Franckaphilia

That was the title of a faculty recital I attended on a recent evening.

César Franck

Fully, it was “Franckaphilia: The Complete Organ Works of César Franck – Part I: From Palace to Paradise,” performed by Janette Fishell, IU Jacobs School of Music Organ Department Chair. She performed in Auer Hall on the magnificent and relatively new (dedicated in 2010) Fisk organ, named the Maidee H. and Jackson A. Seward Organ. A Part II recital has been scheduled for January 2017.

Born in Liège, in what is now Belgium, César Franck (1822 – 1890) spent his adult life in Paris working as a pianist, organist, and composer. His work is typical of late Romantic musical compositions, but very enjoyable even if one isn’t predisposed to the Romantic period. This recital was composed of two sections. The first was “Trois pièces: No. 1 Fantaisie in A Major, No. 2 Cantabile, No. 3 Pièce héroïque,” followed, after a brief pause, by “Trois chorals: No. 1 in E Major, No. 2 in B Minor, No. 3 in A Minor.” Of all of repertoire, my favorite, and generally a crowd-pleaser, was the truly heroic, even bombastic, “Pièce héroïque.”

Fisk Organ in Auer Hall
IU Jacobs School of Music

I have been told that the Auer Hall organ is particularly well suited to Romantic music. I wouldn’t know. I have enjoyed a number of recitals and concerts there, including the evening previous to this concert, when a young Mexican harpist of our acquaintance played his senior recital there. It’s a wonderful, contemporary, mid-size (400-seat) concert hall—a fine facility in a very fine school of music.

Franck himself was associated with a fine organ. In 1858 he became the organist at Sainte-Clotilde, a basilica church on the Rue Las Cases in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris, and kept that position for the rest of his life. A year later the church acquired its famous Aristide Cavaillé-Coll organ, played by Franck and a number of later well-known composers. Franck subsequently became a French national and in 1872 was appointed to a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire.

Who knows whether I’ll manage to take in Part II of Franckaphilia, but if it happens I’m sure it will be equally enjoyable.

Political Theater of the Absurd

P.T. Barnum portrayed as a
"Hum-Bug": a cartoon by H. L. Stephens (1851)

Let’s be honest: Political campaigns often are as much about entertainment as serious stumping, regardless of party. At least in the beginning. At the start of the season candidate Donald Trump, now widely considered a fatal mistake for and by the Republican Party, could be compared to P.T. Barnum. Showman extraordinaire, Barnum (1810-1891) was America’s penultimate purveyor of humbug during the second half of the 19th century. “I am a showman by profession...and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me,” he said. Barnum also made a brief, unsuccessful foray into politics. He was a fitting model for Trump.

In the beginning Trump was a P.T. Barnum for our time. He might as well have adopted Barnum’s famous (though erroneously attributed) maxim: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” And the suckers flocked to him. No matter how outrageous his rhetoric, Trump’s adherents cheered.

But a gradual metamorphosis took place. Trump ceased to be funny. He became vicious. He attacked persons of color, immigrants, women, military veterans, the disabled, Muslims and Mexicans, even crying babies. He displayed a shocking disregard for the Constitution, law, and basic civility. Suddenly comparing Trump to Hitler, once regarded as political hyperbole, took on an air of prescience. The Barnum for our time shed his comedic cocoon to reveal a xenophobic, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, duplicitous proto-fascist, whose key supporters aligned themselves with the KKK and other white supremacist groups.

One often wonders, when watching Theater of the Absurd, where the line runs between reality and fantasy. It’s the theatrical equivalent of surrealism. Why are those clocks melting? Could clocks melt in real life?

We wait for Trump to say, “Just kidding! Surely you weren’t taking me serious.” But he does indeed seem to be serious. Thankfully many of the saner members of his own party have awakened to the imminent and very real danger of a Trump presidency and are turning against him. Sadly, even when the November election rings down the curtain on this absurd political theater, as it must, America will still have to deal with those in his audience who stayed to stand and cheer.

A Tale of Two Sidneys

Sidney Bechet at Jimmy Ryan's Club
in New York City, 1947 

Sidney Chambers, the troubled vicar of Grantchester in the PBS Mystery series that bears the name of this actual Cambridgeshire village, is fond of jazz music. So every now and then when Sidney is in a reflective mood, viewers are treated to a few snatches, which often happily feature the unmistakable trembling soprano sax tones of the incomparable Sidney Bechet.

I cannot recall when I discovered Bechet; it seems as though his special sound has always resided at least at the edge of memory whenever I’m not actually listening to one of his recordings.

The improbably handsome actor James Norton portrays the 30-something Anglican priest, a Cambridge graduate and former Scots Guards officer assigned to pastor Grantchester. But Sidney Chambers is hardly a simple country vicar, as the plots of these stories invariably revolve around the complex Reverend Chambers’ involvement in some crime or other. Bechet’s alternatingly poignant and playful sound complements the often fraught character of Sidney Chambers.

The series is set in the 1950s. When Sidney spins a Bechet LP on his turntable, lights up a cigarette, and leans back in his study chair with a tumbler of amber liquor, he listens to the jazz artist in his prime. New Orleans-born Sidney Bechet (1897-1959) was largely self-taught and was recognized fairly early in his career as perhaps the first notable jazz saxophonist, although he played several instruments.

