1001 Irish Dance Tunes

In 1907 two Irish-American policemen in Chicago, Captain Francis O'Neill and Sergeant James O'Neill, published The Dance Music of Ireland: 1001 Gems, and you can either buy a reissue of it from Walton's, or download it from the web (it's not copyrighted) and print it out and bind it yourself, which is what I did.

Every day I play a two page spread of them, eleven or twelve, occasionally putting a mark in the table of contents if I like one of them especially well. So far I've played 767 of them now on the flute. Just 234 to go. I'll probably start over again at the beginning, unless I'm totally bored with Irish music by then.

Each of the tunes is short and simple, but they're astonishingly varied and creative, and each of them has a suggestive name, like "The Straw Seat," or "Condon's Frolics," in English and Irish. Here's a link to two reels. There are obviously hours and hours of traditional Irish music on Youtube!

I'm using the tunes as reading and fingering exercises. A lot of them fall exactly in the range of fingerings that I find a bit awkward on the flute, so I'm learning to overcome that awkwardness. I can't play them quite as quickly as they're supposed to be played, but they have charm even when played too slowly.

In general I shy away from exercises. I think it's better to play real music, that was meant to be music, and practice the hard as if they were exercises. That's why the Irish dance tunes are so useful, and fun to play, unlike most exercises. I try to imagine people dancing as I play. Music is for the whole body, not just the ears.

An Unexpected Parrot

From about fifty meters away, it looked very much as if a man was pushing a toddler swing with a parrot perched on the bar. As I gazed incredulously, a tall thin jogger slowed down to ask, in American English, “Is that a parrot?” “Seems to be,” I answered.

It was late on a Friday afternoon. The winter sky was clouded over, and the light didn't appear to be coming from any particular direction. I was walking our dog, a fairly large, brown mongrel, before showering and changing clothes for the Sabbath.

The dog and I slowly approached the swings to get a better look. I said hello. The man returned my greeting. The parrot's tail was bright orange-red. Its plumage was healthy-looking, mainly gray with some black stripes. I didn't want to get too close, because I thought the dog might scare the parrot. The man gently pushing the swing was above middle height, thin, in his fifties, dressed in a greenish, military-style jacket, wearing a baseball cap, smoking a cigarette, and holding a ceramic cup, presumably of coffee.

The swings, which my grandchildren love, stand on a grassy area in the midst of carob trees, planted in regular rows at a regular distance from each other – clearly a relic of the time when my Jerusalem neighborhood was the sparsely populated edge of an Arab village.

“Why doesn't he fly away?” I asked the man in Hebrew.

“Because I clipped his wings,” he answered in an accent I couldn't place right away.

The parrot ignored the dog, and the dog ignored the parrot. The man and I began a conversation.

“He likes to swing, doesn't he?”

“He's usually in a small cage,” the man explained, “and I have to take him out every once in a while to make him happy. He gets edgy when he can't move around.”

From there we went through the obvious questions and answers, though I didn't ask him why he didn't buy a bigger cage for his pet. How old was the parrot? (Young, just a year and a half). They live a long time, don't they? (Fifty years or more, as long as a person). Did he let him loose in his house? (No, because the parrot left droppings all over the place, but they didn't small as bad as human feces). Did it talk? (A little). And so on.

As the man talked, it became clear to me that he was an Arab.

The conversation drifted onto the subject of animal intelligence. The parrot's owner thought that even the smartest animal was no smarter than a four-year-old child, because no animal could find its way home from a strange place. Though I know that isn't true, I wasn't going to express a difference of opinion. Maybe the parrot wouldn't be able to find its way home.

I wanted to ask the man about his family, where he lived, and what he did. I thought he might know who the carob tree plantation once belonged to, but he wasn't interested in that. Instead, he told me that all we ever possess is the meter and a half of ground we're buried in. The earth and the sky belong to God. Then he began to talk about fate – whether we live or die is in God's hands. He pointed up to the gray sky.

What can you do when someone talks to you like that? Just nod in agreement.

After the theological discussion was over, I told the man I hadn't wanted to get too close to the parrot, because I thought it might be afraid of the dog. No problem, said the man. He finished his coffee, discarded his cigarette butt, put the parrot on his shoulder, and approached us. The parrot, clearly fond of its owner, had no interest in the dog, and the dog didn't notice the parrot. He sniffed at the man's jeans. I was afraid he might pee on him. He's done that once or twice. The man leaned over to pat the dog: Arabs usually don't like dogs, but this man was atypical. The dog enjoyed the man's patting.

I told the man I had to get going. He wished me a good Sabbath, got into his car, an old tan Opel, and drove off with the parrot on his shoulder.

