in the meantime.

I think it's official tonight. I miss my piano.

Sitting on big covered front porch wrapped in a light wool scarf listening to the rain fall around me an espresso in hand listening to Radiohead's 'Sail To The Moon' on vinyl the crackle and hiss adding to the ambience of Thom Yorke's dingy old upright piano chords filling the house wafting out the windows to me open this summer evening to welcome the breeze. It's been over a month since they hauled it out of my living room. I don't know time sort of all melts together it seems.

But I like dingy old uprights. And beautiful concert grands. And everything in between.

Just the idea of metal and wood copper and steel and brass and mahogany and spruce and ebony. And there is something maybe even magical the sound of a piano through open summer windows. I like walking around town quiet summer evenings shadows long somewhere on the air the sound of a piano coming from a living room. It seems rare these days. A piano or any instrument really.

Which is really quite sad I suppose. Or at least to me.

I cannot hear a piano in a song now without wishing to sit down old wooden ebony garage sale chair and play mine. To hear that wonderful tenor. I know it is for the best that it's gone for now. That when it is returned it will be infinitely better and I will be drowned in its sound like never before. But in the meantime.




In the meantime ...

a strange kind of love.

And there it was.

Randomly I just put on some strange mix tonight house quiet so dialed up the volume on the stereo and came across a song by Peter Murphy (of Bauhaus fame) and stopped in my tracks.


That was it.


Or really really close. The idea in my head of how the voice sounds for my music. I love his range - how low he goes (how he hits that E2). He never gives the presence of the dynamic range I hear in my head for my own stuff, but leaves a sense it is possible and just instead chooses to sing restrained and holds back. It is a fitting soundtrack for the night ... turned up quite loud to let the reverb of his voice fill the room from all directions ...

the sun hanging low.

I don't know but for some reason when Summer comes even if it's not quite here yet but Summer meaning I can open windows in the evenings cos the day was warm enough I always put on music I listened to years ago. It's not even Summer yet here by date and certainly not by weather still tucked away under heavy cloudy skies if the mercury tips seventy it's a good day. But it's warm elsewhere and I'm pretty sure it's warm where I used to listen to this music. I used to drive out these deserted country roads I can't remember now their names without cracking open a map which would seem to ruin the nostalgia. Highway C I think. Or K. Some letter definitely an old two-lane letter highway through cornfields past barns and old farm houses. I once had this crap but perfect first apartment down near the river. The Missouri River. Brown and muddy and wide and slow-moving like a wise old man dirty from a day in the fields but all-knowing and charming in his own way not anything like the crystalline clear waters from blue glaciers here flowing to the ocean. But I still remember the golds. Of the fields. Of the sun hanging low as I'd pass corn stalks golden a haze hanging above them this visual cacophony of insects fluttering catching the light squinting to see them individually not just a blur. Windows down on my little red Toyota or better yet no windows the breeze warm in my face on an old just-about-broken-down Murray ten speed on which I'd racked up a couple thousand miles over the few years I owned it before leaving it behind as I left it all behind the corn fields the golden-orange warm Midwest sunsets and cicadas and roads for the mountains and glaciers of the Pacific Northwest.

But there was this barn I found once deserted and quite literally falling apart. A truck was parked underneath an overhang that looked as if it would be crushed at any moment. I'd stash my bike somewhere out of view or park my car off the highway in the corn fields so as not to bring any suspicion my old inherited Pentax S3 a single-lens relic my Dad had gotten in Korea and bestowed to me that I used to teach myself exposure and aperture and how to judge the light slung over my shoulder and would crawl into the barn to find a battered staircase leading up to a second story open from decrepitation the roof having long ago caved in. Before getting there on headphones or amped-up late teenage adrenalin-inducing car stereo I'd have Michael Stipe stuck in my head climbing up that staircase 'Let Me In' or 'Country Feedback' or anything from the Out of Time album or Midnight Oil's Earth and Sun and Moon or a bit later in the summer yeah anything from R.E.M.'s New Adventures In Hi-Fi record. 'E-Bow The Letter.' 'Electrolyte.' I don't know for some reason his voice just fit with Midwest summer dusks. Low key. Unstrained. Delicate but totally. This was before landing somewhere in the midst of dark Brit Pop the likes of Suede and Radiohead in LA and after settling in Seattle. I wasn't even twenty yet. So I'd crawl up to the hole in the roof in that barn and just sit there listening to the country quiet down. Every once in a while an old beatup pickup or some station wagon would drive by. Only once did anyone ever notice me up there and I wondered what the old farmer thought some kid sitting in the hole of a deserted barn roof up to no good probably but he paid no mind and I kept listening to the cicadas and watching the shadows grow longer before scrambling back down to hop back onto bike and haul it back or maybe just amble around some more til well past dark. It was the country afterall and these lettered highways were deserted.

