Matching Tracksuits

It was the last day of school before Christmas break, and students were waiting for their buses to arrive when one girl mentioned how sad it was that they would never see each other again. “The world is going to end Friday!” she explained. Nothing can get fourteen-year-olds excited than superstition, and before long, the room was abuzz with talk about what Friday would hold for us. This particular young lady — I’ll call her Susan — was convinced that all the hype about the Mayan calendar was anything but hype.

“I’m serious!” she insisted. “We won’t be coming back to school.” Everyone discussed it a while, and all remained unchanged. After a few minutes, when the conversation had apparently died down, a skeptic, upset that the end of the world was once again the primary topic of conversation, got upset: “Man, don’t talk about it. You’ll jinx things!”

The day is almost over, and I guess we all feel fine.

A little over two years ago, K and I invested in a digital piano with our tax return windfall. The Girl was taking an increasing interest in music, and guitar is not an ideal instrument for youthful, musical experimentation and discovery: you really have to coordinate both hands at once to get anything vaguely meaningful unless you’re in an open tuning with a slide. Having taken piano lessons for several years in my youth, I was also eager to rediscover the piano.

Since then, I’ve combed my old piano books for familiar and new. One of the pieces I’ve fallen in love with and begun working on is Mozart’s “Fantasia No. 3 in D minor”, K. 397. Naturally, I turned to YouTube and found three radically different interpretations.

You can tell a lot just by looking at the times of the video: Jorg Demus’s version clocks in at 4:12; Gould’s lasts an excruciating 8:22; Arrau’s, a reasonable 6:07. Just from looking at the times, you see that Demus is playing twice as fast as Gould, who in turn is taking a tempo thirty percent slower than what seems reasonable.

Jorg Demus plays it like he’s taken a whole bottle of speed. At this speed, the second part of the piece, which transposes into D major, sounds almost like a tape played at double-speed. This portion is marked allegretto, which Demus seems to think is synonymous with presto. It’s most painful at the 3:30 mark. In fact, as I listen, it sounds like it must be artificially accelerated.

Gould, on the other hand, plays it like he’s taken a bottle of valium. Slow, plodding, almost childishly mocking, with typical Gould liberties: erratic tempo, unnecessarily arpeggiated chords.

And of course, there’s that ever-annoying Gould humming in the background. I can put up with it on his second recording of Goldberg Variations, but perhaps that’s only out of habit.

Only Arrau plays it as it seems it should be played. The tempi aren’t exaggerated — allegretto sounds like Allegretto — and there’s enough of a lyrical touch to infuse an artist’s ever-important “interpretation” (often “mutilation”) without compromising the period and making it sound like a Romantic wannabe. Arrau has such a perfect touch that I’d have been partial to his interpretation from the start.

Yes, this is a filler post…

It’s a yearly tradition for us, going back to our first full summer her in 2006: the Bluff Mountain Festival in Hot Springs, North Carolina. A few hundred people get together to listen to old-time music, bluegrass, and a bit of country (not the same types of music at all: the latter two are derivatives of old-time music) under the shade of oaks and magnolias.

There are ballad singers who are keeping alive music that has roots in the original settlers’ English, Welsh, and Scottish culture.

There are bluegrass bands with well over a century of playing experience among the members.

What I’ve always loved about Bluff is the combination of old and young: the sense of continuity and community is encouraging in these extremely divided times.

That sense of ageless community is nowhere more apparent than the clogging floor set up in front of the stage. In years past, there were two groups that clogged: the Green Grass Cloggers (who celebrated their 40th anniversary this year) and the younger crew, the Cold Mountain Cloggers.

This year, the members of the Cold Mountain troupe were unable to perform as a group, spread about the area at various other events, but when the Green Grass Cloggers were finishing up, they invited the dancers present to come out and join them, making for an interesting combination of Western and tie-dyed shirts.

Yet the Green Grass Cloggers only danced periodically. The majority of the time, audience members took to the plywood dance floor.

Watching the men and women in their sixties and seventies come up to relive their youth made me realize how deep the music runs in mountain culture of old. Everyone learns a bit of clogging; everyone learns to play (or play at) some kind of instrument; everyone sings along with the majority of the performers.

At the other end of the spectrum are the children from the audience who see the dancing, hear the itching rhythm of the instruments, and want to move. They get on the floor and jump, shake, twirl, hop, run, skip, tumble, and anything else that comes to mind.

“That’s some mighty fine dancin’ goin’ on down there,” a performer might encourage.

Mighty fine indeed.