pnArt

Many decades ago, when we were kids, my Mom used to sing us a song -

It’s three o’clock in the morning / I looked upon the wall

The spiders and the fireflies / were playing base-a-ball

The score was 5 to 2 / The spiders were ahead

I got so darned excited / I jumped right out of bed

I could still remember the tune perfectly as I sang it to my wife last night.    So today I set out to learn more about this song.   Who sang it?  Who wrote it?    It turns out to be 20th century example of folk music.

Googling for the lyrics I found dozens of variations.   Sometimes it’s three o’clock, sometimes it’s four o’clock or five o’clock.    My mother must have sweetened up the lyrics for us kids, because I found no other examples of fireflies.   In most of the songs the insects involved were bedbugs and something else - roaches, beetles, cooties (i.e., lice),  or mosquitoes (often “’squitoes” or “skeeters” to keep the rhythm).    I only found one other example of getting excited and jumping out of bed.    In all the other ones an insect hits a home run and knocks the singer out of bed.    The setting in my mother’s version was unspecified but in many of the ones I Googled it was jail.  Other times it was a shack, barracks, a tent, or just a bed at home.   A typical example:

Oh, five o’clock in the morning / I looked up on the wall –
The roaches and the bedbugs / Were having a game of ball
Oh, the score was six to nothing / The roaches were ahead –
The bedbugs hit a home run / And knocked me out of bed

The origins of the song are hazy.    The earliest reference I found was 1934.   My mother was a child of the Depression so that timing is right.   The lines are often cited as part of a camp song, usually with the title “A Jolly Bum” or “The Bum’s Song”.   When sung by folk singers it’s sometimes part of a song called “Portland County Jail”.    I also found mutiple versions in songs about Army life.   Almost all the performers I saw named were so obscure they don’t even appear in Rhapsody, which has an impressively large database.    The one exception is that two sources claim that Bruce Springsteen sang it at the Bridge School Benefit Concert of 28 Oct 1995 at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, but I couldn’t locate a recording of this.

This website has a collection of some variations:  http://rolandanderson.se/bedbugs.php

And here’s a discussion of “Portland County Jail” by a group of folksingers:  http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=8265

All of the references I found only described the lyrics, not the music.   Locating the tune was interesting.  On Rhapsody I searched for “o’clock in the morning”.  I found dozens of “Three O’Clock in the Morning” references.   This looked promising.  I clicked on one, which turned out to be an instrumental, but the tune was exactly what my mother sang!    Farther down the Rhapsody list I saw a version by the Andrews Sisters with the Glenn Miller Band.   I played it.  It was a love song about dancing the night away -  nothing to do with bugs playing baseball - but it had the same melody.       I also spotted a version by B.B. King.    Blues and county jails often go together so I played that.  No luck -  just a lonely man missing his woman, but also lacking bugs and sports.  In the end I listened to every vocal I could find with a promising title, but I never found anyone actually singing it.

If anyone reading this can locate a recording of those lyrics actually being sung, I’d be interested in hearing it.  Thanks in advance.

Collaborative creation with strangers; borrowing bits of music and making something new;  adding your own ideas or verses to someone else’s work;  applying an old song to a new social or political situation – and not an intellectual property right to be seen.

Web 2.0?   Open source?   No - traditional folk music.

For centuries, long before there were record companies and the DMCA, this was how people made their music.   Folk music really was the “people’s music”, arising from their shared experiences and expressing their feelings and opinions.   The “same” song appeared in many guises, with new lyrics, different subject matter, or with changed endings.   Sometimes the sailor got the girl, sometimes he got hanged.  Sometimes Shenandoah was a Native American chief; sometimes Shenandoah was a river.  Change some lines and a protest song about the king’s taxes becomes a protest song about cruel mine bosses.  Change a few words and a windlass shanty becomes a logger’s shanty on the other side of the world.   Songs often referenced each other and the same stanzas would be borrowed and reappear in hundreds of different songs.

