Friday, October 9, 2009

La Dolce Vita

The weather has always affected my mood. And if you live in the Washington D.C. area, you know that the weather this week has been nothing short of glorious - bright blue skies, not a trace of humidity, a cool breeze, highs in the low seventies. It's the same weather we had earlier this year on our trip to Paris and a few weeks ago when we were in New York. Gorgeous. The kind of weather that makes you happy you're on the right side of the dirt. So it should be no surprise that I have been in an inordinately happy state lately. It's not just the weather. Other factors come into play. I've been re-listening to Robert Greenberg's astounding Teaching Company course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music during my daily commute to work and having just finished his two lectures on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony I decided to listen to it straight through during my morning workout. It's been ages since I've done that but I had to. Professor Greenberg plays it in pieces during his lectures, stopping to explain what exactly Beethoven is doing here, what he's doing there, etc. Which is great because you come to appreciate and understand the music more than you ever could on your own. But if you know Beethoven's Fifth you know there is a driving, pulsating push forward, especially in the first, third, and fourth movements. You're always anticipating what's coming next. So when Greenberg cuts the music off during his lectures I'm left yelling like an idiot at the tape player in my car "No, don't stop it there!" So on Wednesday morning I listened to it in it's entirety while on the elliptical machine at the gym, Greenberg's lessons fresh in my mind. And what are those lessons? How the symphony is a battle between the C minor and C major keys, how the four beat short-short-short-long C Minor "fate come knocking at your door" motif in the first movement signals a dark and desperate future, one so ominous that its dominance is almost certainly inevitable; how the second theme of the first movement comes back in C major during the recapitulation, signaling its entrance; how C minor re-establishes its furious power in the third movement with a variation of the fate motif; how C major mocks and debilitates C minor during the trio section, rendering it helpless; how the C minor chord comes back weak and impotent in plucked, pizzicato pieces at the end of the third movement, a shadow of its former self; how it is so weak it cannot even complete its cadence material at the end of the movement; how the closed C minor cadence which our ears are ready for never comes; how instead a deceptive cadence leads us straight into the glorious, heroic, triumphant, C major first theme of the fourth movement; how the C minor fate motif reappears, pizzicato again, during the final section of the fourth movement development section, only to be crushed, once and forever, by the C major first theme of the recapitulation; C major, the key of triumph, triumphs. Good wins over evil. Happiness over despair. It may be the most greatest piece of music ever written. Combine the rush from this astounding music along with the endorphin rush I always get from my workout (I do 25-30 minutes on the elliptical machine with very low tension but as fast as I can, going somewhere between 3.7 and 4.4 miles, ending up each day soaked with sweat and high as a kite), add in the lovely weather, and what you get is a happy guy. The rhythms of Beethoven's Fifth kept pulsating through me for the rest of the day and during my lunchtime walk, which is usually about two miles but which I stretched to three due to the weather, I felt myself getting giddy. Passersby probably wondered what the goofy smile on my face was for.

On to Thursday. I've recently hooked up my ION turntable to my new PC and started converting some old LPs into MP3 format - a lot of music I love but was reluctant to pay for in CD or MP3 format because I already owned it on an LP. Last week I transferred some of these old, beloved songs over to my computer and loaded them onto my IPod. Having listened to nothing but classical music* lately, I was ready for something different so I decided to listen to some of the newly added songs during my workout. I listened to, in order:

Brown Eyed Girl - Van Morrison
I Think We're Alone Now - Tommy James & The Shondells
Hurt So Bad - Little Anthony & The Imperials
Chapel of Love - The Dixie Cups
I Wonder Why - Dion & The Belmonts
Tonight's The Night - The Shirelles
In The Still of The Night - The Five Satins
Maybe - The Chantels
Since I Don't Have You - The Skyliners
Up On The Roof - The Drifters
Crimson and Clover - Tommy James & The Shondells

How's that for a playlist? I love each and every one of these songs and it had been awhile since I'd listened to some of them. So listening to them during my workout had the same effect on me Thursday as Beethoven did for me on Wednesday. I left the gym exhilarated and looking forward to the day. I took another long lunchtime walk, this time with a stop at Borders Books to pick up a George Pelecanos novel to read next week. Which leads me to another reason I've been so happy this week. Today starts a period of ten days off work for me. I've got more music to transfer, movies and baseball to watch, books to read, new recipes to try out. I want to pack as much into these next ten days as possible. Including blogging. I hope to catch up on my Mad Men posts (the season keeps getting better and better), and let you know what I think of the current state of affairs on politics.

Oh, one more note. Yesterday I met Catherine Dent from the great television show The Shield. She played officer Danny Sofer during the shows entire run. Now, I don't know if I've mentioned how much I loved The Shield show during its run but love it I did. My wife and I never missed an episode and for years my buddy Mike and I had our weekly The Sopranos/The Shield telephone conversation discussing that week's episodes. And we were in agreement that The Shield was better than The Sopranos. Week in and week out it never failed to deliver. It was one of the best TV shows ever.

So how did I meet Ms. Dent? During my lunchtime walk I was standing at the corner of 18th and M St. waiting for the light to change when I heard a couple standing next to me asking someone else directions to a restaurant in the vicinity. When the person didn't know the woman turned to me. As soon as I saw her face I said to myself, "I know this woman." But from where. While she was asking me directions to the restaurant my brain was spinning a mile a minute, trying to place her. And then it hit me. Instead of answering her question I said, "Weren't you on The Shield?" And she smiled and said yes, she was. And I started gushing about how great a show it was. She was clearly pleased she'd been recognized and I told her how much I loved The Shield, that it was one of the best shows on ever on TV. She introduced herself and asked me my name, which surprised me, and we shook hands. She was (is) an absolute sweetheart. There was no pretense about her at all. She just seemed like a very nice person. Unfortunately, I didn't know where the restaurant was so I couldn't help them out. We said goodbye, she thanked me, I thanked her, both of us with a smile on our face. A nice moment.

A nice week. And now I'm about to start a nice ten days. See you soon.

*"Classical" music is a misnomer, according to Greenberg. We should call it "Concert" music. Classical music should refer to a period of Concert music, roughly that period from the death of Bach in 1750 to premiere of Beethoven's Third Symphony in 1805, when everything changed forever after. The Classical Era of 1750-1805 was the era dominated by Haydn and Mozart, when the symphonic form took affect, when the piano replaced the harpsichord as the main keyboard instrument, when homophonic music - one main melody, all else supportive of the main melody - replaced the polyphony of Bach and the Baroque era of in which multiple melodies competed and complemented each other. Classical music was the music of the Enlightenment, when reason and restraint dominated and overly emotional displays were considered a lapse in taste. Music during the era was considered a decorative art. Beethoven, probably the most disruptive force in all of music history, would change all that.

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