The Privilege of Being an Amateur

Yesterday (March 24, 2015), the Har-El concert band, conducted by Eitan Avitsur, accompanied a performance of the The Visit, the well-known play by Duerrenmatt, in Hebrew, as part of the Jerusalem Festival of the Arts. Everyone put in a lot of work, especially all the actors and the people involved with the production.
The music was composed by Orna Magen, the director of the music center where the Har-El orchestra rehearses, and arranged for our band by Eitan.
The orchestra worked hard to learn and rehearse it with the actors and get everything synchronized. The music wasn't challenging, but it was appropriate for the production, it sounded good, and it added a lot to the play.
The actors were in the theater, rehearsing, from around noon, and most of us musicians got there at 3:30. Setting us up on the side of the stage took a lot of time, and then we had a full run of the production, and it was pretty disastrous. The lighting person kept forgetting to keep the light on over us, so that we could see the music, we missed some cues, the actors muffed and swallowed some lines. It seemed to me we would need another three or four rehearsals to get the production ready for performance, but I don't think I could have taken any more. By the time the run was finished, I stiff from sitting so long and bored with the whole project.
But after a half hour break, the audience started filling the Rebecca Crown Hall, a fine venue, and I was getting excited. When you actually perform for a live audience, even if you're playing a rather obscure part, as I do, on the baritone saxophone (I could play instruments with more melodic parts - flute, clarinet, or alto saxophone, but I'm public spirited, and the band needs low voices), you feel as if every note counts. You play with attention and intention.
I'm not sure whether professional orchestral musicians, who perform often, muster the same feeling of excitement as we amateurs, who only perform once in a while. The results of professionals are obviously more polished, more accurate, and more musical, but they may not have the enthusiasm that amateurs have - and that goes for the actors as well.
There were a lot of flaws in the performance. Some of the actors bellowed their lines instead of speaking them in natural human voices, and they obviously weren't half as good looking as professional actors. But they did a creditable job, and the play came across.
It's centered around a figure who is sacrificed, so that the rich Old Woman who revisits her birthplace can take revenge on the man who wronged her. Initially inclined to protect him, the townspeople are seduced by the Old Woman's money and turn against him, eventually killing him. It's an allegory about a scapegoat that doesn't pretend to be realistic, not a bad sort of play for actors who may not be accomplished enough to appear natural on stage.
I made my wife attend it with a friend of ours, and I was afraid she would hate it, but she and our friend both enjoyed themselves. So did I.

Mixed Feelings - as Usual

Last night the concert band, in which I play baritone saxophone, performed outdoors under the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. We played two hour-long concerts, and we attracted a fairly big audience. It was kind of fun, but also kind of a bother. The Jerusalem Municipality, which sponsored the event, didn't even think of providing us with water to drink, and I had to park in an expensive parking garage.
More complaints: The lighting was poor, it was hard to read the music, and, since we were outdoors, it was hard to hear ourselves, though there were microphones and loudspeakers. But at least it wasn't windy.
Generally I enjoy playing in the band (otherwise I'd quit). Even though the baritone saxophone parts are usually boring, I hear and play the music from the bottom up, and that's interesting.
At the concert, we didn't exactly play my favorite kind of music (to put it mildly): some "Israeli" music ("To the Life of this People"), some "Jewish" music (a medley from "Fiddler on the Roof"), some light classics, and even Simon and Garfunkel songs. The arrangements are more sophisticated than the material itself.
I wouldn't have gone out of my way to attend our concert, but there is a place for kitschy, accessible music, and it beats a lot of other loud, thumping noises that pass for music in the public arena.
Later this month we're going to be accompanying a musical comedy, and that will be a lot more interesting in every way.