So now in my little house half a world away over a few mountain ranges and a continental divide I sit on my porch after a run windows open listening to Stipe sing 'You' delayed guitars fed through a classic Leslie amp cycling around and around. It's cloudy. It's not the same. I should grab a down sweater as it dips below sixty though it's not yet dark. It's not muggy like it was all those years ago Missouri country summers. I've moved on from deserted letter highways cutting through cornfields to glaciers and craggy peaks and alpine heavens but still look back can't help it when the calendar winds up in these Summer months and the windows get opened in the evenings. And the music hasn't changed. Not one bit. So I can put some on the living room stereo and let it echo through the house through open windows floating out on the breeze. It's not a decrepit barn falling in hole in the roof but I can still picture it. I can still picture it.

lotof.

So Lotof called today.

'Hello Thom, this is Lotof at Michelle's Piano. I have some information about the time frame. There is a very strong possibility that we can have the truck in your area this week on Friday. Please call me so we can chat about it. If I'm not here, please ask for Ken. He's our moving manager and he can coordinate with you as well. Thanks, bye.'

That was quick.

-----

So we had gone to Portland this past weekend. Found ourselves on the southwest side of town donning sunglasses as we pushed open the doors of some outdoor shop where Katie found a 'Climbers Wanted' tee (and myself a windscreen for my new über-light Snow Peak Giga stove) and headed down Grand. Glanced off to the left when we reached Stark and there was Michelle's. Earlier in the morning we had walked up and back the sixth block of northwest Stark downtown stumped only finding a bank and some other business which was clearly not a Bechstein dealer.

They had moved since New Years Eve a few months ago and so here we were by accident. So we turned down Stark.

I peeled open the door and saw him sitting at his desk. He was on the phone so I wandered over to an old fellow nineteenth century black satin Blüthner set amongst a group of new polished Bechsteins. Played a few chords. A quick melody of some sort. Quickly he got up walked over and introduced himself as Lotof.

I introduced myself and how I had been at the old location on New Year's and given his card. He smiled and nodded. We talked about hammers and bass strings and felt and voicing and repetitive tunings and such carried on for a bit after all was said and done two or three months I'd be without my piano the hammers shipped off to the Berlin factory for replication and how they'd be contacting the head Bechstein technician from Texas for consultation on the restoration and so forth. A handshake. Keep me on the waiting list for a Seattle pickup I told him after he invited us back with a smile to a master class the visiting German pianist Alexandra Sostmann was giving that evening and we left heading back out into the sun of a surprisingly warm Portland afternoon to carry on.

---

Noticed the call on my phone this afternoon. And here I am and have been this evening ... debating.

Can I stand being without the Bechstein for a few months? I imagine how it will sound with new hammers and dampers and strings. I've been here before - imagining the sound, I mean. The tenor incredible already what would it be like? The felt a hundred and thirty-six years old. Worn. The action old and creaking under my fingers. Some keys sticking. What would it be like to play it all responsive and delicate? I can barely play pianissimo without fighting against the piano. Some notes won't play fortissimo when I bang on them.

But I sense it's there. I know it's there. Just waiting. But for what?

To be picked up by a gang of men to haul it out sans legs through my front door down the porch steps into their waiting truck off south to Portland to sit in a workshop torn apart while a factory - the same factory where it was likely built all those hundred-some years ago across oceans then carried on a horse-drawn carriage down cobble streets to an eager household to be given life - assembles a replica of the hammers for me to play? Then installed by competent hands and glued and voiced the worn patina given a loving polish to be wrapped up once again for a trip back north back up the stairs of my porch through the front door uncrated in my living room gently set down back on its legs lid propped open the guys standing back inviting me to sit down with a friendly gesture and play it and I ...