Traditional folk music is social history and one of the world’s finest interpreters of English folk music, Louis Killen, graced us at a Folk Song Society of Greater Boston house party in Brookline on June 11.

Killen, who’s 75, was born in northern England.   He lived in the US for several decades before recently returning to his native land.  He’s been a sailor and shipyard worker in both the US and UK and throughout it all he has gathered and recorded a vast collection of traditional music and he’s worked with Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl, A.L. Lloyd, among many others.

Killen is best known for songs of the English miners, especially union and protest songs, and for sea shanties – sailors’ work songs used to establish a rhythm for hauling or other repetitive tasks.

The concert was wonderful.  Killen often sang unaccompanied, although on some songs he played a concertina.    The house party setting -  a Folk Song Society tradition -  made it seem much more like an informal gathering in a friend’s living room than a concert, even though there was a small admission fee.  Killen did his best to eschew many of the songs he’s best-known for, instead introducing us to some less well known material.   But he also sang some pieces we all knew and the room sang along.    Near the end of the evening both his voice and his memory started to give him trouble and this only served to remind me to treasure these moments with the old breed of folk singers.

And we had some special treats.   Another internationally-known folklorist, Norman Kennedy, from Aberdeen, Scotland, was in the room.   And he sang a long, fascinating, and very Scottish version of a song that I eventually recognized as a version of “Cruel Sister” (AKA “Binnorie” “Wind and the Rain”, “Two Sisters”, “Twa Sisters”)  but he was halfway through before I realized what it was.    And a member of the new generation of English folklorists, Sam Lee, from the English Folk Dance and Song Society, was also present and he, too, entertained us with his singing, offering new hope that this remarkable history written in music won’t be forgotten very soon.

As both an artist and buyer of art, few activities are more delightful to me than a good open studios or art walk.  Throw in live music and a nice June afternoon and I’m the happiest camper you ever met.

Sunday my wife and I attended the annual Beacon Hill Art Walk in Boston.  It had everything: art, music, sun, June.  Plus Porta-Potties -  no art event is complete without bathrooms.

In preparing for this blog entry I wanted to research similar events throughout New England.   But it’s impossible because there are so many of them!  

Boston alone hosts at least a dozen such events including this one along with open studios in the South End, Jamaica Plain, Fort Point, East Boston, and others throughout the calendar year.   In Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Brookline, and on outward blossom countless more.   In Lowell we’ve had open studio and similar events for years, thanks to the efforts of some now defunct local arts magazines, artists’ groups such as the Arts League of Lowell and the Western Ave Studios, and various local civic organizations.

When my wife and I travel to Vermont and Maine in the summer and fall most years we seldom manage to get back home without spending some time at some local open studios we pass on the way.   This cottage industry seems to be growing so fast it makes Web 2.0 look pokey.

The Beacon Hill Art Walk has been going for 19 years.  It’s just on the Boston Side of the Salt and Pepper bridge over the Charles River.    The artwork, and the artists, are tucked into all the little alleys and courtyards and interior gardens that surprise and deflight visitors who, from a distance, only see solid brick residencies in that neighborhood.   And for artists who couldn’t claim a garden or courtyard for their work, tents and stalls were set up on sidewalks, in the Vilna Shul, and even under the elevated Red Line tracks.

The sheer artistic eclecticism of the Art Walk was amazing.  I think I saw every medium and style I’ve ever heard of, not to mention a few new ones.   The artists were all happy to describe their methods and techniques and I took notes in case I get the itch to try a few new things myself.    The quality was variable, but generally high.  Some of the artists were clearly professional and others were talented amateurs.    The prices were lower than what I would have expected at a show of this caliber.

One thing that sets the Beacon Hill Art Walk apart from others of its ilk is the music.   -  5 chamber ensembles - 2 string quartets, a string trio, a flute ensemble, and a string quintet.  Plus two klezmer bands, fiddle music, guitar music, Armenian music, Greek music, and native American flute!    This is due to the efforts of Ivy Turner, the Art Walk’s music coordinator and the very talented musicians who donate their time.   Musical art and visual art go together so well that I don’t know why all such events don’t do this.