Flute Thoughts

Instead of bringing my European, metal flute to India, I bought an Indian flute, a bansuri in Mumbai. I ordered the bansuri from Anand Dhotre, who is listed as one of the best makers in India. He came to the hotel where I was staying in Mumbai with two flutes, so I could choose the one I liked best. Since I could barely get a decent sound out of either of them, I picked the one that looked nicest. While we were in India, I took out the bansuri from time to time and struggled to produce a decent sound and cover the finger holes, which are far apart and quite large. I'm not sure just how I'll use the instrument. Just producing a deep, full tone on it gives me great satisfaction.
Typical (of me, and probably of most acquisitive men), I now own a large number of flutes. In addition to the high quality bamboo flute made by Anand, I bought a simple one from a

peddler on the street in Mumbai. I also have the Chinese-style flute I bought as a souvenir in Vietnam, which was the instrument that persuaded me I could learn to play the flute. And I haven't parted with the beginner's Armstrong flute that I bought when I decided to take the instrument seriously, although I've replaced it with a better one, a Di Zhao step-up flute.
I try to start every day with an hour or more of flute playing, after which my lips are rather tired. It's a kind of meditation, a way of preparing myself for the day, checking in on myself.
It's kind of strange that recently I have been concentrating on two instruments that I never thought of playing when I was younger: flute and baritone saxophone.
Every instrument is a voice. Some people can do so much with one voice, like fine violinists, that they aren't tempted to develop others. But I was never able to commit myself to a single voice, and if I were forced to choose one, I would be hard put to decide which instrument to abandon.
Not only is every instrument a voice, it is also a key to musical experience. Baritone saxopone led me to years of playing with a big band, to saxophone quartets, and now to a concert band. I don't know what door the flute is a key to.

The Most Beautiful Concert Imaginable - and Somber Thoughts

Last night we heard an Austrian tenor, Daniel Johannsen, accompanied by a British pianist, Graham Johnson, perform Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin. Johannsen's voice is sweet and accurate, his stage presence is modest, and he sings strongly but almost as if he isn't trying to. I am not particularly fond of Lieder in general, but Schubert's Lieder are something else.
Then, after the intermission, we heard the string quartet, Death and the Maiden, performed by the Aviv Quartet: Sergey Ostrovsky, Evgenia Epshtein (violins), Nomie Bialobroda (viola), and Alexandre Khramouchin (cello). Their playing was on the highest level, dramatic and entirely in harmony with one another. We were elevated by the performance.
During the intermission, I looked at the audience. I am seventy, and I didn't feel old compared to the other listeners. It was great to watch the people greet friends, gesture animatedly, and respond enthusiastically to the atmosphere of high art. These old people, including myself, are engaged in life, interested in getting out and hearing music, pleased to see one another.
Then, in keeping, perhaps, with the morbid theme of The Beautiful Miller Girl, whose admirer drowns himself in the end, and the title of Death and the Maiden, I started wondering where the audience for Lieder recitals and chamber music is going to come from when we all die off. How many of us will still be alive in ten years, coming together again to hear great music?
As my wife and I walked home from the concert, I didn't raise my depressing thoughts. Rather we talked about how wonderful it is that these four musicians have worked so long and so hard to become masters of their instruments, brilliant interpreters of music, and an ensemble that plays with such mutual understanding. 
I also had thought, during the concert, how the music written after Schubert, which the Aviv Quartet also plays, radiates back onto Schubert. Ears that have heard Shostakovich cannot but hear Schubert in a new way. We recently watched a BBC program about the first performance of Beethoven's Eroica, based on the conceit that no one, not even the musicians, had ever heard the symphony before. But that's not how we hear classical music now.

Iron(ing) Man

The dry cleaner on Bethlehem Road, near the corner of Yehuda Street (in Jerusalem, of course), has a pair of amazing shirt-ironing machines. The shirts are placed vertically in the machine, the machine puffs up the sleeves, and then it presses and folds the shirts. Nevertheless I don't bring my shirts in to the laundry. I wash and iron them myself.

I could afford to have the shirts done, and they would come out a lot better than they do when I iron them, but it's a point of honor with me to iron them myself. What exactly that point of honor is, I'm not sure. I try to be self-sufficient. If I can do something, I would like to do it myself.

