Rolling On One

Several months ago Arlene found out about an article about Adinkra stamps in a magazine published by the Surface Design Association, a group of fiber and textile artists. It turned out the the most cost-effective way for us to advertise our stamps in the magazine was for her to join the association. We went to a meeting of the local chapter yesterday at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton. I was just tagging along, having been warned that I was welcome but would have to put up with a lot of gabby women. The fact is, I went to an all male college where I had to either bicycle or hitchhike 17 miles to Bennington College if I wanted to talk to a woman. Eventhat was only spring and fall — Bennington wasn’t in session during the winter, and then it was something like a 50 mile drive to Smith, or farther to Mount Holyoke, Skidmore, or Vassar. I’ve never recovered from that; I have a high tolerance for gabby women.

The meeting started off with a tour of the basket exhibit at the museum. It was pretty impressive! The tour was given by the museum’s education director, who is a member of the group. She had an excellent idea of how to tailor her presentation to the interests and level of knowledge of the group members. Besides that, she had recently taken a workshop on ash (wood) splint basketry. There were a few “normal” baskets in the exhibit, and a lot of unconventional ones that you might not think of as baskets at first. With a little justification (”well, it’s made of fiber, and it could hold something, maybe”) you could probably accept them as baskets, or at least as basketry. One, a lamp with a shade woven from cable ties, looked like something you might be able to make in an afternoon. Others were so complex that you knew you would have to study for years before starting to duplicate them and then work most of another year on the one item.

After lunch in the museum cafeteria there was a show and tell session. Arlene showed off a discharge-printed T shirt she had done at the Nature Printing Society meeting a couple of months ago. Here’s a photo of someone else talking about her recent experiments with dyeing indigo over fiber-reactive dye colors. Also in the picture is someone else’s shibori-dyed fabric and a basket made from watercolor paper painted with acrylics and cut into strips by being run through a pasta maker.

Drat! I’m doing this on my PC, without my familiar software (Photoshop and Interarchy). I seem to have uploaded photos that didn’t get sized and rotated the way I wanted.

And here are close-ups of more indigo over fiber-reactive dye samples:

A few days ago Arlene called my attention to an email I got from the Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA) announcing an upcoming release of American Shad Fry into the Charles river. It sounded interesting and wasn’t too far from work, so I decided to go.

Shad are the biggest members of the herring family. Like other herring (and also like salmon), they live in the ocean most of their lives and swim up rivers to spawn. Anglers love them. They’re relatively big, challenging to catch, and good eating. They haven’t been breeding in the Charles since early in the industrial revolution, when the Charles was dammed for water power and there was no way for the fish to get upstream past the dams. Besides that, the Charles used to be badly polluted. The CRWA has been very active in helping enforce environmental laws and raising public awareness of the desirability of having a clean river, and by now the Charles is one of the cleanest urban rivers in the world. In recent decades fish ladders have been added to the dams, but fish ladders and clean water is not all it takes. The fish return to the river where they grew up, and if no fish have spawned in a river, no fish are going to return to it (except for a few strays, perhaps, but that’s not likely to establish a population.)

Fisheries biologists have found that it’s possible to re-establish a population of anadromous fish in a river by taking adult fish from one river, getting them to spawn in captivity, and stocking the baby fish in the river with no population of those fish. I’ve heard about that, and heard that it has worked in the Connecticut river. Here was my chance to learn about it in person.

Here’s an adult American Shad. This is a fish any fresh-water angler would be delighted to catch:

The US Fish and Wildlife Service had brought several hundred thousand shad to the Charles, but not that big. These were five days old, about the smallest fish I’ve ever seen. This bucket probably had a couple hundred of them:

In that picture, it looks like water with some pieces of lint in it, but the lint is fish! Each one is only about twice as long as a mosquito wriggler, maybe half an inch or three quarters of an inch long, transparent except for the eyes and backbone.

I got to the event in good time. There were two trucks parked close to the river, official US Fish and Wildlife Service flatbed trucks with big tanks on the back. One tank had several adult shad in it, including the one in the picture above. You could climb up on the truck to look in the tank. The F&W people were scrupulous about warning everyone, “Be careful! There’s nothing behind you to keep you from falling off!”

