Author: bfaure

Posted on

Beethoven’s Glorious Ninth

Ludwig Von Beethoven died in 1827, likely not hearing reflected in performance a single note of his composed music in the last 13 or so years of his life.  An all occlusive deafness stole any semblance other than vibration of the complex sound paintings he was continuing to create, with nothing but his memory of sound and prodigious compositional talent to guide him in his later years.  Yet, this profound silence proved no obstacle to an other worldly genius. Beethoven’s life mask as seen above, created in these difficult years, emotes a deep internal projection that is unmistakable.  This is a man who lives among the profoundest of thoughts in his soundless prison. Beethoven wanted in the time he had left to attempt to leave for the world a record of his vision of a passionate life, and the conquering of death. He left us his entire conceptualization in the experience that is the Ninth Symphony.

I have been around classical music my entire life, but I honestly have not been ready to absorb Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a profound personal experience until now.  This specific symphony has been used and misused to adorn everything from unique shared human events like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and reunification of the German people to commercials and phone ring tones.  Most who have stated they have heard it, have heard only snippets, and would be overwhelmed and subsumed by its immense size and scope.  Easily twice as long as any other Beethoven Symphony, it clings fragilely to faint outlines of symphonic structure while traveling in directions never previously conceived,  and demanding a commitment from the listener few other musical creations ask.  Each of the four movements stand  nearly as a complete symphony, with drifting lines of intensity, sudden rhythmic shifts, sublime beauty, and echoes that later would be referred to as motifs.  It is exhausting for performers, singers, conductors, and the audience as Beethoven peals back raw layers of emotion, than expounds upon them, never to finish them, demanding ever more commitment to see the piece as a whole .  It is the complete cantata of a man’s struggle with his mortality and the conceptualization of the yearning for connection with the eternal.  Beethoven, initially composing this never before heard musical experience, may not have originally conceptualized a choral ending movement, but the finished product recognizes his recognition that only the human voice raised to heavenly sound could provide a final enrapturement.  Thus the unforgettable finale of the choral last movement.

My father passed last year, and I believe his struggles in his final year prepared me finally for the whole of this great work.  I prepared myself with study for a scheduled performance, and finally heard it last night in its entirety in live performance ,  performed by the  Milwaukee Symphony and Chorus.  I was transfixed.   In the end, transcendent, and with most in the audience, emotionally tearing.  Beethoven, in triumphing over his deafness, has left us with an inkling of the eternal.

The first movement sets the tension with an opening like no other previous work.  A sustained chord layer is built like a slowly wakening consciousness until it uncoils into an intense rage, partial melodic infusions work around the orchestra in an unhurried Allegro pace.  An attempted more pleasant second theme is wrenched back into the tense minor chord of the first theme, refusing to let go. This is a dark and troubled place Beethoven’s mind is inhabiting, asking for some clarity to the strife and pain life brings, particularly in an age when a person’s many ailments had to simply be suffered, for no treatment was available.  The music of this first movement introduces us to dissonance and makes us uncomfortable.  It elicits a sense of heroism but denies an ultimate triumph.

The second movement in typically symphonic form would normally allow respite from the tension of the first movement in both tone and length.  Beethoven would have none it, inserting an even more agitated scherzo, in place of a typical quiet idyll, then expanding and evolving it to previously unheard of complexity and length.  When the second theme is introduced as a buoyant trio to restore hope and a veneer of control, Beethoven creates a tug of war between the two themes and refuses to relieve the angst.

We have now pulled ourselves emotionally through over 40 minutes of music and are not yet half done.  Beethoven thus far denies us even a hint of the redemption for a difficult life.

And then, exhausted, we are lifted to the stars.

The third movement takes the unexpected pace of an Adagio, and slowly elevates us to the metaphysical.  Beethoven was a great composer in many idioms , but he and Mozart were absolute geniuses when it came to Adagio slow movements.  We feel slowly freed of our earthly responsibilities and tragedies and long for the beyond, mysterious and as of yet unresolved.  Then towards the end of the Adagio, trumpets suddenly  interrupt our idyll to signal a dramatic awareness, the orchestra tries linger, the trumpets return more profoundly and  the orchestra  exclaims the famous Glorious Chord.  We look up to see what is to come…but it is not to be, and the movement ends with an unresolved yearning.  Has Beethoven taken us this far, only to tell us there is no meaning, no resolution to this life?

The fourth movement then goes where no symphony had ever gone before.  Each of the three previous movements’ motifs present, only to be rejected each time by defiant cellos and basses, that interrupt and refuse to be pulled down into any of the preceding tension and indecision.  No  – there is a way out and a way up, and the deep sonorous voice of the orchestra, the cellos, basses and bassoons quietly begin to declare the theme of triumph we now recognize as the Ode to Joy.  Beethoven finished the symphony in 1824, racked by deafness and disease, sufficiently ill that he would die only three years later.  He wanted the world to know that his soul, our soul was not bound by our earthly limitations, but would ultimately be transcendent.  What follows is 25 minutes of the messiest glory filled music in the history of composition. The Frederich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy declares a singular humanity and connection to a Supreme Being beyond the celestial heavens — and Beethoven describes this transcendent joy  in a magnificent heavenly cacophony between singer soloist, choir, and orchestra inhaling and exhaling like a supernatural bellows, seeking higher  ever higher ecstasy until culminating again in an even more Glorious Chord of all three.  Then again, the silence…is it over?  No…. No, a quant little “turkish” march breaks out , and the process begins all over, march becomes fugue, fugue becomes a brilliant full orchestra presto, and then again quiet.  We seek one more time to imagine a salvation.  Schiller’s line -“Brothers, above the starry canopy, there must dwell a loving father”  rings out in hymnal form by the choir, and then all heck breaks lose as the answer is a resounding yes, first led by the soloists then, maximally surging choir and orchestra, until like a massive celestial pipe organ, the immense colors and sound drive an explosion like the crescendoing path through a comet’s tail, into an indescribably joyful resolution that leaves the performers and listener utterly exhausted, and profoundly transcendent.

