Love and Work

“If I died tomorrow,” my mother used to say, “your father would mourn for the rest of his life. But if they took away his violin, he’d be dead within a week.” She didn’t say this bitterly, or with animosity towards the violin with which my father earned his living, or the piano on which he composed whenever he had a free minute. She knew that as a woman she had no rivals. “With my music and you, I will be the happiest man on the planet,” he wrote while he was courting her. But my mother was right when she said that he wouldn’t be able to live without music. 

In the family mythology, my father was considered 1. a saint, and 2. a happy man. The saint part I heard mostly from his mother, who would sigh and look towards heaven whenever she said his name. But both sides of the family were united in their admiration for how hard he worked and never complained nor lost his temper. Here again, my mother had a more nuanced view of the man she loved: “Yes, your father is very good. But he’s not a saint. Mostly he just doesn’t care enough to get involved in things that don’t have to do with music.” 

This led directly to part 2 of the family myth, that my father was extremely happy. How many times did I hear my mother say to him, with a rueful smile, as she struggled with some domestic issue, “As long as you have your violin, nothing bothers you…” One of the things that did not bother my father, but did bother my mother, was his relative lack of ambition or, put another way, his contentment with the way things were. 

“Tonight we’re doing Parsifal, with Solti, who is a genius. I can’t wait!” he would say as he was getting into his tailcoat. Never mind that he would have to make his way home on foot because the streetcars would have stopped running by the time the performance ended. Never mind that the next day there were classes to teach at the conservatory, plus symphony rehearsal, plus private students, plus another opera at night. All that mattered was that he would be playing four hours of Wagner under a superb conductor. 

My mother worried about how long he could keep up this pace. If only, she thought, he were more aggressive, would put himself forward, would use his connections, he wouldn’t have to work so hard and would get more recognition. But recognition, which he fully enjoyed whenever it came his way, was far down the list of my father’s concerns. What he really cared about was playing and composing as best he could, all day, every day. 

When we were living in Quito, Isaac Stern came to give a recital. At the end, as my father exulted over Stern’s gorgeous tone and his fabulous technique, my mother asked him if he didn’t find Stern’s virtuosity discouraging. “Discouraging!” my father said, “why would I think that? On the contrary, it makes me want to play all the more.” 

All those years of watching my father find solace in the daily practice of his art imbued me with a sense of the connection between work—good work, that is--and happiness. My father, even my childish eyes could see, had both love and work. My mother had love, but lacked real work. I knew without a doubt that, despite his monstrous workload, my father was the happier of the two. 

I wanted to be happy like my father, but I was not a man. I was consigned by fate to my mother’s domain, where love and its attendant concerns— rearing children, looking nice, thinking and talking about feelings—held sway. Later, as an adolescent, I remember coming home from school, wanting nothing more than to go into my room, close the door, and write in my diary, and seeing how desperate my mother was for me to sit down and confide in her. “So that’s what happens when you depend too much on people to make you happy,” I said to myself. 

I have known few people with as deep a passion for their art as my father had. The gods did not bestow an equivalent gift on me. But when I sit down to write I call up the image of my father at the piano, and I try to enter into my work as humbly and wholeheartedly as he did, and on good days I get a taste of the joy that sustained him.

My father and I. Fall, 1960

 

Cloistered

Here is what I think about these days when I feel isolated and frustrated:

1936. A turn-of-the-century apartment in Barcelona: living room, dining room, four bedrooms. A pared-down kitchen, no ice-box. One bathroom. No hot water or central heat. In this apartment live my father, his parents, his two younger sisters, and his older brother with his wife and two baby boys. And the maid, an orphan whom my grandparents took in many years ago. She sleeps on a cot in the kitchen.

The Spanish Civil War has broken out. My grandfather is an accountant in a cement company, but construction in all of Spain has come to a halt, so there isn’t much work for him. My grandmother sends the maid out to the shops every day, and makes do with what she brings back: bread and garlic and maybe a bit of hake or cod.

The older son used to have a job, but now has lymphoma and grows weaker by the day. Doctors and nurses are at the front, stitching wounds and amputating limbs, so he is cared for by his wife and his mother. His wife is a Mexican citizen. Like the Israelites smearing blood on their doors so the angel would spare their firstborns, the family has nailed a Mexican flag on the door of the apartment to deter the anarchist gangs that roam the city.