The other truck had a tank of the fry. It had a hose coming from the river which was bringing in river water so that the fry would be at river temperature when they were released — a sudden change of temperature wouldn’t be any good.

One of the first people to show up after me (the F&W people were there before me) was Derrick Z. Jackson, a Boston Globe columnist who writes almost as often about environmental issues as about social ones.

Two other spectators, who might have come to the river just to go fishing rather than watch the event, were this father & daughter:

Before any fish fry hit the water, the little girl had caught a sunfish. It doesn’t show in the picture, but it’s splashing there at her dad’s feet.

These folks spoke briefly.

I had been talking to the guy in the khaki before things really started; he’s from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. He was telling me about how successful the shad restocking efforts have been in many rivers, especially in the middle atlantic region. Perhaps the most interesting thing he told me was that all the fry have been marked so they can tell if fish they catch five years from now are wild fish or come from hatchery stock. How do you mark millions of fish fry that small? By adding some fluorescent dye to the water they’re in. If you want details, try this.

The woman on the right, in serious hip boots, is Mary Griffin, commissioner of the Massachusetts department of fish and wildlife. Later on she got to hold the hose that the fry were released through. The man in the middle is Bob Zimmerman, the director of the CRWA.

There were lots of people from the press, from local paper through community access TV to Boston Globe.

OK, now we’re getting ready to release the fish!

I love that smile. It really looks to me like, some days you have to spend all day worrying about a department budget and some days you have to spend all day arguing with legislators, but every so often you get to remember why you wanted to be a wildlife biologist and it’s all worth while.

And here’s Derrick getting his version of that last picture:

It seems I am three degrees of separation from a composer who is having a CD release event at a classy downtown Boston gallery next week (actually, Back Bay rather than downtown, for locals) and needed someone to play the shofar at it. That’s going to be me.

Any musical instrument gives you the option of just picking it up and making sounds or first thinking about that particular instrument, that kind of instrument, its history and cultural connotations, and then making sounds. I’m not sure, but I suspect that the sounds are much more likely to be music if you think first.

The shofar (and there’s a picture of one on one of those links) is one of the world’s oldest musical instruments. It’s the reason musical instruments called “horns” are called horns; it’s just an animal horn with the end cut off to form a mouthpiece. Shofars were used as signaling devices on the battlefields of the ancient Near East at least three or four thousand years ago, the way bugles were in the Civil War. For the last two thousand years, pretty much their only use has been as part of the observance of the Jewish New Year.

“Kavanah” is a crucial Hebrew word which is pretty much like concentration, intention, attention, and mindfulness. It’s what you want in someone who is leading a religious service — thinking about what you’re saying and meaning it, not just repeating the prayer for the five hundredth time. It’s also that better option for playing a musical instrument. It’s particularly important for shofar, which only has a few notes, fewer than a bugle, and depends on something other than what notes you play to be interesting.

To play shofar, you have to work backwards, through all the times you’ve heard the Rabbi preach things like, “The shofar calls us to repentance at this season of the new year” and “The shofar is our wake-up call to get back to the work of tikkun olam, improving the world”. You need to make that clear in the sound! A little farther back, you have to remember all of Jewish history and how the shofar has been sounding in religious services for over two thousand years, and get all the wanderings of the Jewish people in there. Going back to Talmudic and Biblical times, you remember how many references there are to the shofar in ancient texts (and lest the shofar player has forgotten, a large section of the traditional New Years service is composed of Biblical verses about shofar.) Just check out the best known mention of shofar in the Bible, Joshua 6:4-20, to get an idea. If you’ve never heard a shofar, how well can you understand those verses? Unless you’re aware of them, what makes you think your sound has any content? Then you think of how those verses got there, and all the ancient battlefields where the shofar was the signal to charge, to regroup, or to retreat if necessary. There must have been many people who would get flashbacks of battle, post-traumatic stress, whenever they heard the shofar. You can imagine a grizzled veteran at the time of King David saying, “forty years later, and whenever I hear that I still look over my shoulder to see if the Midianites are chasing me.” When you’re playing shofar, you want a sound that would do that to that guy if he were around to hear it.