There can be no experience that rivals unadulterated emotion.  Beethoven changed the musical experience forever with the ninth and changed the perception and standard of excellence of every composer that followed him.  The outright intimidation of the genius of Beethoven’s epic masterpiece left many unwilling to create their own Magnum Opus for fear it would pale in comparison to the Olympian Ninth.  It has become the musical expression of what we ideally wish to project as our common humanity and best impulses.  Called to greatness, Beethoven triumphed.  If you get a chance someday, to experience this first hand, as I did, be prepared to be shaken to your core.  Until then, watch one of the greater performances preserved for all time, in Sir George Solti’s London Philharmonic performance in 1986. If you can find the time try to master the performance as a whole and live the complete transformation  —  if you are strapped for time, immerse yourself in the final movement  begun precisely at the one hour mark ( 1:00:00) and  the glory will still envelop you…

Posted on

The Power and Duality of Richard Wagner

We are often called on these pages to speak of genius.  The story of western civilization is replete with epic personalities and talents.  The accomplishments in art, music, literature, philosophy and science often soar to heights that elevate humankind to a special, almost immortal transcendency.  But inevitably, the source of such genius is at base a flawed human, filled with original sin. Caravaggio painted with epic beauty, but was difficult and violent. Percy Bysshe Shelley was an icon of idyllic poetry, but treated people in his life with disdain and infidelity.  Isaac Newton almost single handedly invented modern math and science, but was raptor like in sharing any sense that the inspiration may have been collaborative.

Then there is Richard Wagner.  A savant in perfidy, Wagner holds a special place in the pantheon of geniuses who managed to deliver a lifetime of troubled actions, making it to this day hard to separate the works from the ugliness beneath them.  Wagner ran from his debts, treated his wife as a stranger, and other men’s wives as his prey, used and abused admirers,  denigrated other great artists’ works to elevate his own, and pandered to an ugly strain of anti-semitism that allowed others to use his art as propaganda for the worst racial philosophies.  Connecting it all, was a megalomania that allowed him to excuse himself for all behaviors, for the propagation of his work as unrivaled.  In total, not a good person.

The music is looked upon with the same dualism as the composer.  The infusion of Wagner’s philosophies of life into every stitch of the music led to a type of unified field theory of musical art that fused Wagnerian poetry, stage design, operatic voice, and massive musical structure Wagner called Gesamtkundstwerk , or art in totality.  He described the concept in essays that he felt was an evolution above and beyond the Beethoven conceptualization, that injected the other senses into the musical drama.  His works became increasingly contra-tonal, complex, philosophically linked — and long. …very long.  Long and divergent to structure to the point that Rossini, the great Italian composer is famous for having described Wagner’s music as containing “wonderful moments, and dreadful quarter hours of an hour.”   The music drama form was reworked by Wagner to  predate and forever influence cinema of the twentieth century, with the influence of musical cues known as leitmotifs that predicts a character’s appearance, reveals inner emotions or tensions , or reorients the story.  Think of the foreboding two note leitmotif of the shark in Jaws.  No Wagner, and its just another shark in the ocean.  The leitmotifs allowed Wagner to time travel through the epic stories, recalling characters, previous story lines, and linking them all over an extraordinary canvas of size and scope. The orchestra itself became larger, heavier in brass, to recreate the heroic figures and their actions, mirroring the increasingly pre-christian and racial memes of Wagner’s obsession with early German and Norse myths.  The so called romantic middle operas, Der Fliegende Hollander (Flying Dutchman), Tannhauser, and Lohengrin developed Wagner’s spectacular sense of sound and color with many melodic moments that function as stand alone individual classics of the marriage of the visual and the aural.

The Magnus Opus is, however, the Ring, Der Ring Des Nibelungen, a marathon of four linked operatic dramas , Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung, run as designed, in sequence, over 15 hours long, and performed in total  only in so-called “festivals” to preserve the sanity of the audience.  Wagner took twenty six years to develop the The Ring into its final form, and seeing it as the perfect synthesis of music and drama,  browbeat his patron King Ludwig of Bavaria into freeing up the necessary funds to build a performance hall worth of the immense scope.  Bayreuth stands today as the birth home of this spectacular sensorial event, and music listeners feel a sense of pilgrimage if they secure the experience of the Ring at Bayreuth at least once in their lifetimes.

The music of Wagner requires tremendous patience, necessarily leaving behind the modern world of the short attention span into a floating consciousness that presages modern philosophy, atonality, inner conflict, innate heroism, and savage beauty.  Despite the megalomania and the  perverse humanity, the thematic brilliance shines through.  The thrilling ride of the Walkuries.  The tempestuous, violent ghost existence of the Dutchman.  The Wedding march in Lohengrin. The  spiritual Pilgrim’s Chorus of Tannhauser.  The other worldly achingly beautiful Tristan and Isolde Liebestod.  The glorious reverberation of Siegfried’s Rhein Journey.   Love him or hate him, Wagner owned the ability to grasp essential human emotion and pull it from you no matter your reticence in accepting such genius from such a flawed individual.

There are multiple moments of musical performance greatness, but a behind the scenes look at the extraordinary endurance and raw emotions required to pull out Wagner’s ultimate music scape knows no better example than a short vignette of the great George Solti leading the Vienna Philharmonic in recording rehearsal of Siegfried’s Funeral March from Gotterdammerung.  This is a young Solti, willing to drain every ounce of human emotion from his orchestra and himself, in emoting the cataclysm of death and the loss of a heroic life.  The below recording is just over six minutes long.  One can begin to perceive why only a few conductors and a few orchestras are athletic and psychically stable enough to pull off an entire Ring performance.  What a performance to begin your journey.

 

Posted on

Fallen Heroes Remembered

 

                                                        The British Advance   The Battle of Brooklyn    1776

    Somewhere, beneath the brownstones and newly chic coffeehouses and restaurants of the Gowanus district of Brooklyn, New York, transected by the busy streets of 3rd street and 4th avenue, lies a mass grave.  Buried by centuries and concrete, tens of thousands of people daily unknowingly walk over heroes, several hundred lain together head to foot, placed there by invading British armies in August of 1776.  Attempts over the years to identify the hallowed ground, and memorialize appropriately these men of an another age and another time,  have proved fruitless.  The place, once country berm against a small creek known as Gowanus, has likely been erased by history and the massive growth of a modern metropolis.  Yet , somewhere beneath the raging civilization, they are there, the remnants of the 1st Maryland, known as the Maryland 400, who took it upon themselves, to sacrifice themselves, and save a nation.

    The people who participated in the Revolutionary War for American Independence required a will and internal rectitude of such supreme depth to accept the challenge of defeating the greatest military power on earth, that it  at times of crisis,  many assumed the hand of divine providence.   John Page declared , in his 1776  letter to Thomas Jefferson,  “Do you not think an angel rides in this whirlwind, and directs this storm?”  At the center of the whirlwind, of course,  was not the epic philosopher Jefferson, but, like all conflagrations,  the every day citizens that left their nondescript worlds to put their lives at risk for a cause they felt greater then themselves.  As through history, men of similar geography and life view formed  militias in their home towns, and met up with their like minded neighbors, to form regiments. In a world where the violence of the battle and the paucity of medical knowledge to prevent disease among congregated men or respond appropriately to injury made the risk of dying a palpable reality, the cause had to be clear and indisputable to risk all.  The ideas of equality and freedom, not just for the elite, but for every man, was just such a powerful elixir.  Among the most capable and the most committed, was the 1st Maryland.  The men of Maryland were acutely aware that their colony had been formed on revolutionary principles —  particularly, religious tolerance, at a time of rigid religious segregation.  This innate binding of people to accept other placed Maryland at the forefront of colonies that could understand the implications of a document such as the Declaration of Independence.  It brought the 1st Maryland a reputation of being one of the most accomplished, courageous, and committed regiments of General George Washington’s fledgling army.

