: lower black pain.

It didn’t matter if my grandmother liked you or not. There’d be a big hello, and then she’d offer you a tin of cookies and ask you all about yourself. But as you’d try to tell her she’d make positive sounds like “uh, huh” and “ok” in an increasing amount, until she’d overlap you talking. Then you’d stop talking. And then she’d offer you more cookies.

You wouldn’t take more cookies, not because you didn’t like the first one, but because you wouldn’t be able to figure out what it had actually tasted like. Grandma’s cookies were filled with applesauce instead of butter and sugar because Grandpa was diabetic. Grandma had studied nursing. She wasn’t a nurse, there wasn’t time for all that, but she did know enough to make accurate inferences between what one ate and how one was faring, so her cookies tasted that way because they were healthy, which was mostly confusing because nothing was really healthy back then.

She wrote a whole cookbook. It’s amazing to have a cookbook of your grandmother’s recipes, even just for the historical value. Most of the dishes are made with brand names of things; half a can of brand x condensed milk, 8 sticks of brand y margarine. I can’t eat any of those things anymore, but I do remember exactly what they all tasted like. Including the cookies, which were neither crispy nor soft… somewhere in the middle, dome shaped, about an inch and a half diameter with a distinctly springy consistency, somewhere between a marshmallow and a foam peanut. I must have eaten a thousand of those things.

Yet those cookies are not my grandmother’s legacy. They would have been, if I hadn’t accidentally found, in the dining roomin the huge piece of furniture that held all the candlesticks and holiday linen, at the very bottom of the bottom drawer, underneath sets of placemats and the Thanksgiving tablecloth a large folder from a copyright office.

Grandma, what is this?

What is what?

This.

What is it?

A envelope.

What’s in it?

I don’t know, I haven’t opened it yet. It’s from a copyright office.

Well what is it?

I don’t -

I gave up and just opened it (that loop could have gone on forever).

It’s music.

What does it say?

Mommy Dear?

Oh yes, that’s the song I wrote and copyrighted.

In 1938?

I guess so. I wrote a lot of music, you know that.

I did not.

It was an analog triumph. The five pieces of music were handwritten, the notice was manually typed, and the signature on the document had been made with a fountain pen. The whole thing looked like it had taken time to create; no faxes or copy machines or even fast planes to carry it from place to place. And copyrights were fancy. I couldn’t afford one. I was still sending myself everything in a self addressed envelope and not opening it.

When I was a little girl I wanted to play at Carnegie Hall.

In New York?

Yes.

I lived in New York. She didn’t like New York. She did not encourage me to seek a career in the arts, in fact, the polar opposite was true. She played the organ, but only at home, and I was allowed to play it as long as I put the settings back where she had them, but she didn’t give me lessons. It was something she did for fun, I guess.

I asked if I could borrow the music for an hour. I went to Kinko’s and made photocopies, then over the next few months I made a digital version with some very rudimentary instrumentation. That July, for her 85th birthday, my Mom and I threw my grandmother a “record release party”, with burned CDs of the music and a printed insert book with her picture on it.

We decorated the basement with pages of her newly printed score, and she sat at a card table while we each approached her for her autograph. She even asked us our names. I mean, she knew our names… she just really got into it.

Then three generations of her family sat silently and listened to her music. it wasn’t Carnegie Hall, but she seemed to like it.

My grandmother made my grandfather’s career possible; a black lawyer in the 1940s (who sometimes got paid in chickens) who was eventually elected as a county commissioner and then the became the state’s first black district court judge. Her home was a political hub; she arranged fabulous get togethers and rallies and events and salons made even more impressive when you take into consideration that she didn’t like people at all.

She was busy with a reality that necessitated putting dreams, literally, at the bottom of a bottom drawer, because the time for a girl from Topeka to play Carnegie Hall hadn’t come, we were not on Planet Rihanna yet, she was old enough that her parents felt blessed they had never worn chains.

Imagine all that, and then being an artist on top of that. Because that was her temperament, everything she ever did and said makes sense if you think of her as an artist. Like the rest of us, she didn’t get a chance to live too far beyond what was necessary. But sometimes those cookies had raisins in them, so they were chewy little things with littler chewy things inside them, like chewduckens. That’s how she expressed her art.

For me, this column is a happy indulgence, but also my attempt to open up some bottom drawers before I’m a nonagenarian. My true legacy from my grandmother isn’t the life I knew, or even the life she lived, but the folder at the bottom of that drawer. And, of course, her cookbook, although I have never baked those cookies, and at this point I don’t think you’re really asking why, but you’re probably gonna need a glass of water with that.

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Remember your first crayon box?

12 colors was enough for the sky and the ground and the house and the grass

and then you got the 24 pack with the two levels of crayons cause they had that little cardboard step inside the box and then you could really go to town on the cat and the dog and the cars and the people

but then you went to a kid’s house that had the mega box of 64 with the sharpener on the back (sharp inhale) and you thought you were a renaissance master. But no matter what you wanted to draw, you almost never used the color “yellow-green”.

