Our Towns

Musical Journey

I heard only the last few seconds of the recording as I started the car and turned on the radio. It was vaguely familiar, but the Wisconsin Public Radio filled in the details. It was the chaconne movement from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin, No. 2 (a chaconne is a series of inventions created over a repeated harmonic framework; a partita in Bach’s time was simply another word for suite). This chaconne is a legendary part of the violin repertory, but this version was played on the piano and only with the left hand.

Curious,, I found it in an online music library to listen to the entire 16-minute piece. It’s a devastatingly emotional performance. And it was all the more powerful when you consider its long journey from the original idea 300 years ago to my ears on that November morning.

Circa 1720: J.S. Bach finishes this section of the partita, one of six pieces in his Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin.

1877: Johannes Brahms “discovers” Bach’s chaconne (it was published 1802) and writes to Clara Schumann that it is, “…one of the most wonderful and most incomprehensible pieces of music. Using the technique adapted to a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings….There is only one way in which I can secure undiluted joy from the piece, though on a small and only approximate scale, and that is when I play it with the left hand alone…. The same difficulty, the nature of the technique, the rendering of the arpeggios, everything conspires to make me feel like a violinist!” Brahms later publishes the piece as Chaconne aus der Partita Nr. 2 d-moll: Bearbeitung für Klavier, linke Hand.

**Leon Fleisher.** *Photo by Stephanie Kuykendal.*

1944: Leon Fleisher makes his Carnegie Hall debut at the age of 16. The conductor Pierre Monteux declares him “the pianistic find of the century.”

1964: Fleisher mysteriously loses the control of his right arm. The condition is later diagnosed as focal dystonia.

1967: He continues his career playing only pieces written for the left hand, including the Brahms arrangement of the Bach Chaconne. He also commissions several contemporary composers to write pieces for the left hand.

1991: Fleisher records a recital album of songs played only with the left hand. Brahms’s arrangement of the Bach chaconne is among them.

2024: An unknown listener goes to the Wisconsin Public Radio “Classics by Request” website page and asks Ruthanne Bessman to play Fleisher’s recording of the Bach chaconne.

November 23, 2024, 12:09 p.m.: The piece reaches my eardrums, 303 years after it was originally written, 147 years after Brahms arranged it for piano, and 33 years after it was recorded. And now, you can listen to it, as well. Here is the recording.

Our Town

I probably won’t get to New York to see Our Town on Broadway before it closes in January. I’m sad about that, but I have seen several great productions in my life time. Enough, at least, for me to consider Thorton Wilder’s masterpiece "The Great American Play.”

I know. Putting Wilder above the likes of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams is sacrilege in some quarters. But even the greatest productions of these very great playwrights’ work don’t move me like Our Town does. And while I will not see this version (directed by Kenny Leon), Jesse Green’s review of the production reminded me of that plays’s “titanic” power.

Green also exemplified the particular power of great arts writing. I found myself tearing up while reliving the moments of the play, in large part because of the depth and vividness of his writing. It is a play, after all, that blends the homespun and the metaphysical: the story of a young couple who, as Green writes, “fall in love completely unaware that they do so under the shadow of the granitic pillars of time.” Green writes:

“In its portrait of ‘the life of a village against the life of the stars,’ as Wilder described it, the monumental is always expressed in the miniature, and the miniature is always crushed by the monument. That effect is achieved by writing that is ingeniously mitered, doweled and sanded until it seems as plain as old furniture.”

Describing the overwhelming third act in which (spoiler alert!) the deceased Emily returns to relive a single day of her life, he continues:

“What would happen if one of the dead, ignoring the advice of her cohort, sought to return for one day to life? The answer is that she could not endure it. And neither could we.
I would tell you more about what was happening onstage but by that point I could no longer see it. Perhaps if you have lost a loved one, or feared losing yourself, you will feel the same way.
In other words, you will feel the same way.”

Insightful, profound, beautiful.

Willa Cather’s Town

As winter descends and the icy wind begins to howl, it’s perhaps a good time to revisit Midwestern winters of harder times, before thermostats and Thinsulate. The opening paragraph of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! offers, perhaps, some solace.

ONE January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain "elevator" at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office. The board sidewalks were gray with trampled snow, but at two o'clock in the afternoon the shopkeepers, having come back from dinner, were keeping well behind their frosty windows. The children were all in school, and there was nobody abroad in the streets but a few rough-looking countrymen in coarse overcoats, with their long caps pulled down to their noses. Some of them had brought their wives to town, and now and then a red or a plaid shawl flashed out of one store into the shelter of another. At the hitch-bars along the street a few heavy work-horses, harnessed to farm wagons, shivered under their blankets. About the station everything was quiet, for there would not be another train in until night.

Bridget Everett’s Town

Bridgett Everett and Jeff Hiller in *Somebody, Somewhere.*

I first read about Bridget Everett when she was performing in cabaret shows in New York City. That was 15 years ago, but lines like this, from Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, probably caught my attention: “Bridget Everett is, without a doubt, the life of the party. Whether it’s a party you’d be interested in attending — or one you’d instantly flee in search of Xanax — depends on your affection for big-boned, loudmouthed, dirty-talking girls with attitudes stretching from here to Kansas.”

She is indeed from Kansas—Manhattan, Kansas specifically (the “little apple”!), and that town of 50,000 is the centerpiece of Somebody Somewhere, now in it’s third and final season on Max.

It’s about life in a small town, but we’re not in Dorothy’s Kansas any more. Refreshingly current and open-armed, Everett and showrunners Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen have assembled a cornucopia of quirky—but very human—characters to surround Sam, played by Everett, the big spirited hub of the show.

She’s also its center of gravitas. Sam has moved back to Manhattan to care for her sister, who is dying of cancer, and after she passes, Sam stays and tries to reconnect with family and friends. It soon becomes clear why she left in the first place.

Then she meets Joel (Jeff Hiller), whose giggly ebullience goes head to head with Sam’s sorrow, snark and cynicism. He helps her connect with a motley local crew, whose lives intertwine with Sam’s in incidents that are by turns maddening and rapturous. Forget about Bedford Falls for a year. This is the place to hang out this holiday season.

Out of Town

As you read this, Euclid is transmitting images to the European Space Agency, which launched the space telescope in the summer of 2023. It’s mission is to study dark matter—a force so strong it can bend light—and dark energy, the force which opposes it. While scientists parse and try to understand the mystical ways of the universe, we can at least relish the images the Euclid is beaming back to earth. Click on each image to enlarge.