    The world forever changed on July 4th,1776 with the Declaration of Independence.  A treatise that stated men were not so much bound by their ancestry but the revolutionary concept of a set of ideals opened the world to inexorable tumult between the traditions of tribe and king, and the enlightened view that every man should be his own king.  On the North American continent, the ideas were so compelling that it determined to pit men against the greatest economic and military power on earth in Great Britain.  The British King,  King George III, was certainly not of a mind to allow such heresy to take root and fragment off a massive portion of his worldly dominion, and determined to ruthlessly crush the revolt.  He was not interested in drawn out affairs.  He sent a massive transoceanic invasion force of 35,000 to snuff out a wisp of optimism that may have been gleaned by the Americans in their unexpected achievement of the ignominious withdrawal of British forces from Boston the winter of 1775.  Despite the massive expanse of the American colonies, there were only three populations centers of any significance, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and the British military plan was to capture New York, carve the rebellion in half, and take care of each residual remnant separately.  The Continental Congress promised General Washington a fighting force of 28,000 men, but the reality between a professional fighting force, and a ragtag conglomeration of disparate militias, was acutely apparent.  The brief ebullience of the July Declaration quickly  gave way to dismay, as a very real professional fighting force of 32,000 men, 3000 supporting navy delivered by over 100 royal fighting ships disembarked on Staten Island, preparing to deliver a knockout blow to the American rebel contingent guarding the city.  The rattled Americans could see the daily accumulation of an invasion force many times their own , and given the dominance of the royal Navy, no chance to do anything about it.  General Washington, unsure of British invasion beach, hastily determined to split in half his already outnumbered army, and managed only to sew confusion in the ranks and weaken his resistance capacity  further.  On the morning of August 22nd, no further guessing was necessary as seasoned troops began to transit across the harbor to Gravesend Bay, landing on the south shore of Long Island.  By noon there were 15000 troops including thousands of Hessian troops, considered among Europe’s finest, disembarked and facing a spread out, ill equipped and panicked 6000 Americans.  Generals Clinton and Cornwallis pinned the frontline troops at Guan Hills while a flanking maneuver fairly easily crushed inward the American’s left flank.  Almost immediately, desperation set in.  In short order, half of the entire American continental force was cratering and at risk for being entirely surrounded, and the war was in danger of being over before it had practically begun.

    General Washington, viewing the unfolding calamity from Brooklyn Heights, against the East River, realized only a hurried, dangerous retreat across the river to Manhattan offered any temporary salvation.  Some event would have to buy him time, and it would take asking the impossible of panicked retreating men to attack against all odds,  to gain that time.  With the retreating army piecemeal and chaotically drifting toward the heights, it fell to the several hundred men of the 1st Maryland guarding the south banks of Gowanus Creek near the old stone Vechte- Cortelyou farmhouse, coalesced under the leadership of Lord Stirling.  A Scottish lord peerage achieved through lineage, Lord Stirling (William Alexander) was every bit American born and bred.  He was a trusted confidant of Washington’s, an unconflicted American patriot, and stepped forward to take on the task with his troops.  Known forever as the Maryland 400, the fighting force was likely closer to 275 battle capable troops, facing at least five times the opposing British force, led by General James Grant.  Facing insurmountable odds, the Marylanders managed as many as five separate charges into the teeth of the advancing British army, facing artillery against flint muskets, often engaging in desperate hand to hand combat.  Where minutes mattered, the regiment managed to hold off the British for over four hours with savage sustained attack — until there was essentially no regiment left.  Behind the brave charges, thousands of American soldiers made it to the heights, escaping to Manhattan, to fight another day.  It was estimated less than 20 Marylanders survived the battle.

    The 1st Maryland Regiment holds the Line at the Old Stone House and Mill as troops escape across Gowanus Creek to the Brooklyn Heights, in the foreground.

    We are privileged on Memorial Day to take a moment to reflect on the sacrifice of so many to allow us to live out our lives in a land of freedom.  Very few understand how rare in human history this concept of universal freedom is, and how extraordinarily fragile such freedom truly is.  It has been borne on the back of enormous individual sacrifice, that at most times, was given with little faith in a successful outcome or sufficient reason for the sacrifice.  More often than not, it was given to protect the fellow human along side that perhaps would survive to enjoy someday the preservation of those freedoms, the freedom to live an eventful and self determined life.  We owe so much to all who have given limb and life in defense of an indivisible truth that all people are worthy and all opportunity for happiness is shared.

    With a marauding, overwhelming British force and a collapsing army, no 1st Marylander could expect that their individual sacrifice in the middle of a whirlwind, could possibly effect the ultimate outcome in the slightest.  But they were determined to give their lives at least trying to hold their freedoms to their last breath, and in so doing, in the middle of the whirlwind, gave the angels time to make miracles happen.

    Somewhere beneath the bustling metropolis of Brooklyn, New York, lie 256 Marylanders, lain by their British foes in a mass grave, facing east and towards the rising sun, brother to brother.

    Thanks to my father, and all veterans, who served and sacrificed for their country, on this Memorial Day.

    Posted on

    Who’s Country Is It Anyway?

    New York Times November 5th 1968

    In significant quarters of the United States, the election of Richard Nixon was a cultural event.  An appalling cultural event.   Nixon was seen by many as an abomination of the symbol  America was supposed to project to the rest of the world in their chief executive position.  He was a dark, conniving destroyer of reputations, who saw communists where others saw progressives, and worst of all, had support of what he referred to as the “silent majority” — to liberal elites, the great reactionary underbelly of American life.  This sense of Nixon, epitomizing the cancer on progress as a people,  was forever memorialized by Pauline Kael, the entertainment critic for New Yorker Magazine, stating, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them”.  The cultural divide extended uniformly through the American Media and the country’s universities, who saw their burgeoning activism and progressivism threatened by the whims of an electoral college that had rewarded, in the defiance of the popular will, a person antithetical to all  they envisioned for a country in transition.  Finally, it was immersed in the permanent government, the Washington bureaucracy, that could not conceive of a cadre of Nixon loyalists infecting the levers of power, only 8 short years from the time their Camelot infused hero, John Kennedy, had supposedly banished Nixon to the political wilderness.  Yet there he was.  With his election , Nixon had overturned their world, and the clash as to who would control the narrative, and who’s narrative would prevail, commenced almost immediately.