Impersonation

Because of a favorable and intriguing review in the New Yorker. "Try to Remember: Tana French's off, intimate crime fiction" by Laura Miller (October 3, 2016), and because we had recently been in Ireland, where French's books are set, I bought and read the first of her Dublin Murder Squad series, In the Woods (Miller was reviewing the sixth, but I decided it was best to start at the beginning). I enjoyed reading that long, intense book and ordered the second one, The Likeness, which I have just finished reading. I intend to go on and read the rest, but not immediately. Hers are books that are hard to put down, and one doesn't always want to be swept away by that kind of energy.
The Likeness is narrated by Cassie Maddox, a detective who was a major character in In the Woods. The premise of the book is entirely unlikely, but, because French is a convincing writer, I ignored the impossibility of the initial situation and plunged right in. But I can imagine a reader thinking, "Oh, go on," and setting the book aside.
This is how the plot is set in motion: a young woman is found stabbed to death in a rural area about an hour away from Dublin, and she looks so much like Cassie, that her boyfriend, a murder detective who has been called in to begin the investigation, is afraid that it's her. Strangely, though she is obviously not the victim, the young woman's name is Lexie Madison, which was the name Cassie had assumed when she was working undercover to catch drug dealers, in other words, not the name of a real person (though, if you do a web search for Lexie Madison, you will find that there actually are women with that name). And, coincidentally (obviously not coincidentally, since Tana French put in in the book), Cassie had been stabbed while working undercover.
Because there is almost no evidence, Cassie is sent undercover again, to impersonate the victim (the police pretend that she hadn't died, which they can do handily, because in any event they can't locate the victim's next of kin) and live with her housemates under a false identity, in hopes of discovering who stabbed "Lexie." At the same time, the police are trying to find out who the victim really was.
So, for nearly a month, Cassie is living with four young adults who knew Lexie intimately, trying to pass herself off as that person, whom she herself had never known. French presents her preparations for taking on the role very interestingly.
With the passage of time undercover, Cassie becomes obsessed with Lexie and envious of her freedom and courage: she dropped her entire life several times, moved from place to place, repeatedly took on new names and identities, and so attained freedom, which Cassie envies. This fluidity of identity suited "Lexie" perfectly to fit in with the four graduate students in English Literature at Trinity College, who are living together in a mansion inherited by one of them, and restoring the house bit by bit. They, too, on principle, refuse to bring up the past, the time in their lives before they met each other and banded together.
A lot of the novel's plot is not really a plot. It's about Cassie's state of mind and her relations with the two detectives who are in charge of the investigation, and in a sense the novel is about how easy and how hard it is to be someone else (and, by extension, to be oneself). Also, like any good mystery novel, French keeps us guessing about who the murderer actually was.
In the Woods, the first novel in what has turned out to be a series, was narrated by Rob Ryan, a detective who was Cassie's partner in the murder squad, and Tana French managed to project his voice successfully. Now Cassie is the narrator, and, again, Tana French has gotten deep into her invented character's soul. So, like an Elizabethan play within a play, we have impersonations within impersonations: someone (we only find out who at the end of the book) was impersonating Lexie Madison, whom Cassie once impersonated, then Cassie impersonates Lexie, and, of course, Tana French is impersonating an invented character (just as Lexie was invented).
French is very good at describing places and things, quite imaginative, and highly intelligent. Lexie's four room-mates are quirky, original characters, and French manages to make us believe in them (at least while we're reading the book). They have created a closed milieu for themselves, aloof from the other students at Trinity, distant from the villagers around the house where they live, and cut off from their families. Strikingly, the police department, as French depicts it, is a mirror image of this little group. Detectives, even in relatively peaceful Ireland, can't live normal lives because of their work: both the intense demands of solving crimes and the stress of dealing with crimes all the time. Like the student characters in The Likeness, the detectives live beyond the realm of ordinary civic life. Perhaps that's why Tana French chose to invent and explore their world.
As I said, I'm planning to read the rest of the books in the series, but I need some time to recover from this one. I just downloaded Barchester Towers.

The Great America Some Voters Yearn For

Because I read RoddyDoyle's novel, “The Dead Republic,” in which John Ford appears as a significant, fictionalized character, I became more interested in John Ford than in Doyle's novel (a disappointment). I watched“Directed by John Ford,” a tribute to him by Peter Bogdanovich, made in 1971, which explains why other important movie directors admired Ford so much. My curiosity was aroused even further, so I decided to download one of his movies and see why people like Scorcese and Spielberg thought so highly of him.

I chose “The ManWho Shot Liberty Valence” mainly because I have always liked Jimmy Stewart (a fellow graduate of Princeton, after all) as much as I have disliked John Wayne.