My mother used to send my father's shirts out to be laundered. A man named Mr. Epstein came to our apartment once a week to pick up dirty laundry and deliver the clean shirts and sheets. They would come back starched with a shirt cardboard in them, and eventually I would get to draw on the shirt cardboard or paste things onto it. Mr. Epstein was lean and energetic, and kind of gruff. My mother made a point of speaking very politely to Mr. Epstein and calling him by his last name. She absolutely never spoke rudely to storekeepers or to the people who worked for us. She was a democratic person.
 When I iron, I don't feel as if I'm a man doing women's work, though I guess more women iron clothes than men. I certainly would never expect my wife to iron my clothes for me. That's not how tasks are allocated and shared in our
An acquaintance of mine, a wealthy, gay English Jew who eventually jumped out of a window and failed to kill himself immediatelWhen I iron, I don't feel as if I'm a man doing women's work, though I guess more women iron clothes than men. I certainly would never expect my wife to iron my clothes for me. That's not how tasks are allocated and shared in our y (he died in hospital some time later), once shared an Arab Christian cleaner with us for a wh ile. The cleaner, Bashir, was actually a chef at the King David Hotel, but tourism had fallen off to almost nothing, and he was laid off. It was a bit embarrassing to be hiring such an intelligent and highly qualified man just to clean our house, but he needed the money, and he wasn't ashamed to work.

While Bashir, was working for us, I bumped into our gay acquaintance on the street, and he told me that Bashir did shirts splendidly. Then he looked at me and said, "But you probably iron your own shirts, don't you?"

It wouldn't have occurred to me to ask Bashir to do our ironing. I can't handle having a servant, though my mother always had women in to clean our small apartment, and in fact they had very little to do, so they also did the laundry and ironed our clothes.

These African-American women were a constant presence in my life as a child. My mother (who was nosey because she cared about people) got them to talk about their lives, their children, and their husbands. She spoke with them like a friend, not like a mistress to her servant. Obviously she was white, and they weren't, and she was rich, and they weren't, and that affected the relationship. But that was an unavoidable given of the situation.

One of the women who worked for us for a long time was named Dorothy. She had very dark skin and very African hair, which she didn't disguise in any way (though she didn't have an Afro either; this was in the 1950s). Dorothy was smart and dignified, articulate, and no one could push her around. If she had had a fair start in life, in a society that gave black people equal opportunities, she would have been a lawyer, not a house-cleaner. She often spoke to my mother about her sons, whom she was sending to Catholic schools, for the discipline. I hope they went on and did well.

Dorothy was very dismissive of my mother's skill when she saw something my mother had ironed by myself. I sure Dorothy would have a good laugh at me.

I don't enjoy ironing, so I let my laundered, wrinkled shirts pile up for a couple of months before I iron them. I only wear buttoned shirts that have to be ironed on Shabbat, so my supply of shirts can almost last me all winter. When I finally start on them, I get involved in the process. Yesterday night I had thirteen shirts to iron, and I resolved to do them all.

When I iron, I don't feel as if I'm a man doing women's work, though I guess more women iron clothes than men. I certainly would never expect my wife to iron my clothes for me. That's not how tasks are allocated and shared in our home.

We had gone to a recital earlier in the evening, Schubert Lieder sung by a plump American tenor, and it was about ten when I set up the ironing board, filled the steam iron with water, and set to work. I iron in the living room and listen to CDs while I work. Last night I listened to Helene Grimaud playing two Mozart concerti and Jean-Pierre Rampal playing twentieth century music for flute and piano. Two brilliant French musicians.

I didn't like the music that Rampal was playing all that much, but I was full of admiration for his sound and technique.

It took my nearly two hours to finish the shirts. By the time I was finished, my legs were aching, and I was exhausted. But I went to bed with a feeling of satisfaction. Ironing is meditative. It takes some concentration, but it's not terribly demanding. As I iron, I listen to the music and follow the thoughts and memories that pop up in my mind.

I imagine I'll have to iron another batch of shirts in the spring, when we put away out winter clothes. I can't say I'm looking forward to it, but I won't mind either.

Engagement with Life and Drifting

One of the most satisfying moments for a parent, in my experience, is seeing one's grown children assume the commitment to raising a child of their own. If they do well at it, this is an assurance that one hasn't done such a bad job oneself. Beyond that ego satisfaction, raising children, like marriage, is a sign of engagement in life - though there are many other ways of engaging in life, and certainly not every parent has made a mature commitment to being a parent.

Many of our friends have grown or growing children who have never, as the saying goes, found themselves, which is hardly surprising. Finding oneself has not been easy since modern societies have told us that we must invent ourselves rather than accept the definitions imposed by traditional society.

