, are now so common as to feel hackneyed.  Then, he rails against the system that has raised prices so high that there's no room for risk and experimentation.

Mostly, it's an inspirational story of Prince's developing principles that can guide all of us who work in theatre. 

Richard Rohr's Falling Upward

Reflections on Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr, read on Kindle. Also "David Brooks's 5-Step Guide to Being Deep," by Uri Friedman, in The Atlantic on line. Also NPR's All Things Considered, "The Three Scariest Words a Boy Can Hear,"  (i.e., "be a man"), interview with Joe Ehrmann, http://www.npr.org/2014/07/14/330183987/the-3-scariest-words-a-boy-can-hear 


"What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age." - Carl Jung. 


By "neurotic hindrance," does Jung mean the feeling that I'm letting down my late father if I don't make myself rich and famous?  It looks like it.  To me, "maturity" has meant rising to prominence in some field and securing the future with responsible planning. 


At 55, I'm startled to hear that "growing up," as I've received it, is just preparation.  But now that I've heard about getting beyond "grown up" in Ronald Rolheiser's book Sacred Fire (see my article "Beyond Growing Up"), I'm hearing that message everywhere.


Columnist David Brooks uses the phrase "being deep" to describe the maturity that goes beyond setting up one's domain and securing it for one's family. He cites a rabbi's analysis of the two stories in Genesis about "the resume Adam," charged to fill and subdue the earth, who is all about building and starting things, and "the internal Adam," charged with "serving" and "keeping" the Garden, who is more about asking why we're here.  Brooks defines five qualities that lead us to depth -- love, suffering, internal struggle, obedience (i.e., to a call, to someone else's need), and acceptance -- "unearned admittance" of others into a "transcendant community."  Reviewer Uri Friedman notes that these are mostly things that happen to us, not things that "self-help" can attain. Brooks's idea "inverts the reigning culture of self-help in this country."


Football pro-turned clergyman - coach Joe Ehrmann urges us to give up the idea that "being a man" is based on winning at all costs.  "Transactional coaches" yell at the kids, and the game is all about the coach's identity; "transformational coaches" foster "authentic community." Raised by a "tough" father to control circumstances and dominate others without showing vulnerability, Ehrmann realized the emptiness of his "manhood" when he could find nothing to say or do while his little brother died of cancer.  


Rohr makes much of the story of another strong man, Odysseus, whose entry to "the second half of life" is the gate to Hell, literally.  He's a conqueror, lord of the island of Ithaca, and successful navigator of his "odyssey";  but during a trek to Hades, he receives the prophecy that he must carry an oar, symbol of his sea-faring life's journey so far, to bury it where his achievements will mean nothing, among land-locked people who won't even recognize what an oar is.  There, he's to sacrifice a wild bull, breeding boar, and battering ram -- symbols of three energies that drive the adolescent male -- and settle there awhile.  What happens next in the prophecy, and in Rohr' analysis, gets pretty vague: Somehow, the old man Odysseus will return home and die contented among "his people." 


Rohr admits that his book is "useless" as a self-help book, echoing the comments about Brooks's "Five Steps."  We all know that first half of life well, because it's the subject of all the Disney movies and all the hero stories in comics and myths, and it's what celebrities say when they get serious: "you have to go for your dreams!"  Rohr and these other sources say, yeah, sure, but once you've done that, all you've got is "the container" for your life.  Wait, and the contents will come unforced. To go on a quest to find the meaning of it all would be just another ego-centric effort that will prevent attainment of the goal!


Rohr relates this to Jesus's dictum, "He who would be first shall be last." He also counts 250 times that the phrase "Do not be afraid" occurs in Scripture, and another saying of Jesus: "Why do you ask what am I to eat?  What am I to wear?" (Luke 12:23).   The second half of life is about letting go the stuff you built up in the first part. 


Maturity also means honorable discharge for one's "loyal soldier," that part of one's consciousness that goes to battle for all those standards and strictures that define right thinking, right religion, proper living.  Freud called this "the super-ego," a voice in our heads that we often confuse with the voice of God (location 1039 in Kindle).  But Freud says that the "super-ego" is a poor substitute for "real adult formation of conscience" (1054), because it resists change and growth in oneself; it's always trying to change other people.


Whoa!  May I observe that ALL of our political and intra-church discourse of the past decade has been reduced to the "loyal soldiers" of opposing camps attacking at each other -- and setting up barricades?


A more mature "conscience" would be inclusive, forgiving, and cognizant that "one size [of justice] doesn't fit all."   Rohr reminds us how Jesus tells his disciples to forgive "seventy times seven" offenses, to love our enemies, and to heal -- without quizzing anyone on their beliefs or behavior.  "Every time God forgives us," Rohr writes, "God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us" (1148). 


Why should we imagine Jesus as a different kind of judge at the end of time?  Rohr quotes a professor of Church history who remarked offhandedly to his class, "Church practices have all been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus," by which he meant that we still prefer synthesis and resolution and certainty to mercy, grace, vagaries, and failure (1148 and before).  We prefer rules, hard and fast, to the give-and-take and unpredictable nature of "relationships."


The crucifixion is a supreme example of the necessary suffering that we must all go through.  It's part of the immature and ego-centric thinking to look upon the crucifixion as a "mechanical substitutionary atonement theory" (1273).  No matter how we prepare ourselves, suffering and sacrifice will come, and we have to be open to it to make something of it.