Classical music in America has been getting grayer and grayer.     Although my wife and I are in our 50’s we sometimes feel like the youth brigade at traditional classical concerts in Greater Boston.   Audiences are moving away to retirement destinations, or just plain dying off and the old composers are not attracting enough young listeners.

The Boston Chamber Music Society, which we’ve subscribed to for many years, was recently forced to end its Friday evening concerts at Jordan Hall and fall back on a single Sunday evening concert at the Sanders Theater.   A few years ago, sensing their decline, the BCMS issued a questionnaire to their subscribers asking for advice.   My wife and I suggested expanding their program material to include more modern and living composers and composers from broader cultural traditions.

Apparently we were out-voted because the program didn’t change.  In the years we’ve attended their concerts we’ve heard every major piece written by Brahms, Dvořák, Beethoven, et al.   Many times.   The BCMS ensemble is second-to-none in their skill and command of this repertoire, and the music is beautiful, but really, enough is enough.

And yet . . . and yet, even as old listeners are dying off, young people are being drawn to the richness and subtlety of this music and are redrawing the map of the music to include the whole world.   The New England Conservatory and NPR produce a weekly radio program, From The Top, featuring jaw-dropping talent from teenagers across the US performing both traditional and contemporary classical music.   The host of the show, Christopher O’Riley, also gives solo piano concerts, and we attended one in West Palm Beach recently where he interspersed 19th century classical works with his own arrangements of songs by RadioHead.

And around the world small ensembles are gaining audiences and acclaim by widening the box.  One of our favorites is the Boston trio, Triple Helix who gave a marvelous concert recently in Groton featuring works by Shostakovich, Bright Sheng, and Piazzolla.

Last night we attended a concert by the Chameleon Arts Ensemble at the Goethe Institut in Boston.   The building is in a residential neighborhood on Beacon Street and the auditorium there is a long narrow hall apparently carved out of several living rooms or dining rooms in a row.  It features intricate rococo plaster reliefs on all the walls and ceilings, and the floor is flat so only the front rows have a good view.

And it was sweatingly hot.   But the reason why it was hot was because it was packed.   The seats were filled and more people were seated or standing on the sides or in the doorways.   And for the first time in years of classical concerts, my wife and I were among the older people in the room.  I never thought it would feel so good to feel old!

The concert was excellent and eclectic.   Starting with Schumann’s opus 73 fantasy, it included Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, the world premiere of Zhikr: Songs of Longing by Shirish Korde, (featuring soprano Elizabeth Keusch), Takemitsu’s Rain Spell, and Faure’s opus 45 piano quartet.

In terms of sheer technical virtuosity Chameleon is very good but not quite on the same plane as the BCMS.   But they make up for this by not being on the same plain as BCMS either -  the program and their performance of it was fresh, exciting and courageous.  On Spiegel im Spiegel, which has become a minor hit recently in the classical world, the instruments are left naked and exposed, especially the clarinet, so they have to be perfect.  Were they?  No, but somehow it didn’t matter and I was completely absorbed by the music.

The hit of the evening was the Korde, and the composer was there to receive the warm, enthusiastic response from the audience.   The piece uses 7 instrumentalists and a singer, and features extensive percussion plus a harp.   It’s a fresh and engaging work with African, Indian, and western flavors reflecting Korde’s own personal background.  When I got home I tried to find him on Rhapsody; I failed but any composer who makes me want to hear more has succeeded at something.

So classical music has a future after all, and I’ve found it in a long, hot, narrow room in Boston.

For non-classical music the streaming subscription services such as Rhapsody provide a rich source of content at a nearly adequate quality level. Recent improvements in the Sonos search tools make it easier than ever to search Rhapsody even without a computer booted, and almost every popular song I could ever want seems to be accessible. But I still relentlessly build up my own music library.

Why?

