Phil’s Blog

There’s a term for misheard song lyrics: they’re “mondegreens”. Many people have experienced this, or something like it — you hear a line from a song that doesn’t quite make sense until you find out that the real lyric isn’t what you thought you heard. For example, a lot of people apparently heard “the girl with colitis goes by” (instead of “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes”) when they first listened to “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”. I didn’t, but I wasn’t stoned at the time, as those people probably were.

The word mondegreen comes from the canonical example. In the Scottish ballad “The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray” these lines occur: “They have slain the Earl o’ Moray, and laid him on the green”. The author Sylvia Wright heard this as “they have slain the Earl Amurray, and Lady Mondegreen”. Wright made this the basis of an article in Harper’s Magazine; she called it a “mondegreen”, and the name has stuck.

There’s an excellent article in Wikipedia on mondegreens and related phenomena: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen. I first heard of mondegreens in the 1990s in the San Francisco Chronicle, where Jon Carroll wrote an annual column about them. There are now many articles online, containing many other examples. I haven’t seen one of my favorites in any of these articles, though: “Stand beside her and guide her through the night with the light from a bulb”.

I personally encountered an excellent mondegreen when I was playing cello in the orchestra at Limestone High School. We were playing the Farandole from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne. Whoever was responsible for the program apparently misheard this as “Foreign Doll”, because that’s how it came out in print.

I’m not sure I have any true mondegreens of my own to report. As far as I’m concerned, true mondegreens are based on mishearings that are genuine, involuntary, and persistent. More commonly I find that when I hear something that doesn’t sound right, I immediately analyze it and correct myself. I assume that’s the experience of others, too.

Nevertheless, I have a small collection of what I call “demimondegreens” — deliberate perversions of song titles and lyrics. These aren’t parodies, just snatches of things for which I hear alternate versions in my head, even though I know perfectly well what the real words are.

For instance:

In The Mikado, Pooh-Bah sings “She’ll toddle away, as all aver, with the Lord High Executioner.” I think that Yum-Yum is, for some reason, going to change her name: “She’ll toddle away as Oliver …”

I have a set of demimondegreens that I call “The Sado-Masochist’s Gershwin Song Book”:

-- "Someone to Walk Over Me"
-- "I've Gotta Crush My Baby on You"
-- "Slap That Bass"

To me, the original German text of "None but the Lonely Heart" shows that Goethe had an appreciation of Italian opera. Instead of "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" I hear "Nur Verdi Sehnsucht kennt".

You'd better be sitting down for the last one. I hear it as a joke, which you won't get if you haven't driven Interstate 5 in Southern California:

Q: Mr. Cattle Rancher from Bakersfield, how do you get your stock to Los Angeles?
A: I herd it through the Grapevine.

I just bought and assembled an IKEA nightstand. Having left all my furniture behind in moving from a small house in California to a tiny apartment in Montana, I’m gradually acquiring only the most necessary furnishings, and IKEA suits me perfectly. I’m not buying solid pieces that I’ll be passing on to my grandchildren, I’m buying for price and current utility.

Whenever I start assembling IKEA furniture, it occurs to me that this may be the closest thing we have in the 21st century to a universal shared human experience. I count 32 languages on the page of warnings, and this doesn’t include the three additional languages on the following page (Malaysian, Arabic, and Thai — at least I think they’re Arabic and Thai; the print is so small I can barely make them out, and I’m not going to worry if I’m wrong). When I look at this page, in my mind I can hear people swearing at IKEA, all over the world, in all these languages.

And there are some notable omissions among the languages, too. I don’t know why Russian and Hebrew, at least, are not represented. Is there another set of instructions in 35 *other* languages for the rest of the world?

The other thought that IKEA brings to mind is the Wordless Workshop feature that appeared in Popular Science for over fifty years. Every month, the Wordless Workshop walked you through a household project in a series of drawings with absolutely no text.

https://www.core77.com/posts/39776/The-Closest-Thing-We-Had-to-an-Industrial-Design-based-Comic-Strip

I don’t know who, if anyone, had a subscription to Popular Science that made the issues accessible to me when I was a child, but I remember seeing it fairly regularly, and I remember being intrigued by Wordless Workshop. I had no occasion or opportunity to carry through any of the projects, so I think it was mostly a fascination with the problem-solving mindset, which was totally foreign to our household culture. My father was so unhandy, and so passive, that if a light bulb burned out he would have taken it as a sign from God that we were meant to sit in the dark. I’m sure it was partially in reaction to his apparent uselessness that after college, when I was in a position to learn to do things for myself, I took up photography, printing my own photographs in my closet-turned-darkroom, and taught myself how to tune the engine in my car (before computers made that equally unnecessary and impossible).

