Technicalities - the Craft in any Art

Every art has its component of craft: the skill and knowledge about the materials and equipment that you use. As a serious amateur musician, I'm always trying to improve my technique, my sound, and my grasp of music. When we visit the United States -- we just returned from a twelve day visit to our children and grandchildren -- I often order are saxophone reeds, and much more occasionally saxophone mouthpieces (because they're quite expensive and tricky - you have to try them to know whether they're any good for you) on the Internet, because it's expensive and inconvenient to have them sent to us here in Israel, and there is a huge variety available on the web that no local music shop can afford to carry.
Maybe as much as ten years ago, I bought a beautiful looking metal mouthpiece for my baritone saxophone. It has a very live tone, but I've never managed to master it, to play in tune with it, to control the dynamics, to keep the tone consistent, and that frustrates me.
Theorizing that the reeds I was using with that mouthpiece were too hard, this time I bought a box of five rather soft reeds. For anyone who doesn't play a reed instrument, I should explain: the bottom line is, the harder the reed, the harder you have to blow, and the more pressure you have to exert with your lips. The advantage of a hard reed is in the solidity and intensity of the tone, and the disadvantage of playing on a soft reed is that your tone can sound flaccid, and you lose projection and volume.
Mouthpieces are the other end of the equation. The wider the tip opening (the distance between the end of the reed and the tip of the mouthpiece), the harder you have to work to get a sound out of the instrument. But if the tip opening is too narrow, your sound is choked, it's hard to play loudly, with projection, and sometimes you can even stifle the sound by squeezing the reed and mouthpiece together with your lips and blocking the air completely.
All of this is highly individual. There is no single good combination that works for everyone. In the reed-player jargon, the combination of instrument, mouthpiece, and reed is called a setup. If you go to one of the hundreds of saxophone sites on the web, you'll see descriptions of the setups that various famous musicians use. The (ridiculous) idea is that if I played on exactly the same brand of saxophone, with exactly the same kind of mouthpiece and reed as Sonny Rollins, I, too, would be able to play as well as he does.
The prudent approach would be to find a setup that works for you and stick with it. But musicians are, quite properly, never entirely satisfied with their sound. Just recently someone sent me the link to an interview about practicing with the late Michael Brecker, where he talks about trying new equipment. So I have approval for my restlessness. In the same vein, my late musical guru, Arnie Lawrence, often said that you shouldn't keep doing what you already do well. The only way to advance in your art is to keep trying new things and taking the risk of sounding bad for a while (if you're a musician).
This notion isn't limited to the craft and art of playing a musical instrument. If you're a poet, and you always write blank verse, try rhyming for a change. If you're a painter who specializes in watercolors, try acrylics or oils or printmaking.
Does art begin where the technicalities leave off? Perhaps, but without mastering the technicalities, one never leaps out into artistry.

The Old Country, as it were

So here we are at our daughter's temporary home in Rockville, MD, making up for grandchild deprivation. Every time we visit the United States, the country where we grew up, I feel odder and odder about being here. We are out of touch, even though we read the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and we follow US news on the web, and we have dozens of friends and relatives with whom we remain in contact.
But what is Rockville, MD to us? Our daughter and her family are returning to Israel this summer, and the apartment they've been living in has a temporary feel to it - hardly any pictures on the wall, hardly any investment in the place beyond the utilitarian. Compared to their house in Israel, which is decorated and cared for, this place seems a bit like a motel room they've been camping out in.
Our son, by contrast, has settled in here in the United States. He attended university and law school, and, after working for a big firm for 6 years, he's gotten a job with the US government. He and his partner have bought a charming house in an area in DC called Friendship Heights, and they've been working steadily at making it their home.
But the Washington area was never my home, and I only know my way around here tentatively. But it's a city of tourists and transients. No one really expects you to know where you're going.
The season doesn't help me feel at home here: winter. We don't really have winters in Israel, not winters with days and days below freezing, not winter with snow permanently on the ground, not winter with cold, dry winds, not winter that makes the landscape bare and abstract.
The whole point, of course, is to be with the grandchildren, to be in their company, to hear their voices, to enjoy their energy, to watch them move with the grace and enthusiasm of healthy children, and to be thankful that they are healthy children whose parents make sure they are stimulated and enriched, without being controlling.
We're going to go to a modest ski resort in Pennsylvania with the family today. I don't imagine I'll see a lot of them! I'm not sure how much fun a sexaganarian non-skier will have up there, but I'm going along for the ride.