My father’s sisters are fifteen and twelve, and have to be kept mostly indoors because the streets are rife with soldiers. My father is twenty-two. Ever since his mother sat him on her lap and placed his fingers on the keyboard of the upright piano, music has been his life. A violinist, he is starting to make his way professionally.

Of all the family, he is the most endangered, more than the dying brother or the pubescent girls. Catalonia is in the grip of leftist furor. Centuries of deprivation have stoked hatred among the poor towards everyone and everything that smacks even remotely of privilege: the wealthy and the middle class, the great landowners and the farmers with a single field and a mule, and the church—priests good and bad, monks, nuns, former altar boys, and members of a Catholic organizations such as the Children of Mary.

In high-school my father belonged to the Children of Mary, along with the rest of his class. This now makes him subject to summary arrest and execution. One night his best friend, hiding in his own parents’ apartment, is dragged out from under the sofa and put on a truck headed for Montjuich, the hill overlooking the city where dozens are shot every day at dawn. But my father’s friend is charming, and on the way he strikes a conversation with the guard, who lowers the tailgate and lets him jump off.

As in every civil war, one is at the mercy of disaffected neighbors, disappointed rivals, the spiteful, the petty, and the just plain evil, any one of whom may take it into his or her head to nod in the direction of one’s hiding place. So my father has to stay in the apartment 24/7. Not only can he not go outdoors, he can’t stand on the balcony or close to a window. Not only may he not play the violin--that would give him away immediately--he has to speak softly and tread lightly, lest the downstairs tenants hear a man’s voice and footsteps while my grandfather and the elder son are out of the house.

What do they do, the ten of them, day after day in that apartment? There is a piano on which the girls practice their scales. There is a radio, but reception is poor. Otherwise there is nothing:  no TV, no wi-fi, no working telephone, no books or magazines other than those already on the shelves. There are frequent blackouts.

There is always prayer, and they all say the rosary together every evening. And for my father there are buttons to paint, for a little income. It is fashionable at the time for women to wear large painted buttons made of tagua, an ivory-like plant material. So my young father sits by the window (but not too close) with a slender brush and some paints, and invents tiny bucolic scenes for women to wear on their chests. What, at twenty-two, does he make of women, now that the only ones he sees are his mother, the maid, his sisters, and his brother’s young wife in the bedroom next to his?

Food is the great issue. How to get it, how to apportion it. The decisions are in my grandmother’s hands. My grandfather needs nourishment so he can continue to work, as does the maid. The girls are still growing. The daughter-in-law is pregnant or nursing. Now that his cancer is progressing, the older son doesn’t want to eat much, but he must be encouraged nevertheless. And my father—how to satisfy the hunger of a twenty-two-year-old man? Fortunately, he doesn’t get any exercise, so that helps.

At night the family gathers around the table, a candle flickering in the center because the electricity has been cut off.

“Here, take this bread. I’m not feeling very hungry.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s yours. Please eat it…”

They go to bed early to keep warm, but before retiring they file into the kitchen, one by one, and down several glasses of water. This is to give their stomachs the illusion of fullness, so they can fall asleep.

The war lasts three years.

My father, aged 21, the year before the war

Why Concerts Make Me Sad

When my father died of lung cancer at fifty-three, his death wrenched me out of the ocean of music that I'd been swimming in since infancy. Even as a toddler, I was so immersed in his music that my mother found me on the potty one day, humming the third movement of the Beethoven violin concerto, which my father was preparing to perform.

I spent a major part of my childhood attending--more like being dragged to--concerts. Sunday mornings, in Barcelona, my mother would take me to Mass, and then to the symphony concert in the Palau de la música catalana. There, in the hallucinatory Art Nouveau hall, swinging my legs, which were too short to reach the floor, I would sit through endless programs. Once I'd located my father in the violin section, I would entertain myself by gazing at the plaster busts of long-haired muses that emerged out of the wall behind the orchestra.

When the Ecuadorian government imported a quartet of Catalan players to Quito, with my father as first violin, we all--the second violinist, the violist, the cellist, my parents and I--shared a house so the quartet could spend mornings practicing for their bi-weekly performances, which I was required to attend. At twelve years old, even though by then my feet did reach the floor, a late Beethoven quartet seemed to last an eternity.