Bechet played mainly clarinet professionally in New Orleans and elsewhere during the Teens and then about 1920 traveled to London, where he discovered the straight soprano sax. The instrument would be used to produce his signature sound. Critics called it “emotional,” “reckless,” and “large.” His sound featured a broad vibrato, a technique common to some New Orleans clarinetists at the time.

Bechet’s reckless, erratic behavior was career limiting. For example, he was imprisoned in London for several days in 1922, having been convicted of assaulting a woman, and was subsequently deported back to the United States. Consequently Bechet did not truly rise to fame until the 1940s. After performing at the Paris Jazz Festival, he moved permanently to France in 1950, and his popularity surged there. The next year he married Elisabeth Ziegler in Antibes.

Sadly, Sidney Bechet died of lung cancer in Garches, near Paris, on May 14, 1959, his sixty-second birthday. Fortunately his recordings live on so that we, like Grantchester’s other Sidney, Reverend Chambers, can still get lost in the trembling tones of Bechet’s sax. I recommend “Petite Fleur,” Bechet’s own composition, which he recorded In 1952: http://youtu.be/wMwckuWpxDs. You will fall in love with the sound.

Small-Screen Mysteries

Parker Stevenson(as Frank Hardy) and
Shaun Cassidy (as Joe Hardy) from
the Hardy Boy Mysteries of the 1970s.

Rewatching some of the early episodes of the PBS television series of Agatha Christie’s mysteries featuring Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, so aptly portrayed by the incomparable David Suchet, set me thinking about other small-screen adaptations that I have enjoyed seeing as thoroughly as I liked reading the original books and short stories.

Like many of my generation—and before and after—my love of mystery novels began during my preteen years in the 1950s, when I discovered the Hardy Boys. The books were “factory” novels, like the Nancy Drew books, written by a number of ghostwriters under the collective pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. Teenage detectives Frank and Joe Hardy enjoyed a run on television in the late 1970s, played by teen heartthrobs Shaun Cassidy and Parker Stevenson.

The decade of the 1970s also saw a series of television programs based on the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers, a contemporary of Agatha Christie. The tongue-in-cheek aristocratic amateur detective of the title was played by Ian Carmichael, my favorite among the Lord Peter portrayers.

And, of course, the next decade bore witness to the start of a long series of television adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, with Jeremy Brett as the eccentric detective. Brett became the quintessential Holmes, just as Suchet has become the definitive Poirot, both actors filming the majority of their respective canons. At least for their—and my—generation.

Great mysteries will always find new adaptations for new generations of enthusiasts. And then there are the mystery novels being written now that will find their way to the small screen to the delight of new audiences of mystery addicts. I could certainly suggest a few characters that I’d like to see. One would be Maisie Dobbs, the World War I nurse turned 1920s private detective, from the well-crafted series by Jacqueline Winspear.

Or what about the Roman Empire era “finder” Marcus Didius Falco, who stars in the wonderfully well-researched historical mysteries by Lindsey Davis? And then there’s Diane Mott Davidson’s caterer-cum-snoop Goldie Schulz and Greg Herren’s gay New Orleans-based New Age detective Scotty Bradley. Well, the list could go on and on. I am addicted to mysteries after all. Who are your favs?

Poetry

My interest in writing poetry began in high school and continued into college, although nothing I produced then was particularly worth reading. After college, in the 1970s, I wrote poems with greater intent and even published a few. But after that decade other interests, activities, and life in general made for about a thirty-year hiatus. I didn’t take up writing poems with any real passion again until after I retired in 2006.

Nowadays I write for my own pleasure, and I share my work with family and friends. My poems tend to be either autobiographical or responsive to nature—or both. I don’t consider myself a nature poet, but I have always responded to the passing seasons, flora and fauna, and weather phenomena. Perhaps because I also work in the visual arts, mainly as a painter, I try to create visual images with words. I have persisted in a lifelong fascination with impressionistic and expressionistic free verse, inspired by the likes of Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, and many, many other Modern poets. If there is one thread, however slender, that unites at least some of my poems now, it is reflection on aging, keenly felt in particular since my cancer diagnosis in April 2015.

Is writing poems a form of therapy? Certainly. What artistic expression is not? But writing, at least for me, is always more than that. It is the creation of art, which in itself is intensely fulfilling. I suspect it’s that way for most poets, who, when it comes down to it, seldom write poetry as their livelihood. Many, in fact, never get published or, like Emily Dickenson, are published extensively only after their death. And fame? Most find little within their lifetime, although some achieve it later. Sylvia Plath, for example, became really well known only after her death.

Thanks to the ease, convenience, and low cost of the Nook on-demand publishing platform, I’ve put together a couple of collections of poems in recent months. Published privately and never intended for sale, these volumes are gifts for family and friends. (The cover of the first one is pictured above.) Having worked in publishing and possessing an inclination for writing and design are helpful but not essential to this type of project.

In sum, the advice I’d give to anyone who is curious about writing, whether poems or some other form, is simply to do it. Ultimately, the intended beneficiary is the writer. If readers also benefit in some way, so much the better.

Note: This commentary is cross-posted on two blogs: Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com) and Living With…A Cancer Journal (http://livingwithcancerjournal.blogspot.com).