Four reasons:

Ownership I like to own my stuff. I don’t want my access to music to depend on my fleeting financial fortunes or decisions made in corporate meeting rooms or the success or failure of Rhapsody’s business model or the reliability of my network connections or whether all the unions between here and there are happy with their contracts. My own music on my own harddrive (with suitable backups, of course) is the key to sleeping well at night, and maybe even enjoying some bedtime music on my way to dreamland.

Portability I can listen to my own MP3’s anywhere I want - at work (where most companies don’t allow streaming), weeding in my garden, in my car on long drives, traveling overseas, or out for a run.

Searching/Tagging The MP3 tagging scheme seems to have been first designed by geeks with a degrees in musicology from the back of a matchbook, and it’s since mutated into more strains than the flu virus. But its sheer amorphousness and lack of definition makes it clay in my hands, and I’ve used the tags to create schemata that allow me to search, recognize and organize my music easily. All of this is lost when I have to rely on some third-party to notate the music I’m hearing.

Audio Quality Most music services stream at 128 kbps. While there are slight quality differences between formats – MP3, AAC, RealAudio - there is no format where 128 kbps is artifact-free for close listening. It’s fine for casual music doing chores around the house or background music for dinner, but listen closely with good headphones or earbbuds and at times you will have no doubt that it’s compressed My lossy-format standard is MP3, between 192 and 320 kbps VBR. By ripping the music myself I get to choose the codec and the parameters, and I get to adjust loudness and gapless settings as I see fit.

The vast majority of my music is transcoded from CD’s I own. This addresses all four of the issues above. In recent years I’ve been buying used CD’s, partly because they’re cheaper than new CD’s and partly to thumb my nose, within the bounds of the law, at a record-industry that remains in denial about what century this is. They don’t make a penny when I buy a used CD.   In even more recent years I’ve been buying MP3’s online from Rhapsody or Amazon, as their selection is finally starting to broaden to the point of practicality.

I have not been tempted to use P2P file sharing. I’ve been amazed at the rationalizations used by that crowd to convince themselves that what they’re doing is not wrong. It’s striking how an adolescent sense of entitlement can energize such creative thinking.  A few file sharers admit what they’re doing is illegal but try to ennoble it as a kind of civil disobedience for a greater cause.  I can accept a civil disobedience argument in support of a great moral struggle – say, ending Jim Crow or apartheid, or achieving colonial independence.   But civil disobedience in the cause of pampered American or European teenagers getting more free stuff is too much of a stretch.

Thank god the blog writers aren’t on strike. Where would we put the picket lines? Second Life? Except for football I don’t watch TV anyway so the Hollywood writers’ strike is no big deal for me. Maybe a long strike will encourage others to junk the boob tube, too, and get a life, even if it’s only a Second Life. (Boob “tube” is an anachronism these days - can someone suggest a more up-to-date alternative?)

My wife spent the weekend up in Orford, Canada at a chamber music conclave. I stayed in Chelmsford to face the remnants of Hurricane Noel by myself. The local Boston media breathlessly warned us to expect high winds, floods, and power outages. So on Friday I cleaned some junk off the top of my whole house generator. I then went to the store to stock up on essentials - beer and coffee – I couldn’t think of anything else I needed. In the end it was a big nothing so I took advantage of the weather to spread some pelletized limestone on my lawn, allowing the rain to wash it into the soil. There was no wind to speak of.

Without my wife to cuddle up to at night I decided to let my cats sleep in our bedroom. I awoke in the middle of the night with the Birman sprawled across my legs and our 20 pound Maine Coon wedged against my hip, leaving me pinned in place like some Gulliver trapped by furry Lilliputians. I wanted turn over but I didn’t want to disturb them so I stayed still. It was better than sleeping alone.

It’s been preternaturally warm this fall.    Today is in the 80’s and at my house we haven’t seen any temperature below 40F.

“Preternaturally warm” is one of those hackneyed quasi-literary phrases that’s supposed to mark me as an educated writer, and inform you that you’re reading something of substance.  More often it just signifies that the author has spent too much time with genre horror fiction.

