05 Sunday Oct 2014
Sometimes the road takes a turn.
I have wanted to update you on what needs to be a short fermata in my blog posts. New readers have joined from Uruguay, Kenya and Iraq bringing my stories to over 90 countries. I know you enjoy these posts and gratified beyond belief.
Don’t worry, there are many more stories on the way this Autumn.
But if you remember, Jan and I returned to the Berkshires this summer for a family wedding.
18 Wednesday Jun 2014
Tags
Asia Barong in Great Barrington, Bali, Berkshires, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Indonesian Gamelan, John Cage, Lake Buel, Longhua Temple, Ludwig van Beethoven, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Route 7 in Massachusetts, Wat Chalong
Longhua Temple in Shanghai.
“The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”
I like surprises. The opening motto for this post is from Henry David Thoreau’s The Pond in Winter. Sorry, but none of us are as hip as we think we are. I keep urging people to get over themselves and not be indifferent to traditions. Beethoven and Emerson were big fans of the Bhagavad Gita long before the 60s and the Beat Generation.
I’ve spent a lot of time going in and out of Asia since 2002. Multiple trips to Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Laos, China and Taiwan, twelve if I’m bothering to count. I’m sure to be back as soon as possible to experience India, Indonesia, Bali, Singapore and Penang, Kuala Lumpur.
Jan and I’ve been hooked by the food and philosophy, the complicated history (I love a good story and just trying to sort out the Soong Sisters is a historical page turner), the music and the landscape, the medical ideas and body use disciplines of yoga and Thai massage, the poetry and the I-ching and Tao Te Ching, but most of all the people, which now means old friends.
People aren’t their governments and Planet Earth is full of wonderful humans. Language barriers? Here’s a tip – smiles don’t need translations or apps.
14 Saturday Jun 2014
Posted in Composers, Contemporary Music, Food, John Cage, Southwest Chamber Music, Travel, Uncategorized, Vietnam
Tags
Ascending Dragon, Barry Lyndon, Berkshires, Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nejaimes Liquor Store, New England, New Marlborough, Oliver Knussen, Song Hong Ensemble, Stanley Kubrick, The Last of the Mohicans, The Old Inn on the Green, Vu Nhat Tan
Twilight fog in New England at The Old Inn on the Green in New Marlborough.
There is an unescapable magic in the New England countryside of the Berkshire Hills in Western Massachusetts. The legendary fall foliage, the evanescent green of spring, the fireflies of summer, the winter white snow fall.
And this post is a story for my many curious and interested readers in over 80 countries around the globe. America is a complicated country, with huge frustrations, a complicated historical legacy concocted from British, French and Spanish colonial interests, and often maddening contradictions. There’s nothing like a good meal and a good book to help you start to understand a people and their country.
Do yourself a favor and make a reservation at The Old Inn on the Green.
11 Wednesday Jun 2014
Tags
Berkshires, Betty Freeman, Eikando Temple, Henry David Thoreau, John Cage, Kyoto, Lake Buel, MItsuyo Matsumoto, Quartets by John Cage, Red Fox Music Camp, Seiji Ozawa, Tanglewood
A path in the Berkshire woods near Lake Buel.
I awoke yesterday morning to the sound of soft rainfall on the leaves and trees. The birds were an amazingly diverse choir, tweeting and humming and cooing and singing me out of sleep into emerging daylight.
The Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts are a locus for my life. They provide a genuine home for American musicians at Tanglewood in Lenox, where in 1979 I met my wife Jan. Her mother was born in Pittsfield in 1928 and her grandparents are buried there. Her aunt and uncle still live in New Marlborough, her old Cousin Andrew is a farmer in Sandisfield and young Cousin Rebecca is getting married on Saturday in Great Barrington.
But as I heard the rain fall softly I remembered, with birds and rainfall my soundscape as I awoke, music by John Cage inspired by the old colonial composers and Henry David Thoreau.
31 Saturday May 2014
Tags
American Music, Berkshires, Boston Symphony, Brooklyn Bridge, Charles Ives, Charles Wuorinen, Elliott Carter, Gloria Cheng, Hollywood Boulevard, John De Keyser, Leonard Bernstein, New York City, Tanglewood, When Pigs Fly Farm
The Housatonic at Stockbridge.
Maybe I was fated to fall in love in the Berkshires…
Let me flashback to a hot summer afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard in 1968. The bookstores, record shops, head joints, Indian restaurants, foot traffic and motorcycle gangs of Hell’s Angels were prodigious. I’d been inspired hearing The Fourth of July on a CBS Young Persons concert with Leonard Bernstein. Who was this American composer, Charles Ives? Our “Emerson, Twain and Thoreau all rolled into one” as Bernstein had described him.
John Kirkpatrick had recorded the Concord Sonata and I had gobbled it up like a piece of pumpkin pie when I saw the record at an old Hollywood Boulevard legend, Phil Harris Records. No bar lines? No meter? Fists on the piano? Forget the Mahler revival underway, my passion revolved around this American composer from Danbury, Connecticut. Next door to Phil Harris Records was a legendary music shop, our Doblinger’s or Patelson’s, owned by John de Keyser. Oversized scores of Boulez’s Pli selon pli and Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion were in the window display enticing me to enter.
I looked in awe at an item on the shelf. There was the great white whale of American music, The Concord Sonata by Charles Ives.
Sound Travels with Jeff von der Schmidt 