There was also a color called “green-yellow”, which was fine when rendering the gentle sunlight peeking through branches of jaunty sycamores, but somehow nothing in your head was ever really “yellow-green”.

When all was drawn, that box always still held the apricot, salmon, and yellow-green crayons.

Well, the idea of having an orchestra, even a virtual one, is just like that. Only sonic.

I’ve been sorting through strings and brass and winds and Irish flutes and Japanese percussion and hurdy-gurdy sounds for days, searching for the perfect combination to “color in” the music I am finishing. I was actually a little overwhelmed, until I realized today, on the subway, what would really be a great place to start – a crazy idea that would never, ever happen.

Four pianos.

C’mon, four pianos is much crazier than an orchestra, because they’re heavy and big and seem entirely impractical, even though it’s a visually simpler set-up. Four pianos is not a regular thing. I looked it up. Bach. Philip Glass. John Cage. And well, me. It’s a odd thing to ask for, because orchestras are set up all over the world already, but nobody has four pianos, you don’t need four pianos, it’s like having four dining room tables. For four pianos you have to rent a couple, and then somebody has to deliver them and tune them again because they don’t really travel well.

I’m not trying to make trouble, far from it, and I do want to add some other instruments too, eventually. It’s just that I don’t need 64 crayons, just four good ones. I don’t actually even play piano: I have a keyboard, and I use it a lot, but I don’t, y’know, play. So it’s interesting to me that I’ve chosen that sound as the core of the piece.

My love of piano is pretty specific, and although it would be more on theme to reference Basie or Gershwin or Tom Lehrer, it is much more honest to admit that they actually followed another guy.

As I a little kid learning how to read, I felt like a detective. Writing was all around me, everywhere, just waiting to be decoded, and I loved figuring out what things said. Math was ok, but I didn’t like the “showing your work” part; reading teachers never asked me to do that. Ideas could come out of my head and onto a page and I never needed to explain where they came from or how they ended up that way (which would have been a disaster because I still don’t know).

Even though most of the music that filled our home was from the radio, we did have a few albums; some jazz, soul, and a brick of Disney soundtracks my mom gave me on my third birthday from a 1-800 number on television (you could buy a lot of stuff that way).

On those special occasions we actually got a new album, it was a wonderful experience. It took forever to take the record out of the cover because I was never allowed to take the plastic off, and I never wanted to ruin the record sleeve because that’s where all the lyrics were. I would read every bit of information over and over while the records were playing (I couldn’t have been more fascinated if it was a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence).

That is where I learned to spell “orchestra”. And “xylophone”.

And “Bacharach”.

It’s a tricky word… arach rather than ack.  But there were so many opportunities to see it: written by, conducted by, piano played by, on every song. I’m not certain if my mother started out buying Burt Bacharach albums, I think we used to call them “Dionne Warwick albums”. But the third pop song I ever learned all the way through was “I’ll Never Fall In Love Again”. I was four.

I sang it everywhere. Now, the full picture here is that it’s 1971, and my Mom’s a divorcee, raising a kid by herself, two steps away from the 1960s in the middle of the Bible Belt, working two jobs sometimes to send her kid to a school that just happens not only to be Catholic but connected to an abbey filled with actual nuns. (Which is actually how I know French.) So: I sang this song EVERYWHERE – out on the playground, in the lunchroom, and after school in the main hallway because I remember the echoes were just really cool.

I’d heard a woman named Sandy Duncan sing it on some variety show, maybe Ed Sullivan?  But I think the nuns thought that my mother was despondently pining through our apartment like a midwestern Bronte sister, singing that song over and over, a top-of-the-pops lament which floated through our windows and over the Kansan plains. When she came to pick me up one day, they gently and nunishly brought it up to her, then tilted their heads about 14 degrees and asked if everything was ok.

So my mom told me I had to learn another song from the album, but many of the Burt Bacharach songs were along the same lines, so we settled on “What the World Needs Now Is Love”.  No nun can disagree with that.

And then Close To You came out, performed by the Carpenters. A little while ago I wanted to know what love sounded like, and there, that song, that performance, is the answer. The song is so simple, but when it would combine with your ride in the car or your trip to the grocery store or even breakfast it always lifted it, just a little bit. The songs of Burt Bacharach were everywhere, they seemed universal, but when I saw him on television he was just kind of a regular guy sitting and playing piano. Oh, and singing sometimes, which, strangely, wasn’t really his thing. But he made music out of music, if you know what I mean. It really was just a guy playing the piano.

What I love most about art is combinations of simplicity…harmony, dissonance, complement, contrast. Music has all that; notes and rests; highs and lows, louds and softs (that is not a word, is it? If I played that in scrabble, you would definitely challenge, right?)