There’s one more interested party to consider: the animal who grew the horn in the first place. It deserves to be treated with due respect. According to the Bible, when Abraham didn’t sacrifice Isaac, he found a ram caught by the horns in a nearby bush and sacrificed it instead. According to Jewish legend, one of the horns of that ram is the shofar that will be sounded to announce the last judgement. Well, really, all that has to do with how I play shofar is to show that there is an awareness of the animal through shofar tradition. Sometimes when there’s a lot of saliva in my shofar mouthpiece I can get a faint whiff that reminds me of old-fashioned carpenter’s hide glue. At first that was off-putting, but now I remember that it’s the animal asserting its part of the process and letting me know that the sound is a tribute to it, too.

Two weekends ago Matt and I drove out to the Red Mill to get lumber for a cover for the fire pit (he felt strongly that e should make an effort to keep the fire pit from filling up with snow.) We were on our way home, between downtown Casco and the house, when his phone rang. “Nope, we’re not going to stop to get what they’re asking for,” he remarked as he reached for it; even the general store in town was in the other direction, and any other grocery store was over five miles behind. But it wasn’t that, but a bird alert. Arlene was calling to say there was a bobwhite under the lilac bush, and that we should park at the bottom of the driveway and walk up quietly if we wanted to see it.

We spotted it when we were halfway up the driveway. I circled around to the back door and got my binoculars to get a good look, and m camera. The bird was amazingly cooperative. Matt hung around the front and took lots and lots of pictures. I took over 50 pictures myself, of which I like these the best:

It’s not what you would call a colorful bird, but look at how beautiful the colors are. I especially like those chestnut and white feathers under the wings.

Bobwhites aren’t believed to breed in Maine. We’ve been told that this is probably an escaped bird, possibly from a game farm. We would love for its chicks, grandchicks, and great-grandchicks to grow up on our land, but it’s not likely.

So what else I’m doing these days (and you thought you’d never see anything new on this blog) is studying torah trope.

A couple of weeks ago I uncovered a book The Art of Torah Cantillation that I had picked up oh, maybe eight years ago, when the Temple Emanuel choir made a quick trip to a choir festival in the Catskills. Probably it was having relearned the tunes of the wedding blessings a month ago that made me decide to get to work on it, but I read the CD into iTunes and started to practice.

In a Jewish Saturday morning synagogue service there’s a reading from the Torah (5 books of Moses) and a reading from the prophets, the way many Christian services will have a lesson from the Old Testament and a lesson from the New Testament; except that firstly, the Jewish readings are much longer, and secondly, the Jewish readings are chanted rather than just read. If you’ve ever gone to a Bar Mitzvah service you’ve probably heard the Bar Mitzvah boy (or Bat Mitzvah girl) chant the reading from the prophets.

The chanting is done to a traditional tune, which has an ancient notation written right along the text as little dots and squiggles (in printed Hebrew texts of the Bible — not in the handwritten Torah scroll). The tunes for the Torah are different from those for the prophets (and there are other tunes for other books read in the synagogue, Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations). They function as punctuation and almost an audible diagram of the sentence. That helps a lot in listening, because the Hebrew text itself doesn’t have punctuation except for a mark at the end of each verse. Also, there’s a special tune for the end of each reader’s section — very convenient in the unlikely event that you’ve dozed off or otherwise spaced out during it (or maybe you’re pondering the import of a previous verse), because when you hear it you can wake up in time to be part of the congregation’s response. Maybe a particular mark means “this word starts on the note ‘fa’, and at the syllable with the mark, jump to ‘la’ and stay there to the end of the word.” That kind of thing — short motifs, mostly three notes or so but sometimes a lot longer, that are the building blocks for the whole tune.

At one time I was pretty good with the trope for the prophets, but I never learned the Torah trope, much less the tunes for the other books.

If you want to see what trope looks and sounds like, check LearnTrope.com I don’t like the voice on that site nearly so well as the recordings that came with my book, and the text in the book has a lot about the whole structure and philosophy of cantillation, so I’m going to stick with the book and iTunes. What that web site does have is pictures of hand signals for the trope, which the book only mentions.

I can show you my garden arbor, looking almost the way it will when it’s finished. It needs more pieces cut and many pieces to be put on, and some finish on the seats (I think I’ll use a clear oil on them, because the paint I used for the rest of it will get chalky and could rub off on dark clothing). All the parts that aren’t there yet are in planes perpendicular to the picture, so they would be barely visible even if they were there; so this is what it looks like! And this is where it’s going to stay, as a sort of gateway into the woods. Hey! I’m pleased with it!

