Some Glad Afternoon

'Bluegrass' is what we heard, 'free concert by the ocean.' So we studied our maps, finding Golden Gate Park, and we went.

“So many hippies,” my friend Jordan said, his voice shocked and low.  “So many hipsters.” So much plaid, so much pot, so much 'stach. We were standing between the two stages of the Warren Hellman Public Celebration, a free concert honoring a man who brought about Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. There were people crammed everywhere, people sitting down and chatting, people on the beach, people with children and cameras.

The music blasted over us through an impressive set of speakers, but the maker (Steve Earle) was only a tiny, blobby figure on a far-away stage, discernible only because I could see the flashing of his guitar as he swayed back and forth with his music.  Even with the proximity of being at this location, it was difficult to believe the music I could hear was the same music that was coming from Steve Earle's living, breathing, guitar-strumming self.

When he finished his set, we all drifted and shifted to the stage on the other side for a similar performance from Buddy Miller; I didn't feel that deep and abiding attraction to any musician until I shoved and sneaked my way up the side just so I could see the stage. 

I was just in time to see Gillian Welch, with her partner David Rawlings, wondering to her listeners what tunes would go well with their matching sequined outfits.  She looked tiny on that stage, but not so lost from my sight that I couldn't connect her to the tunes she played: "Elvis Presley Blues," "Look at Miss Ohio," "The Way It Goes."  I marveled at how the notes and chords fitted together so well; how they were both familiar and strange to my ears.  To finish it off, EmmyLou Harris joined them. They offered up that old gospel tune “I'll Fly Away,” and even over the added voices of the audience, the sound had a beautiful sense of intimacy.

 To see as well Old Crow Medicine Show from that distant but workable vantage point was another pleasure of the day.  To be drawn into their onstage energy, their high-fuel performance, as if life and music were a freight train destined to crash—known to be destined to crash, and pushed to a greater speed despite that knowledge, was incomparable in experience to any of their recordings I have heard.  They played some fast, fast tunes, and of course they played “Wagon Wheel,” (you've probably heard it: “Rock me mama like a wagon wheel, rock me mama any way you feel,”)...they played, too, a tribute to Whitney Housten and another to Warren Hellman.  What makes OCMS remarkable (besides front-man Ketch Secor's Virginian accent) is their rough-edged force, which draws in people like some of the friends I've come with, for whom OCMS is the only recognizable name on the bill.

I'm sorry to say that public transportation schedules made me leave then, to the sound of Robert Earl Keen.  My feet ached from standing for hours, but I would have stayed if I could; there was still more music to be heard.

Problems

I came to San Francisco to see the San Francisco Symphony play a heart-filling piece written by Camille Saint-Saëns in 1886: his Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Opus 78, the Organ Symphony. They played, too, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Opus 40, and Prelude to Act I of Die Gezeichneten by Franz Schreker. These were bonus pieces for me; I had never heard of them before sitting down in the Davies Symphony Hall for the pre-performance music talk.

The problem with talking about orchestral music is that if I talk about the theory or the history of the music, it doesn't mean much in terms of the sheer emotional qualities that are present in performance. So while I can tell you that, interestingly, Rachmaninoff had hands about a thumb longer than the average hand, and so his music can be physically challenging for pianists of today, it tells you very little about the way you would hear the sound—the way it would impact your body, your soul...whatever it is that makes up the collection of you when you experience a glorious piece of music.

Conversely, if I can only tell you that the music I heard was beautiful (it was) or deeply moving (it was that too), you will no notion of the magnificence of the full orchestra: the sound of thirty violinists playing a figure, and the low brass adding emphasis with the string basses, all while the rest of the orchestra offers multiple other voices and rhythms so that you, listening, have no notion of exactly how many different parts are coming together to create this linear movement from one moment to the next. And that movement is where what we hear is no longer just noise, but music, and everything we think of music as being.

So I will distill my evening down to a single moment for you. I am looking down a long distance to the stage, watching the full orchestra: the bows of the violins moving as if they are all drawn by the same hand; the the bells of the trumpets and trombones flashing as they are raised, and a moment later, lowered; the conductor's arms and baton creating continuious, inclusive motion that brings each musician together so we, listening, are only aware of the culminated effect even as we can see so many musicians playing. Then—the organ sounds, the strings play that line, the woodwinds have gone all tinkly, the brass rises above the rest and I can feel my skin as though it is disolving cell by cell into the sound. It is induplicatable—this feeling is the reason why I come and sit in a hall full of other people, just to hear the crashing of music against me, to feel again a little like I felt the first time I thought I knew what love meant.

Lovely, Magnificent, Wonderful

I've been serving my country with AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.  It's a wonderful experience, but sometimes music—and internet—is difficult to come by.  So even though this performance happened way back in November, I'm putting this memory out there.  It was one of those nuggets of civilian life that reminds me of where I was before I joined NCCC, and what I'm looking forward to returning to this fall.

November 11, 2011

The venue is Raw Space, a coffee shop with a beer and wine license and a nice little stage behind the storefront that looks like it should be next door, but isn't. The town is Ellensburg, Washington, home of Central Washington University and its cello studio.

There's four of them, opening for Ashia Grzesik.  I can tell they are unseasoned, still students by their general inability to hear how their individual parts fit with the other individual parts, how the chords are structured and balanced—but after all this time, it's so lovely, magnificent, wonderful to hear music that isn't pop, music that is live and tangible—the different voices of each cello so distinct, each player's fingers moving over the fingerboard—music that isn't overplayed or disagreed upon or disliked, dismissed by one or another team member when the eleven of us are crammed in the van.

And then the stage clears, and an accordion player begins a tango-esque duet with a violinist—they are the only bodies on stage: this long, skinnylegged girl and this happy accordion-playing man, alone, until Ashia comes on, stepping carefully—artfully—from the back of the stage, black-gloved hands moving so the walk becomes a dance, a flourish, a visual invitation.  She sits down, pulls off her gloved fingers one by one—the first hand her left, the bow hand—helped by the right hand, the right hand fingers, one by one, with her teeth because her bow is already in her left hand—she imagines her glove as a violin, stretched from her hand to her mouth, bow moving back and forth over it—she flings it down—the music—the music!

I can hear the gaps in her voice, the river-like flow of her (in)articulation—the steadiness of her cello in her hands as she plays, head tipped back in song.  Cello, accordion, and violin, rushing onwards through love songs and Poland songs and blame songs. In between Ashia is gesturing, telling stories with her hands. She speaks of farmers and bison and a square window in a square house holding a grandmama with World War II cars, stories, and the the best pirogies, the best pirogies...

The songs run together, beautiful and sure—but the stories—she tells them with her hands and face, ribcage and toes, everything expanding from that tiny, lipsticked mouth to us, her audience.  We are giving and she is giving. In this polite venue, I can smile in gleeful silence, wrapped up in the music, the concept of performance and vibrations and time over space.  The things I have missed so much since coming to AmeriCorps NCCC, the things that kind people like the biologist on this project, Scott, bring to our lives because making the world better happens in so many, many ways.