This boggles my mind:

In September 1979, when I was in charge of the music library at Connecticut College, Mark, a theater major who hung out at the music library, and whose last name I’ll suppress to preserve his privacy, mentioned that just before returning for the fall semester he had spent some time in New Jersey at a summer camp, where he had filmed a walk-on part in a horror movie.

That movie turned out to be Friday the 13th, which was shot in September and October, 1979, and was released in May 1980. (Mark is the guy in the still. He’s uncredited in the movie, where he appears in the pre-titles sequence as one of the campers in the sing-along at the lodge.)

Flash back now to about 1975, when I was working at the public library in Wellesley, Mass. Among my co-workers was an older man who was a theater enthusiast and a fan of the actress Betsy Palmer. Somehow he had managed to become personally acquainted with her (probably by hanging out often enough at the stage door), a fact that he made sure we were aware of. He boasted that he had lunch or dinner with her whenever she was playing in Boston.

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last forty-five years, you may not know that although Betsy Palmer had a legitimate career on stage and film, her fame as an actress now rests on her appearance in Friday the 13th as Mrs. Voorhees — a part she took because she needed the money to buy a car.

Kevin Bacon dies early in Friday the 13th, and undoubtedly never was on the set at the same time as either Mark or Betsy Palmer. Nevertheless, by the rules of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”, which don’t require that actors be in the same scene as Kevin Bacon, just in the same movie, I think I can claim a pretty low Bacon number. I not only knew someone who knew Betsy Palmer, but I knew someone who was actually in the movie!

If you don’t know what a Bacon number is, see this Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon

Buckle in. This is a long one.

Today, December 12, as I just discovered in my archives, is the anniversary of what is perhaps the most important milestone of my childhood. According to my transcript, I transferred into Lawrence (Mass.) High School on December 12, 1962. I guess there’s no better time to tell that tale.

We moved many times during my first seventeen years. Between the age of three and the time I went to college, I have memories of five communities in Maine, one in Massachusetts, and one in New Hampshire. It goes without saying that I got quite used to being uprooted. I was a stoic young soul, and it didn’t occur to me that this might not have been the natural order of things.

Demographic studies show that Americans were more mobile in the 1950s than they are today. Economic opportunities were expanding rapidly after World War II, and in any given year at that time, twenty per cent of the population relocated, though most of those moves (60-65%) were within the same county. I can’t prove it, but I strongly doubt that — except for corporate relocations and military transfers — many other families moved hundreds of miles every couple of years over a decade, as we did.

When we last saw me in this blog, I was sitting on a potato barrel in Limestone, Maine. If that photo dates from October 1962, as it probably does, there was a lot going on behind the scenes. My father, the town’s Methodist minister, was having an affair with one of his parishioners. Apparently I have suppressed most of the specific memories from this era, because apart from some furtive, whispered phone calls of my father’s, my recollection is just that there was an almost palpable atmosphere of simmering tension at home.

I turned fourteen around this time. I’m finding it hard to reconstruct what I was thinking and feeling, or how much I really understood of what was going on. I know I was confused about sex, and uneasy about the changes in my body that puberty had brought. I don’t remember being conscious of the gossip in town, or the scandal in the church, that (as is now obvious) were taking place around us. And I don’t remember anything about when and how we kids were told that we were moving, yet again, after barely a year and a half in town. This time we were leaving Maine altogether, and my father was being transferred to a new conference — i.e., a different geographic and administrative unit within the Methodist Church. Does this remind you of the Catholic Church’s habit of shuffling abusive priests around rather than confronting the problem? Me too.

I have pretty vivid memories of the move itself — though research on memory has shown that a lot of what we think we remember is actually a story we make up to fit the mental picture we have of the time in question. But even if some of these memories are embellished, what’s important is that this is the way I remember it.