By the time we came to the U.S. I was in high school, and had been playing the violin for several years. By sheer dint of exposure, I was finding it easier to sit through and even enjoy my father's symphony concerts, and his chamber music and solo performances.

Then, as I was finally maturing musically, my father died, and I stopped going to concerts. Half a century later, I still find it painful to attend live performances. As a result, over the years I have missed a lot of good music. In Vermont, there is a vibrant musical community, and magnificent players regularly spill out of New York looking for venues, but it's all wasted on me. I can enjoy listening to music on the car radio, or on CDs in my living room. But live performances bring tears to my eyes, and so I avoid them.

Why, I've been wondering, shouldn't I get the same joy out of going to concerts as so many of my friends do? What is it about live performances that plunges me back into a state of mourning, as if my father had just died? Why can I listen to music in my car but not in a concert hall?

And then it came to me. There is one sound that is never heard on a recorded piece, but that you always hear whenever a string player picks up his or her instrument, whether preparing to practice scales or to perform at Carnegie Hall: the sound of tuning up.

For the violin, it starts with the two highest strings, A and E, played together, then A and D, and finally D and G, the tones growing sharper or flatter with each turn of the pegs, the adjustments finer and finer until the three perfect fifths are reached.

Together with my parents' voices, the sound of a violin being tuned, that homely wah-wah without which no music can begin, was one of the first vibrations to reach me as I swam in my mother's womb. So that, to this day, hearing the search for those perfect fifths immerses me in my father's presence: his hyper-flexible, tobacco-stained fingers, the circular sore on his left jaw from too many hours of playing, the aroma of cigarettes that enveloped him.

But if I open my eyes and see someone else tuning the strings, my father is suddenly wrenched away from me, replaced by a stranger who may well be a better violinist than he was, but is not him. And I am plunged into mourning once again.

If for me my father's persona was inextricably identified with music, it's little wonder that music, which like smell bypasses the obtrusive medium of language, can bring him back so vividly. And just as vividly--since it's no longer him playing, nor will ever be--snatch him away. I don't suppose that there's much I can do to alter this, nor at this stage do I really want to. I simply accept it as a fair price for all the years that I spent floating in the warm currents of my father's music.

My father (mustache, violin) and the Catalan quartet in Quito, 1955

Passionate Cursive

Life of my heart, the only woman I have ever kissed, I want to kneel at your feet forever… my 28-year-old father writes.

A stack of letters between my parents has lately come into my hands. The first letter dates from 1941, at the very start of their courtship, when he is her violin teacher, and the last is probably from 1953, the year before we leave Spain for Ecuador.

Between those two dates there are dozens of letters, most of them written by my father in Barcelona during the times my mother is at her parents’ farm in the country. But during their courtship he writes even while they are both in the city and he sees her every day. He walks her home from the university and then goes to his parents’ apartment, finds a quiet corner and pours out his adoration on paper (goddess of my dreams, star of my firmament, joy of my life…).

The next day he meets her at the usual place. “When I would see him coming,” my mother once told me, “I always looked at his breast pocket, to see if there was a letter peeking out.”

There usually was, and these and the letters that he wrote during their times apart make for overwhelming reading. The first time I plowed through them, I had to take breaks, because their intensity made me gasp.

Does anybody still write love letters like these (adorable angel, without you the city is a desert, gray and dead, and I wander the streets like a soul in torment…)? Her beautiful hair, the soft skin of her cheeks, her hands, her eyes, her sublime spirit have kindled in him a flame that will never be extinguished…With his music and her love, he tells her over and over, he needs neither wealth nor fame to be the happiest man on earth.

In letter after letter, my father’s elegant handwriting unfolds across the page like a visual melody. How can these harmonious loops and strokes, these impeccably parallel lines, hold so much ardor?

My mother’s letters—there are several in the collection—match his in intensity, but the writing is often illegible. Sometimes the handwriting leans forward, others backward, and the words stretch out or bunch irregularly on the page, propelled by the changing rhythms of her feelings. 

But my musician father was accustomed to containing his emotions within the boundaries of a certain form, and even in the transports of amorous passion, his pen-holding fingers kept a steady beat. Which is why, reading his letters almost a century later, I can feel his young heart, beating in my hands.