Anyway, art isn’t always better if it’s more, so four pianos allows me to focus on the music and not spend time tweaking hurdy-gurdys. (Eeegh. That sounds awful). Four pianos is enough…I don’t need a crayon sharpener.

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What does love sound like?

Yes, it is the middle of February, the time such questions sound particularly twee, but I’m asking in a literal sense. What does love sound like?

This ballet project is quite humbling. Scoring or arranging a piece of music for orchestra isn’t like writing a piece of music at all. I know how the music goes, but now I’m figuring out what it sounds like. It’s the difference between writing a script and having a performance. How many violins it takes to make a “twirling around looking up at the sky as a little kid” sound. 8, by the way…it takes eight, apparently.

Emotion is even more difficult to transcribe than action, because it’s so personal, and love is the most personal emotion. So I’ve tried pianos, an English horn, a vibraphone, a harp, and a muted trumpet as the lead instrument in the second movement of the ballet. Ok, all of these are digital. I mean, I play a few instruments but I’m not Buckaroo Banzai yet.  See, I’ve invested in a few virtual orchestras, computer software with recordings of actual instruments being played by virtuoso musicians which offer, in some cases, extremely granular nuances of tone and virtuosity that you can play with. So at least ONE of these sounds should sound like love, right?

There’s love and there’s fear, those are the only things there are. What about hope? Love. What about anger? Fear, duh, it’s like you didn’t pay attention to Yoda at all.  But we’re all a little more… familiar with fear. Case in point: we all know exactly what fear sounds like.

Weeeeeeoooooooooooo. Bum Bum Baaaaaaahh! Buh Dup Buh Dup Buh Dup Buh Dup. We can all hum fear, right off the top of our heads; minor diminished chords, that shriek-y thing from the string section, very very low slow brass. And then the synthesizers, and the super echoey sounds. Oh! Oh! And the CHILDREN SINGING LAs. Not the Danny Elfman fast LAs, but the singsong super innocent ones coming down the dark hallway in a little white vintage dress.

la la la la la la la la

Grown Men run away from those LAs. In my experience the thin line is the darkness. One night my kid was singing sweetly to herself in her bed as I was saying goodnight to her I kissed her on the head and turned off the light. And she kept singing.  In the dark now. And there was just a little second there where I thought she was going to eat my face. She must sensed my terror, because she stopped singing, and with genuine heartfelt concern said in the ABSOLUTELY SWEETEST VOICE EVER (in the dark)

“What’s the matter, Daddy?”

I didn’t run. They get you if you run. For sure. But I did turn a light on. Kept it on all night. It was like a slumber party.

Yep. Fear is a soundtrack that’s easy to recognize. Also super easy to make now; I just got a software update that came with four digital instruments designed to do nothing but make scary wind noises and dissonant freak-you-out sounds. And there are loads more of these things you can buy, because there’s a great demand for it now if you’re a composer doing soundtracks. Think of all the spooky shows on tv… then list a few love shows. Is that even a thing? A love show? Romantic comedy I guess…how many of those are still on?

The soundtrack of fear is inspiring new advances in technology, while the musical instruments of love don’t really seem to be evolving all that much. There’s the acoustic guitar, and the piano in the right hands (or with the right hands on top of it), and the human voice (if it’s in a reasonably well lit room). In the 80s, there used to be saxophone music; oh yeah, that was the love throw down. A sax solo? What? Forget it, it’s over, we’re heading right to a chapel from this dance floor. Or laundromat. That music was everywhere.

I do play the alto sax, but not like that. There was never a chance of anything romantic happening while I was rocking the golden tin Bundy. I don’t think those student saxes are capable of playing love music – they must have some sort of regulator or governor in them to keep the youths from being corrupted.

So what to do. For the ballet, I decided that an English horn, when played well, sounds like happiness to me. A vibraphone sounds like childhood. A piano sings of time. But love, as mentioned before, is personal, and can sound like anything, really. I’ve written love songs. They never seemed to work out. Well, one did, once.

When I was about 22 I went to a birthday party in a large shared flat in San Francisco. The person who invited me introduced me to the host, a young woman who had the very specific problem of wanting to let her girlfriend know how much she loved her.

“Let’s write her a song” I said, because, me.

It was her girlfriend’s birthday party. I didn’t know either of them, but the young woman brought out a guitar, and we both sat in her kitchen, and she told me all about how she felt; how they’d both been hurt, how she had never been able to express her emotions before but now she could, but only while her girlfriend was sleeping… she’d whisper how very much she loved her into her slumbering ear. When they were both awake, face to face, she was much too scared to say anything.

So that’s what I wrote the song about. I played it for her about 20 minutes later; she sat silent for about a second and then, without another word, ran out of the room and came back with her girlfriend, who was understandably concerned about the stranger in the kitchen with the guitar. I introduced myself as her birthday card, and sang the song for the very second time while they held hands, and cried a little, and at the end I said “Happy Birthday” and walked right out.