I've said that all this is a shock to me, but, as T. S. Eliot would point out, I've known this all along.  Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and every fantasy hero from Dorothy and Frodo to Luke and Beowulf have to leave home and suffer to achieve the purposes of their lives.  Perhaps the strongest image of achieving maturity late in life is King Lear:  Powerful, richly robed, respected, he's still an adolescent who just wants to play around with his buddies.  "Responsible" daughters and sons-in-law take charge, with disastrous results.  Lear reaches insight after he has lost everything, and, nearly naked, he gives his cloak to warm a poor beggar. 


Typing all this on my little laptop, in my ideal house, with a couple contented dogs curled at my feet, I wonder what giving it all up would entail?


Well, the Book of Common Prayer gives me this to pray every morning:  "...and in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose."  Amen, I guess.

Stephen Sondheim, Movie Star

Response to Six by Sondheim, directed by James Lapine for HBO Documentary Films, 2014.


For James Lapine's documentary Six by Sondheim, seamless editing gives us one anecdote told across sixty years of archival film, as Stephen Sondheim tells interviewer after interviewer about that afternoon when he was fifteen, and Broadway master Oscar Hammerstein taught him more about writing a musical than he learned anywhere else.  In his twenties, in black-and-white, he appears reserved until he launches into the story.  Then we see the animation and hear the delight that remain with him to the present day.  The face has changed, but Sondheim's voice -- in both the literal and figurative senses -- remains the same.


Anyone interested in Sondheim's career and craft will recognize all the material lovingly assembled here. It's roughly organized around six songs, but each song is a gateway into a stage in Sondheim's career, or into an aspect of his creative process.  We see Larry Kert in close up performing "Something Coming" with piano (and a leather jacket) on the set of a New York local Sunday morning TV program, and Dean Jones' final take of "Being Alive" in an extended clip from the 1970 documentary about the recording of Company's original cast album.  Thanks to YouTube, we hear "Send in the Clowns" spliced together from a half-dozen different interpretations (the egregious one being Patti LaBelle, who holds the second syllable of "you in midair" until the house goes wild), topped by a new performance by Audra McDonald with a classical guitarist. 


"Opening Doors" is presented as an accurate and affectionate picture of the life Sondheim led with his cohort of writers in the late 50s and early 60s -- Mary Rodgers, Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, Fred Ebb, John Kander.  It's directed as a kind of MGM musical / MTV video hybrid, the camera swirling around the three characters as they sing their rapid-fire conversation on a pastel-colored retro soundstage set.  Every phrase gives the actor some specific thought to project, illustrating how Sondheim gives his actors so much to "play" in face, gesture, and tone.


Even for the aficionado, there are a few surprises.  The prime example is a performance of "I'm Still Here." Written to be an anthem of survival for a diva past her prime, the song here is turned inside-out:  a youngish man sings to minimal accompaniment as the camera turns our attention to women in various stages of life as they react.  It's very uncomfortable, as the words seem to conjure feelings of loss and regret in the women.  In the end, it's very moving. 


Another surprise is to see Sondheim's home movies, visiting the Forum and making the obvious joke. We see him walking around his Connecticut home, his standard poodles cavorting.  We see rare clips of Merman in Gypsy and Glynis Johns in A Little Night Music.  Sondheim is momentarily nonplussed when Interviewer Diane Sawyer asks, "Do you regret not having children?"  Another time, speaking directly to the man behind the camera, James Lapine, Sondheim expresses gratitude for their collaboration on Sunday in the Park with George, because it revived him at the point when Merrily We Roll Along had failed, "and people wanted Hal and me to fail."  .


I also prize a close up of Sondheim's face, in black and white, ca. 1965, during a discussion of Do I Hear a Waltz?  Book writer Arthur Laurents is telling the interviewer what Sondheim accomplishes in his lyrics, making each line tell.  [I quote from memory]  "You hear a song begin, 'When I hold your hand,' okay, we all know the rest, 'I fall in love,' okay, and we're ready for the next song. But not Steve...."   Sondheim displays no overt reaction to his friend's appreciation.  "No one else is writing like him," Laurents says.  The camera lingers on Sondheim.


In 1965, that was the face of a young man whose resume was already full of hits that are enduring classics:  West Side Story, Gypsy, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  Still ahead of him lay the writing of scores for shows that re-imagined musical theatre in a way that would have made Oscar Hammerstein proud. 


Thinking back on that young face, I'm reminded of the last words in the documentary, written by James Lapine, spoken by "George" at the end of "Sunday":  "Blank.  A white page or canvas.  ....So many possibilities."

Film of Odd Thomas Captures Voice, Spirit of Novel

That the film Odd Thomas went straight to DVD is no reflection on its qualities, which are those of the title character.  Created by novelist Dean Koontz, embodied and voiced by young actor Anton Yelchin, "Odd" is modest, funny, guardedly cheerful, interested in the people around him -- living and dead. Like the film, which got caught in a netherworld between lawsuits and distribution, "Odd" inhabits this world but can see into the world beyond. (Read my response to the novel.)


As in Raymond Chandler's classic "Marlowe" novels, the narrator's voice is more important to our enjoyment of the story than the story itself.   Critics who fault director Stephen Sommers for voice-over narration evidently miss Odd's charm -- except for the critic who thought it was too charming.  For me, the time reading and watching the story is like spending time with a kind and exuberant friend, whose patter doesn't cloy.  That said, Sommers keeps explanations to a minimum with flashbacks that really go by in a flash, and instant replay that refocuses us on significant clues that Odd has noticed. 


Aside from gory spirits, a foray into hell, and translucent demons that swarm like roaches, this really is a simple detective story.  Odd opens and closes a murder case in the first moments of the movie, when the mute young victim points to her killer.  The main investigation begins with Odd's premonition that a massacre is planned for Odd's sunny little town.  For clues to the who, what, where, and how, he searches a home, looks through files, stakes out a bowling alley, and examines a corpse at different stages of nausea-inspiring decay.  Mute spirits sometimes help him to find clues, and sometimes get in his way, but it's really a human-sized story for our humane lead character.  