    Five years later, despite President Nixon’s seemingly immense electoral popularity, the permanent state and media, helped by Nixon’s many flaws, managed to take him down.  The President, who in 1972 was elected by one of the greatest landslides in American history, found himself only 20 months later, by August 8, 1974, without any residual  political support and had to resign, rather than face impeachment.  The attack that had exposed his fatal mistake, had both external and internal elements.  The American press, led by the intrepid reporters Woodward and Bernstein, had done the heavy lifting of telling the story of Nixon and his staff, but its was many years  later, when it was finally admitted that ‘Deep Throat’ ,the prime whistleblower who functioned as Woodward and Bernstein’s inside mole, was Mark Felt, Associate Director  of the FBI.  The deep state and press, sharing a mutual disdain for Nixon, had collaborated to bring him down.

    Thus, the means for securing a vaccination against elections that threatened the accepted status quo- in essence, sustained, intense and disproportionate press focus on perceived vulnerabilities of an unacceptable president, coupled if possible with deep state cooperation and coordination — was realized.  For the next forty years, with variable intensity, the machinery was oriented towards reigning in Republican Presidents.  The exception was the Clinton experience, where the mainstream media, positioned to bury the “intern” story, was caught completely off guard by a new force to this point not recognized, the internet, with a new arm of investigative oversight less biased by traditional views of the world exemplified by a uniquely new reporter, Matt Drudge.

    The years of the Obama Administration were the reconstruction of the Kennedyesque narrative.  Mr. Obama, a compelling figure who pushed all the right buttons — suave, progressive, intellectual — was feted for eight years by a compliant press the protected the image against whispered, darker reflections of a more imperious side – Fast and Furious, the weaponization of the IRS and other government agencies, the Benghazi debacle.  None of the narratives gained weight, or reached the White House, because the press, having learned from the Clinton experience wouldn’t let it, and the politicized Justice Department had determined the ends justified the means.  The end of the Obama Administration presented real dangers, though, to all that had been accomplished.  An unstable maverick in Donald Trump had managed to wrest the Republican nomination, and showed no indication that he would follow the civility of previous Republican candidates to avoid the risk of a war on culture.  At the same time, the Obama legacy was to be put in the hands of Hillary Clinton, a uniquely soiled candidate who encompassed the worst traits of her husband’s love affair with crony capitalism and innate dishonesty without the accompanying natural political instincts.   What to do….What to do.

    It progressively appears the old war horse of media narrative and deep state coordination was dusted off and pointed at Trump.  Unlike in Nixon’s case, no one waited to see how the election would turn before initiating action.  Too much was at stake, and no one would be able to trust the internet to cooperate.  Trump was a perfectly designed foil.  He had no political experience and no real organization.  His business life was riddled with shady characters, shoddy tactics, and international scope.  He was the perfect anti-Obama — rude, bombastic, and reactionary.  Not since the juxtaposition of Kennedy to Nixon, was the righteousness of the process so obviously clear to both media and deep state characters as the potential jump from Obama to Trump.  With such juxtapositions, the trust in the natural electoral process to do the right thing could not be calmly and passively accepted.  The first action was to somehow cleanse Hillary Clinton of her stunning malfeasance in her Clinton Foundation activities, laced with sloppy security breeches codified in thousands of destroyed emails on a private server — and the on going abeyance of the Obama Administration, and perhaps the President himself.   This required tortuous legal justifications by the Justice Department and FBI, that under a Republican Administration would have led to a Constitutional crisis —  interviews not recorded and not taken under oath, immunity provided preemptively, legal decisions to ignore the mountain of evidence and declare outcome prior to any legal process.  Despite the smell, the media accepted the outcome with satisfaction.  The second process was to turn the legal investigative engine upon the opponent Trump, taking the kernel of longstanding Russian interference with American elections and point a one sided lens upon Trump.  Cooperation with the Clinton campaign with acceptance of opposition research purchased by Clinton and then laundered like dirty money through government investigative organs to have it appear as clean counter intelligence,  appears to have required coordinated activity with both the Justice Department and FBI, and possibly National Security agencies.  Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal was the first to report the identification of a possible mole positioned by the FBI in the opposition Trump campaign.  Andrew McCarthy of the National Review, a former federal prosecutor, has outlined in devastating fashion, the two juxtaposed processes of investigation of Clinton and Trump, as near polar opposites by the same legal arms of our government.  After the stunning election of Trump to the Presidency, the narrative had to be put into over-drive, from one of Russian Interference to the quid pro quo of Russian Collusion, and from nearly the first day, the elected President has been under attack in a fashion positioned to overturn the election.

    In my childhood, I remember the daily broadcasts of the Congressional hearings that pealed away Nixon’s defensive layers one by one, until the core conspiracy had been identified, vilified, and the outcome inevitable.  The combined pressure of external and internal forces is immense and inexorable.  Nixon’s supreme failure was the confluence of the elite institutions hatred of his persona and resultant success threatening the accepted meme, and the extent to which he used unsavory elements to fight back.  Trump’s own naivety may have been his best weapon.  Nearly two years of searching for evidence of ‘Russian Collusion’ has turned up nothing potentially for the simple reason that there may have been no there there.  The Trump phenomena did not rely on traditional campaign structures and was therefore was not sophisticated enough to contemplate an organized coordinative process involving Russians, hackers, and Facebook ads.  Trump was too busy utilizing a previously unconceived triad of threadbare campaign finance, old fashion rallies, and celebrity fueled twitter artillery.  Stunningly, he won, and the unseemly, unsophisticated attacks and subsequent dismantling of the progressive legacy have driven the permanent state and Obama holdovers to the precipice of madness.

    The clarity as to what has transpired has only begun to be revealed, and a painful boomerang may yet strike heaviest on those who sought to artificially direct the outcome.  Unlike forty-five years ago, the country may not accept the logic to overturn the election, and those that hoped to control events in a constitutional republic, may find enough of the old pride to assure  a government of the people, by the people, for the people, has not yet perished from the face of the earth.