Love is personal. It’s not that nobody knows what love sounds like, it’s that only you know what love sounds like to you – and when you recognize the music, it could be metaphorically played on any instrument at all. Except, as previously discussed, a children’s chorus, because that is eternally terrifying.

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I started writing this column after my daughter’s keen criticism of the entertainment lineup I presented last year during Black History Month. I’d arranged a home film festival, with entries chosen to be delightful yet impactful from over 100 years of African American cinema. This greatly wearied her; there was too much black and white, as many of the films and clips were classic monochrome, but also the underlying thematic unity of an ever-present political maelstrom regarding skin tone and social class. That too.

Ten year old people have astonishing insight, and without this discussion I would never have set about trodding this path, embracing Black history in a personal way, where what’s happened already is “history” and I, quite legitimately flexing a rich brown which PANTONE has recognized as 18-1028 (the “Emperador”), am Black.

Thus my history, as that of every Black person, is Black history. It’s not just the giant events of the past, but a legacy being built every day, all around us, and this year I’m taking care to balance essential tales of overwhelming circumstance with those of challenging yet manageable personal incident. With whimsy. There should be more Black Whimsy.

So this year we’re focusing less on images. Again, there is an essential story that must be told and we are lucky to have evidence of the extraordinary individuals associated with our progress and culture. But I’m writing a ballet, right? So I thought we’d focus more on music. There was extensive research. Well, there was an enthusiastic Wikipedia dive. The initial list was pretty good. Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie from my grandfather, who took the time to share his love of jazz with me and gave me my first real record, a 78 rpm recording of “April in Paris”. Then Marion Anderson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Grace Jones because, y’know, awesome.

The ability to find these recordings without searching endlessly through a card catalog at a library somewhere still amazes me, and I’m thankful for that, and incredibly I discovered people I wish I’d known years ago. I recently discovered names like Florence Price and William Grant Still who were Black classical composers because new recordings of their work have been popping up, which is very exciting for me because as a kid I thought it might be just me thinking about oboes and harps. (I mean, I grew up in Kansas City, a little bit isolated from any underground artist movement…my mom probably wouldn’t have let me stay out that late anyway.) It was actually my Grandmother’s love for Tchaikovsky that served as my main historical through line to this music (I’ll tell you that story a little later).

But how surprised was I to find the name Joseph Bologne Chevalier De Saint Georges.

Again.

Joseph. Bologne. Chevalier De Saint Georges.

Champion fencer, classical composer, virtuoso violinist, and conductor of the leading symphony orchestra in Paris in the mid 1700s.

What?

Now I could go way into this but you’ve got a lot going on. Let me just say three things quickly:

1. there is a painting of him that is in no way like the painting of Beethoven we’re all familiar with where when people said “Oh, but Beethoven is Black!” we all went, “…but IS he?”  Joseph Bologne Chevalier De Saint Georges is not only rocking the 18-1028 but he is straight out of central casting for the next Bridgerton.

2. Somebody should make a movie about all this OH WAIT THEY JUST DID! Honestly, I’d never heard of him before, yet there just happens to be a big budget film coming out this year telling his story. Miracle.

3. On the internet, directly underneath his name are the words “The Black Mozart”.

Not to winge, but that’s the heaviest part of these 28 days for me; the struggle to be recognized as more than the variant of a lighter skinned original. Black history presented as separate from Just History. There is an unimplied implication of opposition to a main timeline that we are a branch of rather than a root feeding into.

I’ve been told a great deal of times that I did not “know my place”, or that the most I could achieve was to be “the first Black” something, always following or imitating. Many of the musicians and artist on this year’s listening list “knew their place” in the world but actively ignored it, and had the audacity to change not themselves, but the world around them until it was indeed their own. In many cases attention wasn’t initially focused on their achievement at all, but their Nerve, as each of them were asked the question: “How dare you?” and their art was their answer.

I want this month to offer my daughter strategies to see herself as a Black person not in opposition, but invention, with all history as a story she has the right to tell.

So as we’re listening to Prince, Joan Armatrading, Shirley Bassey, Jon Batiste, and even the recordings of her great-grandmother, she should understand that not only is this specific music associated with her, but she is heir to all music. She is experiencing the world, all the time, and she is Black, all the time, and that is how Black history works; not in opposition, but as a uniquely independent lens through which life is seen and reflected, often in powerful art, which she can someday create as a new guardian of this cultural audacity.

And if she ever gets asked the question, “How dare you?!?” she should respond with, 

“Well, I dare pretty well. But y’know, I practice a lot. Thanks for asking.”

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I very recently started a new job, at an actual building that I actually go to everyday with my actual human body.