Too bad for the critics who complain that it's small-scale and that it doesn't live up to their expectations of  apocalypse.   I, for one, stopped going to movies regularly when I got tired of seeing the entire planet threatened in every movie, and in the previews, too.  I've longed for a movie scaled to human proportions. 


Exciting series; delightful movie.  Spoiler alert:  I also start crying about five minutes before the hero does. 

Reflection on the film Odd Thomas, directed by Stephen Sommers, based on the novel of the same name by Dean Koontz. Anton Yelchin plays the title role; Addison Timlin plays "Stormy," and William Dafoe plays the police chief. Read my reflections on the Odd Thomas series here.

Bewitched Craft

[Photo: Agnes Moorehead, Maurice Evans as Endora,Maurice]

I remember clearly when a neighbor told my mom about this new series Bewitched, already a few weeks into its first season.   I begged Mom to let me stay up late (8 pm, I guess -- I didn't learn time until second grade!) to watch it.  I identified those characters with my family, and my sense of myself to this day owes something to that light-hearted show (see "My Mountain of Mystery").  I latched onto the word "warlock" spoken with the first appearance of the character "Maurice" (pictured above), and hoped to discover I was one. That's why I never read the Harry Potter books: that story was my inner life for years.

The surprise in viewing some early episodes on DVD is the seriousness of the creators Sol Saks and frequent director William Asher (husband to the star, Elizabeth Montgomery) and its marvelous cast.   By the end of the series in 1972, we were seeing pretty much the same story every week (witch casts spell on Darrin but Samantha saves the day by explaining that it was all an idea for an ad campaign).  Here's a quick run-down on some moments that aren't funny or gimmicky at all, even though that Sixties laugh-track continues non-stop:

• Husband Darrin (actor Dick York) is apprehensive about meeting his mother-in-law, who's a witch - ha, ha.  But he's the one who answers the doorbell when she's expected for dinner.  He opens the door, and there's Agnes Moorehead wrapped in some exotic shimmery thing, scowling.  The music goes soft with strings, and Darrin smiles.  Camera shifts to Endora, and her scowl softens.  They're cat and mouse for seasons afterward, so this beginning was a surprise. 
• Same episode, just a minute later:  Endora fixes her own martini and challenges Darrin with rapid-fire questions:  What do you do, and why is it worth doing, and why are you preventing my daughter from being who she is?  Darrin keeps a tense smile, and tries to argue his perspective, that this is to be a normal family. "What's normal for you," Endora says, deadly serious, no laughs on the laugh track, "is asinine for us."
• In an episode with the irrelevant title "A is for Aardvark," Darrin is bed-ridden, so Samantha magically arranges for the house to cooperate with Darrin's every whim.  With a little taste of power, Darrin embraces witchcraft, quits his job, arranges to sell the house, and plans a life of endless amusement.  Then there's a delivery at the door: flowers and a little engraved bracelet for Samantha.  He apologizes for how simple these items are: "I ordered them weeks ago."  With the camera tight on her face, Samantha bursts into tears as she smiles and thanks Darrin and pleads with him to see that this is all that matters to her, not the witchcraft or the fur coat or anything else. Nothing funny about this; and I'd swear Elizabeth Montgomery wasn't aware of the cameras or a script: it seems real.
• There's nothing funny when Jack Warden as Darrin's client "Rex Barker," drunk at a dinner party, backs Samantha into a corner and gropes her just out of the camera's view.  She turns him into a poodle.  But when she tells Darrin what happened, he blames her and says she over-reacted.  Her indignation is not funny.  (I'm reminded uncomfortably of Elizabeth Montgomery's made-for-TV movie after the series.  In "A Case of Rape," she played a woman beaten and raped by an acquaintance, blamed by cops and husband for "asking for it.")
• Actress Marion Lorne is "Aunt Clara," an elderly witch who can't do magic the way she used to.  The scriptwriters treat her character with care:  Samantha adores her, covers for her, and fiercely stands up for her when Darrin wants her out of the house.  When Aunt Clara causes friction during a visit from Darrin's parents, Darrin visits Aunt Clara in the guest room, intending to tell her -- nicely -- to clear out.  She dithers about her lovely door knob collection, and laughs and smiles.  He never says what he came to say.  Once the door is closed, Aunt Clara gets serious, and speaks to her luggage:  we're not wanted, we'd better leave.  It's not funny;  our hearts go out to her.
• An episode "And Something Makes Three" is remarkable, first, because magic plays no part in the plot.  There's a disappearing swimming pool to excite the neighbor Mrs. Kravits in the first and last minutes of the show, and there's one of those wavy-screen visions, little witch children on broomsticks.  Otherwise, it's the story of Louise Tate's fear that her husband Larry (Darrin's boss, played by David White),  sixteen years married, won't be pleased to learn that she's having a baby.  Larry's a stock character, a suck-up to clients, obsessed with the ad agency, ogling younger women -- but his joy and a kiss to his wife when he learns her secret seem sincere. 

Aside from these specific episodes, I appreciate the decisions that the producers made from the start, casting Elizabeth Montgomery as the "witch," then surrounding her with actors of the vaudeville era. Everyone else seems to be playing a part on a stage -- wise guy, drunk, bully, glamour queen, haughty old lady.   She alone -- trained on screen, never on stage -- looks and speaks naturally. She focuses intently on the eyes of the person with her, not playing to an unseen audience.  Her makeup is subtle -- a huge contrast to the other women in the show -- and her clothing is appealing but plain -- even Tomboyish.   . 


