Life On a Lake 

Dedicated to the Joys of Waterside Living

255

Who will believe  a proven liar? (WMD.) I wouldn't.

I could not watch President Bush's State of the Union Address last night, for fear that it would further diminish my lingering love of country.

Okay, okay. I admit to watching news summaries of it later on TV. Much had already been strategically leaked days before, so there were few surprises.

And what benefits did I get from the summaries? Not many, but they did break me of the laxative habit. At least temporarily.

254

One New Year's Eve about ten years ago I went to a party. I drank quietly by myself for a few minutes and then noticed an attractive woman sitting nearby, whom I recognized as the wife of the recently deceased conductor of the Seattle symphony, Rainier Meidel.  Her name was Cornelia.

We began chatting and I told her about the important role music played in my life. She nodded, happily responsive. She smiled and I assumed she was pleased to be recognized and identified. I decided to press on.

"In fact, I have music playing most of the time while I work," I added..

Her face hardened immediately and I knew I had said the wrong thing. She had one of those plastic faces that quickly expresses one's beliefs beyond any doubt.

"When you listen to music," she said, "you must always pay close attention. Do not do something else. Listening to the music is what is important. Only the music."

I knew that she was right, in her own way, and that I was wrong. But she was a professional musician and played the cello in her husband's orchestra, the finest one around for hundreds of miles, and I was just a listener who was seeking to entertain himself.

She had a strong German accent and a personality to go with it. I could imagine how she was as an instructor. You would learn to play, and play well, or else. The "or else" meant she would no longer bother trying to teach you. You would be dismissed.

So for a moment, a brief one, I tried to imagine my life without music as an accompaniment to my work and play. I could not.

Sorry, Cornelia, but I must continue in my blithe, errant manner. Music as background and, sometimes, as with the Shostakovich, it will arrest me and turn me in an important new direction. But not usually, not often.

Yet I still think it must be neat to be able to play the cello and I may someday consult the Yellow Pages for someone in this distant neighborhood who could teach me how at a price that is not exorbitant. 

At the same time, while I am listen to my beloved Dimitri and one of his cello concerti, I am pretty sure that I will never get around to doing it.

That is the nature of dreams.

I hate to think of a life without music. Music is a constant daily presence in my household. In itself music is provides a calm, steadying influence in good and in difficult  times. Without it our lives would be much poorer.

My rage the past year has been Dimitri Shostakovich, a Russian composer of the early and mid-Twentieth Century. It came about this way:

One night shortly before bedtime, a piece of music began on our TV dish that was startling and astonishing. The readout on the screen said that it was Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. I didn't know it was his long, famous Leningrad, dedicated to the long World War II battle with Nazi Germany in which the famous city (variously called Petersburg and Stalingrad) sacked the city and saw it burned nearly to the ground.

It would have to be a pretty good piece of music to be commensurate with such a catastrophic event. It was. I listened late into the night. Often it turned quiet (like Tchaikovsky does) and I could barely hear it; other times it became nearly deafeningly loud. And when it was loud, it was awesome. A day or two later I ordered a CD of the music.

I play it often. But since then I have listened to and accumulated much more of Shostakovich; his fifteen symphonies, his many string quartets, his violin and cello concerti. They are uniformly high in quality and bear repeated listening. But then everybody but me has long known this. I am slow in coming to some important things in life.

What a joy the discovery of fresh new music is, even if it is more than fifty years old!

Trumpeter swans on snow and ice

253

So much depends
On the white swans
In the buff fields
Stiff with stubble.

(With apologies to WCW)