     

     

     

    Posted on

    Ramparts of Civilization : New Look, Same Vision

    Manning the Ramparts at Bunker Hill
        photo attrib.  walkingthepoint.com

    We are rapidly approaching the ninth year of this labor of love I call Ramparts of Civilization.  Since inception on July 4th, 2010, almost 500 individual treatises encompassing over 400,000 written words have filled the pages of this blog.  Topics have kept a diverse view of an interesting world. We watched the unfolding amazing rescue of Chilean miners through techniques of horizontal drilling we now recognize as the basis of modern fracking, to the introduction of private industry to the once government exclusive world of space travel.  We visited the heroic worlds of Washington at Trenton, Confederate regiments at Gettysburg, and the brave airmen of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain.  We sought the roots of inspiration of great artists like Caravaggio and Winslow Homer, master composers such as Haydn, Debussy, and the immortal Beethoven.  We memorialized inspirational leaders in crisis  like Lincoln and Churchill,   We uncovered greatness in lesser known heroes of western civilization, like Norman Borlaug, Nikola Tesla,  and Roger Bannister.  And through it all, Ramparts kept pace with the characters, political challenges and strains applied to the foundational creeds of western civilization, and leapt to the defense of unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Over 37,000 viewers from 167 countries have sought out, and hopefully enjoyed, the stories of our mutual contributors, legacy and journey.

    Its been fun and educational for me, and, if you’ll  have me, I think I’ll try to keep it all going a while longer.

    To keep the experience fresh, a few changes are worthwhile and appropriate.  In keeping with the times, the blog theme has been changed in appearance and color, to bring a cleaner, more accessible look to the site.  Rather than having to scroll down for each individual posting, the essays will be more coalesced on the front page, with introductory paragraphs visible to hopefully entice a deeper dive, and a more diverse reading experience.  Some may miss the old Ramparts brand photo of Fort Union, New Mexico, one of the final stops of the Santa Fe Trail, but the contemplative and discerning figure of Abraham Lincoln highlights the increasing depth of focus of the site, consistent with readers who have been staying longer, and responding more.   The mobile site now Apps on your phone  as Winston Churchill, a patron saint of Ramparts, so you can take Ramparts with you for review on your phone, wherever you go. And one more subtle change.  The site’s banner, “Get Your Daily Ramparts”  has been changed to the more assertive “Come Defend the Ramparts”, as it has become increasingly apparent that the once universal values that girded civilization are under increasing attack and require a more inspired defense, that demands, and will require, the  active vigilance of each and every one of us.

    I hope you will find the site still worth a portion of your time you reserve for the internet.  The ongoing vastness of interesting subjects, people, and events awaits us.  Through it all, we will keep the same vision that inspired the very first page of this blog 8 years ago, and stays like an eternal flame today.  Welcome again dear readers and commenters,  to the refreshed Ramparts of Civilization.

    Posted on

    Flying Too Close to the Sun

    Paul Ryan
    Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

    Daedalus, having created the ultimate labyrinth to secure forever the Minotaur for King Minos on the island of Crete, was imprisoned by the king to prevent him from ever revealing the brilliant secrets of the labyrinth to anyone else, on any other land. Daedalus, however, determined to set himself free, and using his profound intellect constructed a perfect set of wings for he and his son, Icarus, to leave the island by the method the king thought impossible – by flight.  Wings so beautifully constructed from string, feathers and wax, that Daedalus and his son were soon safely airborne over the sea, and free of the king’s confinement.  Icarus, however, enamored with the freedom of flight, ignored his father’s admonition of the fragility of the freedom supported by wings – too close to the foamy sea, and the wings would be water laden; too close to the sun, and the wax would melt , the wings fragment and deconstruct. Surging ever higher, Icarus’s wings deconstructed, and he was dashed into the sea, and drowned.  Daedalus’s victory proved etherial, and his  great intellectual gifts were not sufficient to overcome human nature.

    Paul Ryan had hopes on November 8th, 2016, of escaping the prison of government inaction of the past thirty years, and finally freeing the budget of the United States from the strangulating grip of unreformed entitlements.  His two decade personal crusade to use his intellect and character to achieve the politically daunting process of epic, generational governmental action had lived for this day.  He had learned at the feet of the energetic and innovative Jack Kemp upon coming to Washington DC, became at 28 years old, a politician himself and won for 9 consecutive elections the 1st District of Wisconsin’s congressional seat.  He rose to the head of the Budget Committee,, then the House Ways and Means Committee, succeeded getting the House to pass the Ryan inspired entitlement reform bills only to have them quashed in the Senate, then in 2016 became the radical reform candidate in the Vice Presidential position on Mitt Romney’s ticket, only to fall in defeat to President Obama.  But on November 9th, 2016, the now Speaker of the House surveyed a republican house, senate and president, finally in position to achieve real reform as a culmination of a twenty year quest.

    So close, and yet, not remotely close enough.  The appetite for Ryan type reform with measured, distributed pain to a mature and educated electorate was as etherial as the wings of Icarus, and quickly dashed.  The President, who’s personality Ryan found untenable, was of no mind to drive policy that required entitlement reform beyond Obamacare, and fretted about that.  Ryan, as Speaker, was poorly constituted to be any kind of an enforcer, and could barely assemble a weakened bill overturning the Affordable Care Act, only to see little direction from the White House and no direction from the Senate, as even weaker versions failed to pass.  The ultimate dagger was.aptly,  delivered by Senator John McCain, who proved to be the deciding vote preserving Obamacare, after having just completed his  re-election to the Senate in a candidacy whose central message was repealing it.  Any talking of budgetary restraint to protect against future debt growth disappeared in a tax bill that valued growth over deficit relief, and a budget bill that blasted out of the water any residual gasps of control.

    The once rising Young Gun of the House, the Thinker, that was going to secure America’s future with policies designed on smarts and freedom, looked at the landscape and realized no one was listening to his intellectual framing any longer.  Only 48 years old, a recent Presidential timber candidate, Vice Presidential nominee, and as Speaker, third in line to the current President, decided to leave the arena.  Paul Ryan had designed some beautifully rendered means of escape for the country from an impending future of debt constraint and deterioration, but he proved all too deferential and insufficient in ego to drive the dream to victory.

    In 1929, Winston Churchill was asked to abdicate his cabinet position of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and rapidly drifted into the political wilderness, his ideas and style felt to be antithetical to modern progress, and with little respect from the opposition and minimal support from his own party.  He was 55 years old, and would not return for a decade to any position of public trust or leadership.  But Winston Churchill was always sure of his calling, even when destiny seemed cruel in its place for him.  The World Crisis of 1939 broke, and suddenly Churchill’s type of leadership was felt to be the missing ingredient to survival.  It may be Ryan has little stomach for the abuse Churchill endured until history again found him, and will want to only spend his time in think tanks with people who are sympathetic to his theories.  I, for one, thought Ryan understood his calling, and the recognition that he very well could have been the indispensable man, that Churchill always assumed himself to be.