I hit a note ...

then a chord ... then a melody ...

Then I just start banging and the sound rebounds off the plaster walls and glass and the oak floors and back to me washing over and through me and I am totally at a loss ... or so I imagine.

'Sure Lotof - I can be around Friday - what's the delivery window?' I think I hear myself saying ...

evolution.

So after a week's worth of research and a few emails to some Flickr contacts down in California, I've nailed down our summer holiday plan.

I know just last year I jotted down in my journal how I liked being able to find a place for us to settle in for a few days. To give J's legs a chance to rest and his imagination a chance to run crazy in amazing backcountry wild splendor.

But this year will be different. This year's plan is more ... ambitious. This year's plan is (dare I say) ... epic.

We'll be out for four nights and five days. The whole week. We'll have to negotiate cross-country route-finding for a couple of days (though there is nothing like being in the high Sierra above eleven-thousand feet just wandering). Climb up and over a questionable col along the thirteen-thousand-plus-foot ridge of the Sierra Crest separating the Bishop Creek drainage of the John Muir Wilderness to the north from the super-remote northern bounderies of Kings Canyon National Park to the south.

The place we'll be going: Evolution Basin.

I've had my eye on this spot for a few years but always thought it out of reach for even my well-adept-at-remote-backpacking eleven-year-old. It's a two-day trip in (whereas Dusy Basin last year was just a day's hike from the trailhead - at least for us). But as I weighed the options of getting into the Evolution Basin - of which there were many from Lamarck or Haeckel or Wallace or Echo Cols to even going the long route over Piute Pass and all the way around Piute Canyon to the southwest (out of the question - that's for people who actually like the long way around which does not for better or worse define myself) - I finally landed on a Class 3 route over a col of the Sierra crest that will drop us more or less directly into Evolution Basin where we'll then have two days in which to wander.

It will be absolutely off the hook. I'm excited about the potential light. And shadows. The alpenglows of the the high Sierra summer are truly indescribable. As the nineteenth century geologist (and first director of the USGS) - Clarence King - put it -

'The Sierra Nevadas crest a line of sharp, snowy peaks springing into the sky and catching the alpenglow long after the sun has set for all the rest of America.'

And we'll be out there.

This trip goes along nicely with my whole personal plan of going even more remote this year, which as of now apparently also includes trips with J. And will help pave the way - as each year I exhaust the more traditional approaches and hikes into Kings Canyon - for future trips that will be more remote and off the beaten path so-to-speak. So next year maybe we'll visit the northern flanks of the Palisade crest and the Palisade Glacier, or the flip-side of the Palisade Basin which last year we merely glimpsed into from Knapsack Pass. Or Sixty Lakes Basin (under the shadow of Mount Clarence King itself) and Rae Lakes over Forrester Pass (a trip I foolishly and over-ambitiously came up with back when J was all of eight and for which we fell drastically short - instead camping for two nights at Kearsarge Basin after a still-heroic climb for an eight-year-old boy over a twelve-thousand foot Sierra pass).

Unfamiliar routes to familiar places maybe. Leaving the trail for the open country of this high alpine environment that - as photographer James Martin wrote in his book Sierra - 'invites exploration.'

J can do it. Heck, maybe we'll even climb Haeckel or Wallace this year on the way to Evolution. We'll see. However it turns out - for four nights we'll revel under the stars (planning it this year around the new moon as well in order to witness the Milky Way from the remoteness of the Sierra wilderness) and bask in solitude unprecedented. And he'll come back with more strength, more humility, more appreciation. Maybe remembering how Thoreau once put it that 'You are rich in proportion to the things you don't need' and the lessons I try to teach him while we're out - how important it is to strip away all but the bare necessities and to appreciate it all.

Yeah. Word. And like I said ... epic.

one-hundred-eighty-seven years ago today.