Some movies made in 1962 (when I graduated high school) are extremely dated, and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” is a prime example. The characters lack depth. The plot is stupid. The moral issues are clichés. The scenery and the sets are patently artificial. But I watched it to the end and enjoyed it – possibly because it made me realize how much things have changed in the ensuing years. I also wanted to see how ridiculous John Wayne and Any Devine could get, as well as the exaggerated drunks – funny alcoholics.

John Wayne plays a soft-hearted tough guy, and Jimmy Stewart plays a brave wimp, whose successful political career is based on his fame as the man who killed Liberty Valence, Lee Marvin. The bad guy is a mild villain compared to sadists I have seen on the screen in the past decades. But you can tell that Marvin was having fun playing him, whereas Jimmy Stewart seemed mildly embarrassed throughout film, and John Wayne didn't even try to act. The female lead, Vera Miles, was told twice by John Wayne that she looked pretty when she was mad, and she didn't even shoot him.

The explicit political message is democratic: people are created equal (even John Wayne's loyal, black hired man), and citizens can successfully mobilize, vote, and defeat powerful and unscrupulous special interests (farmers against cattle ranchers). Nor is the West lily-white. In a brief, unbelievable schoolroom scene, the brightest pupil is a Mexican-American girl, and, later, John Wayne almost forces the bartender to serve his African-American sidekick (played by Woody Strode).

However, if I got it right, the implicit political message verges on fascistic: you'd better have a gun, a real man risks his life (Jimmy Stewart confronts Lee Marvin, who is a far superior gunman), and political success is based on a lie (John Wayne really killed Lee Marvin). The West is where men can (and have to) be men.

If you missed “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence” back in 1962, don't bother watching it now. However, I did see why directors admire Ford's directing, the way he used scenery, the way he managed crowd scenes, and the way he got actors to seem natural even in preposterous situations. He clearly had a deep grasp of what the cinema is and can be. He also had a naïve idea about American greatness that leads only to the political nightmare we are living in now.

The Unfortunately Named Mr. Trollope

After reading a bunch of modern stuff I decided to download a classic to my tablet, and I've been reading The Warden, the first of the five - oops, six - Barchester chronicles. Being the kind of reader I am, I might end up reading all six.

Trollope is a droll writer. Look at this description of breakfast at the home of Dr. Grantly, a thoroughly negative character (so far):

The breakfast-service on the table was ... costly and equally plain; the apparent object had been to spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendour. ... The silver forks were so heavy as to be disagreeable to the hand, and the bread-basket was of a weight really formidable to any but robust persons. The tea consumed was the very best, the coffee the very blackest, the cream the very thickest; there was dry toast and buttered toast, muffins and crumpets; hot bread and cold bread, white bread and brown bread, home-made bread and bakers' bread, wheaten bread and oaten bread; and if there be other breads than these, they were there; there were eggs in napkins, and crispy bits of bacon under silver covers; and there were little fishes in a little box, and devilled kidneys frizzling on a hot-water dish; which, by the bye, were placed closely contiguous to the plate of the worthy archdeacon himself. Over and above this, on a snow-white napkin, spread upon the sideboard, was a huge ham and a huge sirloin; the latter having laden the dinner table on the previous evening. Such was the ordinary fare at Plumstead Episcopi.

Whoa! Who is Trollope kidding? Could any family of seven (two parents, three boys, two girls) put away so much food at a sitting? It makes the breakfast buffets at Israeli hotels look skimpy. And look at the delightful verb, "frizzling." 

It's a pleasure to read such a judgmental narrator: "the apparent object had been to spend money without obtaining brilliancy or splendour" - Trollope doesn't object to luxury, just to bad taste, carried to extremes: "the bread-basket was of a weight really formidable to any but robust persons." (I've made some platters and bowls like that in my pottery class!)

True, the characters are not developed to any significant psychological depth, but the character of the narrator is vivid and engaging. 

I recommend it, not that it needs my recommendation.

Archduke

On the afternoon of November 28, I heard Beethoven's Archduke Trio performed by Revital Hachamov, piano, Lavard Skou Larsen, violin, and Ramon Jaffe, cello. I was thrilled by the performance and found myself thinking that this piece of music was one of the major monuments of Western Culture, and how unique that culture is, in that a piece of music could be even considered as one of its major achievements.

The concert was part of the wonderful "Etnachta" series, free concerts at the Jerusalem Theater almost every Monday afternoon, usually with superb musicians and great variety. We try to get to them as often as we can.

At this concert, I saw an acquaintance of mine in the audience, a Swiss man of roughly my age, who is very devoted to classical music, but I didn't have an opportunity to speak with him until the following Saturday morning at synagogue. I had a brief conversation with him then and told him how much I loved the performance of the Archduke Trio.

With his somewhat ponderous manner and German accent, he told me he actually hadn't liked that performance so much. You could tell, he said, that the musicians weren't used to playing with each other, and for a piece like that, you need an ensemble who play together regularly.