Pizzicato (continued)

Slowly and solemnly, my father set the violin on my left shoulder and tucked it under my chin, then stretched out my left arm to support the neck of the instrument. It was my long-awaited first lesson--the beginning, I hoped, of long, interesting sessions in which my father would pay flattering attention to me, and from which my mother would be excluded.

“You must hold the instrument up, up! so it’s never pointed at the floor,” he said. Then he went to work on my right hand, molding my fingers one-by-one into proper position on the frog of the bow. While this was going on, my left arm had drooped until my elbow rested comfortably on my belly. “Up!” my father reminded me. Next he gently placed my bow on the A string. “Now, veeery carefully, move the bow towards the tip.” I did, and the bow skittered disgracefully across the string, making an appalling noise.

“Yes,” my father said, “it is very difficult. I will explain.” Stopping periodically to raise my drooping left arm, he explained how the hair of the bow should be turned towards my face when I was playing near the frog, then gradually turn until it was flat when I played at the tip; how I was to press lightly against the string when the bow was at the frog, and gradually increase the pressure as I moved towards the tip; how at all times the bow was supposed to stay in an ideal (but unmarked) spot between the bridge and the fingerboard; how I should never put on too much resin on the hair, or touch it with my fingers, or neglect to wipe the wood with a cloth after every practice session.

“Bowing is very difficult,” he repeated, “but it is the key to a good tone, and without good tone there is no music.” Goodness knew I wanted to have a good tone. Those first bowings across the A string had been the sound equivalent of sucking on a lemon. But I was hopeful. Surely it wasn't all about the bow, and before the lesson was over he would teach me how to play a song? But after a few more explanations and some more proppings of my feeble left arm, my father declared that he had a rehearsal, and had to leave.

“What am I supposed to practice?” I asked.

“Bowing on the A string, of course,” he said.

“But what about my fingers, the ones on my left hand. Don’t I get to use them?”

He waved his hand towards the ceiling. “That will come much later, when you have practiced lots of bowing, at least five minutes every day.”

“Five minutes just bowing on the A string?”

“Of course,” he said. “Bowing is crucial! And don’t forget to hold up your left arm.”

And I did practice bowing on the A string, although all the instructions about the angle of the bow hair, the pressure and placement of the bow on the string, and the need to hold up the violin quickly vanished from my ten-year-old mind. This was so different from the piano, when from the first day one could play five notes with just the right hand, and those five notes sounded like regular notes, not like the unearthly screeches I got out of my A string. But at least my mother was keeping out of my way.

A week later, I caught my father as he was getting up from lunch, brushing crusty breadcrumbs off his pants. “Can I have my lesson now?” I asked. “Well, o.k.,” he said, looking at his watch. “Five minutes, because I have to leave for rehearsal.”

He repeated all the instructions from the first lesson, and showed me how to bow on the E string. “Now that you’re playing on two strings, you should practice ten minutes,” he said, putting on his coat and picking up his violin case.

A few weeks later, I was allowed to place my index finger on the A string, to play a B. By now I was required to practice fifteen minutes a day. I stood in my room (”Your father is composing. He must not hear you,” my mother said, closing the door), playing my five notes over and over, not knowing what I was aiming at but feeling in my very bones that the evil wooden box under my chin and the reverse magic wand in my right hand had nothing to do with music as I understood it.

Music was what my father made, and anything less sounded to me like an abomination. If music had been presented in a less reverential, more playful way, I might have developed a friendlier feeling towards the violin, but this was long before the Suzuki Method. As it was, with every squeak, every wrong note, I felt like a clumsy altar boy who spills the communion wine at Mass.

My humiliation at the inability to sound like my father soon turned to rage. Gritting my teeth, I would crumple up a particularly difficult sheet of music, then guiltily smooth it out again. Once I whacked my bow hard against the music stand, and several long white hairs came loose. Terrified that I had done irreparable damage, I cut them off with my mother’s manicure scissors and hid them in the kitchen trash. You know that little overhang where the top surface of the violin meets the side? A close look at my first violin would reveal two shallow dents made by my front teeth....

3,672 Stitches

Three years and 3,672 stitches later, the needlepoint pillow I started from an Ehrman kit is finally finished.  I didn't actually count the stitches.  I just multiplied the number of stitches per inch (12) by the size of the design (18"x17").  Math is so useful sometimes.

When I told a friend--an exceptionally creative woman who is always elbow-deep in some project she has just invented--what I was working on, she opened her eyes wide.  "You are working from a kit?" she said, appalled.  "But that's just like painting by numbers!"