But I like “preternaturally”.  It’s derived from the Latin -  “praeter naturam“ meaning “beyond or exceeding natural”, and it comes from a respectable family:  in theological law, especially among Catholic scholars, “praeter” finds several other uses.

Praeter intentionem - “outside the moral intention” - doing something harmful in the course of doing something morally neutral or good.

Praeter legem - outside the law  - not regulated or specified by the law  (not to be confused with contra legem - “against the law”)

Praeter ordinem - outside the normal order of things.

As a gardener I’ve watched the growing season grow over the last 40 years.   I can reliably plant crops now that would have died of frostbite before yielding any fruit when I was a teenager.   Yet I have far less time in the fall and winter to work on my fences and terraces and chop trees in my woods without worrying about ticks, because we have such a late freeze and early thaw.

Watching this trend over decades of gardening convinces me that this is not just Al Gore blowing hot air.   Studies at UMass and UNH confirm my personal observations that this is a real warming pattern and not some brief meterological condition.  When I was born the atmosphere had 300 ppm of carbon dioxide; in Ben Franklin’s time it had 276 ppm; today it has 385 ppm and the best scientific evidence points to man’s role in this.   So is it  praeter intentionem,  praeter legem, or praeter ordinem?  Or is it all three?

I cooked several gallons of butternut squash soup this weekend.   Some was consumed by musicians visiting us and most of the rest was frozen for future lunches.   On Saturday the AMC Mountains and Music committee descended on our house to throw a party honoring my wife who just finished her tenure as committee chair.  They brought all the food, drink, and desserts, and even supplied real dishes, glasses and silverware.   My wife is a little embarrassed at the attention but I enjoy any opportunity to party with musicians.

I’m in Rock City – that’s Rock City the bookstore and café, in Rockland Maine. Last year it was called the Second Read, but nothing else has changed. It’s still the classic used bookstore and coffeehouse with little tables upfront where all the local bohemians and a few out-of-state ones such as yours truly, sit and write, sipping fair traded Nicaraguan coffee and espresso and munching cakes and pies and brownies. Latter-day Hemingways prefer caffeine and a sugar high to wine, and laptops to pen and paper, but little else has changed. Glancing around at people’s LCD screens I can see the four line stanzas and double-spaced text that reveals poems and stories in progress.

My own project is postcard poetry. I’ve signed up to write poems on postcards – one a week – and to send each poem to someone on a list of other poets sharing this project. There are over a hundred of us signed up.

I first heard about this from Brent Allard, the exalted leader of Poets Unbound, my poetry group in Nashua. Brent had the inspiration of making his own postcards from photos he took. I take photos – see some at my other website, pnArt.com. So I’ve gathered together a selection of photos that I think will work as 4×6 postcards, and don’t have so much nudity that I’ll get arrested by the Postal authorities.

This is fun but lately I’ve wondered if I should be aiming higher. One of our friends just won a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work in helping veterans overcome the trauma of war. There’s nothing like this to make you ask yourself what the hell you’ve been doing with your life.

And why am I in Maine, just now? My wife is attending a chamber music workshop sponsored by the Bay Area Chamber Concerts in Rockport, and I’m tagging along. They spend the day getting coached and practicing and I sit at Rock City, writing, or visiting galleries and museums along the coast. In the evenings I socialize with them. I love hanging out with the chamber musicians. I remain convinced that there is no better company – no category or class of people more convivial, stimulating, interesting, and just plain nice, than chamber musicians. I have no idea why this seems to be true. Does it have something to do with so many of them being doctors? Like so many other chamber music gatherings, this weekend’s workshop could pass as an AMA convention. (and by the way, the McArthur genius mentioned above is usually part of this crowd, and he’s a doctor!)

Bermuda is a tiny speck of former vulcanism dusted with sand and fringed with coral reefs, isolated in the Atlantic ocean a thousand miles east of the Carolinas. I’m watching the sun set from the Pompano Beach Club, high on a cliff on Bermuda’s west coast as I write this. I’m listening to classical music on KUSC , thanks to the world wide web, and it cuts out from time to time, thanks to the resort’s rather creaky internet connection. I’m sipping a 12-year old Macallan.