On our way home from Portland this morning we heard Hyphenated Blues by the Okratones on WUNH, the campus station from Durham, New Hampshire. It’s about last names. Just listen.

I started doing Hebrew calligraphy while I was working at Parke Math Labs in 1978, give or take a year. A born-again woman who worked in the same building said “I just found my name in the Bible, as a heading over a verse in a psalm.” I explained that her name, Beth, was the name of a Hebrew letter, and that psalm had one verse starting with each letter of the alphabet in order. The name of each letter was shown in her Bible as a heading over the verse. She asked me to write the Hebrew letters next to their names. I was embarrassed to find that I didn’t remember how to write them all, so I reviewed the alphabet (or in Hebrew we say alef-bet, for the first two letters, like saying ABC) and really practiced writing for a while.

In preparing to write a ketubah for Charley and Patsy I was going through a file folder from way back when, and was pleasantly surprised to find a xerox of the nicest piece of calligraphy (or at least most imaginative) I ever did:

You don’t need to know any Hebrew to see what’s going on here. The original was a bat mitzvah present for Arlene’s second cousin once removed Julie, who’s six years older than Charley, so I must have done it over 30 years ago (which would tally with saying I was into this stuff around 1978.)

Besides being a big party, a bar or bat mitzvah has some real ritual to it, mainly that the kid in question chants a part of the lesson from the Torah and/or lesson for the Prophets for that day in synagogue. Julie’s reading was, of course you guessed, the story of Noah, and all the text there is from it. Along the ridgepole it says, “These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man of his generation.” The gunwale and sternpost of the ark are the verse with the dimensions of the ark. Along the top of the cloud, and descending from it, is “And the floodgates of the heavens were opened, and there was rain on the earth 40 days and 40 nights,” and because those weren’t enough words to show how hard it was raining I threw in “rain, rain, rain, rain, rain” in cursive script.  The story wouldn’t be complete without the rainbow and its text “I have set my bow in the clouds as a sign of the covenant between me and the Earth.”

I went to a concert last night, part of the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, in a renovated carriage house on one of the old sea captain estates along the main road into the town. If the festival hasn’t changed its home page since I set up that link, the picture on the festival web site home page shows another concert in the same space.

Early last week a Facebook friend, who has been a knitblog friend for years before Facebook, posted “concert this Friday in my carriage house.” Since I drive past Newburyport on the way to Maine most every Friday, it sounded as though I might be able to get there.

There was no trouble finding the address. I had to take a kind of deep breath and walk down the path alongside the immense house towards where the carriage house would be, and then guess where the entrance was. I saw some people standing by the door, a tall woman (matches the description of my blog friend) talking to two men. When she turned in my direction there was no question, and I said, “Hi Julia!” She said “Dean!” and gave me a big hug, then introduced me to the two men, “This is an old blog friend that I’ve never met.” One of the men was the architect for the building renovation, the other, the artistic director of the music festival.

The festival web site listed the concert at 6:30, including a reception; so I was only a little worried about being late because of traffic. It took just under two hours from Newton to Newburyport, just about 50 miles and interstate highway all the way, because of rush hour traffic on the route 128 part. I got there at five to seven, and there was plenty of reception left. My supper was cheese and crackers, a slice of quiche, and raw vegetables (I can’t find the e-acute to write crudites properly).

I actually spoke to a few people besides Julia. I asked the architect if the white sail things suspended from the ceiling were for acoustics, lighting, or just to break up the space. He said, “you’ve got all three of the reasons they’re there,” and expanded on them. I love it when I can ask something that’s not a dumb question!

The musicians were three young women, the Trio Cavatina, playing piano, cello, and violin, joined for one piece by the artistic director of the festival playing the viola. Not just any viola; the piece he played on was by Brahms, and the viola had belonged to a friend of Brahms, who likely had played that piece on that viola when the piece was newly composed.

