Pardon me! It's just my fartlek.

I like running.  I'm not very good at it.  A more precise description of what I do might be called "shuffling."  But I still enjoy it.  There's something about lacing up those hot pink running shoes and heading outdoors into the crisp morning that brings joy to my soul.  It's also an excellent time to compose new music.  While my feet pound on the pavement rhythms and melodic fragments organize themselves in my mind to come out on paper later.

I recently discovered fartleks.  Fartlek is a Swedish word that means "speed play."  It involves alternating face paced intervals with slower recovery intervals.  I've been running some fartleks lately.  I give it my all for one hundred paces, then huff and puff pathetically in the slower interval that follows.  This is especially true if that slower interval happens to come when I am chugging up a hill.  Then I resemble the Little Engine That Couldn't more than a champion marathoner.  Many times I've encountered another runner on such a climb, during the resting phase of my fartlek, and as they dash past with grace and élan I want to shout, "I can go much faster!  I'm on a fartlek!"  In my mind I plead with them to not think I'm lazy due to my slow pace.

This has caused me to ponder the fartleks in our lives.  We all have times of success, prosperity, of moving towards a goal.  Then there are those periods of seeming stagnation and hopelessness.  The British composer Edward Elgar is a good example of this.  Born into a working class home in 1857, he worked diligently to overcome the class prejudices of Victorian England.  His modest success in the 1890's was crowned with a true masterpiece in 1899 with Variations on an Original Theme, more commonly called The Enigma Variations.  The Nimrod variation alone is so beautiful it defies description.  Numerous other outstanding compositions followed in the years to come, including one of the most well-known pieces in the United States, Pomp and Circumstance No. 1.  If you've attended any graduation, ever, you've heard it!

By 1912 Elgar was lauded and praised all over the world.  He was enjoying a fast fartlek interval.  But then World War I began, and Elgar became depressed and discouraged by the conflict.  He saw and understood that the British Empire, of which he was fiercely proud,  was on the wane.  He also recognized the dying gasps of the European Romantic music tradition, and knew he didn't belong to the new modernism that was rising.  Deeply troubled, he wrote no significant works for many years.  No doubt there were critics who judged him to be "finished."  Yet Elgar defied them all.  In 1919, with a burst of speed in a brilliant creative fartlek, he composed the Cello Concerto in e minor, and the cello canon has never been the same.  It is magnificent.  If he had composed nothing else, that concerto alone would have guaranteed his fame.

So let us look kindly on others who appear to be slow, unsuccessful, lost, or bewildered.  Let us help and encourage those who are on a "resting phase" and need to recharge.  Let us never confuse the recovery period of a fartlek with stupidity, laziness, or failure.  Do not judge.  The most glorious creation you can ever imagine may be just around the corner.

Sir Edward Elgar

Life is a Beach.

"Life is too short to even care at all," sang the band Young the Giant this morning as we listened to my daughter's iPod on our morning commute.  They repeated it over, and over, and over again, concluding with a line about the merits of cough syrup.  I finally asked my daughter, "What is this song about?"  "I'm not sure," she replied, "Maybe suicide?"

I'm not sure, either, but if I really believed the philosophy they seem to be peddling, I'd want to commit suicide, too.  Planet Earth can be a rather depressing place.  Interspersed with the laments of Young the Giant I heard an NPR update on the sinking of the Korean ferry, 285 bodies recovered to date, most of them teenagers.  I also heard news about the Turkish mine disaster, the last of the 301 victims was buried on Sunday.  Flooding in the Balkans, Putin posturing, political attack ads.  What good does it do to "care at all" in the face of such overwhelming tragedies?  I might have some hope of making a difference if I were a doctor, a nurse, a journalist, or even a sincere politician (an endangered species), but I'm a musician, a composer, the most useless of all professions at solving world crises.

