Tom Glenn's Blog, page 4

Opera

Ever since I was a small child, I have been addicted to opera. I had old 78 rpm records of complete performances of Hansel and Gretel, Aïda, and La Traviata, the fourth act of La Bohème, and excerpts from Carmen. While still a child, I would struggle to raise enough money to buy a standing-room ticket for Sunday afternoon performances at the San Francisco Opera and take the train across the bay from my home in Oakland every week for five or six weeks to hear whatever opera was being performed. I went on to study music at the University of California, Berkeley, where I took a bachelor’s degree in music in 1958.

My fascination with opera was part of the reason that foreign languages attracted me. I wanted to understand what the operatic characters were saying in French, Italian, and German operas. As a child, I taught myself French and Italian, had four years of Latin in high school, and took German classes (in addition to studying music) in college. Immediately after graduation, I enlisted in the army to go to the Army Language School (now called the Defense Language Institute) and ended up learning Vietnamese, a twist of fate that shaped the rest of my life.

To this day, I am magnetically attracted to the premise of opera, that singers act out a drama. Little that I have seen on stage or screen has matched the dramatic power of, say, the final duet in Carmen that ends in her murder. There is a kind of emotional magic in sung drama.

These days I’m too pressed for time to spend very many hours listening to opera recordings, watching performances, or playing through the scores at the piano. Between writing and doing presentations and readings books for review, I find little free time. But every once in a while, I sneak an hour or two to enjoy opera. It is still a genuinely great art form.

Easter

Today is Easter. The holiday made me go back and dig up a post on this blog from 2017. Here it is:

Easter Sunday was on March 30 in 1975, one month before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. In my novel Last of the Annamese, the protagonist, Chuck Griffin, goes to English-language Catholic mass that morning after working all night at the Intelligence Branch at Tan Son Nhat on the northern edge of Saigon—he is deluged by intelligence indicating that the North Vietnamese are preparing to attack Saigon. He attends the service not because he is Catholic (he’s not) but because Molly, the American nurse at the Saigon clinic, is singing in the folk group for the mass.

My description of the mass and the music accompanying it comes from my own recollections. I was the director of the folk group at the American chapel, and I, like Chuck, had been up all night reviewing evidence of a forthcoming assault on the city. The folk group hymns sung at that mass are the ones I remember: “I am the Resurrection,” “Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Your Peace,” “My peace I Leave You,” and “How Great It Is to Be Alive.” I recall my feelings of cynicism at the joy of the prayers and music of the feast of Easter, the greatest feast in the Catholic church, contrasted with the brutal reality we were all facing. I knew then that the attack on Saigon was weeks away, even though I couldn’t persuade the Ambassador that the end was coming.

That was the last mass I attended in Vietnam. After that, every ounce of energy I had went into getting my people out of the country before the attack came. I went from 10-hour days to 16-hour days to no time at all for sleep. I never saw the members of the folk group again. When I was evacuated under fire on the night of 29 April, I had amoebic dysentery and pneumonia from inadequate diet and sleep deprivation, but those illnesses weren’t diagnosed until I was back in the world (the U.S.) in May.

The meaning of Easter has never been the same for me.

Greensleeves: Dorian Mode

My recent posts on music, scales, and modes reminded me of the song “Greensleeves,” written in the Dorian mode. According to Wikipedia, “‘Greensleeves’ is a traditional English folk song. A broadside ballad by the name ‘A Newe Northen Dittye of ye Ladye Greene Sleves’ was registered by Richard Jones at the London Stationer’s Company in September 1580, and the tune is found in several late-16th-century and early-17th-century sources, such as Ballet’s MS Lute Book and Het Luitboek van Thysius, as well as various manuscripts preserved in the Seeley Historical Library in the University of Cambridge.” Myth has it that Henry VIII wrote the song as a gift for Ann Boleyn, but the piece is based on an Italian style of composition that did not reach England until after Henry’s death, making it more likely to be Elizabethan in origin.

The melody of “Greensleeves” was adapted in modern times to form a Christmas carol called “What Child is This?” So one hears the melody these days more during the Christmas season than at any other time of year.

Modern performances of the song often raise the sixth and seventh tones of the scale when the melody is going up to modernize the sound. I prefer the original with the lowered sixth and seventh. That makes the song sound remote and alien, but that’s what it is.

My Work with AIDS Patients

My post yesterday on volunteering as a way to cope with my Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) brought questions from readers about what I did to help people dying of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). I’ve told the story here before, but it’s been a while. So here it is again.