I have mixed feelings about wonderful, special musical instruments. Yes, they are wonderful and special. Playing on an instrument with a history can give the musician a feeling of channeling the other people who have played it and a feeling of participating with the instrument’s maker in producing art. That can undoubtedly add to the quality of the performance. But in the final analysis, it’s what the musician puts into the performance that matters. Two months ago I heard a piece by Yusef Lateef, “Love and Humor”, on the radio; it sounded as though one of the main instruments was a squeaking balloon, but it was fascinating music. I have to say, though, that the instruments the Cavatinas were playing sounded beautiful, and so did the viola. I particularly like a good cello sound, and that’s what we had. I’m sure that Priscilla Lee would sound better on my mom’s cello than I would on Ms. Lee’s cello, and I’m not sure that I could tell the difference between Ms. Lee playing those two instruments. Probably she could tell the difference, and that would make a difference in her performance, and I’d be able to hear that. So I’ll give up and say yes, it’s good for good musicians to have wonderful, special instruments.

What I like best about a classical music trio is that I can hear all three parts separately at once. When I’ve played or sung in musical groups with a really good director I’ve been amazed at how the director can hear all the parts at once, not just as a mass of music but as separate parts. You can tell that when the director says, “trombones, you didn’t come in on time,” or “altos, let’s go over your part, I think some of you aren’t sure of the notes.” I still don’t know how an orchestra conductor can keep track of fifteen or twenty different parts. Three is about the most I can do if I concentrate, which I was doing at this concert. I was doing fairly well with the Beethoven piece, though there were lots of times when the violin was near the bottom of its range and the cello was near the top of its and I couldn’t be positive which was which. When the viola joined, I was lost. Four lines is more than I can keep track of.

By the intermission I was ready for a bio break. Was there a restroom in the building? I knew who would be able to tell me — I asked the architect.

I was starting on this story last night –

When I was in graduate school I got the notion that I’d like to learn to play “Turkey in the Straw” on the fiddle. Being a starving graduate student, I couldn’t afford to buy a fiddle. Maybe I could make one? While I was thinking about that, I happened to be in the Brookline public library with my roommate (who was from Brookline), and found a book about making violins. As I skimmed it, I saw the caution, “There is no such thing as ‘that’s close enough’ in making a violin! It has to be perfect.” I knew I wasn’t that good a woodworker, and put the book back on the shelf. But right next to it was a book about Appalachian dulcimers. It had a chapter about making dulcimers that said, “Sure! You can build yourself a dulcimer!” So I set about doing that.

I think I made five or six dulcimers while I was on that kick. Besides Jean Ritchie’s The Dulcimer Book I got a Folk-Legacy  record (vinyl — this was 15 years before CDs were invented) The Mountain Dulcimer – How to make and play it (after a fashion) by Howie Mitchell (I’m amazed that both of those seem still to be available, and that I remembered the names.) Two of those dulcimers looked like the picture on the cover of Ritchie’s book. I sold one in a consignment store in Harvard Square. The other of those, along with a double (courting) dulcimer that’s built as a duet instrument, to be played by two people sitting very close together on opposite sides of the instrument, and a mini dulcimer, sort of along the lines of a backpacking guitar, have been hanging up on our living room wall in Newton for decades. Two others are more primitive, made out of hollow-core doors as Mitchell’s book suggests.

I think the instrument I like the best of the ones I’ve made is a balalaika. The neck is made from a piece of wood that was originally bent to be part of the seat of a chair. Either my grad school roommate or I once leaned too far back in the chair and broke it — but the bend of that piece of wood looked perfect for the neck of an instrument. The front is wood from an orange crate. The top of a tin can keeps the strings from cutting into the wood. The frets were once paper clips. Overall, it looks like something a Russian peasant made out of wood left over after his barn burned down. It looks like a proper folk instrument.

While I was still in graduate school I used to demonstrate dulcimer, balalaika, guitar, and banjo in elementary schools and do a workshop on making a one-stringed instrument with a piece of wood, plastic milk jug, cotter pin (for the tuning peg – a really really big cotter pin, maybe 3/16 inch diameter) and length of piano wire. You could actually play a tune on those things, with a little work.

After a long long hiatus, I started making a cigar-box guitar a few years ago. It’s not finished yet. Besides being designed with a normal set of guitar strings, it has a music box built into the soundboard so that even people who can’t play the guitar will be able to play “Happy Birthday to You” on it by cranking the music box.