We were essentially run out of town on a rail. That language may seem overblown, but remember that this was a clergyman leaving town with his young family in mid-December while school was in session. What was the hurry? They couldn’t have waited for school break? They couldn’t have waited for Christmas?

My memory of the drive to Lawrence is that it took place in the dark. Given that the distance was 350 miles, that I-95 had not yet been built, and that these were the shortest days of the year, most of it surely did take place in the dark. My memory of arrival is this: we four kids being awakened in the car in the middle of the night with “We’re here”, and stumbling into our new parsonage without a chance to get a good look at it.

I had entered Limestone High School as a freshman the year before; I was now a couple of months into my sophomore year. In the early 1960s, Limestone had a much better high school than its beyond-the-end-of-the-earth location would suggest, because in the previous decade the US Air Force had built Loring Air Force Base just outside of town. The population within the town’s boundaries had increased from 2,427 in the 1950 census to 13,102 in 1960 — all of it due to the presence of the base.

Loring was a major, if not *the* major, unit in the Strategic Air Command. The Air Force chose Limestone because it was at the farthest northeastern point in the continental United States, and thus closest in air miles to western Europe. (You could go farther north in Maine, but you had to turn west to do so; the Canadian border turned west just north of Limestone.) This was the height of the Cold War, and the mission of the Strategic Air Command was to keep armed bombers in the air 24 hours a day just outside of critical range of Russia, in case the Russians struck first. Watch the movies Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove to get some idea of the times.

Loring AFB had its own elementary schools, but there weren’t enough children of high school age on the base to warrant building a high school there. Instead, the base sent its high-schoolers to Limestone High — which meant that there was Air Force money pouring in, and more than just farm kids went to school there. The town had just built a new high school with that money. In any case, this was post-Sputnik, and the country was in the mood to invest in education. I took Latin as a freshman, and both Latin and French as a sophomore. I started cello lessons on a school cello and participated in all-county orchestra. I was in a school play (The Curious Savage, by John Patrick, if anyone cares.) I wasn’t athletic, but I was getting by in gym, and the gym teacher wasn’t a monster. There was every indication that I might be starting to fit in.

And then, suddenly, I found myself in Lawrence, a decaying mill town in northeastern Masschusetts, just far enough from Boston that Boston was inaccessible to a 14-year-old — or at least to this 14-year-old. Lawrence had had its heyday in the first decades of the 20th century when the mills were running at capacity. By 1960 the mills had moved to the South where labor was cheaper, and Lawrence’s population had dropped from 94,270 (1920 census) to 70,933 (1960 census). Lawrence has never recovered economically. Although its population is almost back to 1920 levels, it remains one of the poorest communities in the state. Its city government is notorious for its corruption (and in Massachusetts this is saying something); its schools are so bad that the entire school system was recently taken over by the state.

I don’t think things were quite as bad in 1963 as they are now — they’ve had sixty years in which to get worse — but the culture shock of being embedded in rural Limestone, Maine, one day, and in multi-ethnic, urban, decaying Lawrence, Massachusetts, literally on the following day, was almost overwhelming.

(Digression: I share with Robert Frost the distinction of childhood residency in Lawrence. Frost, born in San Francisco in 1874, arrived in Lawrence in 1885 after the death of his father and “under the patronage” (as Wikipedia puts it) of his grandfather, who was a supervisor at one of the Lawrence mills. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892 as co-valedictorian with his soon-to-be wife, whom he married in Lawrence in 1895. (Despite his reputation as a poet of the land, he grew up a city boy.) By 1900 he had dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard and was farming in Derry, NH — another town I have a connection with, since my sister Janet lived there for a fairly long time.)

The high school Frost attended had been demolished long before I got to Lawrence. In 1899, around the time Frost left Lawrence, the city had broken ground for an impressive new high school in a somewhat bastardized Richardson Romanesque style. Twenty-five years later the city expanded it with a large annex. By the time I enrolled at Lawrence High, the massive, forbidding structure occupied an entire city block.

Looking back, it seems as if I was almost, but not quite, thrown to the wolves at Lawrence High. What actually happened seems now so bizarre that I’ve never been able to explain it. It’s almost enough to convince me that a guardian angel was watching over me.