    It appears to not be the case, and Ryan will watch as others avert their eyes to the obvious treacherous waters ahead.  It is sad for me to admit, as I thought Paul Ryan was the Right Stuff, that he would be committed enough to the country and its means of governance, that he would let the voters decide whether he was a prophet or a nag.  Alas, it appears the arena he was close to dominating proved too big for his moment.  Too carefully crafted and averse to the dirty, grungy nature of politics, Ryan flew too close to the sun.

    Its nice to reflect back, though, when the fire was in his belly:

    Posted on

    Jascha Heifetz: “God’s Fiddler”

    Jascha Heifetz
    npr.org

    It is daunting to be the very best anyone ever saw, capable as no other, of  a unique skill.  The rarified achievement at this level, and the difficulty maintaining it,  does strange things to people, and is often associated with at times somewhat bizarre or aberrant behavior.  Michael Jordan for the brief years he was a professional basketball player, was without peer and everybody knew it.  Yet when he was giving his acceptance speech for the national basketball hall of fame, surrounded by his family,friends, and teammates, he lambasted everybody for not recognizing in real time his standard of performance or contributing in any way towards the outcome he achieved.  Tiger Woods self destructively blew apart his unrivaled capabilities.  Albert Einstein spent the rest of his life trying to live up to his unequaled productive decade of olympic mathematical genius from 1905 to 1916 defining his special and general theories of relativity, forever injected into the strange world of academic celebrity.

    Jascha Heifetz was one of the best anyone ever saw, or in his case, heard, and unlike the others, it was clear from the first time anyone ever heard him play until the last time he performed in public – he was unrivaled, the best ever, and everyone including Heifetz knew it.  At age 12 in a private concert the renowned violinist Fritz Kreisler attended, Kreisler remarked, ” That’s it. The rest of us might as well break our fiddles across our knees.”  Heifetz’s teacher, the famous Leopold Auer, was once asked to name his greatest students.  Auer proceeded to name many of the most famous violinists of the twentieth century he had helped mold, but conspicuously left out Heifetz.  When it was brought to his attention that he had forgotten perhaps his most famous client, Auer replied, “Heifetz was not my student; he was God’s Student.”

    Jascha Heifetz was born in 1901 in Vilna, Lithuania, in the Russian Empire still ruled by czars. His father was a violinist with the local orchestra, but he was nondescript, as the jewish family was  not capable of being part of the  societal nomenklatura.  But young Jascha, from the moment music was revealed to him, glowed with an otherworldly level of brilliant talent, that the prejudices of society were  helpless to suppress. Russia of the early twentieth century was still in the grip of czarist totalitarianism and societal hierarchy, but since Peter the Great, the classical arts and the spectacular Russian talent in the humanities were venerated by the Russian elite as Russia’s answer to the West, that looked down its nose upon Russia’s feudal societal retrenchment. Greatness in Russia’s society, when recognized, received expert attention, and by age 5, Heifetz was under guidance of Leopold Auer, the St. Petersburg’s Music Conservatory’s renowned violin instructor, and by eleven in front of a St. Petersburg concert audience estimated at 25,000. The mystique associated with Heifetz prodigious talent was revealed for good.

    Talent supplied from the heavens above.  Heifetz toured Europe and then at age 17,  a Carnegie Hall debut that made his celebrity as a performer international.  1917 was the year of Russian upheaval, and Heifetz determined to stay in America, the land of safety and boundless opportunity.  Heifetz was one of a number of spectacular Russian performers, such as Milstein, Rubinstein, and Rachmaninoff who read the Russian Revolution as antithetical to classic western civilization and musical expression, and sought  their future in the West.  Heifetz had an additional advantage in that he understood presciently the power of the media, and the new vehicles of recording, radio, and film, as projecting to millions, what was once the provence of the few thousands of a concert hall.

    Across the world, the twin towers of Heifetz’s unparalleled technique, the precision and speed of his left hand on the stringboard of the violin, and the spectacular control and sonority of his bow, projected as no other performer, as an peerless, brilliantly hued perfection of performance. His sound was like no other – tight, precise, intense, olympian – delivered perfectly each time while maintaining an almost serene, relaxed expression in his face, seeming  to project that what others found difficult or challenging, Heifetz found effortless.  The visual appearance of control was so overwhelming that observers often reflected that Heifetz’s playing was lacking in passion, too cool in temperature for some listeners.  The semblance of cool was however easily removed by simply closing one’s eyes and resorting to the world of sound, where the brilliant fire of his play became immediately apparent, and absolutely unique. Gorgeous waves of interacting sounds reflecting incredible depth of knowledge of the composer’s intent, the capabilities of the instrument, and at a pace, intensity, and precision few could hold for a moment, much less with each and every performance for fifty years.  He was the best, he knew it, and everyone else knew it, too.

    We are thankful that Heifetz was sufficiently of the modern age during the zenith of ability, where there were opportunities to perform significant visual recordings of his technique to layer on his sound, securing his position in musical history.  Absorb the whole of a concert from over seventy years ago, caught on film, of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.  Projecting as imperious and unflappable, Heifetz plays to cool perfection, but the sound is nothing short of fiery abandon, and the technical virtuosity out of this world.

    Later in life near his retirement from performance, the intimate greatness of a solo performance was thankfully caught on television, and though Heifetz was visually much older, performed Bach, still sounding like no one else.

    Heifetz was considered an extremely difficult personality to live with, struggling with family interactions and several divorces, and reflecting to his fellow performers as bordering on misanthropic. I suspect that such perfection may have contained a thin thread of autistic clarity that allowed him to grasp and reproduce perfect musical moments, but little capability  for human interaction when not listening to his internal muses.

    The muses however they dominated him, gave him the vehicle of expression that fills the rest of us with awe, from the casual music listener to the most talented musical performers that had to perform in constant comparison.  Heifetz died in 1987, the world that produced him and his extraordinary Russian compatriots long gone, but the cool flame of perfection lives among us still.

    Heifetz – the best ever.  He knew it, and so does everybody else.

    Posted on

    People We Should Know #33 – James Lovell

    James Lovell performing navigation aboard Apollo 8
    attrib. wikipedia

    March 25, 2018, is Commander Jim Lovell’s 90th birthday.  He is of course part of a very small group of people who know what its like to be placed upon an ignited,  controlled bomb weighing over 6 million pounds fully fueled and delivering over 7.6 million pounds-force through a 33 foot diameter circle achieving a speed at full throttle of 7500 feet per second.  He is one of three men who have ever travelled to the farthest point reached by humanity beyond the earth – 248,655 nautical miles.  He saw 269 sunrises in space and spent about thirty days in space over four missions.