Mrs. H. H. A. Beach was also a composer at a time of turmoil and uncertainty.  Born Amy Marcy Cheney in 1867, she grew up in Boston and became the first accomplished and critically acclaimed female composer in the United States.  Upon her marriage to the prestigious Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach her career as a concert pianist was severely curtailed as it was not considered appropriate for a lady to be in the public eye.  However her husband did encourage her to compose and she had great success with chamber music, large scale symphonic works, choral and vocal music.  When her husband died in 1910 she resumed her concert career by touring Europe.  That came to an end with the onset of World War I.  As she watched the tragedy of a brutal conflict unfold, she too may have wondered, "What good is my music in the face of such devastation?  Why should I care at all?"  And yet, she did.  She continued to compose beautiful pieces that uplift and inspire.  Listen to this beautiful Berceuse for Cello and Piano or the Theme and Variations for Flute and Strings.   She didn't limit her contribution to composing.  She became a teacher, mentor, and champion for other composers, particularly women, who needed encouragement and support to further their careers.  She was active in important educational organizations that helped young musicians struggling to make their way in difficult times.  At a time when it would have been easy to say "I am one person.  I can do nothing," Amy Beach did everything she could.

I'm going to resist the seductive call of Young the Giant.  I think life is too short to not care.  What can I do?  I know a teenage girl who is rebelling against her parents.  She's a pianist.  I'm a pianist.  She likes Chopin, Debussy, and Bach.  So do I.  We've played some duets together and she's asked me to show her some of my own music.  I'm just a composer, but perhaps a composer is the right person to reach this lost child.  I can't save the children on the Korean ferry.  Maybe I can save one girl from making decisions she will later regret.

How about you?  Will you care?

It's a better choice than cough syrup.

Amy Cheney Beach

Young the Giant

Oh Noah, you goah, all the way back to the protozoa!

I heard through the grapevine there's a recent Hollywood epic with a vaguely Biblical story and a really big boat.  I haven't seen it as I prefer my movies to have either subtitles and a fantastic score by a composer with an unpronounceable name, or Mr. Spock.  This movie fails on both accounts, so I will save my meager funds and attend the opera instead.  Despite my appalling lack of interest, I have become quite aware of all the hoopla and controversy swirling around the movie.  Christians on the right screaming, "Aronofsky's an atheist!  It makes a mockery of the Bible!"  Christians on the left screaming, "Who cares there's no rock monsters in the Bible? At least mainstream Hollywood made a Biblical epic!  That hasn't happened since Cecil B. deMille!"  Critics down the middle throwing out the usual platitudes, "Compelling, gut-wrenching, visually stunning," blah blah blah.  And of course, they all miss the point.

Just get on the boat.

Isn't that what the story of Noah is all about?  Whether you believe it to be literal or allegorical, or even downright fiction, you need to get on the boat.

I read an excellent interview with Darren Aronofsky.  He mentioned a fear he had as a child, "What if I was not one of the good ones to get on the boat?"  But this is the beauty of the tale, everyone had a chance to get on the boat.  Every living soul got to choose for themselves if they wanted to be one of the "good ones."  And it took a long time to build the ark.  How long?  Who knows?  Bible scholars claim anywhere from 40 years to 120 years.  Even at the short end of 40 years that's plenty of time for someone to ponder, "Hmm, look at Noah, working hard.  I wonder if I need to get on that boat?"

There are lots of boats in our lives, major and minor, and they all require a leap of faith to get on board.  Going to college, moving to a new city, trying a new hobby, choosing different friends, different faith, different family, they all demand some degree of courage, a willingness to say, "I wonder what it would be like to catch that boat?"

The painter Édouard Manet was expected to enter law, like his father.  What if he had never learned to paint?  The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff struggled with depression.  If he hadn't tried hypnosis, which helped him a great deal, we wouldn't have the magnificent Piano Concerto No. 2.  And where would we be if Anjezë Gonhxe Bojaxhiu didn't have the courage to leave her home in what was then Yugoslavia, never to see her family again?  The world would be a poorer place, indeed, without Mother Teresa.

How long are you and I, and each one of us, going to stand around and watch someone else build a magnificent boat, or a magnificent home, or a magnificent life?  We don't need to be bystanders.  We can be participants in the great adventure of life.  Believe that you belong on the boat, you are one of the "good ones."  Take a big breath and

jump.

The Grand Canal of Venice
by Manet

Noah