Roosters, Rolands, and Summer Camp

Sun Mar 13 18:00:05 EDT 2005

The other day I walked to St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst. I thought I might find Scott Joplin’s grave, but instead I found roosters, and lots of them. Handsome roosters, brightly colored, healthy and noisy. Is there a farm in the middle of that cemetery?

I did not explore St. Michael’s much because there were services going on, but it was an interesting space, one that I’ve never seen before.

 

 

 

 

Fri Mar 11 03:03:03 EDT 2005

For a few minutes last week I owned three pianos. Now I’m back down to two pianos, neither one “real.” I traded in my old Baldwin Acrosonic (for a surprisingly generous value) for a Roland HP107 digital piano.
Now I have two Rolands, including the earlier HP237R. I was generally disappointed with the durability of the earlier Roland, and I expect to be eventually irritated with the newer HP107 as well. While it’s true that
these pianos never need tuning they do require maintenance. In the case of my HP237R the contacts need replacing, and the piano really sounds wretched. There are no hammers in a digital piano, but the
contacts are what lie under the keys and send signals to the sound system. I had an appointment to get the contacts
replaced but the technician never showed up. I didn’t feel like spending the $300 for the job so I never called the guy back to ask what the hell, why did you keep me sitting here all day waiting for you.

Sales people have implied that my long hours of practice and general style of playing might have contributed to the deterioration of the contacts. I regard none of the marketing copy seriously, but I would not
expect that these things are built for 4-5 hours of use at a time for many consecutive days or weeks. The first Roland really only started going to hell a few months after I started practicing those kinds of hours in
early 2002. I was surprised to have no sentimentality for the old Baldwin. It was the first piano I ever bought for myself. But when the time came to take it away I just wanted it out of here. It is hard to find much
written of any substance about these Roland digitals. Yamaha’s various digital pianos are the market leader. I attribute this to the many bells & whistles stuffed inside. Cheesy beguine and bossa nova rhythms with
department store type entertainments. The keyboards feel flimsy to me, but for amateur and home use I can see the appeal. For classical piano the Roland is simply the best feeling keyboard of any digital piano I’ve
ever tried. Some will dismiss these pianos without question. By extension others will dismiss any music that comes out of them, the most typical refrain being that they are “not real.” I remember similar complaints about
digital cameras in the late 1990s. But while digital photography has largely replaced film in many quarters I would not expect such an abrupt shift to digital pianos, now or ever. I
do not own these as a statement, I own them as a

compromise, and a perfectly acceptable one at that. I work sometimes until 4 or 5 in the morning, and since I live in an apartment building this would be virtually impossible to get away with at a regular piano. What would I have done 15 years ago, before usable digital pianos existed? I probably would have been forced to either keep more normal hours or rent a 24-hour studio somewhere. I have no regard for those who sniff that “they are not real.” I may, however, never get used to turning a piano on or off. It’s like having to turn on the sidewalk before you can walk on it, or plugging in a glass before you can drink it water from it.
Digital pianos allow for some non-traditional methods of practice. Turn the power off and practice with no sound except the thumping of your fingers into the keys. Headphones, of course, allow for practicing that no one else can hear (save for that thumping sound). But headphones give me a headache so I usually just turn the volume down to barely audible. Headphones are not new to my practice routine anyway. In college I would blast Led Zepplin through my headphones and use its beat as a metronome. This technique was inspired by Franz Liszt, who advised his students to place a newspaper or magazine on the music stand while practicing scales or particularly boring passages of music. I also like to play on one side of the room and hear myself on the other side, although this is only a novelty for me. There is a term, and I don’t recall the French, but the English translation is something like “As if coming from outside.”

Today I practiced a Bach French Suite that has been in my hands since college. Every time I play any of it it feels new, which is another way of saying I can not decide on even one coherent approach to it. Muscular or fleet? With pedal or Indian-style? Like a Brandenburg Concerto or like a dance? And which of those styles best suits a modern piano? Will it ever come out note-perfect, and if it does will anyone notice? With this music I’ve never reached the perfect balance between that level of ease that Bach possessed to write this stuff with the process of discovery that I feel every time I start into it.

MP3s of me playing Bach French Suite #6

Last week I opened a photo album that contained pictures from when I was in grade school. They were mostly summer camp pictures. I saw a familiar picture of me with the rest of the kids in Cabin #217 at Camp Chosatonga in North Carolina. It would have been the summer of 1980 or 1981.

I remembered the name of the camp counselor, typed his name into a search engine, and before I knew it we had a correspondance going.

Nothing deep, of course. How could it be? I briefly imagined that we would discover fascinating secrets that could only be known to us and our unique circle of mutual acquaintances. In fact we had as much to talk
about as would any two people whose paths briefly crossed more than 20 years earlier.

The intersecting of lives, whether significant or otherwise, feeds not nostalgia but randomness and associations. Re-tracing the paths taken from those intersections is to reach for one of my favorite theatrical
flourishes: At the end of a film, where the movie ends but the story doesn’t, and before the credits roll a few sentences of text appear on the screen saying “John went on

to run an insurance company, Jane went on to marry a senator…” That stately continuance of the story is one of my favorite theatrical effects, whether in movies, TV, or stage.

I have little patience for nostalgia because its weakest manifestation is the one most commonly expressed: Only the past is golden while the future is nothing but a bleak series of indignities.

We talked of only superficial things. What disappoints me — and maybe this partly explains why I contacted him in the first place — is that he does not seem to remember anything about me. I’m not sure what I might have
hoped for. I sent him a scan of that group picture from cabin 217 and he had to ask which one was me. I told him, and also told stories about the other kids. These stories brought back a flood of memories for him,
memories in which I am nowhere to be found.

I experience a similar feeling of rebuff when someone repeats things I said to them, with apparently no memory that it was I who had said it. Sometimes this is to be expected, but other times I find someone repeating
right back at me a thoughtful point that I articulated days earlier. This happened twice last week concerning things I had said about Christo’s “The Gates.” One person on Friday told me “Someone made a really good
point…” and there followed verbatim, down to my sarcastic asides, my precise comments about The Gates but with no indication of where those comments originated.

My mind is not a steel trap. It is more of a rattling cage. Memories from 20 years ago clatter around in here with as much noise as memories from last night. I move on. I get over the emotional impact of things. But the
literal memories all bear the same weight. How does anybody remember what to remember? I ask myself that question often.

Contacting this person was not completely spontaneous. I had thought of him that week, and as I explained to him there is one specific memory that surfaces frequently, and which I thought merited this communication.

We were on a camping trip in the woods, and as it got dark we looked for a place to stay the night. We saw a clearing that appeared to be good, but when we got there we found it was a trash dump. Earlier visitors had
thrown their garbage everywhere, not just on the ground but in the trees and in the river.

His reacted as if his own front yard had been trashed. He kicked at bottles and cans and yelled at “THE SCUMBAGS!” who did this. I thought he would start crying, but instead he had us kids clean up the place and find a
designated place to dump it.

The reaction was so strong, so angry, that I never forgot it. Today I recall that reaction when I’m in Flushing Meadows wandering the acres of garbage that never seem to clear.

All these years later he still regards the experience of camp counselor as a significant milestone in his life. He was touched that I contacted him to say that he had made some meaningful contribution in my life. He said
it was “every camp counselor’s dream” to be contacted this way — an exaggeration, I think, but sincere.