In the early 1980s, I learned that when my attention was focused on others, my hideous memories of the battlefield, my PTSI, faded. At the same time, I was reading in the newspaper about men dying of AIDS alone on the street because no one would go near them or touch them—people were terrified that they might contract the disease if they had physical contact with its victims. I told my wife I couldn’t tolerate that situation and wanted to volunteer to help those men. I warned her that AIDS was fatal and that there was some chance I would be infected—back then, we didn’t know that the disease was transmitted through body fluids—and if I came down with the disease, she would, too. She told me to go ahead.

I spent the next five years volunteering to look after AIDS patients. Over those years, I cared for seven men dying of AIDS. I did everything for them, cleaning, cooking, bathing them, grocery shopping for them, taking them to gay bars, and being their companion. Then science discovered a way to prevent AIDS from killing its victims. So I switched to working with the homeless for a couple of years, then volunteered with Gilchrist hospice for about nine years. I spent so much time working with the dying because most people refused to volunteer for that kind of work. Most people (well, Americans anyway) want to avoid anything having to do with death. I had faced and witnessed death repeatedly on the battlefield and was not afraid to work with the dying.

I grew to love every one of my AIDS patients and grieved when they died. I have never regretted my decision to work with the dying. It is something I have been able to do that others cannot or will not do.

Once again, I am content.

Sad Memories

Years ago, I wrote in this blog about my return trips to the U.S during the Vietnam war. I told about arriving at the San Francisco airport with the troops. Crowds of people spat on us, screamed at us, called us murderers and baby killers. I was already suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI), and having the American people condemn me made my suffering worse.

I spent the better part of thirteen years in Vietnam between 1962 and 1975 when Vietnam fell to the North Vietnamese and I escaped under fire after the enemy were already in the streets of Saigon. I was a civilian under cover as military and served on the battlefield providing signals intelligence support to friendly troops in combat against the North Vietnamese invaders. I spoke Vietnamese, Chinese, and French, the three languages of Vietnam, and through the intercept and exploitation of enemy radio communications, I was able to tell U.S. troops where the enemy was, what his intent was, and what units he had deployed. During those years, I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S.

PTSI is still with me and always will be. It never goes away. I have had to learn to cope with the nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, irrational rage, and depression that PTSI inflicts. Among the hardest memories to bear are those of my fellow citizens insulting me and spitting on me because I risked my life for the good of my country.

I found that the best remedy for PTSI was focusing my attention on others who needed my help. So I volunteered to be an AIDS buddy, helping fatally ill patients to die with dignity. When science found a way to prevent death from AIDS, I went on to work with the homeless for several years, then volunteered with the Gilchrist Hospice for nine years. I finally had to quit that work because I was getting too old and feeble to be able to lift the patients. Then I turned to writing to be able to vent my feelings.

I paid a hefty price for my willingness to serve my country on the battlefield. But it was worth it for the good I did and the lives I saved. And if asked to do it all over again, my answer would be an unqualified “yes.”

I am content.

Music: Unique (2)

Continuing my discussion of music’s uniqueness: the rules of harmony don’t stop with regulations about the order of triads. What if you flatten the top tone of the triad and create a diminished chord? Or sharpen that tone to create an augmented chord? What if you add in other tones to produce an added-sixth chord, a seventh chord, a ninth chord, etc.? The result is that the rules addressing the use of chords in music are numerous enough to fill heavy volumes. Books on the rules of harmony are plentiful, but my preference goes back to Walter Piston’s venerable Principles of Harmonic Analysis. (Boston: E. C. Schirmer, 1933), later revised and republished by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. as Harmony in 1941.

I am again struck by music’s uniqueness: none of the voluminous sets of rules cited above apply to anything but music, and the rules of no other discipline apply to music. And yet I am persuaded beyond doubt that my study of music (I have a BA in it from the University of California, Berkeley) and learning to think in music greatly bolstered my facility in English—I have six books and 17 short stories in print. None of that would have been possible without my knowledge of music.

Music: Unique

I have just completed my review of Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023). I’ll notify my readers when it’s published. The book dwells on music’s timelessness and its simultaneous ability to recall a time long past. The example I use to sustain the book’s premise in the review is Bach’s fugues, as vivid and alive as the moment they were written, yet able to present a sense of centuries ago.

The book prompted me to understand once again the total uniqueness of music. It proceeds by its own rules that do not apply to anything else. Nor do the imperatives of any other discipline apply to music. It can be used to express any and all human emotions, yet can be, as with Bach, emotion-free. It is created to be heard but can be written by a composer who cannot hear it, as Beethoven proved. That fact consoles me because my hearing is failing as a result of an old war wound.