Now every morning I walk my daughter to school (surreptitiously, as not to embarrass her) then continue three blocks to the subway. Been a bit of time since I’ve done this sort of thing, so my capacity for public interaction is not at all what once it was. Even though the walk is short and uneventful, at the end I do head into a dark vast cave emanating otherworldly screeches and wails as if from Greek myth.

But it’s winter now; so my coat and hat and new fancy mask offer a layer of shielding I never had before. And the corner before the subway station has a friendly crossing guard, probably in her late sixties, who that first day gave me the absolutely warmest smile and hearty “Have a nice day”.

Sometimes, quite rarely, the spirit of the city speaks directly to me, transmogrifying into the sun peeking from behind clouds, or the trains perfectly connecting, or a genuine and enthusiastic smile from a stranger saying “Have a nice day”. It’s the world saying, “Hey. You’re doing ok.”

In the middle of my second week the weather took a bizarre turn, and it was suddenly 62 degrees outside in January. My daughter and I had really enjoyed the walk to school, so when I reached the crossing corner I said “Good Morning!” to the guard with appreciative gusto.

Her smile fell. Her face hardened. Her eyes narrowed. She silently nodded her head, once, dismissively, like a Roald Dahl villain, and I just kept walking toward my stop, my face oddly frozen in a smile, like at the end of a ZOOM call when you’re waiting for that “Leave Meeting” button to kick in.

I immediately rewound the event in my head to determine what might have offended her, I mean I wasn’t wearing anything weird that –

– ah. I realized that my mask had been pulled down, and this had been the first time the crossing guard had seen my face, and it was now obvious that she had thought, all along, that I was somebody else. Whoever the other guy was, she liked him a lot. Maybe he’s on TV or something. Thus, I had stolen all that warmth and good feeling. It wasn’t my fault, but an unfortunate expansion of the moment you realize a person is actually waving at someone behind you.

The way her face had dropped at the sight of the lower third of mine revealed such a definitive disappointment I felt I now owed her something to balance my unintentional deception, my IRL catfishing.

So. A gentle charm offensive.

The next day; much colder outside, mask back on, pace steady but not rushed; I offered a clearly audible “Have a good day!” as I passed, the phrase chosen as not to imply familiarity, but authentic respect, citizen to citizen.

The day after was a little warmer; so a mask-down genuine smile with a single nod, no audible greeting, moving quickly, no response expected.

By the fourth day, I got a very tentative “g…good morning” back. No eye contact.

I always speak first now. She doesn’t always even acknowledge me. Yet every connection with a person is both effort and gift, so I am paying forward the compassion she mistakenly gave to me back to her. In installments.

As nice as it was to have the world ethereally happy to have me back in it for a week or so, it’s a better start to the day for me to express gratitude and enthusiasm, prime the kindness pump, help the ball get rolling a little bit.

I understand that this has nothing to do with writing a ballet, and I’m not gonna twist this around to make any kind of musical sense, though I have just now remembered that in the UK a crossing guard would be called a “lollipop lady”; which is a bit zen given the title of last week’s column.

I will say that the act of going to the office everyday is a brand new rhythm for me, and the cacophony and jostling of my daily underground journey is balanced somewhat by a harmonious morning stroll…

…until I hit that corner, because she is still…very angry. I’ll keep politely smiling…mask or not, but I’ll be looking both ways before I cross the street.

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In grade school each year they’d take us to see something called a “Lollipop Concert”. We’d sit in the front rows of the hall that the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra played in while each musician introduced us to an instrument. Then they’d play a few pieces: “Peter and the Wolf” and some others, but the most important for me, the one they would always play, because I think we always went in the fall around Halloween, was the Saint-Seans masterpiece, “Danse Macabre”.

Love. That’s what it was. I still love it, it’s been practically my whole life, and I can’t get over hearing it that first time. Those concerts are where I first dreamed about writing for an orchestra; before that, the closest I had ever seen was a black and white film of Cab Calloway decked out in a white zoot suit, maniacally conducting his band – half with his baton and half with his crazy hair. Then there was a very funny Bugs Bunny cartoon, but that conductor was kind of the villain. We were all five, and probably somewhat adorable, and it took me until about two years ago to realize why they gave us all lollipops, but I never needed one because I was just awestruck, listening to the orchestra play.

So here I am, finally, finishing some of my orchestral pieces.

Yep.

Here I am. I’m doing that.

