There are giants in your life. And there are GIANTS in your life.

Norita was the giant who towered with loving influence and musical joy over all others while always elevating everyone around her to her level.

As my decade-plus piano teacher, she instilled in me the essential importance of learning technique and mastering both basic scales and fundamental theory; the artful balance of metronomic rhythm and emotional phrasing essential for playing even the simplest of Bach Preludes; a healthy respect for the rigid mechanics I needed to master before I could enjoy the brilliant ornamentation of Mozart; and a lifelong love/hate relationship with the ungainly accidentals layered over the impossible key signatures behind what was undoubtedly her—and subsequently my—lifelong love of the shimmery musical evocations of Debussy.

Her introductory description of Debussy and the Impressionists—that their work wasn’t as constrained by meter as it was driven by emotion—gave me a helpful (albeit transparently clumsy) crutch when she assigned me their pieces: Their works were among the hardest to master and therefore the most frustrating to learn and the easiest to avoid practicing, so I’d often show up for my lessons COMPLETELY unpracticed and try to use the I’m-not-unprepared-I’m-really-just-deeply-caught-up-in-the-emotion-of-these-chords-that-I’m-playing-so-slowly school of rationales as I secretly struggled to wrap my hands around their unfamiliar tangles of notes in front of her. I’m sure she totally saw through my strategy, but she patiently let me struggle there at her piano, no doubt secure in the knowledge that I was still playing the music at least once a week ... even if it was on her time.

First Lutheran Church—where she influenced literal generations of singers as the universally beloved director of children’s choirs from kindergarten through high school—once bought out a production of Forever Plaid that I was doing at Theatre Cedar Rapids 20+ years ago. There’s a moment in the show where I sit at the piano to play a very complicated arrangement of “Heart and Soul” while the other Plaids search the audience to bring me an unwitting duet partner, and on the FLC night they completely randomly selected Norita to bring on stage for our impromptu duet. When I looked up from my playing to find her sitting next to me, both of our hearts soared; I was so proud to show her what her years of lessons had taught me to do, and she was thrilled at the opportunity for us to perform together. And the audience—all FLC members who knew us well and who knew that she’d been my teacher since early grade school—roared with approval over sharing our moment together. I’ve accompanied the FLC choirs she’s directed, I’ve played duets with her at recitals and I’ve been behind the piano at many concerts she’s attended, but that brief, unexpected moment next to her at the keyboard in front of 500 people we both knew and loved remains one of my two favorite memories as a pianist. (The other is conquering the mighty Wilhousky “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—with her considerable help and guidance—and being able to accompany my mighty high-school choir as they sang it at my graduation.)

Norita had been in the ICU this week after complications from heart surgery. My sister had been to see her, but I wasn’t able to get to the hospital until this morning. I brought my sister with me, but the door to her room was shut when we got there as her family met with her doctors. We moved to the waiting room and eventually learned that they were saying their goodbyes, and Norita died soon afterward. While I’m sorry I wasn’t able to see her to maybe hold her hand and say my own goodbyes, my heart continues to soar over the loving memories of her that people are sharing all over social media. She was the patient, loving church mother to thousands of kids who spent their entire childhoods singing in her choirs. She was the consummate musician who tirelessly shared her love of choral and piano music with performers and audiences alike. And she was always a supportive friend to generations of students and choir members she always called “my kids,” even as we reached our 50s and 60s.

Among her many legacies are the careful phrasing and fingering notes she copied from her well-worn piano scores into her students’ new books before she started teaching us new pieces. She had beautiful handwriting, and I—along with countless other pianists—have stacks of music books filled with her thoughtful, helpful notations. And since I can’t find a good photo of the two of us, I’m instead posting this image of Edvard Grieg’s “Papillon”—an Everest of late Romanticism that I regretfully never *fully* conquered—covered in her bright red markings. Just finding and photographing my sheet music filled me with joyful memories of her excitement over introducing it to me, my delight over slowly unlocking its beautiful secrets, and her growing pride over my milestone accomplishments as I became more deft at its mechanics and more expressive with its emotions.

It’s always sad to say goodbye to a beloved friend and mentor, but it’s extremely comforting to know that Norita is being loved and celebrated so happily and so genuinely as word spreads of her passing. Her “kids” will always love and remember her every time we sing in a choir or sit at a piano. And she’s no doubt already spreading her joys of music to hosts of heavenly choirs.

We’ll miss you, Norita. But you’ll always be with us.

Debussy extensions sold separately

The Sea is Frozen!

