Dry Ice Factory

When the composer Henryk Górecki died 15 years ago, I wrote a post largely about how I'd discovered his music. Excerpts:

Sometime in the mid 1980s, DGK, explorer of new and unusual music, showed me an obscure LP he'd picked up out of random curiosity. Packaged as the soundtrack album to a French film called Police, it consisted in fact of a full recording of a modern Polish symphony for soprano and orchestra. Neither on the record album nor anywhere else that he looked was there much information to be had on the work or its composer, one Henryk Górecki. DGK was astonished and spellbound by the audacity and craft of this music, and, unlike with many of his passions, when he played it for me I was too. ... For years, this marvelous piece of music remained our secret shared passion that hardly anybody else had heard of, like The Lord of the Rings in its early days. When I began to collect CDs a few years later, I found a German import with this work on it, and bought it quickly. Imagine our astonishment, then, when in 1992 a new recording of it on Nonesuch, a well-known American classical label - conducted by David Zinman - became a monster hit and the toast of the classical world, the first contemporary work to reach the top of the classical charts. The musical equivalent of the Lord of the Rings paperbacks had hit the stands. Suddenly our obscure passion was the talk of the town.

The resemblance with being an early Tolkien fan hit me forcibly, though I wasn't old enough to remember that personally. Of course, we didn't think we were literally the only people who knew this piece, but nobody we knew did and no critics we read mentioned it, so it remained our secret gem. And then, all of a sudden in 1992, as with Tolkien in 1965 its fame exploded and everybody, at least in the field, knew it and was talking about it all the time.

Now DGK has sent me a scholarly (but readable) article on the history of the Third's reputation before the Zinman recording. It didn't have the wide renown of subsequent years, but no, it wasn't that obscure. It was played and commented on. True, some people hated it (and still do!) but it was generally praised and considered remarkable. I guess we just never came across those. Though in fact DGK tells me that he'd gone looking for the record after reading a review in Fanfare, the review magazine for fans of the truly esoteric in classical record collecting. I hadn't known of that alert, but it proves the point: there was awareness and praise of the work.

But the article makes the situation remind me even more forcibly of Tolkien. For, of course, there were lots of reviews of The Lord of the Rings when it first came out in 1954-55, and articles about it later; it just wasn't the widespread popular phenomenon it became after 1965. And, as with Górecki's Third, though there's an assumption that it was generally panned when new, that turns out not to be true. There's an article in the upcoming Tolkien Studies 21 - which is in press right now - called "Reconsidering the Early Critical Response to The Lord of the Rings" by Matthew Thompson-Handell, which reveals that the general early critical response to the book was quite favorable, even among some of the reviews which have gained a reputation as pans. The guy who wrote, "This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once"? That's taken totally out of context and does not express what he meant. Read Thompson-Handell's article and you'll see.

Today I did get up to the City early on. But as I didn't need to be there until 12.30 instead of 10.00, it was easier.

The topic was SF Music Day, an annual event I'd never heard of before. The promoters take over the Veterans Building for an afternoon, presenting 6 events (each slightly less than an hour) in each of three concert spaces in the building. Times are coordinated, so attendees can hop from one room to another, but I didn't. Most of the items in Herbst Theatre, the main space, were jazz-oriented, so I planted myself for the entire afternoon in the cavernous and echoing room on the second floor where the classical performers were. The acoustics were fine for the music, but it was difficult to make out any spoken words from anybody.

The highlights came at the end. Pianist Elizabeth Schumann thundered her way through Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and loaded it with enough tone color that an orchestration seemed superfluous. Then she surprised everybody by choosing for an encore Gershwin's "Embraceable You," but encores have a long tradition of clashing strongly with the main work. Then Schumann came back with four of her colleagues from Ensemble San Francisco for an energetic and catchy run through Dvořák's Op. 81 Piano Quintet.

The day had begun with the Benicia Chamber Players, who regularly perform on both sides of the Carquinez Strait, in two movements from Schubert's "Rosamunde" Quartet, the work I missed yesterday, and a squeaky squawky work by Gabriella Smith. Then some of the young chamber musicians who are the subjects for master classes at Kohl Mansion played movements from string quartets and piano quartets by the Viennese classicists.

In between these and the closing numbers, we got a couple more varied groups. The Turas Ensemble is two barefoot sopranos who sing ethereal versions of I know not what, because I couldn't make out any of their spoken explanations of what they were doing, or their lyrics either. Some songs unaccompanied, some with dulcimer or hurdy-gurdy or whatnot. And the Berkeley Choros Ensemble play instrumental popular music from Brazil, rather pleasant to listen to and moving enough to encourage one older couple to get up and dance, or at least sway together, to the music.

Getting out of a concert in the City at 5.45 on a Sunday - not Friday or Saturday when places would be crowded - would ordinarily be a perfect time to seek out a restaurant for dinner. But today I felt no urge to do that, and went straight home instead, where I'm partaking what I ought.

Been away for a couple of days. Not on my favorite form of vacation. Now back. Very thirsty, mostly.

Today the first rains of the season arrived. It poured heavily and wetly for about four hours, which is longer than the heavy downpours usually last around here. Nevertheless I ventured out into it, and I was far from the only one, to the local history museum for an evening talk about Eichlers.

No veteran residents in Silicon Valley need to be told what that means. An Eichler is a home built by the developer Joseph Eichler, who in the 1950s-70s was one of the many builders busy turning the local orchards into tract housing developments. Eichlers came in various models, but they all had a strong family resemblance, and until the imitations ("Like-lers") came along, looked like nothing else for sale in the middle-class housing market.

For one thing, they were built in post-and-beam construction, with no load-bearing walls. That meant those walls could be light or intermittent or even made of glass. The resultant opening up to the outside (many Eichlers came with courtyards or atria) and the Prairie School-like expansiveness of the beam-driven construction is what made Eichlers feel like "Frank Lloyd Wright for the masses," more effectively than Wright's own Usonian houses.

Eichlers are easily recognizable from the outside by their beam ends, grooved wood on the facades, and low-slung roof rises. To this day there are whole blocks in this area with nothing but Eichlers.

The speaker was a real estate agent who specializes in Eichlers. He talked a lot about maintaining sale value and on remodeling to update Eichlers (original construction was a bit shoddy) while keeping the mid-20C spirit of the original. Most of the audience were Eichler owners concerned about whether their neighbors were going to build second stories. I grew up in an Eichler but haven't lived in one for many years; I may have been the only person there whose primary interest was in architecture as an art form. Nevertheless when I asked a question along those lines, the speaker proved to be well-informed.

I learned something of the history of Eichlers, both the firm and the style of houses; and where exactly they are. I learned that the realtor keeps maps of Eichler developments, such as this one of my town; my family's Eichler was in Fairbrae Addition, the big red blotch in the middle of the map. Here, this is a typical Eichler.

Well, maybe not that accursed. This is the fourth time I've given this paper - it was premiered less than 15 months ago - and only the second time something went wrong.

The first time was the other time. I was ill and isolating at the conference and couldn't read the paper. So the papers coordinator did it for me.

This time was for a regular meeting of a Zoom group online. In the middle of reading it from the Word copy on my screen, my computer froze. I had to apologize and take a break. In the end, I had to hard-reboot the computer (i.e. press the power button) and it took almost 20 minutes to get everything up and running again, counting all the kerfluffle I'd spent trying to avoid having to do that. How embarrassing.

The other two times went very well indeed. So yes, maybe not that accursed.