Well, yes, it is--except slower.  And that is precisely why I do it.

After hours of squeezing words out of my brain and onto the screen, or notes out of my mouth and into my recorder, nothing restores my soul like threading a needle with bright-red wool and filling in a poppy petal.  When you do needlepoint from a kit, the goal is to reproduce exactly the design stamped on the canvas.  In a way, it's not unlike playing music composed by someone else, except that the player has a lot more room for interpretation.  With needlepoint, you color outside the lines at your own risk.

When I sit at my embroidery frame, it doesn't take me long to enter into a semi-hypnotic state, lulled by the "thwack"of the needle piercing the canvas and the "swish" of the wool pulling through.  It's a rhythmic activity, not unlike walking, and like walking it frees my mind to saunter at leisure, and even to wander off its usual well-worn paths.  Sometimes, between one row of stitches and the next, an idea comes to me, seemingly out of nowhere, or the solution to a problem appears as I anchor the end of a length of wool.  But the main virtue of needlepoint, as I suspect is true of most varieties of handiwork, is that it is almost impossible to remain tense while doing it.

As petals, leaves, and stems begin to emerge I take pleasure in their colors and shapes, and feel grateful to the artist who created them, just as I send thanks to Georg Philipp Telemann for taking the trouble to write, back in the troubled 1700s, the lovely duo recorder sonatas that I am struggling to learn.  There is so much beauty in this world, and I give thanks to the artists, musicians and writers who make it their own and then offer it for me to delight in.
A while ago, I briefly considered making my own needlepoint designs, but this would negate all the therapeutic effects of needlepoint.  With every stitch I would anxiously question my choice of colors, the curve of a leaf, the shape of the negative space.  It would be like endlessly rereading my own writing, word by dispiriting word.

No, for me, the virtue of needlepoint lies in its very absence of creativity, an absence which, happily but unpredictably, sometimes triggers my own.

From My Father's Hand

I found the manuscript of a piano sonata of my father's among some papers a while ago, and today I scanned it and sent it to his editor in Barcelona.  She is hurrying to get his few remaining unpublished compositions out in time for the celebration of the centennial of his birth later this year.

The score is signed and dated spring, 1966, two years before his death.  The paper has yellowed with age, but the familiar blue ink has kept its color, and it called up for me the memory of my father sitting at the dining room table, copying out scores by hand.

He composed at the piano, alternately holding a pencil and a cigarette between his right index and middle fingers, squinting against the smoke and trying out chords one after another.  When a piece was finished he orchestrated it.  And when that was done he copied out all the parts, by hand.

Like most professional musicians, my father cobbled a living playing the violin in orchestras and chamber ensembles, and teaching college classes and private students.  While he was alive, his compositions brought him recognition but no significant income.  So the copying out of scores had to be sandwiched in between endless rounds of classes and rehearsals and his own violin practice, not to mention driving my mother to the grocery store and all of us to church on Sundays.

In the evenings, after the last private student had packed up his violin and left, he would sit at the dining room table with his ash tray and his cigarette and his fountain pen with the blue ink and copy out the music he had written, note by note, stopping every once in a while to push his glasses up on  his nose.  And when I showed up with the plates and silverware to set the table for dinner he would blow on the ink to dry it and stub out his cigarette and put everything away without a word.  Then we would eat and when that was over he would leave for orchestra rehearsal.

I wonder what he thought about during those endless hours of copying music?  Did he hear it in his head?  Did he resent having to do this mechanical task when he would much rather be at the piano creating new work?

I never saw him rush.  He never seemed frustrated.  He sat there for however long he had, peacefully making marks that I found, and still find, beautiful in themselves--the verticals perfectly vertical, the bars on the sixteenth notes parallel with each other, and the tempo and mood indications in his  sweeping, old-fashioned hand--allegro ma non tanto, moderato cantabile, molto espressivo.

My father's handwriting was famous in the family.  He was said to have inherited this talent from his father, a silent, obsessively orderly man whose hand was even more perfect than my father's.  It was considered unfortunate that the calligraphy gene had passed me by, though at least the musical one, for better or worse, had not.