I don’t know how much time elapsed between our arrival in Lawrence in the middle of the night and the day I was to start school at Lawrence High. There must have been at least a day or two intervening. The calendar says my first day at Lawrence High (December 12, 1963) was a Wednesday. I’m going to guess that we traveled to Lawrence on the previous weekend, although that *is* just a guess. The day before I was to start school, a boy showed up at our door, introduced himself as Chuck Feeney, said he was an upperclassman at Lawrence High who lived a few doors up the side street from us, and offered to walk me to school. I may have been to Lawrence High to register, but I don’t remember doing so. I didn’t know the way, there was no school bus, and there had been no talk of my being driven to school, so the apparition of Chuck at our door was something of a godsend.

There must be a mundane explanation for Chuck, but I don’t know what it is. My parents were apparently not behind it; they seemed as surprised as I was. It’s very unlikely that anyone at my father’s church instigated it; Chuck had no connection with the church. In fact, the church (like just about everything else in Lawrence) was ethnic, but it was German. There were no Feeneys in the congregation; the names I remember are Hildebrand, Kress, and Dimmlich. I never asked Chuck about his family background, but he volunteered that he lived with his Lithuanian grandmother, who spoke no English. (That’s Lawrence in a microcosm.)

I don’t know for how many days or weeks Chuck walked me to school. It’s possible that we walked to school together for the entire six months that I remained at Lawrence High. However long or short our association, I remember him with gratitude as a mentor. He taught me my first swear words, and his favorite adjective of approbation was “sexy”.

I felt safe with Chuck, but once I got to school, the situation was different. Without a protector and mentor, I now for the first time resented and dreaded school. The building resembled a prison more than it did a school (at least to me). In my memory the corridors are cavernous; the teachers are grim; the atmosphere breathes unease. It’s like something out of Poe. The building looked as it had in 1924, and the curriculum, the furniture, the textbooks, and (seemingly) even the faculty had all mummified around the same date. As far as I can remember, the French book literally offered “Où est la plume de ma tante?” as an example of a conversation starter. Catcher in the Rye had been published over a decade earlier, but the English Department’s idea of a contemporary novel that would appeal to teens was Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen. Gym had been no fun at Limestone, but bearable; at Lawrence High I heard my first “Are you queer?” During breaks we were allowed (“herded” is the better word) into the park across the street, where I spent the entire time trying to stay clear of the toughs who were looking for somebody to beat up, or at least to harass verbally. The cello had stayed behind in Maine because it belonged to the Limestone school system. If music or theater existed at Lawrence High, they remained concealed to me.

After a few months I was in such pain that I told my parents “I’m not going back there.” At least that’s apparently what I said. I have no memory of that, but then a lot of that time period is hazy now. I can hardly believe that I found that level of assertiveness. If alternative schools existed in 1963, my parents didn’t know about them. Prep school was what occurred to them. Phillips Andover Academy (Andover was next door to Lawrence) was their solution of choice for me, but it didn’t happen. The only thing I remember from the interview at Andover was that I was advised to develop an interest in sports; if I did, they might possibly consider me.

I’m sure my parents were floundering at this point. I feel sorry for them now. I realize that they were trying to do their best, but they had never known what do with me. What they came up with next must have been virtually unthinkable: a Catholic school. They got me into Lawrence’s Central Catholic High School — and on reflection they and I could have done worse. At least I felt safe there. I don’t know what it cost, but it was probably relatively cheap, and the academics were likely about as good as anywhere else short of Boston Latin. Central Catholic saved me from what might have been complete disaster. Eventually, like Robert Frost, I was valedictorian at a Lawrence high school — just not the same high school as his. But that is a story for another post.

– Lao-Tse: The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao.

– Wittgenstein: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

– Tom Lehrer: If people can’t communicate, the least they can do is shut up.

Enough said.

Note –> Re-posted after a technical snag caused the original post to be truncated.

“Song: A brief composition written or adapted for singing” (American Heritage Dictionary, 5th edition). Not an adequate description of the wide variety of uses for this word. It doesn’t even cover the entire range of Schubert’s Lieder, which include compositions that go on for almost twenty minutes, hardly “brief” in anyone’s book — but I don’t want to get into that here.