So I came home from work feeling a little bit bipolar-depressed-y and went right to bed ... only to be awakened three hours later by the realization that tomorrow is garbage day and I had to get the damn Bitch Kitty box all scooped and cleaned and shit. Well, technically SHE did the shitting the moment I was done scooping (natch) but my cheap joke here is still funny. Once the garbage was out though, I was sitting and chatting with my folks when 91.7 started playing Debussy’s La Mer (which is French for The Sea Except Without Enough Syllables Or Even Damn Letters To Let You Say It In A Charming I’ve-Been-To-Paris-Once French Accent) just as the skies started making all kinds of diluvian bluster in anticipation of an impending downpour, but Debussy’s churning ocean (which has TWO SYLLABLES and is therefore FAR EASIER to say with a charming accent of any kind and ARE YOU LISTENING, CLAUDE?) and Iowa’s churning skies never synched up so untold volumes of referential and metaphorical poetry were lost to the ages. Anyway, my head’s a lot clearer now as I climb back into bed and leave you with this totally random, totally awesome, totally mesmerizing MIDI of “Let it Go” from Frozen:

Happy 127th birthday, Grant Wood!

EMERGENCY EDIT: My bad. His birthday is actually on the 13th. I've apparently had it on my calendar wrong for years. But my hearty birthday wishes still stand.

Grant Wood, best known for his iconic American Gothic, lived and worked most of his life in and around my home town: Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His legacy in the area—in addition to an exhaustive collection of his work in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art permanent collection—includes an annual art festival, a grade school (my alma mater!) and even the entire region’s public education agency—all in his name.

Of course, no Cedar Rapids student’s education is complete without thorough coverage of Wood’s stylized, iconoclastic, humorous and sometimes political oeuvre. And this Cedar Rapids student came away with a lifelong love of his work.

Grant Wood was a pioneer in a loosely coordinated artistic movement called Regionalism, which eschewed modernist, abstract trends like Impressionism and Cubism in favor of stylistic, romanticized views of everyday rural life in the 1930s. The Regionalists were less concerned with the trendy politics of 1930s Social Realists than with renouncing the hegemony of popular European art and culture and celebrating the honest work ethic and modest demeanor of the Midwest.

In 1928, Wood received a commission to create a giant stained-glass window for the American Legion in Cedar Rapids. In preparation, he traveled to Munich to study ancient stained-glass techniques under Germany’s famed master craftsmen. The window he created, featuring a 16-foot Lady of Peace standing over six life-size soldiers representing the Revolutionary War through World War I, was a masterpiece of technique, form and color. Though as far as Google and every search term I can think of are concerned, it never had a name. But you can see it in all its nameless glory right here:

Fun fact: The model for the Lady of Peace figure was his sister, Nan Wood Graham, who was also the model for the female figure in American Gothic.

Despite the window's unmistakable American themes, it drew fire from misguided patriots who criticized Wood for studying with the Germans—the enemy!—so soon after the first World War. One of the most vocal groups was the local chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wood’s elegant response: Daughters of Revolution, a satirical painting showing three dour spinstresses standing self-righteously—one, pinky extended in haughty indignation, holding a teacup in my grandmother’s china pattern—in front of Emmanuel Leutz’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware:

Wood’s point, lost completely on the knee-jerk reactionaries the painting so elegantly mocked, lies in the fact that Washington Crossing the Delaware—that beloved icon of American patriotism—was painted by a German.

I loved this painting before I even knew its story. The delightfully smug women drew me in because their spiritual progeny hung just a few branches over on my family tree. The Blue Willow teacup fascinated me because its cousins served as my grandmother’s everyday dishes. (Have you ever eaten green Jell-O from a blue plate? It looks very-not-deliciously brown.) And that shape—that relentless horizontalness—made the painting such a challenge to display in any setting.

My framed print of Daughters of Revolution—along with one of my grandmother's teacups that I've always displayed with it—are currently not challenging me to do anything but pay for their storage in a giant and impeccably tidy storage facility at the edge of town. But they are quite literally among my favorite possessions and they will see the light of day again as soon as I finish painting my bedroom. Correction: As soon as I find them in my vast storage room first. In the mean time, I am proudly and dutifully as a Cedar Rapidian sharing the works here so you can enjoy their oft-overlooked brilliance and awesomeness.

ArtThrob: The Burghers of Calais

(Original French title: Les Bourgeois de Calais)

1889

Auguste Rodin

Impressionism (1872-1892)

The relatively short-lived period of Impressionism in art was as defined by what it wasn't -- clear lines, plausible composition, realistic depictions of figures and the space they occupied -- as by what it was: impressions of visual perception told through explorations of changing light and color and even through the rough-hewn textures created in paint using varying brush strokes. A radical departure from the longstanding -- though always evolving -- rigors of academic Realism, the fresh ideas of Impressionism on canvas quickly inspired similar reinterpretations of artistic norms in music, literature and sculpture.

Enter François-Auguste-René Rodin.