Looking back on 1964,  I see how the creators picked up on the issues of the day, not for preaching, but just for resonance:

• Samantha's father Maurice thunders his displeasure when he learns of his daughter's "mixed marriage," a phrase understood then to make the mortal husband analogous to a black man or some other ethnic minority. 
• In another episode, Samantha carries a sign to protest stereotyping of witches -- which she calls a "minority group" -- mirroring the black Civil Rights movement of the day.  It's hard to believe that these episodes were filmed during "Freedom Summer," a year following Kennedy's assassination, in the year of the Civil Rights Act. 
• Just a year or so before, Betty Friedan had written in The Feminine Mystique how men removed women from serious roles in society by setting them apart as magically "closer to nature" with their mysterious intuitions and unique power to give birth.  She made women aware how they had to suppress their education and talents to serve their husbands' careers.  Bewitched is that story, exaggerated just a bit.
• Because the witches we meet are flamboyant men and women who hide in plain sight among "normal" people, there's a parallel to the world of gay men and women -- such as Agnes Moorhead, Paul "Uncle Arthur" Lynde -- involved and hidden in the world of entertainment.  "Why must my daughter hide who she really is?" anticipates the Stonewall "riots" of 1969. 

Finally, I appreciate the theme music credited to Howard Greenfield and Jack Keller.  It starts on a diminished chord, it incorporates the vibraphone used for magical effects in the show, it's perky, and it provides recognizable motifs for incidental music.  

Reflections on episodes from the first of eight seasons of Bewitched, originally televised between September 1964 and June 1965.

Sondheim's Murder Mysteries

[Photo: Sondheim w/billboard at Cannes, 1974 (pinterest.com)]

On a whim last week, I got the DVD of The Last of Sheila.  Though its boxoffice take in 1973 was so-so, it has had a cult following ever since.  Who knew?  But I'm not surprised.

First, it's a very satisfying whodunit.  That's what drew me to it at age 14, when I walked down to North Springs shopping center alone to see it in an empty theatre.  I was into both crosswords and detective novels at the time (still am!), and this punched all my buttons. The set-up was classic:  A Hollywood mogul invites six guests to his yacht for a treasure-hunt in Mediterranean ports, one year after inviting the same six to a party where his wife Sheila was killed by a hit-and-run driver.   We quickly come to suspect that the game is an elaborate cover for the host's revenge on his wife's killer.

 I was drawn to the movie also by the Ellery-Queen-like challenge issued to the public by writers Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim (whose names meant nothing to me, yet), who let it be known that they had hidden the solution to the puzzle in the title of the movie. 

Then, it's also fun in the way of any movie filled with celebrities (from the 70s B list and a couple of A- stars).   I've read in Craig Zadan's excellent Sondheim and Company that the script's first draft involved businessmen snowed into a Swiss ski resort;  director Herb Ross was so right to shift the venue and the character types.  Raquel Welch in a bikini, James Mason in a monk's cowl, Dyan Cannon in hysterics:  We love to see them well dressed, undressed, launching little zingers at each other, and emoting.   In 7th grade, I loved "getting" the names they dropped (Steve - and - Eydie, Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, and closing song by up-and-coming sensation Bette Midler).

Looking at the show in adulthood, I especially appreciate the performance by Joan Hackett in the thankless role of the one person on the ship neither glamorous nor clamorous.   Scene by scene, even while she smiles, we watch her disquiet grow as she suspects what's going on behind the fun.

Director Herbert Ross used -- pioneered? -- a technique that has helped me in the murder-mystery plays I've co-written in the decades since.  He found a way around the anticlimax built into the genre:  once the deductions begin, dialogue can bog down while the entire cast sits still, rehashing clues and theories.  Herbert Ross cut away from discussion to show us multiple reenactments of the crime from new angles to reflect different theories.   All these years, I've recalled how I cringed in the dark theatre each time the heavy stone came down on the victim's head with a gruesome sound effect -- and how exciting that was!  It's still effective, and a picture is worth six pages of detective monologue.

Then, of course, there's the cult of Stephen Sondheim.  I'm a proud member since 1974.  For us, his affinity for puzzles and his inventions of murder games for celebrity friends are common knowledge.   I'll only comment from observation and experience that contriving a puzzle, composing a song, and writing a murder mystery share the characteristic that things have to "go" with each other both "down" and "across."  That's self-evident in a crossword; it's the effect of setting a rhyme to land at the musical climax of a song (e.g., from "Ladies Who Lunch," everybody tries..., look into their eyes..., everybody dies..., everybody rise!).  In The Last of Sheila, there's a story moving forward (guests deal with mishaps on the yacht) while clues fill us in on the back story: across and down. [See my Sondheim page for a curated list of dozens of my articles on Sondheim, his scores, craft, and colleagues,]

Now it's my turn to drop a name:  When Mr. Sondheim and I had a chat at New York's Music Box Theatre following a performance of Side by Side by Sondheim in June 1977, he filled me in on some details about an item I'd seen in Earl Wilson's gossip column.  I'd read that Sondheim and Perkins had written a sequel of sorts, The Chorus Girl Murder Case, and Michael Bennett was to direct the film.    Sondheim told me (and a couple dozen of my high school chorus friends) that the script was complete.  Set backstage during preparations for a musical in the 1940s, the movie would include more than a dozen new Sondheim songs or pieces of songs, "each one containing a clue" he said with a satisfied smile.

That's the last I've heard of The Chorus Girl Murder Case, though a show with similar title ran on Broadway ten years ago, or so.  Kander and Ebb wrote a show with a similar premise.  Where's that movie?  Where are those songs?