I do want to point out, though, that even in the rarefied world of “classical” music, the art song is an acquired taste. I have the impression that there are a lot of people who will sit through, and even enjoy, a Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Verdi or Puccini in Italian — tunes, drama, pageantry, costumes, scenery — who would be running for the exits after twenty minutes of a single singer, on a stage, singing Schubert in German, or Fauré in French, with only a pianist for company. Not that there aren’t some great tunes there. I think most people know Schubert’s Ave Maria even if they’ve never heard of Schubert. But that song is not typical Schubert, and lovely tunes are not what the art song is really about — at its best, it’s a marriage of poetry and music that doesn’t yield its secrets easily.

I want to talk a little bit here about how deep even a relatively simple song like “An die Musik” can be. Take a breath, and maybe read this post in several sittings.

Here’s the whole song, all 23 measures:

https://youngholm.com/py/assets/schubert_an_die_musik_2nd_version.pdf

Only sixteen measures are actually sung. There’s a two-bar piano prelude, then two verses whose music is absolutely identical, including a single bar of piano interlude, and a four-bar postlude in each verse.

The text is by one of Schubert’s friends, a poet named Franz von Schober, who is scarcely remembered now except for having provided Schubert with song texts. This poem was not even included when Schober published his poetry on its own in 1865, long after Schubert’s death.

Bear with me as I quote Schober’s poem in the original German, and then several translations. The translations aren’t selected for their quality; they’re just the ones that appear in publications I happen to have in my library. Note that none of them are intended for singing, so they’re not subject to the contortions inflicted on translations that try to match the meter and rhyme of the original text.

============

Schober’s original:

Du holde Kunst, in wie viel grauen Stunden / Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt, / Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Liebe entzünden, / Hast mich in eine bessre Welt entrǔckt.

Oft hat ein Seufzer, deiner Harf’ entflossen, / Ein süsser, heiliger Akkord von dir, / Den Himmel bessrer Zeiten mir erschlossen, / Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir dafür.

============

Translation from The Fischer-Dieskau Book of Lieder (translators George Bird, Richard Stokes):

O kindly Art, in how many a grey [sic] hour / when I am caught in life’s unruly round, / have you fired my heart with ardent love / and borne me to a better world!

Often, has a sigh from your harp, / a chord, sweet and holy, from you, / opened for me a heaven of better times; / O kindly Art, for that I thank you!

============

Translation from The Ring of Words (translator Philip L. Miller):

O sublime art, in how many gray hours, / when the wild tumult of life ensnared me, / have you kindled my heart to warm love, / have you carried me away to a better world!

Often a sigh, escaped from your harp, / a sweet, solemn chord from you, / has opened the heaven of better times for me — / o sublime art, I thank you for it!

============

Translation from the Bärenreiter edition of Schubert’s complete songs (translator Richard Wigmore):

Beloved art, in how many a bleak hour, / When I am enmeshed in life’s tumultuous round, / Have you kindled my heart to the warmth of love, / And borne me away to a better world!

Often a sigh, escaping from your harp, / A sweet, celestial chord / Has revealed to me a heaven of happier times, / Beloved art, for this I thank you!

============

Translation from The Schubert Song Companion by John Reed (translators Norma Deane, Celia Lardner):

Thou lovely art, how often in dark hours, when life’s wild tumult wraps me round, have you kindled my heart to loving warmth, and transported me to a better world.

Often a sigh, escaping from your harp, a touch of heavenly sweet harmony, has opened up a paradise for me. Thou lovely art, I thank thee for this gift.

============

In a short space, these translations illustrate a number of the difficulties of translation in general, and of translating poetry in particular. Please bear in mind that though my German is OK, I’m not an expert on translation.

Most of the German nouns present no difficulties. For example:

Kunst = art
Stunden = hours
Leben = life
Liebe = love
Welt = world
Seufzer = sigh
Harf’ (Harfe with elided ‘e’) = harp

Some of the phrases using these nouns caused the translators to make varying decisions, though. “In wie viel graue Stunden” (literally “in how many gray hours”) becomes “in how many a bleak hour” or “how often in dark hours”.