Classically trained and well-established in creating representational art, Rodin saw Impressionism's dreamy figure studies and craggy, dimensional textures as a vocabulary he could use to render bold ideas, subjective emotions, and plays of shape and light in sculpture. His raw, turbulent works brought new, profound depth to the revolutionary cacophonies that had so far been constricted to the flat canvases of Impressionistic paintings, and his most riveting use of this complex, muscular multi-dimensional language is in his mighty Burghers of Calais. The sculpture depicts six men walking to their martyrdom to liberate the French town of Calais during the Hundred Years' War. The men are overcome with terror and anguish and resignation and peace all at once, and Rodin sculpted the figures with such a masterful mix of romantic realism and primitive rawness that you can see and understand their every emotion from your every angle. The piece is enormous in size and exaggerated in scale and arguably unfinished in its rendering, all of which invite you to approach it with your own perspectives, examine it with your own curiosities and appreciate it with your own conclusions.

French law decrees that no more than twelve original casts may be made of any work by Rodin, which means The Burghers of Calais tells its weighty story in museums and university campuses all over Europe and the United States, including a single figure from the piece who stands resolutely at the entrance to the University of Iowa's Boyd Law Building.

I make a point to see my reproduction of the work every summer on my annual pilgrimage to visit friends in Washington, D.C. It stands with other Rodin masterpieces in a relatively austere corner of the sunken sculpture garden behind the Smithsonian's relentlessly round Hirshhorn Museum. I usually stop there on my way to the airport at the end of each visit. I walk around the sculpture a few times to take note of specific details Rodin included -- like articulated toes to help propel the walking figures through space -- and specific details he didn't include -- like eyeballs to help the figures see where they're going. Then I sit in my same spot on a little concrete ledge to take in the piece in its weighty enormousness, to contemplate the explosive change Rodin and the Impressionists brought to the way we see and understand and interpret art, and to take comfort in the fact that my Burghers will most likely stand caught in their time and this place, waiting for me year after year every time I come to visit them for as long as I live.

ArtThrob: Paris Street; Rainy Day

(Original French title: Rue de Paris, temps de pluie)

1877
Gustave Caillebotte
Impressionism (1872-1892)
Art Institute of Chicago

While technically created in the heart of the Impressionist period -- which trafficked in explorations of light and color and brushstroke techniques at the expense of clear representation and plausible perspective -- Paris Street; Rainy Day reigns in Impressionism's visual indulgences with cleaner lines, realistic human figures, and vanishing-point perspective that extends almost mathematically from the rectangular cobblestones in the foreground to the ambitiously double confluences of angles at the distant ends of the forked street. To enhance the effect, Gustave Caillebotte paints the figures in gradient levels of focus, creating a photorealistic contrast between the three figures enjoying relative visual clarity in the middle distance, the three (well, two and a half) figures who are too close to stay in complete focus at the front of the painting, and the increasingly-less-defined human shapes receding into the misty distance.

While providing a convenient context for allowing distant figures to fade to gray -- along with filling the setting with shimmers of Impressionistic light and reflection -- the misty weather in the painting also allows for the curvy shapes of umbrellas and hunched people to provide visual counterpoint to the geometries of the streets and buildings ... plus it gives the figures a range of purposeful movement, whether they're casually dodging raindrops or hurrying to get somewhere dry. The overall effect is a graceful collaboration of shape, energy, atmosphere, physical presence and measured social observation.

Paris Street; Rainy Day greets visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago at the top of the Grand Staircase as they enter the permanent-collection Impressionism galleries. Its rainy ambiance may seem dour, but the choreography of human figures and the multi-directional spatial composition are an apt invitation to explore the museum, intermingle with the other patrons and contemplate even the things that aren't immediately in focus.

Flashback Sunday: Exhibition Edition

A year ago tonight I was sitting with thousands of my closest friends on the vast lawn of the Brucemore mansion historical site listening to the final summer outdoor concert of the mighty Orchestra Iowa. The concert is cleverly called Brucemorchestra, and it's an epic, pull-out-the-stops evening of glorious music and literally glowing civic pride.

Last year's concert finished with Modest Mussorgsky's mighty "Pictures at an Exhibition," which wavers over the years on and off top 10 favorite orchestral works. It was originally written just for piano in 1874 as a musical narrative of -- you guessed it -- pictures at an art exhibition. The work comprises a series of short pieces that musically describe the separate works of art in the exhibition, and they're all connected by endless variations on a theme called "Promenade" ... which is basically just music to accompany you as you walk from picture to picture.

There are probably 40 orchestral arrangements of this piano work that have been scored in the century-plus time since it was written. Impressionist Maurice Ravel's gloriously brass-heavy version written in 1922 is arguably the most popular, and not only is it my favorite but it was the version Orchestra Iowa played a year ago on the Brucemore lawn.