I started the final term paper for my senior-year of high school advanced English lit class with a similar sentence that Harvey Sachs uses in his book The Ninth: Beethoven And The World In 1824 ~

Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125, is one of the most precedent-shattering and influential compositions in the history of music.

To be precise, mine went something like this ~

Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in D minor, the "Choral," his one hundred and twenty-fifth work, is and will always remain his greatest, most monumental gift to all mankind.

Before anyone draws any conclusions - or calls me out for possible plagiarism that garnered me a perfect 'A' for my rather scrutinous diatribe of Beethoven's Ninth (beating the to-be valedictorian's grade by nearly a full letter and prompting his mother to insinuate to mine that she must have also helped me on my paper, to which my mom could both honestly say she did not as well as report back to me it seemed his mom had apparently helped him) - keep in mind I handed in that term paper in 1994, and Sachs' book was published last year. Maybe Sachs got hold of my term paper somehow ...

Regardless, it was one-hundred-eighty-seven years ago today that - in a small Viennese theatre named the Kärntnertor - that what was indeed to become nearly-unilaterally-thought as the greatest achievement in Western music (and dare I say all of art) was performed for the first time by a hack-by-today's-standards smattering of musicians and vocalists.

Similarly, Beethoven is just-as-nearly-unilaterally considered of epitomizing and in fact being 'the quintessential genius of Western culture.' About his last symphony, the Russian revolutionary and at-times-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin whispered to conductor and composer Richard Wagner in 1849 (a mere twenty-five years after its premiere performance), that 'if all the music that has ever been written were lost in the expected world-wide conflagration, we must pledge ourselves to rescue this symphony, even at the peril of our lives.' The Ninth is considered 'both an extraordinary, living musical organism and a milestone in the history of civilization.' And so on.

The superlatives for this monumental work and achievement can continue ad infinitum. I certainly spared none in that term paper that I perhaps somewhat pompously but honestly and affectionately titled -

Uhh, yeah.

To continue in my pompous-even-at-eighteen-years-old vein, I then indicated on the second page of said paper that the complete (emphasis used for real back then) orchestral score and a sound recording of the symphony (I did though leave out the terse suggestion of how only Zubin Mehta's live performance with the New York Philharmonic from back in 1983 could be considered worthy of listening) should be used when studying my paper, as well as that 'a thorough understanding of introductory music theory is assumed of the reader.' I was fun even back then. And apparently also just a smidge opinionated.

I included an English translation of Freidrich Schiller's An Die Freude ('Ode To Joy') and then - over the course of eleven carefully-typed, double-spaced pages (with no help from my mother, by the way) proceeded to prove - through at times a bar-by-bar 'critical analysis' of each of the four movements along with historic snippets much like what, over the course of two hundred pages, Sachs tries also to accomplish - that indeed this was Beethoven's greatest gift to mankind.

It wasn't hard.

I didn't use the term 'unilaterally' above (twice even) for no reason or without just cause (or at least not to my over-opinionated-self). I wrote about how Beethoven was never certain about the use of a choral finale or - for that matter - the theme of the 'Ode' itself. It is widely-known that he was what Sachs called a 'write, rewrite, and re-rewrite man ... not a wholly-spontaneous creator.' He went on to say that 'Beethoven knew that perfection was impossible.'

But back to my paper ... I wrote of its 'gigantic proportions' (before I had discovered the gem 'ginormous') and how it more-or-less was responsible for effectively bridging the gap between the Classical and Romantic eras of music history. I quoted Donald Tovey - a notable musicologist among other things - who once wrote 'of all the single works of art, of all passages in a work of art, the first subject of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has had the deepest and widest influence on later music.' To which I responded in my own attempt to back up his statement ~

The opening pianissimo fifths, subdominant and dominant in the key of D minor, gradually quicken and pile up into a colossal wave of the descending D minor triad ...

and how Beethoven masterfully built the tension through the use of a gradual crescendo lasting for six bars.

And on and on. And on. And on.

