Pierre-Laurent Aimard: Elliott Carter: “Catenaires” (2006)
HOW TO READ THIS BLOG
- Click on the music cue (labeled BACKGROUND MUSIC in the early entries).
- When the music starts, click on the blog page to hide the music video but leave the music playing.
- Read the blog entry.
- Then click back on the music to turn it off. Otherwise, it will play forever.
WHAT IS THIS ABOUT AND WHY AM I WRITING IT?
An airplane / in the blonde and hot air / fly slowly … (Paolo Conte, “Aguaplano” (1987)
Let me answer two ways, about history and approach.
Start with history.
History
In 2001, sixty-five and restless, I retired from my job as vice president for student affairs of a mid-sized public university in central California to take a three-year contract as dean of students at a new public university in the United Arab Emirates, with campuses in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. We would live in Dubai until 2004. I was there on 9/11, living sixteen floors up in a high rise complex called the Twin Towers.
We returned to the States in 2004. For most of the time since then, I’ve been fully retired. I’d done the same job for twenty-one years, at three different schools. I enjoyed it but I was ready to do something different. I wanted to make changes in my life. However it turned out, I wanted to write, act and spend lots of time with my wife Esther and son Jeremy.
I’d kept a journal while I was in Dubai –I’d shared it by email with friends and colleagues back home. It was a way to remember things that I knew would grow fuzzier and fuzzier in my mind as I moved further away from then in time. It wasn’t quite a memoir, more my off-again on-again impressions of what it’s like to live in an utterly foreign country with a foreign culture when one has already turned 65. Dubai was an interesting place to write about because it was familiar in some ways and remote and alien in others.
We returned to the States in 2004 just as our son moved to the Emirates to start a four-year stint at the American University of Sharjah. Back home, we travelled some, bought a house and moved into it, and then were caught up in the work entailed in making a new place our own. After two years, life was sufficiently settled for me to take on a large-scale writing project.
I started my memoirs.
I started writing them in 2006 and didn’t finish them until 2016. They covered my life and musings from birth to age 65 and ran 863 pages of text and 191 pages of background material (documents, lists,…). As to content, the memoirs were part chronological in arrangement and part not. One model for m,e was John Updike’s kind-of memoir, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (1989). Another was Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (2005).
When I was done, I printed off two copies, one for Esther and me and one for Jeremy.
A year later, in 2016, we moved across country to Cleveland, Ohio, near where we had grown up and where awe had met each other fifty-three years before. We moved to be close to our son. Jeremy and I spent four days driving cross country in a car with our cat Peach, who didn’t enjoy the drive nearly as much as he and I did while Esther flew ahead and enjoyed some time with her sister. Settled in Cleveland and no longer saddled with the albatross of my memoirs, I had time to think of another writing project. It would either be a rewrite of my Dubai journal or an expansion of some autobiographical music pieces I had written along with the memoirs.
I chose the music.
Approach
Over several years, I’d written pieces describing my encounter with musicians and musical groups and how I’d reacted to them. I had described my forced exposure to opera and how much I hated it; my college radio show, all West Coast jazz; singing on the Showboat and in quartet; how the first time I heard Sonny Rollins had changed the way I listened to jazz; why I felt allegiance to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the wild man singer of my salad days.
from Wisconsin Death Trip (1973)
In the late 70s, I’d taught a course on historical method: on different ways to approach the elusive material of the past, exploring how the way you approach the past determines the sources you use and what you hope to get from them. I was engaged at the time in my own research, which involved theme analysis — nearly endless counting and categorizing– but one of the approaches that appealed to me even then was oral history: using one individual’s intimate recollections to enrich our understanding of times and events. Among the books I assigned in that course were Studs Terkel’s Hard Times (1970) and Working (1974), Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969), and Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip (1973). My own scholarship was headed in a diametrically different direction than oral history, or even history about individuals, but I decided then that if I ever had time, I might like to use my own memories as the data base for a reflection on the times through which I’d lived.
Fast forward forty years and that’s what I’ve been doing for the past seventeen years, with time off for other tasks. And as applies to the history of music, when I read about music, I read books and articles about schools and styles of music and the composers and performers who make it, but I don’t come across much about what the music feels like to the individual listener.
This blog is about how I grew from a musically naïve, insular child into what I hope is a relatively well rounded, certainly enthusiastic listener to music with relatively catholic tastes. I still don’t like every kind of music and certainly not every performer or piece of music, but I listen to a lot of kinds of music and find merit in most.
I started forming my own musical tastes at about age fifteen. Jazz was my first love but since then I’ve deliberately exposed myself to one and then another variety of classical composed music and many other kinds of music and my taste for many kinds of music has blossomed. I’ve listened to and grown to appreciate rock, rockabilly and r ‘n’ b, Motown, gospel, hip hop and rap, bluegrass, some (though far from all) C&W, Cajun and Irish music (traditional and contemporary), Bulgarian wedding music, Afro-Cuban music, Tuvan throat singing, singers of the great American song book, cabaret, bossa nova and tango, and the Middle Eastern pop music I got hooked in Dubai. It’s all music. Some of it’s good, some exceptional. Much isn’t, but excepting Liberace, Mitch Miller, Lester Lanin and most types of ’60s folk music –I do like Dylan– there aren’t many kinds of music that I don’t find listenable when done by good performers.
What I want to do here is lay out how I became exposed to these different flavors of music, when it happened, and my reaction to them at the time and why.
The internet and You Tube permit me to insert sound clips alongside text. Thus, you, the reader, can click on a sound byte and listen while you read the text, and I’ve inserted a few photographs and illustrations to illustrate what I’m writing about.
The segments are short. Each is preceded by a link to a particular piece of music. After the text is a supplementary list of links, additional sound bytes for the sound-addicted and obsessive.
I hope you enjoy what you hear and read here. Let me know your response to them.
My email is dkeymer@yahoo.com.
Dave K.
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
MUSIC & ME 