It struck me, as I scanned the score and with one click sent it flying over the Atlantic and across the width of the Iberian peninsula all the way to Barcelona, that my father had copied out that piece using the same basic technology as Bach--a pen, some ink, and his own hand. Or, in the case of Bach, someone's hand, since Bach's twenty children, I am sure, were put to copying scores as soon as they could hold a pen, or their father's could never have managed his enormous output.

I'll never know how much more music my father might have composed if he had had either twenty children or a computer and a printer.  But those blue ink lines on yellowing paper contain far more than potential melody--they hold the very presence of my father in the dining room at dusk, bent over his task, while my mother sautes garlic on the stove and I put away my geometry problem set and get out the knives and forks, the napkins, and the dinner plates.

The Enigmatic Cellist

I was meeting two friends for dinner at the tiny restaurant in the upscale village.  It was warm enough that tables were still set up on the patio under a canopy.  We were led to one of these, but there was a problem:  between our table and the indoor dining room a man sat playing the cello. 

It was a fine sound, deep and clear.  I knew that I would not be able to eat, let alone talk, next to those thrumming notes, so I asked to be moved. The waiter looked annoyed, but went to arrange for a table inside.  The cellist glanced up from his score, and I felt sure he'd caught the gist of my request.  I was mortified that he must think I wanted to move because I didn't like his playing.

We followed the waiter indoors, and as I passed the cellist, I wished I could make eye contact, maybe smile--do something to let him know that the reason I wanted to move away from him was that he played too well.  We sat down and the wine arrived, and the basket of crusty bread, but I couldn't taste any of it because, through the chatter of the diners and the clatter of dishes and silverware, I could still hear the cello.  And it was distractingly, disturbingly good.

I looked at the people around us.  They were talking and eating, seemingly oblivious to the stream of high art wafting through the air.  Somewhere between the main course and dessert, the cellist began playing the Bach Cello Suites, one majestic, soulful movement after another--allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue....  Here is this man, I thought, pouring out this sublime stuff, and behind it lie years and years of lessons, scales, and auditions, performance anxiety and bouts of despair.  And now it had come to fruition...and here he was, in a restaurant, playing while we chewed our food.

I mentioned to the server how extraordinary the playing was. "Oh, he's good," he said, "he plays with the --- Symphony,"  and named one of the top orchestras in the U.S.  I couldn't believe it.  There are thousands of accomplished string players in the land today, only a handful of whom make it into the best orchestras.  I know that symphony orchestras have been having a hard time lately, but this guy's orchestra is still alive and active.  What was he doing playing in a restaurant?

Musicians have always supplemented orchestra salaries with other jobs.  My school uniforms and tuition were paid with the money that my father, a violinist, earned from chamber music gigs, recording sessions, or--steadiest but most disliked--private lessons or college teaching.  I know that in his early years as a musician, well before I was born, my father played waltzes at an exclusive tea-house in Barcelona.  But never again, after I knew him, did he play background music at a social event, much less at a restaurant.

Is the state of classical music today so dire that fine musicians are forced to play in restaurants, I wondered?  Perhaps the enigmatic cellist was just a friend of the restaurateur...or he was a musical masochist who enjoyed playing while people ignored him.  Eventually he stopped, and I was relieved--the tension of trying not to listen to the music had been wearing me out.

As we were leaving, I saw that the cellist had joined a couple at a table, and was eating with them.  Were they avid music lovers who, amazed to find such a star in their midst, had asked to buy him dinner?  Away from his instrument, the cellist looked affable but unremarkable as he cut into his roasted duck.  Again, as I walked by him I wanted somehow to let him know that he had been heard.  But he was munching away so contentedly that I figured he was happy with things just as they were.

Rainy Day Anniversary

Yesterday, a rainy day, was the 42nd anniversary of my father's death. Today, another rainy day, I don't much feel like writing about what's going on outside, so I'll write about something that my 92-year-old mother recently told me about my father.

Our memories of him, as his life and death recede in time, are growing fewer, and the ones that remain tend to take on a sort of oracular tint. But my father was no oracle. He was a man. Or, I should say, he was a musician. He would have wanted that to come first, I think.

A few months before he died, the local symphony put on the first performance of his Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer, been told in the heartless way of that era that there was nothing, nothing at all that could be done for him. I attended the performance--in a miniskirt so short that I had to spread the program over my lap when I sat down--with my brand-new husband. I don't remember anything about the music. I just remember, despite the miniskirt and the new husband, the crushing, constant awareness that my 53-year-old father had been sentenced to die.

