French Music on the Night Air

I enjoyed a nice Saturday evening of French music a week or so ago. Early on that cloudy evening a friend drove Jim and me to the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception over on Capitol Hill for an Ascension eve organ concert, one dedicated to Frank Graboski’s memory. Frank, a life-long organist, died on Palm Sunday, just a few weeks ago. He had known the concert was coming up and had spoken with the organist who was planning it, Alan Dominicci. Upon hearing of Mr Graboski’s death, Mr. Dominicci altered the concert to memorialize Frank as well as celebrate the Feast of the Ascension of Christ. To do so, he selected a number of compositions from 19th and 20th century French composers, some of Frank’s favorites. 

All but one selection was written by a French musician, the exception a J. S. Bach Prelude that opened the evening. Next was a four-movement piece “L’Ascension” written by Olivier Messiaen. I hadn’t heard that piece for many years and kept worrying that it might be so dissonant as to be off-putting to my partner who chooses pop, rock, and light jazz over classical music. I hoped the long tonal decay of the Bascillica (over 4 seconds) would make the music work and I was not disappointed. Dominicci’s registration and musicianship provided a wonderful musical experience that was made even better right at the end of the final movement the composer titled “Prayer of Christ Ascending toward His Father.” I was caught up in the music’s constant upward movement as if I were one of Jesus’ disciples watching him be lifted by the clouds into heaven, and just as the movement was drawing to a close, the clouds obscuring the sun moved letting the late evening sunlight fill the transepts and choir with light—at least that is my description of what happened. My friends didn’t notice. Was I having a vision? It doesn’t matter. The space around the altar glowed as light poured through the west windows and reflected off the gold-trimmed white walls, ceiling, and floor. 

Following an intermission we heard music by Cesar Franck, Charles-Marie Widor, Gabriel Pierne, and Louis Vierne. This last, Vierne’s “Finale” from Symphonie V was one of Frank Graboski’s great favorites, a piece he had played in concert many times. It ends with great feeling and volume, a feeling of triumph, and seemed so fitting as a memorial to Frank. 

From the Cathedral we drove to The Black Crown, a favorite bar and restaurant near our home. There we ordered drinks and settled in. A trio was setting up to entertain. They got underway with an instrumental composition I didn’t know. Then the singer/percussionist sang a French standard jazz tune, followed by two more, and then a Brazilian samba sung in Portuguese. (I always recall my brother-in-law’s description of Portuguese from when he lived in Brazil. He said it was kind of like speaking Spanish with a French pronunciation through pursed lips.) I loved the pianist's playing, the stand up bass player’s creativity, and the singer’s interpretations. All three provided distinctive improvisations. I also loved the French-inspired place as the location for a fitting nightcap.

Finally we went home; I with French music swirling around in my head and warm feelings related to friends, family, and Frank Graboski. 

Denver, 2014

The Memory of Words Past

Mixed media painting after a Ute petroglyph
by Phillip Hoyle

This little story could be of interest only to writers or to students of aging. Here’s how it goes. 

So at age sixty-four I have just finished writing a novel, a book of over 50,000 words. I have been pondering the future of the manuscript and in so doing decided to ask several people to read it to see if it makes sense, holds together, bores, or entertains. While waiting for their responses, I’m trying to plan creative ways to reread it in an attempt to make sure I will not send a possible agent or publisher a work that seems unpromising. A tactic I learned from my daughter-in-law Heather is to mark all “to be” words, changing them into something active unless they present no alternative. My own idea is to check the use of all, uh, what’s the word? Uh, that kind of word I have sometimes had trouble with. This is awful. Not only do I have trouble selecting the right one of these words; I cannot even think of the name for the type of word. Am I losing my mind? That’s not beyond possibility given my age.

I recall after doing so well in freshman written composition 101 and sophomore and junior ancient Greek, I went for years without naming parts of speech or grammatical stuff even though I was writing on a regular basis. When I entered graduate school I was surprised that I didn’t have facility with that vocabulary anymore. When I heard my professors talking about word use, metaphor, participles, and the like, I realized I’d have to review things I learned in junior high. And now again, after years of writing daily, I cannot think of some simple grammatical concept I studied in Latin, Spanish, Greek, French, and English! 

Perhaps I can discover my lost word if I begin writing about words. So I have noun and verb, subject and predicate. I know objects, direct and indirect. There are past and present participles which are verbal adjectives and gerunds which are verbal nouns. Of course I know conjunctions: how could I ever forget PBS’s “Conjunction junction, what’s your function?” But I have forgotten the elusive word that started all this. What is the term for words such as over, under, above, through, and behind? What is the word sometimes connected with places, actions, characters, things, and so forth. I want it to begin with the letter c or p but don’t remember. I do recall how the selection of the correct word has sometimes seemed a challenge. I can misuse them, thus my impulse to have Heather check them in my manuscript, but I can’t ask her to since I don’t recall the word. It would be embarrassing since she teaches writing. I have to get it. Through, beyond, beside and so forth are examples, but I cannot recall the grammatical name. 

I had a problem with them in Greek; back then I believe it was because I couldn’t recall the right Greek word that in English often serves as a prefix, for example “meta.” Did it mean through or after? See, it still confuses me. I‘ll work at this and will probably go upstairs to read Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Surely that old standby will instruct me. Pronouns, personal pronouns, articles, modifier, adjective, adverb…. Still the word I’m searching for doesn’t arise from the grammatical murk of my befuddled brain, but I’ll keep at my memory quest.

The words describe the relative position of things. There it is, finally: position; preposition. I never thought of this, but the word describes its function. It’s the word at the beginning of a phrase (of course, a prepositional phrase) that tells the relative position of the expression it modifies. I was pretty sure I could recall this word, my attempt stimulating the bank of grammatical words and giving synapses time to connect. I like that. Somehow the recollection of this word seems hopeful, as in: I still know what I know; I still have a functioning brain. 

A question of an old person: Could loops in the aging sensory and memory system be analogous with (is it ‘to’ or ‘with’?) the proliferation of capillaries in the aging circulatory system? It’s a thought, but I recall I was only twenty-seven years old when I first realized I couldn’t recall such grammatical terms. That really surprised me for I had been out of undergraduate school only four years and worked among college educated middle and upper-middle class folk. In four years, I neither heard nor made in conversation even one reference to grammar! This phenomenon of forgetting terms reminds me of my current need to say the name of a muscle at least once a week or I’ll be unable to find the word when I am trying to explain something to a client. Now that list of terms I memorized in my fifties. Should I find that consoling? But lists of words I memorized in junior high or even earlier and have used for decades? Why should they disappear? Oh well, I’m just happy they are still available, even if my search for them takes me into memories and the like. Someday (soon?) I’ll start forgetting what I’m searching my mind for but hopefully will enjoy tours of my past as I follow loop after loop through my tiring brain. I hope I find my past as entertaining to me as I hope my novel will be to others.

Denver, 2012