Phil’s Blog

You know the concept of degrees of separation — that you can connect any two people in the world through a relatively small number of steps, in which A knows B, and B knows C, and C knows D …

I amuse myself sometimes by playing this game to see who I can connect myself with. Case in point …

I’ve just been asked to play the piano for a flute student who is working on the Flute Sonata by Paul Hindemith, an important 20th-century composer. I have a couple of connections to this piece, the first being that I’ve played it before, when I was at Connecticut College in the 1970s and 1980s, and played for a lot of flute students.

But there’s an even closer connection, to the composer himself. In college, my piano teacher was Lydia Hoffmann-Behrendt. She knew Hindemith — they were both Germans who had fled from the Nazis and wound up in New England. Hindemith taught at Yale, so I assume he was more-or-less settled in New Haven. Mrs. Behrendt (as her students called her) had a studio in the music department at Dartmouth, 200 miles north of Yale, and was the de facto piano instructor, though I’m not sure whether she had any official appointment at the college.

She certainly knew Hindemith well enough to have performed with him in New York in 1939, as this New York Times article demonstrates:

https://www.nytimes.com/1939/04/24/archives/hindemith-offers-own-compositions-appears-as-violist-and-pianist.html

So only two steps separate me from Hindemith.

You can listen to the flute piece here: https://youtu.be/quDiUSgB8x0?list=RDquDiUSgB8x0

After dithering much too long, I finally got a new will printed up and witnessed. I have nothing of any particular value to leave behind except my musical instruments, and my financial accounts all have named beneficiaries — but to die intestate is to place a heavy burden on your survivors at a time when you ought to spare them all avoidable hassle. When your estate is simple, it’s only a matter of moments to work through a do-it-yourself will kit.

I’m finding it much more difficult, though, to prepare end-of-life directives. The planning materials available — and there are many to choose from — ask the difficult questions that you’ve been avoiding for much of your life. In their starkest form, they ask, in essence, “What makes your life worth living?” and “Under what circumstances would it be better to die?”

As someone who’s experienced episodes of major depression all through his life, it’s not that I haven’t thought about this a lot. It’s just that, at this point, it’s as if you’re in the final round of the quiz show, and they’re asking “Is that your final answer?” Because, this time, it *is* your final answer.

It seems that as I get older, anything and everything can turn out to be a reminder, an echo, or a reminiscence.

Last night I attended an excellent performance by a local chamber group, the Regal Ensemble. They performed three works, and in each of them I could find some personal meaning.

The first piece was a set of variations for piano and strings by a Ukrainian composer I had never heard of (nor have you, probably): Vasyl Barvinsky (1888-1963). What’s his connection to me? He was arrested in 1948, the year I was born, by the NKVD and sent to a concentration camp for ten years. During that period his manuscripts perished in a fire. What was his crime? The sources are tantalizingly vague. Just being Ukrainian and writing music based on Ukrainian folk tunes was probably enough. In 1948 the world was still congratulating itself on having defeated Hitler, but it was also dealing with Stalinism, the Red Menace, and the Bomb. We thought we had defeated Fascism, conveniently forgetting that Franco was still in power. In 2025, we’re looking fascism in the face again, right here at home, and the Ukrainians are still fighting for their lives.

The next pieces had purely personal resonance. The second performance was of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. These songs, along with the Kindertotenlieder, were some of the first pieces I worked on with singers in college in the late 1960s, when I started to accompany and found that I both enjoyed it and was good at it. I knew little or no Mahler at the time, and these songs blew me away.

The third performance was of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet Op. 81 — one of my favorite pieces for many years. By coincidence, I had been assigned the third movement of this quintet this summer at a chamber music workshop in Sacramento and had spent a day working on it with a group of string players. I had also read through the entire quintet a few years earlier at another workshop, not as an assignment, but in “freelancing” — the term used at these workshops for people getting together after the day’s scheduled activities, to play just for fun. The performance was excellent and very enjoyable, but it reminded me how much I miss the camaraderie of informal music making. I’ve been accompanying at the University, and that’s rewarding, but the atmosphere is quite different when you’re accompanying a student who is on a professional track, in the presence of the teacher.

Two days ago, on November 5, 2025, I turned 77. That seems as good a reason as any to start a blog.

I’ve had several previous blogs, all either defunct (like the blog I kept for our parakeets) or frozen in time (like the Dragonfly Ranch blog, which is still online but closed). Over the last few weeks, I’ve had thoughts I wanted to capture and reflect on, and this seems like a good way to do that. If anyone else is interested, I’d be surprised — but the world is full of surprises. My therapist says she thinks I’m an interesting person, so who knows?

I’m intentionally starting the blog today (November 7) rather than on my birthday for what you might call numerological reasons — or, more respectably, number-theory reasons. Though I don’t think I’m really a math nerd, I *am* a nerd, and I couldn’t help noticing that my age on this birthday is the product of two primes, 7 and 11, so I wanted the blog to start on 11/7/2025 (or 7/11/2025 European style).

I figured that the integer 77 probably had more interesting properties than that, but I had to look them up. When I did, I found out, among other things, that:

* The product of two primes is called a subprime.

* 77 is the sum of three consecutive squares (4*4 + 5*5 + 6*6).

* The word for 77 in Swedish (sjutiosju) was used as a shibboleth in World War II to distinguish native Swedish speakers from Russians and Germans.

Digression: Grammy (our maternal grandmother, who spoke Swedish as a girl) used to amuse us by saying the Swedish for “seventy-seven seasick seamen”: “sjuttiosju sjösjuka sjömän”, which is actually just part of a much longer Swedish tongue-twister, apparently. (You can look it up.) The sound represented by “sj” appears to be unique to Swedish. As an alveolar fricative (you can look that up too), it’s related to the German “ch” in “ich” and to the Welsh “ll”, but different from both of them.

Another digression: I thought about celebrating my birthday at the 7-Eleven, but Missoula doesn’t have a 7-Eleven. And here I thought they were ubiquitous.

Digresson about digressions: You’ll have to get used to these.