If I may take just a moment:

there is a semi famous phrase, which holds the odd coincidence of being attributed to a lot of people I really admire : Laurie Anderson, Steve Martin, Elvis Costello, and even my Fresh Air Fund™ pretend dad Frank Zappa, which goes:

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

I’ve had a little while to think about that, and it’s true; a season of columns (that most people read and don’t listen to) about composing a ballet is not a well worn path to walk. But I think this may be more about my relationship with the music than the music itself. In any case, let me get you up to speed with some hearty backstorying:

In 1986 I spent the summer working in Los Angeles. I was a Universal Studios tour guide. (We’ll come back to that at a later point.) Anyway, while in training there I met a girl

who was a dancer

and as I was a composer I thought it might be cool to write her something to dance to

so I asked her all about her life and she told me and then I wrote some themes based on what she’d said

and maybe I thought she might go out with me once I finished it but that was a long shot

but she did go out with me but way before I finished the music

and without all the broody alone time to walk the moors and sing into a tape recorder I didn’t get to finish it that summer

and then, much later on, we stopped dating

and the project kinda went into turnaround

not because we weren’t dating, but by then I had to graduate from college and get a job in a recession and the days were just packed.

But I didn’t forget about it. I kept at it, humming ideas into a 4 track cassette tape recorder.

Then, in the late 90’s, I bought a Roland PMA-5 sequencer; it’s a little machine about the size of a trade paperback collection of the complete works of Emily Dickinson. I carried that around for months, tapping on a grey little screen with a little tiny stylus…programming six movements, note by note.

A couple of years later I exported those files (in a computer language called MIDI) to one of those first iMacs (the ones that came in the bright colors that looked like intelligent candy), and from there to

an orchestral scoring program, then a full paper orchestral score, then another computer program that actually sounded like instruments.

It’s important to note that none of this technology existed when I first started this. Back then, my only hope of this being real was a commission from an orchestra somewhere, which wasn’t impossible but was, y’know, impossible.

Also, have you seen me? Do I look traditionally responsible (or, responsibly traditional) enough that you’d lend me 100 musicians and your acoustically balanced room for a week? Well, thanks Mom, I know you would, that’s very very nice of you, but the point is that it was not gonna happen for me back then.

But now? Technology. I’m fine. Technology allows me to make any kind of sound I want, and place it literally anywhere on the planet.

And that is the problem.

I now have over 2692 files pertaining to this project. Most of them are copies of copies of back ups from 512k floppy discs to ZIP discs to CDs to hard drive after hard drive… think about trying to save one file over the last 30 years of digital evolution. Yes, I did print out the entire thing, but again, you can’t hear that, so I rendered out audio versions every five years or so with whatever new program I had learned.

Each one of these versions represents me trying to get back to that concert, but standing on stage rather than sitting in the audience.

I’d still take a lollipop.

So this week, I started going through all those files.

Let me tell ya, it was crazy. Just me in my headphones saying things like “What was I thinking?” and “That’s not right!” out loud to myself. My daughter came in and patted me on the head. This year, as a family, we are listening to a classic album a week, all the way through, while we draw or paint or something, and the first one was The Beatles “Let It Be”, but the version they made a few years ago without all the horns and strings added by Phil Spector (against their wishes, actually). It’s just four people and some instruments and some of the greatest music ever.

Fresh from that experience, and not at all critical, my daughter listened to my latest version of the beginning of the ballet.

“It sounds like a State Farm commercial,” she told me, “and then turns into the sad part of the soundtrack in an Avengers movie.”

She’s right: there was a time I used to be involved in advertising and watch a great deal of superhero movies and that seemed to come through clearly in my artistic expression.

My original idea was to find the best bits of each version I’ve created and then put them together in one, but then I got all philosophical and realized I can’t go back 30 years to the original and “re-do” it, I can only really be who I am right now. That’s who we all are, all the time, the surviving bits of who we’ve been, all mixed together, walking around, drinking coffee.

Think about that project you’ve had on the back burner for a really long time, maybe home improvement or a recipe you’ve wanted to try… if you keep it long enough the world around you changes, and you actually need a bigger bookshelf or you don’t eat that much sugar anymore, wow, see what I mean, Dancing About Architecture. I hope that you enjoyed my fox trot to the NeoClassical. Next week let’s cha-cha to Bauhaus.

State Farm. Hey, at least she compared it to professional music that people paid for. I appreciate that.

[Here is a link to the very first audio file of the ballet’s first movement, and then the later version I played my daughter.]

https://on.soundcloud.com/xUU5U

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There’s a picture of me, as a kid, that I think really looks like me.

If you care to argue that all pictures of us look like us, then I respectfully disagree. I have what has been commonly called a “high forehead”, high meaning “substantial” (or I think a better description might be “unavoidable”). I inherited this head from my grandfather, and the worst thing people used to say about it is “you must have a lot of brains in there” which isn’t really an insult. I say the worst thing ‘people used to say’ rather than ‘kids used to say’ because grown adults, quite recently, have said this to me about my forehead before any cocktails had been poured. That’s apparently how many brains are in there.

I’ve gotten used to it now, and thankfully for the moment have preserved my hairline if not the lustrous thickness of scalp fur past. For a while I wanted nothing more than David Cassidy’s hair; the lead singer of a band called “The Partridge Family”. He had a gentle 70’s wavy kind of vibe that didn’t completely cover his eyes but kinda swirled around his face a little… definitely not bangs but I recognized it as an absolutely groovy way to somewhat distract from the front of my giant skull. But as time went on I grew into my head. Which sounds like something to say to a therapist. But I digress.