I'm aware of two other Sondheim murder mysteries.  Crime and Variations was another collaboration with Anthony Perkins, to be broadcast over several nights on cable TV back in the 1980s.  The musical technique of "variation" has an analogy in those multiple versions of the same crime that kept Last of Sheila moving.   But aside from the reference in Zadan's book, I've never seen any other sign that this project was ever realized.

 [Note: Sondheim said that he filled in a "laundry list" of requests for The Chorus Girl Murder Case from would-be director Michael Bennett, and "wrote a treatment" with Anthony Perkins, but that's as far as it went. HBO never filmed Crime and Variations, and HBO owns the property. This comes from an interview at Sondheim.com, ca. 1994.]

Finally, there's Getting Away with Murder, a stage play co-written with George Furth, who wrote the books for Company and Merrily We Roll Along.  Originally called The Doctor Is In, its premise was the murder of a psychiatrist by someone in his group therapy cohort.  I read disdainful reviews with snickers over the prop gun that didn't fire, forcing the actor instead to bludgeon the other one to death. I caught a video online of a staged production that looked pretty flat.

Sondheim made indirect contributions to some of the great murder mysteries for stage and screen. The classic murder mystery Sleuth was Anthony Shaffer's inspired response to a weekend playing games at Stephen Sondheim's town home back in the 1960s.  His working title for it was Who's Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?  It was a great success on stage, filmed twice, first with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, then with Michael Caine and Jude Law (with screenplay by Harold Pinter, not so fun as the original).  Of course, Ira Levin's Deathtrap, play and movie,  takes off from Sleuth, so there's an extension of Sondheim's influence in the genre. Update: Knives Out (2019) and its sequel The Glass Onion (2022) continue the tradition with homages to Sleuth, Deathtrap, and The Last of Sheila, and alluding to songs by Sondheim. Read more about Knives Out and Glass Onion.

Sondheim's collaborators Hugh Wheeler (Night Music, Sweeney Todd) and James Goldman *Evening Primrose, Follies) also wrote murder mystery novels.  Goldman's draft of a musical to be called The Girls Upstairs, was a "whodunit" in reverse:  who will do it?  All the characters had motives to kill each other.  Happily,  with director Harold Prince's involvement, the tensions burst into fantasy follies-numbers, and the result was the wonderful Follies.

So, there's more to connect Stephen Sondheim to murder mysteries than first meets the eye, eh, Inspector?

Reflection on THE LAST OF SHEILA (1973), directed by Herbert Ross, screenplay by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins. With information I've gleaned from other sources, including Stephen Sondheim himself!

Duke Ellington Can't Sleep



It's morning, still dark, early June, 1967, and world-famous Duke Ellington can't sleep.

I'm only reading between the lines of Terry Teachout's biography Duke, but I look at the tired face and "mood indigo" tint to the book's cover and get the impression that the man had a lot to keep him awake at night.

What worries him? He has "made it."  Since the 1920s when his publisher Irving Mills promoted him as a "genius...like Ravel or Stravinsky," Ellington has long been more than a popular jazz musician. But after his heyday in the 1920s and 30s, his orchestra was nudged into irrelevance first by the Swing band craze, then pop and rock.  Bebop jazz made Duke a relic until a gutsy performance at Newport in 1956 brought renewed respect and attention.  Suddenly, he was a national treasure, a cover-of-Time celebrity, and a guest on TV variety programs.

Yet esteem doesn't pay the bills.  He owes over a half million dollars in back taxes.  He has no record contracts, no regular gigs. Relying heavily on royalty payments for his hit songs, he has always paid the "expensive gentlemen" of his orchestra more than they could earn in any other band. 

He has always paid for his musicians in other ways, too.  Touring in the 1930s and 40s, he rented private train cars and chartered buses to shield his African-American personnel from the indignities of Jim Crow restrictions at hotels and restaurants.   By 1967, some of these players, in Terry Teachout's words, have "passed their sell-by date," including the so-called "Air Force" (i.e., the musicians who came to work high).  Because Ellington avoids confrontation, he keeps the deadbeats on. 
 
All along, Ellington has cared more for music than for the money, and it's the future of his music that worries him.  The immediate crisis is the death of composer-arranger Billy Strayhorn, whom he called "his right arm."  Strayhorn died of cancer May 31st, 1967.  (I reflect on their complicated relationship in a blog post In the Mantle of Duke Ellington). 

Strayhorn once explained that Ellington "played piano, but his true instrument was the orchestra."  In each chapter of Teachout's book -- before the one about Strayhorn's death --  some new player expands Ellington's "palette." Ellington and Strayhorn blended and contrasted the distinctive sounds of the musicians in ways that no other bands did, and they left their soloists lots of room to be creative.  Ellington listed names in his scores,  not instruments, and he didn't always assign notes.  He told one player to "rise like the sun" over the music. Asked for more specifics, Ellington said, "Start in B-flat."

By 1967, a society dance orchestra no longer attracts the kinds of soloists whose distinctive sounds have inspired Ellington's compositions for decades.

He's also lonely, though he's probably not alone.  That's what his son Mercer observes in Teachout's biography. Married early, Ellington left his wife but kept her, so that he could tell his other girl friends, "Sorry, I'm married."  He strung along a series of three mistresses over five decades. (On the cover of Teachout's book, we see a scar on Ellington's left cheek from one of these ladies.)  As for his musicians, he'd stopped being their buddy when he started being a "genius," and some weren't even friendly. Some had reason to resent Ellington, because he earned royalties from songs he based on tunes they improvised.  Strayhorn was his closest collaborator, and now he's gone.
 