The line “Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt” understandably caused the translators problems. All of the translations are a bit awkward, but so (I think) is the German. The literal translation of “wilder Kreis” is “wild circle”, but the meaning here is “giddy whirl” — though for some reason all the translators rejected “whirl” in favor of “tumult” or “round” (really?). “Umstrickt” comes from “stricken”, whose base meaning is “knit” — hence “enmeshed” and “ensnared”. In contemporary German it appears to be used mostly where we would use “constrained”.

None of the translators could leave “Ein süsser, heiliger Akkord” (literally, “a sweet, holy chord”) alone. It becomes “a chord, sweet and holy” or “a sweet, celestial chord” or “a sweet, solemn chord” or even “a touch of heavenly sweet harmony”.

Two single words, though, stand out for me as most problematical:

“Hold” is ubiquitous in German Romantic poetry and yet has no good single-word English equivalent. Note that each translation offers a different adjective in the opening phrase “Du holde Kunst”: kindly, sublime, beloved, lovely. To the German Romantics “hold” meant all of these and more. My Collins bilingual dictionary offers “fair” and “sweet” but says those meanings are poetical or dated; in contemporary German the word is used humorously, ironically, or in set phrases (“meine holde Gattin” = “my lovely wife” = “my better half”). I don’t blame the translators for not finding a word that conveys what the German word does in its context.

But “escaped” and “escaping” are absolutely wrong for “entflossen”, in my opinion. The translator who just omitted it and wrote simply “a sigh from your harp” made the best decision. “Entflossen” comes from “fliessen”, which means “to flow”. The image is one of outpouring, of generosity. The harp is overflowing with music; there’s an inexhaustible supply. In English it’s natural to say that a sigh “escaped” someone’s lips — sighs are generally reluctantly uttered. But the poet could have used “escaped” — “entflohen” or “entkommen” — if he had wanted to convey reluctance. The chosen word, “entflossen”, happily rhymes with “erschlossen” (“opened”), providing not just a rhyme but a better image.

I want to make a musical point or two that I forgot to mention in my earlier post about “An die Musik”. In that post I pointed out how closely the piano part mimics an arrangement of a piece for string quartet, with repeated chords in the violins and viola, and the cello in duet with the voice. So much musical accompaniment consists of repeated chords (think “Jingle Bells”) that you might think “so what?” Well, one of the most remarkable things that Schubert did, when he essentially invented the German art song, was to make the piano an equal partner with the voice (we pianists even like to think we have the *more* important part much of the time), and the piano parts in Schubert’s songs are endlessly inventive and varied.

The “simple” piano part in “An die Musik” is actually not easy to play well. Those repeated chords in the right hand must not plod. String players have continuous control over their notes; they have various modes of attack, and they have varying ways to adjust the sound of the note throughout its duration. Pianists can only hit the key and wait for the sound to die away. Every time a pianist plays a chord, there is a decision to make: of these two, three, four or more simultaneous notes, should one or more be louder than the others? If so, which one(s), and how the heck do you make that happen?

The chords that accompany the voice during the verses of “An die Musik” are just that — chords. But the chords in the postludes are not “just” chords. The top note of each chord is a melody played by the first violin. Meanwhile, in the bottom note of each right-hand chord, the viola is playing a complementary melody, while the cello (left hand) punctuates with a couple of rising bass figures. The tension culminates with a poignant dissonance/resolution as the viola plays a D sharp followed by an E. In a real string quartet, the viola would lean into that D sharp just a little and then relax into the E. I try to lean into the D sharp too when I’m playing that chord. Whether I’m “voicing” the chord (as piano teachers put it) properly, I don’t really know. I feel that D sharp in my finger and hope that the feeling translates into the right kind of sound. This is where you need a teacher, a coach, or a recording to tell you whether your technique is producing the result you want.

I said above that the chords must not plod. That’s true here, but Schubert could write plodding when it was called for. In the first song of the song cycle “Winterreise” (Winter’s Journey) the singer is trudging through the snow, leaving town in the middle of the night after a doomed love affair. The weary repeated chords (“ostinato” is the technical term) in the piano, which never for a moment let up, are a crucial part of the song’s effect of hopelessness.