    Yet, there is one career attribute that James Lovell holds uniquely among all other space farers.  He is the only man who has circumnavigated to the moon twice…and never placed his foot upon its surface.  The first time was part of the plan.  The second, a failure of mission, that will always be an exemplary  triumph of leadership.  It is the compelling story of dealing with ultimate adversity and facing the fact head on that a personal pinnacle of a storied career would never be achieved, makes James Lovell , on his birthday, Ramparts #33  – People We Should Know.

    Though born in Ohio, James Lovell was essentially a Wisconsin boy, raised in Milwaukee and educated at the University of Wisconsin Madison.  His first and overriding interest was flight and rocketry, and to assure his interest be realized, he applied, was accepted and transferred to the U.S. Naval Academy.  Upon graduation he attended flight school and received his naval aviator wings in1954 .  In 1958 he was selected for  Pax River Test Pilot School, met future astronauts Wally Schirra and Charles Conrad there, and graduated first in his class.  By this time, the world’s attention regarding flight had been shifted from the level of the atmosphere, to space itself with the successful launch in 1957 0f Sputnik by the USSR.  The best military test pilots were considered the appropriate candidates for selection for the first humans in space in both the US and USSR, as they competitively lurched toward rocketry capable of such achievements.  As has been told in Tom Wolfe’s epic tale of test pilots and the early space program,  The Right Stuff, some test pilots like legendary Chuck Yeager did not feel the pull to leave the active piloting of an atmospheric vehicle for the passive ride offered of a pilot on a rocket.  But rocketry was  in Lovell’s blood, and he applied for astronaut status.  His test pilot school comrade, Wally Schirra made the first cut to be part of the Mercury 7.  Conrad and Lovell would have to wait to become part of the Next 9 for the planned Gemini program.  Lovell achieved his childhood dream of riding a rocket into space on December 4th, 1965 as part of the Gemini 7 mission with Commander Frank Borman spending 14 days in space and over 200 orbits of the earth, achieving a landmark controlled rendezvous with another craft in space, Gemini 6.  He returned to space in 1966 aboard Gemini 12 with eventual moon walker astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, spending time outside of the vehicle, and successfully docking with another craft.

    It is difficult to recall a time when the US space program was achieving on an every three month basis another space milestone, but such was the pace of the last half of the 1960s as both the US and USSR jockeyed to be the first to land on the moon.   The extreme dangers associated with constant tests  in space advancing untested technology eventually caught up with both countries.  In the case of the US, it was realized in the horrific fire aboard Apollo 1, ending the lives of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee on the launch pad.  A pause in the accelerated schedule for Apollo took place for 20 months while the cause of the fire and adjustments to the command module were made and tested.  This had a significant effect on crew selections, and Lovell became one of three crew members of the first human manned craft to orbit the moon, Apollo 8, electrifying the entire world on Christmas Eve 1968 with a poignant reading of biblical Genesis as they were orbiting the earth’s lone terrestrial  satellite.  Apollo’s 8’s spectacular success led to rapid progression to the eventual moon landing of July 20, 1969, of Apollo 11.  Lovell, having been part of the crew first to the moon, looked to his turn to set his feet upon it, and was scheduled for the Apollo 14 voyage as commander of the mission in 1970. A crew re-ordering moved Lovell up in the Apollo series to Apollo 13, and his chance to be the first man twice to the moon, with it.

    So set the stage for Apollo 13.  On April 11, 1970, James Lovell led a team of Fred Haise and Jack Swigert into the command module and a launch towards the moon took place, thrusting Lovell into history.  An initial two minute shut down of part of the Saturn V’s main stage brought an initial concern to the commander but it was adjusted for, and the flight continued uneventfully, successfully leaving earth orbit, docking the command module, with attached Service Module,  to the LEM (lunar lander), and heading for the moon.

    55 hours into the mission, disaster struck out of nowhere.  Initiating the stirring fans for the oxygen tanks  in the Service Module,  the astronauts were suddenly disturbed by a loud bang, multiple alarms, and oscillations of the vehicle that worsened by the second.  205,000 miles from home, they were faced with a terrible reality, the Command Module’s power and oxygen was rapidly declining, and the source of the catastrophe were ruptured oxygen tanks visually leaking life giving oxygen at a rate that left at most 130 minutes to certain fatality.  Lovell and the ground team at Johnson Space Center in Houston realized the only hope for survival would be closing down of the Command Module and transferring the three man crew into the LEM, built for two, as a life raft.

    The blown panels and ruptured oxygen tanks of the Apollo 13 Service Module are visible as the module is eventually  jettisoned.

    Critically the distance from earth was such that a direct abort of the mission and return was impossible, and the injured craft would have to be to the moon and slung around it to return to Earth.  Within a few minutes, the mission had gone from Lovell as the crowning achievement of his professional life with a landing and walk on the moon, to a survival mission in a severely crippled craft with huge challenges in a successful return to Earth.  At best, could the craft be cajoled into several more days of diminished power, reduced oxygen, rising carbon dioxide and with minimal understanding as to whether the Command Module, the only means of re-entering safely on Earth, could be resuscitated satisfactorily for the critical re-entry and landing.

    It was at this moment of supreme failure and danger, that Lovell shone beyond all commanders previous.  His crew struggled psychologically and physically with the miserable conditions of the craft, with temperatures maintained at 39 degrees, and Fred Haise developing a serious urinary tract infection.  The LEM was not designed for either the oxygen demand nor the carbon dioxide production of three men for longer then a day and a half, and they would need a minimum of three.  Alternative air scrubbers were fashioned on the fly.  Circling the moon at a heightened apogee of orbit resulted in the need for course corrections, that Lovell and his crew by care timed burns navigated by dead reckoning, with a mistake likely to send them bouncing of the earth’s atmosphere to certain death.  The command module, the only means of safely returning to earth would at the appropriate time have to be restarted, the LEM and Service Module safely ejected, and a heat shield that had been juxtaposed to the exploded service module hopefully undamaged.  From the catastrophe of April 14 to the re-entry of April 17th, Lovell kept the crew and himself focused on the task at hand and never wavered.  The dream of the moon was gone forever. It was to achieve the near impossible that interested him now, and with an 82 second extension of the expected re-entry radio silence time, it was not clear to anyone on the ground Lovell and his crew had pulled it off, the first successful intra-space catastrophe and recovery mission.