Moments ago I tried to connect to one of the “stations” I’m training at Pandora, only to be politely but firmly told that my IP address had spilled the beans about my location on Bermuda and their lawyers regreted to inform me that their service is only available inside the United States.

The sun is disappearing behind some clouds slightly above the horizon.

After I made some inquiries last week at Pandora about why they don’t do classical music I received a remarkably detailed email from Etienne Handman, COO of the Music Genome Project. He described the theory and goals of the Project - the heart (DNA?, brains? foundation?)  of Pandora. I sent him a skeptical response. I send everyone a skeptical response. Why do I do that?

The sun has emerged from beneath the clouds and is racing to the horizon. The rest of the sky, and the ocean below it, is gray.

I should have at least acknowledged what a remarkable thing is it to create personal radio stations, or I should say “radio stations” by proposing a musician and having it -Pandora - the Box, I suppose - play other music with what it guesses are the same “genes”. The listener dismisses some offerings, accepts others and trains it that way. I’ve created a “Moby” station; my wife has created a half dozen stations ranging from Celtic harp to Radiohead.

The sun has set. I toasted the last of the sun with the last of my Macallen.

Today we snorkeled from a boat chartered by the resort - it was excellent. Then, having not got our fill of boats we rented a battery-powered pontoon (I’ve been writing too much poetry - I almost spelled it “pantoum”) boat and tootled around the ocean near here. And then, after a hot sit on the beach, we decided we hadn’t had enough of snorkeling either and snorkeled some more around the rocky breakwaters here.

It’s 4 PM in Los Angeles. There’s a 2 vehicle accident south of Santa Monica. KUSC is about to play something by Bach conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisc. I’m about to have dinner at Ocean Grill, high over someplace in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.

We are spending the weekend at the estate of a friend on Cape Cod. My wife and her friend are both active in the greater Boston amateur chamber music community and every June we come here along with two dozen other musicians - plus a few non-playing spouses such as me - for weekend of wonderful music and food in a gorgeous beachfront setting. The house is large enough that we can have a piano quintet in the living room plus various string quartets, trios, or sextets scattered among the other rooms.

I’m not a very happy camper this weekend because I have a painful contact ulcer on my larynx and my doctor wants me to rest my voice. But how can I in such a social atmosphere, and especially given that I normally have an atomic-powered motormouth? So I’m being very bad about obeying doctor’s orders, and I’m paying the price in throat pain and delayed healing. I suppose there’s something karmic about the fact that it hurts for me to talk, since for years it’s often hurt to listen to me!

This is a bad setting to disobey doctors’ orders. I’ve never encountered any pastime that attracts so many physicians as chamber music. We may have a half-dozen doctors in the house right now. Recently at a workshop my wife, a pianist, was playing a quartet and all the string players were doctors. And when it’s not doctors, it’s professors, Harvard or MIT deans, business owners, research scientists, and other high achievers who seem to be attracted to chamber music. Why? Lots of hobbies attract their share of learned people but I’ve never seen such a concentration as I’ve seen in chamber music. It makes for wonderfully stimulating conversation at social gatherings and the average chamber music sextet abandoned on a desert island could probably re-create civilization.

To avoid talking I’ve banished myself, with my laptop, to the far corner of the vast pool room, while string ensembles play Brahms and Beethoven at the other end. The weather outside is bright and the yachts in the harbor gleam in the sunlight. In fact, the yacht club is supplying my internet connection, since they rent wireless access to visiting boats for a very modest fee and for their purposes right now I’m a yacht.

Here, in my lonely corner, I’ve been doing my little bit to stop the war in Iraq : I’ve created a parody of the movie poster for “The Endless Summer”, called “The Endless War”. And for more proof that this contact ulcer hasn’t shut me up, a couple of days ago I made my first YouTube video - . it’s just cutesy little woodland creatures around my office park set to music by Rossini. I just did it as a practice exercise for a new camcorder and video editing software I bought recently but that’s a topic for another day.