In other songs, Schubert uses the piano to illustrate natural sounds (hoofbeats, running water, rustling leaves), other instruments (guitar, harp), and states of mind (joy, agitation, resignation) in ways that have seldom been equalled and never surpassed. This is part of the reason why these songs are inexhaustible sources of pleasure to perform.

I suppose anyone who ever attended an Ivy League school has had classmates or college acquaintances who made good. In my case, I can claim minimal distance to both Bill and Hillary Clinton (separately!) and thus to everyone in the first Clinton cabinet, through Robert Reich, who was a year ahead of me at Dartmouth.

Here’s the story: One of the first things I did as a freshman at Dartmouth was to join WDCR, the college radio station. (Just sixty years ago, as it happens — it was the fall of 1965.) For most of my time at the station I was a classical music DJ, and a very active one, and I eventually became director of classical music programming. One of my programs was the Sunday morning classical broadcast, and because no one else on the station wanted to get up that early on Sundays, I was not only the DJ, I was the engineer on duty. The FCC required that someone with at least a second-class radio license had to be in charge at all times when the station was on the air. So I dutifully studied the materials, went to Boston, took the exam (in the Custom House Tower), and got my license. (My license has expired, in case you were thinking of hiring me, and in any case the second-class license has been abolished.)

My second-class license didn’t mean much. It was the Chief Engineer, who presumably had a first-class license, who was responsible for making sure that our transmitter worked properly and didn’t exceed the FCC’s regulations for broadcast power. But once I was licensed, I could perform any routine engineering task, including being in charge of the control room during the evening newscast. And thus I later found myself in a control room on a regular basis, turning Robert Reich’s microphone on and off and queuing tapes for him, while he delivered the nightly news.

The business about “queuing tapes” comes from the fact that we had a daily audio feed from United Press International, which we taped, made extracts from, and played at appropriate times during newscasts. This is how, back in the sixties, local radio stations were able to inject on-the-scene reports from remote locations into their newscasts (“This is John Johnson, reporting from London … “)

Reich and I never had any closer relationship than this, and most of our interaction was over a mike and through a glass wall. Nevertheless, we were something of a team for a while — for how long, though, I can’t remember. More than a few weeks, I’m pretty sure. Maybe a semester? Maybe two?

Reich dated Hillary Rodham while he was at Dartmouth. He met Bill Clinton at Oxford when they were both Rhodes Scholars. Eventually he was Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. This is certainly as close as I will ever get to the corridors of power.

I didn’t know I had this photo. I don’t know who took it. I didn’t think anyone in our family was taking color photos in the early 60s. But here I am in Limestone, Maine, in October of either 1961 or 1962, sitting on a potato barrel, during a pause in the potato harvest. If it’s 1961, I am twelve going on thirteen.

Why am I picking potatoes at the age of twelve, like a waif in a Dickens novel, when I should be in school? Well, there is no school in Aroostook County, Maine, during the potato harvest. The county’s economy runs on potatoes, so school starts two or three weeks earlier than in other places and goes into recess during the harvest, so that everyone can work the potato fields — and by “everyone”, I mean *everyone*.

Only recently, apparently, are some school districts abandoning the practice. Nowadays, with more mechanization and stricter child labor laws (or stricter enforcement, maybe), it looks as if twelve-year-olds no longer go out in the fields in the freezing dawn to fill potato barrels by hand, at twenty-five cents per barrel, as I did. Of course, they’re not learning the value of a dogged work ethic, either, as I did.

Compare that photo with this one from about 1954, which looks as if it was taken by Dorothea Lange:

Photo Credit : Aroostook County Potato Picking, Maine, 1954. Photograph by Verner Reed; © Historic New England

And check out these articles about the current state of things in Aroostook County:

https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2025-10-01/theyre-feeding-america-aroostook-students-learn-work-ethic-on-annual-harvest-break

https://newengland.com/today/lessons-of-the-field-maines-aroostook-county-potato-harvest/

Aroostook Potato Harvest

I’ve dragged out of storage the last remaining records of my youth, with the intention of dealing with them once and for all. There were once half a dozen boxes of this stuff; now it’s down to one plastic storage bin. I figure there must be a reason why these things have survived forty years of weeding and moving.