The reason I feel that this particular childhood photo looks like me has most to do with proportion. You’re born with head parts but then they shift in relation to one another until the time that they suddenly don’t do that anymore and there YOU are.  Nothing exceptionally different, but everything finally in the right place, and in the right proportion. It takes a while.

I’m walking a parallel path to that as a composer… bits of music have been in my head for years, and I’ve captured them on whatever was available at the time. Cassette tapes, answering machines, manuscript paper, bar napkins.  But if I play those recordings I don’t really hear them, instead I hear what the music is supposed to sound like. What it should sound like, when it’s finished.

My composing really took off around seventh grade, when my mother brought home what she thought was a broken cassette player from school: but I fixed it, and along with the cassette recorder we had already I’d tape one part, then play that loud while I sang another, and layer instruments until I was a brown little band.

Now, I am very lucky.  I’ve worked really hard and invested in instruments and computer software that allow me to actually, every now and then, make the music that I actually hear in my head. This is essential because I don’t have a spare room in my basement where a symphony orchestra just hangs out waiting for me. I don’t actually have a basement. Or a spare room. But I’ve studied for hundreds of hours and developed a treasured relationship with a company called Sweetwater (the world’s greatest online music shop) that might best be compared to a musical kind of Stockholm Syndrome, and now I can actually share the music I’ve been hearing for, in many cases, a lot of decades.

What’s most impressive is that the music’s still there. All these tapes should have been destroyed in the earthquake, or the hurricane, or lost in one of the 17 moves, or warped in the hot metal storage space or infested with the deadly mold… my life has been a comic book, and the fact that I can even remember the music is a logistic miracle. But it’s stayed with me.

There’s a thing about cooking that most people have; they would make a fancy meal if someone was coming over for dinner but wouldn’t spend the same amount of time making that same meal for themselves because food is better shared. I do not feel the same way about music; music’s more than food, it’s medicine, and I don’t need to share aspirin to appreciate it.

But I’m gonna. It’s a good time to settle down and find warm socks and get something knit or learn a new game or just whittle some. So I am going to make, finally, a picture of my music, with everything in proportion and balance and all the pieces in the right place, and I’m not only sharing the end result, but the whatever this is before the end result. Process, yes, thank you. And at this point, right now, I’m less driven by harmony, rhythm and counterpoint, and more fascinated with the sustain. These sounds inside my head have sustained, through the entirety of my very odd life.

Yeah, we’re all still here, that’s not really impressive. But, y’know, isn’t it? It kinda is. All of us, still happening, still ringing, still in the air, still music.

I think it’s impressive. We’ll see about my art thing, but we’re all pretty cool.

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I expect previews at a movie, and liner notes inside album covers seem polite and informational and approachable on one’s own terms, but I don’t enjoy prefaces, on the whole. I feel they’re somewhat jarring.

There is a legitimacy to the preface which I never feel comfortable ignoring, because someone read this book before I did and they aren’t merely offering a critique but a fully developed analysis that was deemed important enough by the publisher of the book to tell you something you NEED TO KNOW BEFORE you read the book yourself. 

Skip them? But what if they really are a map through which the subtle genius of the author is fully realized, like knowledge of Classic Italian when enjoying opera or waiting all that time to let the wine breathe (or whatever)? At best they offer some perspective, but most seem to me like drunken apartment roommates of a date I’m waiting at the door for. “Are you guys going out? You are? Really? Well I gotta tell you couple of things you definitely gonna wanna know…”

This, is not a preface. Clearly, it is a pause, once again, between seasons of this column, yet it is not an analysis or require any spoiler alert. Instead it serves as a Playbill of the next season’s theme; I am going to create something, something musical (but not a musical! I heard some eyebrows arching and hearts skipping beats. Not. A Musical. I pinky swear.).

It will take me many weeks (well, hopefully less than 15) to finish, and at the end I will premiere it here and hopefully it will mean more to you because you will have BEEN THERE (or here) when it happens (or is happening). 

There will be stories, and hopefully quasi-elegant quipping, and I do not know exactly how it will turn out in the end, but I’ve been working on it for about 35 years. Most of you have experience with long term projects; many which have now created a smaller projects of their own. 

Look, I know you’re busy with the new year, everything’s crazy after the holidays, totally understand, and I appreciate you dropping by. But let’s meet back here next week. I can’t promise to soothe your Dry January (or my own) but 35 years ago I thought I had something to say and I think it’s probably time to say it.

But not sing it… that’s totally out. You’re absolutely safe. Promise.