Here is what my mother remembers. As they were getting dressed for the concert--his dark suit already hanging loose on his thin shoulders--she asked him if he was nervous.

"Why should I be nervous?" he said.

"What if they don't like the piece?" she said.

"That would be too bad," my father answered. "But they could never take away the pleasure I had in composing it."

That, I like to think, was my father all over. He played his violin, he composed his music (always, alas, with a cigarette nearby), and if people liked it he was pleased, but that probably accounted for no more than three per cent of the reason he did it. Did he look ahead? Did he scheme for ways to promote himself, to get attention? According to my mother, despite her best efforts, this aspect of the artist's life never interested him in the slightest. And because after all he supported us with his music, she couldn't really complain.

These days, my father's entire opus has been published by a Barcelona firm. His music is being performed in Spain and other countries. A number of recordings have been made. The Spanish press wants to know more about his life.

I can imagine what it would have been like if he'd been around for all this. He would have said "Life is good!" and smiled. Then he would have gone to the piano, spread his long, tobacco-stained fingers over the keys, and started work on the next piece.

The Cape

My soon-to-be-five years old grandson , Remy, is a chivalrous little guy, but when you're trying to save the world from evil, it helps if you have the right outfit. His mother told me that the other day he came downstairs with a sheet of newspaper wrapped around his shoulders, fastened at the neck with a taped-on penny. So I've decided to make him a cape for his birthday.

The cape is long and wide, made of black felt with a blood-red lining. It has a raised collar, a fancy gold clasp, and, I hope, the right sweep and swish. It is not a magician's cape, or a Dracula cape. It is an all-purpose cape, for saving princesses or fighting trolls or doing card tricks.

It's difficult to find a gift for a child—or anybody--these days. The avalanche of cheaply available goods that swept over America after World War II has made it impossible for adults as well as children to truly hanker for things. Of course some people hanker for helicopters, McMansions, and yachts. But I'm talking about ordinary stuff, like sweaters, or dolls, or toy cars. The ordinary house today is bursting at the seams with these, leaving little room for wishing and dreaming.

Wanting to please, but hating to add to the clutter, we as grandparents have faced this dilemma every birthday and Christmas since Remy's older sister Violette was born six years ago. The solution we have arrived at is to offer hand-made gifts whenever possible. (It's not clutter if it's hand-made.) Out of Ed's workshop have come a gorgeous pull-cart full of blocks, an art-supplies box and, most recently, a toy chest made in collaboration with the recipients. I've produced a clay statuette of a princess, a be-jewelled, heart-shaped pendant with Ed's picture on one side and mine on the other, a dress for Violette, and now this cape.

The last time I sewed anything, my daughters were toddlers. Now I'm trying to recapture long-lost skills—how to read a pattern, how to line a collar.

Today, having cut the cape and the satin lining and the collar and the interfacing, I put on a Schubert CD and started sewing. It was chamber music at first, and as I pinned and basted I thought about my father, and how chamber music had been his love. I listened to a Schubert piano trio and it sounded not exactly familiar, but absolutely right. I must have heard him practice the violin part. I must have been taken to the performance. I wish I could talk to him about this music. I would like to think that he's listening too, as I sit here making a cape for his great-grandson.

A great-grandson, in a family of girls. What a surprise he was, when we met him at the Maternite in Paris, not only male, but blond and blue-eyed. Where, we wondered, had this little Visigoth come from? I took care of him for several days when he was six months old, and it struck me how uncannily like my husband he was—calm and amiable, interested in his meals, but happy to keep busy putting stuff together and taking it apart.

That resemblance, physical but especially psychological, has continued to amuse and amaze us. How did Ed's influence skip over our two girls only to emerge full-blown a generation later?

I trimmed seams and listened to Schubert and thought of my long-dead father, of my little grandson. No obvious resemblance there. Before fusing the interfacing to the collar I switched from chamber music to Schubert's “Travels In Winter,” sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. We will be traveling in winter down to Philadelphia, to celebrate a birthday. Poor Schubert, dead at 37, left no descendants other than his music.

But oh, “Travels In Winter,” with D F-D! Fie on those fashionable tenors. Give me a baritone like Dietrich of the three names. I turn the cape collar and iron it flat as he pours out his manly sorrows: “mein Herz, mein Herz!” He truly is my favorite singer...him and Elvis. I never asked my father what he thought of Elvis. I wish I had.