I haven’t touched every piece of paper in the box, but these are some of the things I found:

* My grade school report cards.

* High school stuff: newspaper clippings, commencement invitation card, commencement program.

* The scripts of the radio show I DJ’d in college, playing two hours of Mozart in the evening once a week from January 1967 to April 1968.

* Material from my foreign study in Mainz, Germany, in spring 1969 — my passport, my student ID from the university there, my diary, and complete notes for, and draft of, the paper (in German) on the history of the Mainz city theater that I was working on and never completed.

* My Selective Service correspondence, including my lottery notification (I drew 310, which meant I didn’t have to go). We’re talking Vietnam here — this was the lottery of December 1, 1969.

* Diary and expense records from my almost six months in Vienna in 1972.

There’s fodder for a lot of blogging there.

I had seen most of this stuff in previous forays, but here’s one thing I had either overlooked or forgotten. It’s hard to imagine why I saved this — there is an envelope containing receipts from my first year of teaching school in Vermont, 1969-1970. Helpfully, I recorded my monthly food expenses on the envelope, and here they are:

September: $38.40
October: $40.10
November: $26.59
December: $47.90
January: $30.63
February: $41.94
March: $54.33
April: $37.17

I’m not sure why May is missing, but it’s probably because I moved in June and didn’t bother about tying up May.

For those who are of my generation, Friday, November 22, 1963, will always be the day the world changed. Like December 7 for my father’s generation, and September 11 for younger people, if you were alive and conscious then, you will always remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news.

On that day I was a junior at Central Catholic High School in Lawrence, Massachusetts. I had turned fifteen less than three weeks earlier. Eleven months earlier, in the middle of my sophomore year, the family had endured a more wrenching move than usual, from rural Maine to urban Massachusetts. At the beginning of the school year I had transferred to CCHS after serving a six-months’ sentence in Lawrence High School. (Don’t worry — I will write about all of this sooner or later.)

We were in our homerooms awaiting dismissal when the principal announced over the public-address system that the President had been shot. I don’t remember exactly what our dismissal time was (I’m assuming 3:00 pm), but I do remember that the school acknowledged delaying the announcement until final assembly so as not to throw the school into pandemonium on a Friday afternoon. The shooting took place at 2:30 pm Eastern, but the announcement of Kennedy’s death didn’t occur until slightly over an hour later. All I heard at school was that he had been shot. It was only when I got home that I learned that he was dead.

The television was on all weekend, as it was in most of the homes in the country. I don’t know how continuously I watched, but I certainly didn’t watch everything. I know I missed Oswald’s murder.

Kennedy was the first President I knew anything about. I was in grade school during the Eisenhower years. I knew Eisenhower’s name and saw his picture everywhere. I think I was aware of a few things about him — he was a golfer, he’d been a general, he had a heart attack while in office — but my family didn’t discuss politics or world affairs, and the workings of the Federal government were remote and didn’t touch us.

In 1960, though, as I moved from seventh grade into eighth grade in Newport, Maine, even I couldn’t help but start to pay attention. Kennedy’s youth, charm, and galvanism (not to mention his Catholicism) woke the country up, and suddenly, it seemed, everyone was either passionately for him or passionately against him. The election even stirred up our family a bit. I don’t remember this, to be honest, but it seems that my brother Mark, already an activist at the age of eight, put up Kennedy signs around town, which caused some consternation in my father’s church. Nixon, of course, won both Penobscot County and Maine as a whole.

I don’t remember Election Day, but I remember Inauguration Day, January 20, 1961, pretty well. Our eighth-grade class watched the inauguration on TV in our classroom — the only use of TV that I can remember in my official schooling. We saw Kennedy give his “ask not what your country can do for you” speech, and we saw Robert Frost recite his poem “The Gift Outright”.

To return to 11/23/1963 — it’s a commonplace to say that the whole country shifted on that day, as if an earthquake had occurred. Nobody knew what was going to happen next (except that we were getting Lyndon Johnson as our next President). What we did get, of course, was the rest of the sixties: Vietnam, flower power, the ’68 Chicago Democratic convention, Nixon, the draft …

Kennedy’s assassination may not have caused any of this, but it’s certainly convenient to regard it as an inflection point on the timeline.