Essentially I agree with him. Artists who have gotten to know each other very well and who have discussed the interpretation of the music they play certainly achieve a higher level of performance than musicians who are brought together for a single occasion. However, I hadn't felt any lack of communication among the members of the trio that afternoon.

Besides that, I don't object to imperfection in a performance (possibly because I have listened to hours and hours of jazz over the years). At this concert, all three of the musicians were superb and totally familiar with the music, which they had probably played dozens of times with other ensembles. Since they were performing together more or less for the first time, they had to listen very carefully to each other, maybe more carefully than musicians who are used to playing together regularly. Because of their unfamiliarity with one another, they might have been surprised now and then, if one of them did something with the phrasing or dynamics that they weren't expecting, and they had to respond to this unexpected feature. So in a way they were creating an interpretation of the piece as they went, and that's exciting.

When you come down to it, I'd rather hear a live performance with some rough edges than a polished CD of a piece, with all the glitches edited out. Any live musical performance entails a degree of risk, and that's what makes it live.

Looking on the Bright Side

Yesterday afternoon I spent a few hours with two of my grandchildren, a boy going on five and an impossibly cute girl, who is two. We were at the First Station, a public space created where you once could take the train to Tel Aviv. We had a pretty good time and managed to keep busy. The boy got to drive a little electric car for 20 minutes, we heard some teen-age musicians play rock 'n roll, we ate some french fries, and I even bought them some ice cream. But he was not content. Instead of saying to himself, "Wow, I got to drive the electric car!" or "Hey, I got some good french fries!" he kept thinking about the things he hadn't gotten to do.
He appears to have inherited this negative trait from his mother, who inherited it from me, and I guess I got it from my mother, and her parents, back into the obscurity  of the Pale of Settlement. I have a streak of negativity, which smacks of ingratitude.
Recently, after studying with a brilliant and demanding flute teacher for four years, during which I went from barely being able to get a sound of the flute, to a fairly decent level, I realized that I wasn't progressing with him anymore and decided to stop lessons for a while.
It's not easy for me to break things off. I develop a strong feeling of obligation toward people I'm associated with, and I feel slightly guilty for quitting on him.
My first impulse (negativity) is to list the reasons why the lessons weren't helping me as much as they used to. Instead, however, I'd like to express gratitude for what I learned from him.
First and foremost, he taught me to look for a focused sound, which means that he forced me to listen very carefully to myself. I did not come to the flute without musical experience. I am a pretty good saxophone player, but I wouldn't have had the same kind of patience to try improve my sound on the saxophone. Starting a new instrument meant that there was noticeable improvement from day to day. My practice on the flute was rewarded. Not surprisingly, my sound on the saxophone also improved, because I was working so hard on correct breath support, and I was listening better to myself.
Second, he taught me to aim at playing with ease. In his philosophy of musicanship (and he has a strong and well-worked out approach to music), musicians should never make themselves suffer. It's preferable to try produce a note and fail than to try too hard to produce the note and force it out. Playing with excessive physical effort makes you tired, it strains your body, and it distracts you from the music.
Third, he taught me two important criteria for musicality, one of which I knew, but tended to lose sight of. That criterion is movement and rest. Notes are either destinations or movement toward destinations. When you move toward a destination, you should know what it is, and your playing should sound as if it's going there. Then, when you get to the destination, you should enjoy being there, feel as if you've accomplished something, gotten somewhere, attained satisfaction (even when you quickly move on). The second criterion is connected to the first one. The listeners (obviously including the player) should understand what the music is doing, starting on the micro-level of the movement of individual notes in phrases.
That means, when you're learning a piece, you should understand where the notes in it are going and, once you've mastered it, convey that understanding.
Fourth, he forced me to develop a vibrato (which is still developing). I found his concentration on vibrato obsessive, but in the end I was convinced that vibrato is one of the most important ways a musician can play expressively, and I began to listen to the vibrato in other musicians: singers, cellists, and wind players.
Fifth, because he was so demanding, he made me demanding of myself, and I practice flute almost compulsively, every day, only for an hour or so (I'm aware that there's a macho school of musicianship that claims that, if you're not playing three hours a day, you're hardly  playing at all). If I had practiced clarinet as regularly and effectively when I was an adolescent, I would have reached a level that I can only dream of at this stage in my life. Playing the flute has become a kind of anchor in my life, a form of meditation, an exercise in patience, attentiveness, and self-motivation - and a striving for musical expression.
Nevertheless, I started experiencing a degree of frustration during my lessons, a feeling that I wasn't taking possession of my own musicality, that it was time for me to strike out on my own. But this is only because my teacher empowered me.
So, as I try to keep improving, I want to use the strength that I was taught how to develop, and to be grateful for it.