And if that weren't enough to make me geek out like a giddy schoolboy at orchestra prom, the director told us all to light up our phones and wave them rock-concert-style during the epic (and earth-shakingly brass-heavy) last mini-movement celebrating the dramatic picture of the Great Gate of Kiev. Which as you might guess put me on ridiculous-joy overload as the brass thundered through us to rattle our bones and the gleeful audience alternated between waving our phones and taking pictures of the glorious spectacle and I pretty much experienced the Rapture. (And you know what? Kirk Cameron wasn't there. And neither was Donald Trump.)

And now it's safe to say "Pictures at an Exhibition" is solidly back in my top 10 favorite orchestral works. And I probably need to charge my phone again.

Happy 176th birthday, Antonín Dvořák!

And happy one-year anniversary of my freedom from Cymbalta -- according to the essay below that just popped up on Facebook. I'm sometimes glad Facebook reminds me of these memories to show me what I've survived and how far I've come ... and how I couldn't have done it without my family, my friends and even my little joys like gorgeously thematic symphonies.

It is 9:30 pm on what would have been Czech composer Antonín Dvořák's 175th birthday, and as my dad and I drove around tonight on our Thursday evening errands we listened to Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 -- also called "From the New World" due to its early American musical themes and the fact that he wrote it in the United States -- almost in its entirety.

It's the last symphony he composed -- and inarguably his most famous -- and in my opinion its brilliance lies in its endless accessibility. Its dominant six-note theme, often sung to the words of the folk song "Goin' Home," is never far from the surface no matter how many variations or complex contrapuntal themes he weaves it through.

As a composer, he was rooted firmly among the late Romantics with their heroic storylines and their soaring emotions and their confident nods to the nascent but growing fascination with the shimmering textures of the Impressionists and the gorgeous discordances of what would soon be revered around the world as American jazz. And this symphony sits right at the confluence of all that history, all that emotion, all that foresight and all that promise. And all with a mere six-note theme.

I'm trying not to make everything I write an endless litany of poor-little-bipolar-boy horror stories about deep depressive dives or unfairly short manic episodes or the spirit-killing side effects of my constantly evolving med cocktails. Honest. But I took my final Cymbalta 72 hours ago and my withdrawal side effects -- which I've been hoping would have waned to nothing by now -- spiked to soul-crushing levels of rapid-fire misery this afternoon and they seem to have gotten even worse in the last few hours. I'm dizzy and floaty and tingly and chompy and bouncy and unsteady and sometimes even actually confused. And I don't even have enough understanding of what's happening to me to know when the waves will hit or how strong they'll be or even when it's safe to stand up and assume I'll remain vertical.

But tonight, driving around with my dad, listening to music that has soothed and exhilarated and inspired and sustained me for 40+ years, knowing enough about it that I could come home and organize my thoughts and write about it all for anyone who cares to read my parades of paragraph-long sentences ... it all gave me a calming sense of purpose. Of much-needed focus. Of obligation to myself and to my family and friends to keep going and to trust that I'll come out at the end whole and balanced and maybe profoundly exhausted but thoroughly tested and ultimately triumphant.

Just like those six little notes.

My summers with Rodin

Washington, D.C., is so overflowing with American history that there's a monument to something or someone on practically every corner. The Smithsonian museums are so overflowing with history and culture and gift shops and art that some of it literally spills outside into the sunshine. And part of my annual summer pilgrimage to visit some D.C. friends and road-trip to their Rehoboth beach house is my visit to the sunken sculpture garden behind the relentlessly round Hirshhorn Museum, which houses what most people probably see as the oddest examples of Modern art. 

The sculpture garden sits more than a story below street level so it masks all the ambient street noise, but it positively hums with beauty and magic and some of the most delightful -- and delightfully odd -- art that waits there resolutely to nourish any soul. If you're in D.C. and want to visit my little sanctuary, enter from the Mall side and go immediately to your left -- the corner there is populated with the rough-hewn glories of August Rodin, including what is perhaps my favorite sculpture of all time: his mighty Burghers of Calais, which depicts six men walking to their martyrdom to save their city during the Hundred Years' War. The men are overcome with terror and anguish and resignation and peace all at once, and Rodin has sculpted their figures so masterfully that you see and understand their every emotion from your every angle. The piece is enormous in size and exaggerated in scale and almost primitive in its rendering, all of which invite you to approach it with your own perspectives, examine it with your own curiosities and appreciate it with your own conclusions. It's everyone's sculpture -- casts of it stand in museums and university campuses all over Europe and the United States, including a single figure from the piece who stands at the entrance of the University of Iowa's Boyd Law Building -- and it's my sculpture to admire and fear and share and visit summer after summer, year after year.