Western music is based on the diatonic scale. As Wikipedia explains, “In music theory, a diatonic scale is any heptatonic scale that includes five whole steps (whole tones) and two half steps (semitones) in each octave, in which the two half steps are separated from each other by either two or three whole steps, depending on their position in the scale.” We use the major and minor scales for the majority of our music, but we also occasionally use modes, scales beginning on each of the seven tones of the C major scale. The seven modes are named: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian. The Ionian is the same as our major scale, the Aeolian is our minor scale.

Western composers, starting with Bach, have used almost exclusively the major and minor scales (the Ionian and Aeolian modes) for their compositions but have occasionally delved into the modes, as Brahms did by using the Phrygian mode in his fourth symphony. And they have created harmony, the sounding of two or more tones together. That led to the invention of the rules of harmony dealing with triads, three-tone chords fashioned by sounding tones a third apart at the same time, e.g., C, E, and G played together. The seven triads formed by going up the scale are named tonic (1st), supertonic (2nd), mediant (3rd), subdominant (4th), dominant (5th), submediant (6th), and leading note (7th). The use of these chords generated a whole new set of rules, called harmony, governing their order and arrangement. The most obvious among the rules of harmony is that the dominant almost always leads to the tonic, which is music’s resting place.

More next time.

The Indictment

Donald Trump has finally been indicted. My guess is that this is just the beginning and that many more indictments will follow. They will include charges for lying to federal investigators, stealing classified documents, and inciting mob action on January 6, 2021. Then there’s a string of offenses that regularly appear on the internet that may not be indictable: encouraging Russian interference in our elections, threatening Ukraine to dig up dirt on political enemies, cozying up to Kim Jung Un, abandoning our closest allies, defunding the Post Office, proposing $30 billion in cuts to Social Security, caging migrant children at the border, attacking freedom of the press, building a racist border wall, threatening officials to rig the 2020 election, imposing a transgender military ban, denying the severity of COVID-19, and telling 30,573 lies while president and another 503 as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.

What continues to amaze me is that there are still millions of Americans who support Donald Trump. I can only conclude that they agree with his racist views and want to transform the U.S. into a plutocracy. I am comforted that not all Republicans favor Trump, and that Democrats outnumber Republicans. I am confident that over time we will defeat Trump and maybe even incarcerate him. The country will be better off when he is permanently taken out of the running.

Dating

I have a date. Yeah, I finally got around to it. But to be perfectly honest, the woman I’m taking out to dinner is the mother of an old friend, a fellow writer whom I’ve known for many years. That doesn’t mean that I’m not looking forward to it. We’ll be going to one of my favorite restaurants named the Kings Contrivance. That’s also the name of the Columbia village in which the restaurant is located. Here’s the story of how all this came to be:

The restaurant was opened in 1962 by Kingdon Gould, Jr. in an old county home that previously belonged to the Macgill family. Gould named his restaurant “The King’s Contrivance,” which combined his nickname with the word “contrivance.” This name was inspired by the names of old Colonial-era land grants, many of which were referred to as the “contrivances” of their owners. In 1967, Gould sold the restaurant to the Rouse-related developer of Columbia, the Howard Research and Development Corporation. In 1973, Kings Contrivance was selected as the name of the Columbia new village “because of its familiarity and identification with the area of the village.”

I should explain that the city of Columbia, Maryland, consists of ten “villages,” each of which has a community association, that is an independent, incorporated, nonprofit civic association. I live in the village of Hickory Ridge.

So my date and I will, among other things, be reaching back into the history of the lovely town we both live in.

Eight Mice

Some months ago, I discovered that I had mice. When one was moseying across the kitchen floor, I was able to stamp on it and kill it. I had an exterminator in to rid me of the vermin.

No more signs of mice for a while, then they reappeared. So I called a different exterminator in. He has already been here twice and has killed eight mice—count them, eight! He located what may have been the hole near the house’s foundation through which the mice were getting into the house. He’s been here twice and will be back again next week.

My guess is that I’m much more subject to mice infestation than people living elsewhere because, for all practical purposes, I live in a forest. Columbia, Maryland, where I live, is a carefully planned community. Its areas with houses are situated among parkland regions with walkways, grass, and, especially, trees. It is an area that fosters wildlife. I regularly see all manner of animals—deer, foxes, wolves, and some animals I can’t identify. They wander leisurely around the pond to the north of my house and through the open field to the east. It is surely an ideal habitat for mice.

Looks like I finally solved the problem. I’ll find out over the coming year as the exterminator comes back to check things out.