How the timpani comes in playing the dominant F to the key of B-flat. How the second movement ends on the major parallel triad of how it began (parallel keys share the same tonic, in this case the D) and how Beethoven again does this modulation in the fourth movement at bar 230 while seven bars later the movement proceeds to its second section and the tempo ups to the marked 'Allegro assai.' And how - as the movement draws to a close - 'Beethoven is unrelentless in his quest for power, piling tension on top of tension' while 'the chorus is nearly shouting, doubled rhythmically by the entire orchestra.' Of how the orchestra tries to bring the symphony to an end in bar 936, 'but it takes three more powerful, fortissimo quarter notes, enforced with pairs of triplets by the entire woodwind section and the rumbling thunder of the timpani, to finally conclude the symphony.'

How it all ends on the triad it sought to build way back in the opening bars of the first movement with those pianissimo descending fifths ... the D minor.

It should come as no surprise then that I - as a rather self-described precocious teenager - did in fact own a copy of the complete score of this symphony, and would listen intently sitting alone in my room on my bed thumbing through it bar-by-bar, line-by-line, page-by-page as the music unfolded. Unaware of my surroundings. Completely drawn in. Absorbed.

Beethoven was well-known to be scornful. Conceitful (there was only one Beethoven after all!). Pompous. Even hostile - constantly lashing out at friends and acquaintances only to come crawling back quickly after seeking their forgiveness for his verbal brutalities. But at the same time, he portrayed a perfect juxtaposition of a love for humanity but contempt for human beings. A sense of his own musical superiority but physical frailty. An affection for others 'inextricably bound up with affliction.' So on May the sixth, at the final rehearsal for the following day's concert, the composer 'stood at the theater's stage door and embraced, one by one, each of the amateur orchestra and chorus members who were participating, gratis, in the proceedings.' He was grateful. And humble. His own humility had crept in for a moment and taken over.

I could go on of course. More than I already have. My own history admittedly quite tied up with Beethoven. Like of how there is a reason I strongly feel - like the second movement of the Piano Sonata in C minor, op. 111, shows in that Beethoven took us so profoundly into his heart and - as Sach's put it 'into the heart of the Universe' - that anything that followed would have been 'impossibly anticlimatic' - be it Beethoven's Fate or ours that there is no tenth symphony.

That there is not because similarly - in his Ninth - he took us further into his heart than ever possible from any other composer or any other musical work before or after - that he simply had to leave this Earth before he completed another. From those opening pianissimo fifths of the first movement to the blistering Scherzo to the strains of the most-eloquent and beautiful of all slow movements to the grandiose finale and crashing end.

'What must have run through his mind as the ink dried on the last notes?' Sachs asks.

It is hard for me to imagine the mind that can come up with the idea that 'all uniform motion is relative, and that there is no absolute and well-defined state of rest (as in, no privileged reference frames) from mechanics to all the laws of physics, including both the laws of mechanics and of electrodynamics, whatever they may be' - otherwise known as Special Relativity.

But even more difficult for me to imagine the mind that can come up with two-thousand-two-hundred-and-three bars of music that can bring the whole of humanity to its knees.

It has been often said in various but similar ways that if everyone on Earth could hear (insert composer's name, be it Bach or Beethoven or Mozart), there would never be another war. Beethoven had no idea his last symphony - with near-exponential vigor following the premiere performance - would take on a life of its own and come to epitomize more eloquently than any other musical work this particular sentiment.

The summer following that historic evening one-hundred-eighty-seven-years ago today he - disgruntled and grumpy with his affairs and those around him - ran off to the country to escape the throngs of Vienna and take up residence alone as was his custom. To put the symphony behind him and begin working on his final (and again - thought nearly-unilaterally to be the most extraordinary in the genre) string quartets.

And of course then - unknowing of the Fate of the Ninth - Beethoven died just shy of three years later.

I think of myself - that kid sitting on his bed in the dark my ears wrapped with headphones listening painfully loud to Mehta conducting the New York Philharmonic to click on a reading lamp so that I could trace the notes of the score with my finger as it poured itself - as indeed Beethoven poured himself - out to me. To be wowed. Intoxicated. Absorbed. I thought then as I do now that - indeed ... the Ninth Symphony is Beethoven's most monumental work, and his greatest gift to all mankind ...

... then ... now ... and for all eternity.

'You are so weak on this Earth made of granite ... '