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Well, here we goBut not “again”

Nothing ever happens twiceIt’s never “last Thursday”Even if this Thursday feels “just like last Thursday”We never take the same train to workOr eat the same thing, for lunch

Earth, this moving spaceshipis never in the same place twicewe hurtleever forward spinningoutwardlysomewhere over in that directionour very lives great wheels of cheese on rolling metaphorical hillsides (which actually sounds delicious)

Here we go –But not “again”;

The loops we use as metronomesseasons, moons, software updatesare patterns, yesbut non-repeating onesfor Time (dramatic pause)is like Pi. (without the e)(a bold statement which also sounds delicious)

So. Here we go. But not “again”.

It’s said that history repeatsbut it just imitates.We’re never back where we beganor washing the same plates.We’re always in a brand new timeand in a different space.We’re always New.The calendar’s a backbeat,we’re a soloso here we go!but not “again”;

the world is not just maththough day to day to day today seems like a well worn path

let’s celebrate the where we are

exhausted, yet ambitiousand heed the annual countdownyet rememberlife’s delicious.

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I took Latin in 8th grade. Our school had it as a requirement. I loved it, it was like a secret code that unlocked all the Romance languages. I was even chosen to narrate a dramatization of “The Three Little Pigs” in Latin at a pep rally, and no, I was not mercilessly beat senseless by the football team because they also had to take Latin and the quarterback was playing the wolf. Tres porcus parvus. That’s Latin for, y’know, three little pigs.

My high school Latin teacher actually dropped me a line (online) a few weeks ago, it was great - he was surprised that I remembered the language at all and I admitted that I’d subjected my daughter to both Green Eggs and Ham and the first Harry Potter novel in Latin translations. (She also did not beat me senseless as she was too young to know that I wasn’t reading English and just sorta likes me too much.) These alternating Facebook posts reminded me how much I love learning, and communication, and how glad I am that the Time Machine had been invented by the cavemen.

I think about time travel quite a bit; my favorite modern hero is a time traveler, who doubles down by cheating time as a serial immortal. No DeLorean, no mysterious pocket watch, no hot tub, this hero travels in a time (and relative dimension in space) machine, offering advice and wisdom. That sounds like fun. But that’s just fiction.

The Neanderthals did it for real, although the name of the specific genius has been, as one might imagine, lost to time, the gentle and absolute perfection of their engineering skill in the development of temporal technology is undeniable.

Questions? Yes, you in the back. Oh, I get it, I see where you’re confused…

It may help to restate one’s expectations of what a Time Machine actually does. It transports a person through time, allowing them to express opinions, passions, emotions, and information far into the future. And it allows one to reach backward through time to gain these selfsame gifts from people in the past.

That’s written language. It’s the perfect time machine, ‘cause that what it is. Does. Whatever.

That’s how a cave person, writing on a wall can tell me directly how their buffalo hunt went even though it’s been hundreds of years since that happened. Well, lots of hundreds. So whoever scrawled that writing on the cold stone wall possessed a brilliance overpowering any modern day technologist.

Unconvinced? Well, in 1823 Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem called “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, also known as “The Night Before Christmas”. I can say with one hundred percent certainty that it was written by hand, as the modern typewriter was 50 years away from being invented and the computer monitor nearly a century later.

So by hand, on paper, that one copy (probably, though there was some carbon paper in Italy - but what are the chances?) – that one copy of that poem made it to the offices of The Troy Sentinel newspaper, who printed it almost exactly two hundred years ago today.  There’s an original manuscript in Clement Clarke Moore’s handwriting on permanent display in the New York Historical Society library, and almost every American can recite at least two of the lines on that piece of paper from memory. 200 years old.

I wrote something on a computer twenty years ago and saved it in computer program that is now so obsolete I can’t even open it. The words are trapped in code which seems kinda futuristic but is apparently ancient, even though it’s hewn from space age concept and science-fiction craftwork. Twenty years. I didn’t buy that update in 2002 and now it’s all just garbage, not to mention that the disc it’s on is apparently a relic so past any practical use that one is on display in the Museum of Modern Art.

We all assumed that time machines would come from science, that computers would be our conduit to breaking free of time, but they seem more heir to its savagery than we are. I mean, I can still remember things from 20 years ago. Well, some things. If I don’t remember them then I don’t remember that I don’t, so the false confidence is extremely supporting. In any case, it is clear that printed language, whether written upon papyrus or Spanish cave wall, holds a more dependable path to far-future relevance than the miracles of our modern age.

That’s how Dorothy Parker travelled through time (and relative space) to me, to offer advice and wisdom. If you’re reading my words, somewhere in the future, then my message to you is... 

…wait a minute, everybody’s reading this in the future. Wow. That is really effective. Ok, well if it’s the future but closer to where I am now, then I have a message:

Thank you for these two seasons of a column that is so much fun for me: your responses have been wonderful. I appreciate you allowing me to travel through time and space to share yours. Happy Holidays, whenever you are. Thank you for your time. And to all, a good night.

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