Since I have to admit that I am an old man, at least chronologically (see how I can't accept the definition), my engagement in life is different from what it was when I was an ambitious student, a new husband and father, a man trying to make a career, and so on. Ambition is part of being engaged in life, but how much sense does ambition make toward the end of one's life? Or, what sort of ambition is appropriate for one at the beginning of one's eighth decade?

Recently, because a good friend forwarded me a message from a man who was a professor at Princeton when I was an undergraduate, I sent him an email, which he answered almost immediately. As it turns out, he's only ten or eleven years older than I am, though at the time I never even wondered how old he was. He was a professor! But, from my present perspective (and his, I assume), he was a kid then.

Being in contact with that professor put me in mind of my immaturity when I was in college, of how little I knew about myself and the world, about how thoughtless I was. Being smart enough to get into a top university didn't mean I was smart enough to know how I wanted the rest of my life to unfold. I said I was an ambitious student, and I was, but my ambition was restricted to getting very good grades, to excelling, not to anything beyond that. I have always found transitions difficult.

But I was engaged. I didn't drift while I was in college, and I didn't rebel (maybe I should have). I was fortunate enough to get a Fulbright scholarship to study in France between college and graduate school, and I used that year to drift. I had no particular aim beyond talking a lot of French. A friend of mine in the Fulbright program used her time to write a very ambitious paper about something, and that idea never even crossed my mind. I read a lot, wrote a lot of letters home, did some traveling, and went to lectures at the university. Sometimes I reproach myself. I should have used the year more productively. I should have accomplished something. But, in retrospect, having a year to drift, and getting a monthly stipend to subsidize my drifting, was valuable.

Maybe I should let myself drift now.

Praise of The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh

About a week ago I finished reading The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, one of the best writers I know about. This is an early novel of his, first published in 1988, and set in Calcutta, Dhaka (Pakistan), and London. Several passages in the book stood out for me because of the insight they offer about living in India.
Most of the characters in the book are middle class or wealthy, educated and privileged. A bit before the middle of the book, the narrator describes a visit he made with his mother and grandmother to a poor relative whom they had discovered. The narrator, still a boy, looks out from a balcony at "a patchwork of stagnant pools, dotted with islands of low, raised ground. Clinging to these islands were little clumps of shanties, their beaten tin roofs glistening rustily in the midday sun."

Ghosh is brilliant at descriptive writing. These two sentences convey all the poverty of Calcutta. Ghosh goes on:

     Our relative spotted me leaning on the railing and ran out.
     Don't look there! she cried. It's dirty! Then she led be back inside.
     I went willingly: I was already well schooled in looking away, the jungle-craft of gentility.

That "jungle-craft" is probably highly developed in India, where the extremes of wealth and poverty are greater than in the West, but it's something we all have, if we're privileged.

Ghosh goes on:

But still, I could not help thinking it was a waste of effort to lead me away. It was true, of course, that I could not see that landscape or anything like it from my own window, but its presence was palpable everywhere in our house; I had grown up with it. It was that landscape that lent the note of hysteria to my mother's voice when she drilled me for my examinations; it was to these slopes she pointed when she told me that if I didn't study hard I would end up over there, that the only weapon people like us had was our brains and if we didn't use them like claws to cling to what we'd got, that was where we'd end up, marooned in that landscape: I knew perfectly well that all it would take was a couple of failed examinations to put me where our relative was, in permanent proximity to that blackness: that landscape was the quicksand that seethed beneath the polished floors of our house; it was that sludge which gave our genteel decorum its fine edge of frenzy.

One of the themes of The Shadow Lines is the contrast between the more securely genteel life of an English family (lacking "the fine edge of frenzy") and the hysterical gentility of his own family - though part of the book takes place in London during the Blitz, when the facade of normal life in England was literally stripped away by bombs, and the myth of high European civilization was shown to mask unthinkable barbarity.

Later on in the book, in describing an outbreak of ethnic violence in Calcutta when the narrator was a schoolboy, Ghosh speaks of a kind of fear, which, he asserts, underlies all of life in India:

It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world - not language, not food, not music - it is the special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one's image in the mirror.

I believe that "the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent" is not uniquely Indian. All over the world today either there is no normalcy at all, in the complacent sense that we privileged people feel it, or that normalcy is threatened by the potential for violence, by economic insecurity, and by the looming environmental crisis (to offer a short list).