Perhaps it's in this early morning that Ellington imagines a tribute to Strayhorn that he and his band will record in the late summer and fall of 1967, "...and his mother called him Bill,"  words excised from a draft of Duke's eulogy for his friend.  In it, we hear what was best in Ellington's world, and we can hear why he might stay awake, afraid that it's all passed.

We hear numbers written across decades for the orchestra, tailored to soloists long gone from the band, and some solos played soulfully by those present.  Famed jazz artist Clark Terry returns as guest to the orchestra he left years before.  Others that we hear are men who were with Duke from the start, and some, like saxophonist Johnny Hodges, have left and come back. 

Johnny Hodges is featured in "Blood Count," Strayhorn's last piece, composed in his hospital room just in time for Ellington to use at Carnegie Hall.  Ellington's habit of completing projects at or beyond the last minute is a recurring motif in Teachout's biography.   In "Blood Count," the basic melody is like a sentence in two parts:  a long phrase for the soloist that ends in a sigh, followed by short, quick phrases that curl upward, as if a question is being repeated.  On the bridge, the sax wails, building to the final chorus when the whole orchestra swells under punching jabs by the sax. It ends with a long sigh. It's Ellington's "instrument" in a painful, beautiful expression.

The five-dollar word in the title of "Intimacy of the Blues" is an indication of its contents.  The scaffolding is the same twelve-bar blues you'd hear in any backwoods juke joint, but the effects are refined:  rapid-fire staccato notes in the tune, mostly quiet dynamics punctuated by sudden swells in the orchestra.  Near the end, Ellington's piano plays some embroidery that sounds to me like it's in a different key:  Ravel, anyone?

Ellington gets to play melody on Strayhorn's perky old tune "Rain Check," varying the melody largely through his accenting of odd beats -- "Rite of Spring" for a night club.

The final number on the album, though, is a heart-tugger.  After the session was over, as the men were laughing and packing up their instruments, the microphone captured Ellington playing solo through Strayhorn's "Lotus Blossom."  The liner notes tell us, "The studio quieted down as the feeling came through. That is what he most liked to hear me play, Duke said afterwards."

Looking out at his horizon in June 1967, Ellington can tell us what Ecclesiastes says: you never do "arrive."  You can only extend yourself for someone else, as Duke did for this tribute to Billy Strayhorn.   I'm thankful for that record, and the biography by Terry Teachout that has helped me to appreciate all that went into it.  

Reflection on Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout, read on Amazon Kindle.  Also, a compact disc reissue of an album by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, "...and his mother called him Bill"  originally recorded in 1967, issued by RCA Victor in 1968; reissued by BMG 2001. Liner notes by Stanley Dance. 

What's Your Story? What's Ours?

Reflection on last week's institute at Emory University sponsored by Southern Association of Independent Schools with Michael G. Thompson and Rob Evans. Psychologist Michael G. Thompson is author of Raising Cain, Best Friends Worst Enemies, The Pressured Child, and others. Rob Evans is author of The Human Side of School Change, Family Matters, and others.

During the last hour of structured time at a three-day institute for school administrators, Michael G. Thompson introduced a concept that reframed all the other topics we had discussed. In fact, the concept that we all operate according to the "narrative" we tell about ourselves (or about our groups) applies as well to personal life, analysis of news, and history.


"Story" in Educational Institutions
Evans, too, had approached "narrative" from the angle of naturalist Stephen Jay Gould's statement that Homo Sapiens is a pattern-finding animal.  In a school, when we leaders approach change, we must know that we'll be disturbing patterns in the community's lives, and every gain will be balanced by loss.


We should listen to learn the story of those in opposition. Instead of arguing with it, we should look for a counter-story from within the same community.  Thompson gave the example of the school that told itself the story -- in meetings and teacher's lounge chats -- of how a winter storm ruined the year and made everything impossible. The counter-story emerged when one teacher explained that she wasn't so bothered by the uproar because, compared to the death of her husband, it was all pretty petty. Just hearing her counter story lifted the morale of the whole faculty, as they adjusted their own collective "narrative."



A person's "narrative" defines a person's "identity." Evans and Thompson illustrated this by imagining a teacher who has lectured for thirty years, increasingly angry at diminishing returns. "The students get lazier every year," he says. "They can't concentrate. They don't take notes the way they used to." Try to tell him that experiments and brain imaging show that he will reach more students more deeply if he allows for their active participation in their own learning. He will deny the evidence because his identity is threatened. In his own story, he is the last defender of high standards, the voice of reason standing up against increasing waves of stupidity. To admit anything else would be to question the value of his entire career.
I suppose the way into dealing with that teacher would be to ask, "Can you think of a time when the students were suddenly engaged?"  Or:  "Have you ever been totally caught up in learning something since you left school?"  I bet his answer would involve something besides a lecture.

"Story" in Private and Public Life
By coincidence, several programs aired Sunday afternoon on Atlanta's NPR station focused on ramifications for our being "pattern-finding animals." The T.E.D. Talks program gave us an editor of Skeptic magazine who said that we are "hard-wired" to have religious faith because we like to see patterns -- stories -- in events. The "Radio Lab" program focused on neurons that interpret sound waves as pleasing patterns that we call music, and analyzed how the unrecognized patterns in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring frustrated the audience's neurons, causing an excessive release of dopamine that in turn caused temporary schizophrenic behavior -- the famous Paris riot of 1913. 