And now the cape is almost finished. Tomorrow I will attach the collar, and sew on the gold(ish) clasp. The day after we will travel in winter to Philadelphia and deliver it to Remy. When he takes it out of the box, it will be impregnated with hours of thought, reflections, memories. Sewed into it will be the music of Schubert, the voice of Dietrich, the memory of his great-grandfather, and my own desire to make him a real gift, something he can wrap himself in, and be anything he wants to be.

Music in Winter

Yesterday we had the fourth salon in our debut 08-09 winter season. It coincided with a day-long fall of wet, sticky snow. Some people canceled, but a number of hardy souls assaulted our long, steep driveway and arrived unharmed.

Tim and Lynda played recorder-flute duets from the Renaissance, Baroque and Classical periods. We drank red wine and ate Vermont cheese and listened as the snow fell and fell. The musicians stood in front of our porch's tall windows, so that from the living room they were silhouetted against a background of woods whose every twig was outlined in white. Closer to the house, finches, titmice, chickadees, nuthatches and one fabulous cardinal fluttered around the feeder. The snow fell, the music wove ribbons around our souls, and we marveled that such pleasures were so freely and easily available to us. Chamber music doesn't get any better than this.

At the end of the program we demanded an encore. Then Tim and Lynda put away their instruments and we sat and told silly stories and laughed until dark.

It's been—still is—a long winter. But the salons have helped lighten the mood. They have featured friends and neighbors who do interesting things: a breeder of prize-winning Romney sheep, a dairy farmer turned politician, a painter who makes a living from her work, and our two musicians. The next salon will coincide with the start of mud season, a time when Vermonters badly need a shot of something—energy, optimism, laughter—to get them through to spring. We'll have no problem finding an attraction. There are adventurous cheese-makers, writers, sculptors, glass-blowers and milliners within a stone's throw of our front door.

Then spring will come and every last one of us—sculptor, writer, glass-blower, hat-maker, painter and shepherd—will disappear into our vegetable garden, there to hold our own salons with the earthworms, the seedlings, and that most hallowed guest, the toad.

September 9, 2008 "Music For The Queen"

The Queen Listens

When Pau Casals was a child prodigy, he played the cello for Queen Victoria. When he was an old man, and considered by many to be the finest musical interpreter of the century, he played for Golda Meir. Now, he plays for me.

He plays the Bach Cello Suites that he rescued from oblivion and practiced for years before performing publicly. He plays the Bach Gamba Sonatas, where the long sustained notes are among the purest sounds ever heard in the universe.

When Bach was a young man he walked 25 miles to hear the great organist Buxtehude play. But with the touch of a finger—in the car, the kitchen, the shower even—I can hear the best music ever written, music that for centuries only a tiny minority of human beings had access to. I'm not Frederick the Great, but I can listen to Mozart any time I want.

Music is all around us, and we don't hesitate to hum along with it, or ignore it. Music has become universally available only recently, just as brightly-colored man-made objects have a relatively short history. For millenia people lived with only the muted colors produced by natural dyes. Now bright, eye-popping color is everywhere, and many of us have grown almost blind to it. The blindness may be a defensive gesture, as today color often assaults our senses—think of the plastic toys defacing people's backyards, or the expanses of gaudy merchandise in many stores.

We are assaulted by music as well, in elevators, from passing cars, from computers. Handel is supposed to have fainted from sheer emotion when he heard the voice of a famous castrato. What would happen to him if he walked into a typical American house and heard his own Hallelujah Chorus issuing from the kitchen radio, advertising jingles coming out of the TV, and hip hop from the kid's bedroom? He would surely faint again, as would Fra Angelico if he walked into Toys R Us.

Sometimes I feel that I might faint too, if I can't get away from all the music. There has to be silence at certain times in order to really hear at other times. It is ironic that humankind has spent so much energy and effort making music universal, and now people like me spend energy and effort trying to get away from it.

Still, on the whole, I'd rather have it this way: Casals playing Bach, Alicia de Larocha playing Mozart, and Winton Marsalis playing anything, all at my fingertips. Where music is concerned, technology has made me an absolute monarch, and I don't even have to worry about hungry peasants threatening revolt.