Mom was skeptical of all this until I told her a couple of our family "stories." Grandmother Smoot's story, to which all of her favorite anecdotes contributed, was "Cinderella" in reverse: privileged firstborn child, daughter of the mayor in the best house on the top of the hill, planned to go to college -- until the first boy was born to the family.  Then the father sold the house to buy a series of businesses that failed, savings went to the  baby brother, and the little princess became the hard-working serving girl, struggling to support herself and the family. Oh, and she lost Prince Charming to the Great War and had to settle for his younger brother. My Mom's story? She was the apple of her father's eye, adored and spoiled; then she was adored and spoiled by her husband; the story continues in her viduity. 


The Bible fits all stories into one grand narrative of God's plan to make Israel the "light of the world."  Christians see themselves as picking up the slack when, according to their narrative, Israel lost its sense of mission to the world.


Americans, from the earliest colonial days, have absorbed Israel's story into its own, as waves of "God's chosen people" crossed the sea to their Promised Land. In the name of this "manifest destiny," God commanded them to clear out all the native people and to make a "city on the hill" to save the world.   Ideological purity in politics today stems from this meta narrative. The story of Israel, right on into New Testament times, is of a people who let go of their first enthusiasm and who go after the ways of other gods or, in New Testament terms, "the ways of this world."  Americans of a certain stripe feel that they carry on the mission alone. 


When shocked by statements of those politicians who wear the mantle of "conservative" "traditional" and "Christian" values, I can see how every fact fits into this meta-narrative. The "liberal" tenets must be denied without exception, whether these include gun control, climate change legislation, path to citizenship for immigrants, cooperation among states on a "common core" of learning standards, or affordable health insurance for all.


So I shouldn't be shocked when a Tea Party candidate in Mississippi states that "compromise" is how America got into "this mess" -- as if the Founders' "original intent" had been something other than to force compromise at all levels of government.   Denial of compromise on any issue isn't a matter for reason, or even for "belief."


For today's brand of "conservative," as for that veteran teacher, it's a matter of identity.

Beyond Growing Up: Sacred Fire

Ronald  Rolheiser. Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity. (New York: Image, 2014). See my response to a book dealing with the same topic by Rolheiser's friend Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Second Half of Life.

"Why am I dealing with all this anger?" a woman of 50 asked her pastor Fr. Ronald Rolheiser.  His message for her, and for readers of Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human Christian Maturity, is that anger comes with her stage in life.  "If you are through your years of searching for and preparing for marriage and a career," he writes, the time that stretches out before you "can feel pretty bland, or flat, or overpressured, or disappointing" (65).

Yet this maturity that Rolheiser calls the "life-giving" stage, is actually a very good thing. At this stage, a person no longer lets "the pleasure principle" rule, "at least [not for] the most important decisions," and has moved beyond "adolescent self-focus" (66).

The anger comes from a couple of sources.  Like the tribes of Israel, we adults, settling the Promised Land, must eradicate "the Canaanites." Rolheiser reads the violent Old Testament war tales as a metaphor for the unfulfilled desires and ambitions of adolescent "grandiosity" (71).  Then there's resentment, like that of Martha and of the Prodigal Son's elder brother:  

Many are the persons who deeply regret that during [these, the] healthiest and most productive years of their lives they were too driven and too unaware of the richness of their own lives to appreciate and enjoy what they were doing.  Instead of privilege, they felt burden; instead of gratitude, they felt resentment; and instead of joy, they felt anger. (77)

Where does an adult go from here?  Not back to adolescence, though I think that's the way our culture looks at this situation.  How many movies and human interest news items begin with a man or woman deep into career, leadership, and family obligations who decides to chuck it all and go for some quest for glory left over from their adolescent phase -- or some romantic new adventure? 

Forward
The way forward is, naturally, not so exciting.   It's prayer and (you'll think I'm joking) committee meetings. 

About prayer, Rolheiser captures the restlessness that keeps us from it.  Our "congenital disquiet" is "fanned" by demands on our attention and by the culture, its new shows and songs, news, and the fact that everyone else seems to be going to more interesting places (202).  These days, we're pestered by emails, messages, and requests.   But this is nothing new; Rumi in the 13th century wrote "I have lived too long where I can be reached!" (200). 

To find ways to combat that restlessness, Rolheiser refers often to St. John of the Cross who advised monks and nuns in Spain during the Renaissance concerning the long period of tedious routine after initial devotion.  One answer is to think of prayer the way a grown son might think of visiting a parent in assisted living an hour each day:

On the surface your visits will seem mostly routine, dry, and dutiful.  Most days you will be talking about trivial, everyday things, and you will be sneaking the occasional glance at the clock to see when your hour with her will be over.  However, it you persevere in these regular visits with her, month after month, year after year, among everyone in the whole world you will grow to know your mother the most deeply and she will grow to know you most deeply [because] real connection between us takes place below the surface of our conversations.  We begin to know each other through presence (203).

Other siblings may get drama and tears, but that's because they don't have the same deep relationship (204). 

To daily private prayer, Rolheiser adds corporate worship and ritual.  He's in agreement with some other theologians I've read lately who, after Anglican father Jeremy Taylor,  emphasized the role of the local parish priest and daily prayer services in cementing a community and deepening faith (see for one, Timothy Sedgwick, The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety, NY: Seabury, 2008.).

About committee meetings, Rolheiser cites Dorothy Day's friend Peter Maurin, who counseled, "When you don't know what else to do, keep going to meetings because Pentecost happened at a meeting" (131).  Developing this idea, Rolheiser writes of those disciples frightened, unmoored, hiding in the upper room.  As he says elsewhere, "just show up" and count on the Spirit to lead, gradually. 

In this adult stage of life, it's our role to bless others.  Rolheiser acknowledges that it's hard for, say, a revered teacher not to feel resentment and envy of a young new teacher whose popularity will "eclipse" the older man's (233), but his job is to accept and be glad and bless.  "When we bless others we help lift depression from our lives; when we do not bless others, we deepen that depression" (235).

Rolheiser summarizes all in ten commandments for mature living, beginning with the command to "live in gratitude" (245).  Citing Richard Rohr and James Hillman, he advises us to take signs of aging not for signs of death  but "initiations into another way of life" (298).  Models in the Bible for doing this are Job (who leaves naked as he came into the world), Abraham and Sarah, and Jesus -- who can share his spirit with us all only after he has given up life on this earth at the Ascension (309).

Not Just Personal: Justice
Rolheiser also tells us, this isn't about just us.  Summarizing what he wrote in The Holy Longing, (see my reflection, here), Rolheiser outlines "essential discipleship" in terms of actions within community -- forgiveness, gentleness, and actions taken to promote charity and justice.  In the New Testament, "one of every ten lines deals directly with the physically poor and the challenge to respond to them.  In the Gospel of Luke, that becomes every sixth line, and in the Epistle of James that challenge is there, in one form or another, in every fifth line" (50).  We should work, not for "survival of the fittest," but of "the weakest and gentlest."

Personal Response
Personally, while I am warmed by Rolheiser's positive images of mid-life, I must admit that I've been struggling with my mid-life crisis over 30 years.  For a seminar focused on Montaigne, whose essays were his way to take stock of lessons learned at the end of his life (age 40, in the 17th century), I wrote myself into a  "trial" (literal translation for French essai).  In the end, the jury had to rule, if this young teacher won't give up teaching to pursue fame as a writer of novels and plays, will he be guilty of betraying his dreams, or will he be living into a more mature dream?  I was thinking the latter; Dad's one word response was, "Guilty." 

Rolheiser helps me to put that one to bed, finally.   I'm struck by how the author of Ecclesiastes, so weary of life, is just telling about the transition from adolescent expectations and explorations to the mid-life stasis.   "Expressions of this longing and search are what make up the meat of popular music, literature, and movies" Rolheiser writes, revolving around questions "Who am I?  Where do I find meaning?  Who will love me?"(17).  Adolescence is a convergence of hormonal, intellectual, and emotional changes that drive a person out of the home (and good riddance!);  settling in is something beyond "the feeling we get from success and achievement" (9).

Well, at 55, I'm glad to be done with adolescence once and for all.  Except for a few of those pesky "Canaanites"....

Judy Garland at the "End of the Rainbow"

[Photo: Natasha Drena with Bill Newberry (AJC.com)]

Reflection on Judy Garland after seeing The End of the Rainbow by Peter Quilter, directed by Freddie Ashley, at Actor's Express Theatre, Atlanta, June 12, with Natasha Drena as "Judy," Tony Larkin as "Mickey Deans," Bill Newberry as "Anthony" the pianist, and Atlanta's local NPR radio personality John Lemley as "Radio Announcer."   I also draw from the New York Times obituary for Judy Garland, and the recording Judy at Carnegie Hall.


That Judy Garland believed her songs is what made her such a great artist.  That Judy believed her own lies when she promised her intimates to lay off booze and pills is what made her so impossible to deal with. 


We see both aspects of her in Peter Quilter's play End of the Rainbow, as the action alternates between songs onstage during her (final) engagement at a London supper-club and scenes back in her hotel suite. In every scene, she's manipulating her handlers, turning kittenish, pathetic, furious, or imperious in a split-second, with total sincerity. 


As my mentor Frank Boggs observed, "Judy Garland sang a lyric as if she were making it up in the moment." At Carnegie Hall around age 40, her voice husky and quivering, she seemed fresh and exuberant as a school girl when she sang "Zing zing zing went my heart strings," but was self-aware and heartbroken when she sang, "Every trick of his, you're on to / But fools will be fools... / And where's he gone to?" 


In performance at Actor's Express Theatre, Natasha Drena captured both Judy's voice and Judy's  quality of living a song.  I'd known Judy only through the recording from Carnegie Hall and video clips on YouTube; in the flesh, this "Judy" gave me shivers.


Judy's celebrated troubles added pathos and suspense to her singing, as the New York Times noted in her obituary back in June, 1969:  "Whenever she stepped on a stage in recent years, she brought with her, whether she welcomed it or not, all the well-publicized phantoms of her emotional breakdown, her career collapses and comebacks."  Quilter has Judy's fiancé Mickey accuse her devoted fans of loving her more when she suffers more. 


By canny juxtaposition of scenes with songs, the playwright relates lyrics to her life.  Judy sings "I was lost... nowhere to go!" just after we've learned that her  young agent found her truly "Just in Time," so we understand the intensity that Judy, and Drena as Judy, give to those words.  Quilter places "Come Rain or Come Shine" after a close approach to failure and abandonment.   Good choice:  Judy (and her arranger) gave the song an erotic vibe, recreated in this production.  The singer's voice builds to a high-pitch, fever-pitch wail -- as if she's not just offering love, but clutching it. 


A day after posting on this blog about the toxic effect of public adoration (see "Fame Kills" about agent Shep Gordon), I found Judy Garland's story to be a prime example of how that works.  As the Times noted in 1969, "The other side of the compulsively vibrant, exhausting performances that were her stage hallmark was a seemingly unquenchable need for her audiences to respond with acclaim and affection."


Assured that her audience adores her, Quilter has Judy say, "I don't need that kind of love." It has to be personal.  The fiancé Mickey offers sex and "taking care" of her career; the pianist Anthony offers a vision of chaste adoration in a cottage at seaside.


She can't love herself, so she cannot trust or accept love offered to her.  Her appetite for love is insatiable; her substitutes for love kill her.