    Lovell did pull it off, and the aborted mission to the moon , despite its failure, remains one of NASA’s most spectacular collaborative successes.  The courage, quick thinking, leadership, and steadiness of Lovell, absorbing and implementing one of the best engineering recovery processes ever achieved by an organizational mission team is one for the books.  James Lovell never got his third shot at the moon.  The NASA moon program ended prematurely with Apollo 17 in 1972, and 46 years later we have yet to go back.  James Lovell at 90 years of age may have missed out of being able to put his foot in moon dust and gaze at the earth from another planetary body, but he can look with pride that he is remembered for his achievements in failure above those that were part of successful missions.  Getting everybody home when it looked impossible is a singular achievement of this long ago era.  If we soon head back, Apollo 13 will be one of the steps that made it possible.

    On his ninetieth birthday, Ramparts salutes Commander James Lovell as Someone We Should Know #33.

    Posted on

    People We Should Know #32 – Roger Bannister

    Roger Bannister breaks the four minute mile — attrib. GETTY images/Express.co.UK

    The above photo freezes in time one of the epic moments of the 20th century.  Much of what passes for civilization today is the concept of celebrity, the idea of being known for being well known — but this is a relatively new laurel. Until recently, Western civilization, particularly since the Enlightenment, had oriented its esteem on the concept of achievement, the idea that any individual regardless of class, on innate ability, could advance society permanently.  The achieving individual sought achievement through identification of their own talents, self directed effort, securing their commitment to attempting to surmount the acknowledged challenge faced by all humanity, and if possible, surmounting it.  The idea of running an arbitrary distance, the mile, under 4 minutes, had long been felt to be outside the physiologic capability of one particular mammal, human beings.  Unlike any other mammal, the fact that such a potential barrier existed uniquely drove some humans to attempt to prove the barrier a myth. On May 6th, 1954 at Oxford, England, Roger Bannister became the first known individual to drive the human body over the distance of a mile under 4 minutes, and another epic story of individual accomplishment thought previously impossible was recorded. With Sir Roger Bannister’s passing March 3rd, 2018 at the age of 88, Ramparts takes this opportunity to celebrate Sir Roger Bannister as People We Should Know #32, most importantly because Sir Roger himself, as multi-faceted individual,  saw this epic achievement as only his life’s third most important contribution to civilization.

    With dramatic advances in athletic training now often corrupted by artificial pharmaceutical enhancements, the modern concept of “breaking records” is now looked upon with some cynicism.  Athletes such as Roger Bannister was in 1954, are but a quaint memory.  Roger Bannister was not a professional track athlete.  He was a physician who ran as a side activity, and discovered he was surprisingly good at it.  Rigorous training was what Roger Bannister was attempting to accomplish in the medical field, not the track field.  With an ideal physique for the middle distance race of 5280 feet, or 1500 meters, depending on the event, undergoing minimal training but with an acute sense of physiology, Bannister began to identify as he entered adulthood and track competition, that middle distances,  once thought of as endurance events as opposed to sprints, were instead hybrids. Despite a complicated life that intersected intense medical training with physical training and inhibited Bannister’s focus on athletics, he accepted some fairly advanced training principles for his time, of interval and hill training, to substitute for his inability to exclusively commit to running.

    Inspired initially by the 1948 Olympics in London to become a track athlete, Bannister, by  the Helsinki Olympics in 1952,was felt to be a legitimate threat to win the 1500 meters.  In a race in which the first seven participants beat the previous olympic record, Bannister finished a personally disappointing fourth.   He recognized that his approach of intermittent commitment would not be sufficient to defeat the best in the world, and being an innately competitive person, determined he needed to orient himself not just to defeating race participants, but defeating his own perceived limitations.  He set for himself the goal of achieving a sub-four minute mile, a goal which not only had resisted all previous attempts, but would require an average under 60 second quarter mile lap, not felt likely to be physically possible to maintain over a four lap distance.

    Bannister, an accomplished person, felt the pull to accomplish more, and looked around him to see others with similar drive.  Through the summer of 1953, Bannister pulled his personal best down some 8 seconds to 4:02 and could see how the epic speed might be achieved. The only question was at to whether he would be the one to first achieve it.   On May 6th, 1954 at Oxford in a local University versus Amateur Athletic track meet, the conditions were positioned,  if his indomitable will was sufficiently present.  The race had future Olympic champions within the field, and it was acknowledged that they would pace the man who was closing in on the barrier, to the extent they could.  There was an atmosphere of potential history making in the air, and three thousand people , and media, showed up to for the mile event to see if the supposed insurmountable barrier could be broken by an Englishman. The wind at times gusting to 25 miles an hour threatened the attempt, but almost on cue it died down at race time and the challenge was on.  By the completion of the third lap, the pacers had positioned Bannister to have a chance, but it would take a sub sixty-second lap to do it, and it would have to be all Roger.  With just under 300 yards to go, Bannister began his kick, passing his pacer, and pushed all alone down the final turn and straightaway.

    No modern conveniences for the assembled such as clock ticking in tandem with the runner’s efforts were visible, but everyone knew it would be close, and the swelling roars of the crowd pushed Bannister to leave it all on the finish.  Collapsing past the finish line, a video and multiple photos exist that have saved for us both the effort and the drama.  It was ever more dramatic when the official time announcement was delayed some seconds while multiple stop watches confirmed the time…3 minutes 59.4 seconds … and Roger Bannister entered history of those who have been first.

    The record would stand barely a month until it was broken, but no matter, a physician who considered physical capability only one part of a life to be maximized to its full potential had done the ‘impossible’ first, and proved this barrier like many others, an obstacle to be overcome.  Which leads to Sir Roger Bannister’s comment that this achievement was for him only the third of a life dedicated to accomplishment.  Having achieved what he had set out to do as a physical being, Roger Bannister dedicated his life to what he saw as further and  greater  accomplishments, becoming a world renowned neurologist and a loving father and grandfather .

    I met Sir Roger Bannister briefly in the 1980s when he came to give a lecture on the obscure area of neurology of dysautonomia for which he was considered an expert.  He and the audience were fully aware that as much as he might be able to clarify the complicated subject of dysautonomia, inevitably everyone wanted to ultimately share in his memory of the day when he stood alone as the fastest miler in history and briefly feel what he felt.  For what was probably the ten-thousandth time, Sir Roger relented and let us share, but only after his lecture of what he felt was his life work was completed.

    It is an ironic footnote that the death of Sir Roger Bannister, a neurologist, was announced as a consequence of Parkinson’s Disease, a neurologic condition that inevitably steals an individual’s ability to move.  Ramparts People We  Should Know #32 – Roger Bannister will forever be associated with movement, as a gazelle, and a life that celebrated and worked toward sharing that capability with the world.

    Posted on

    People We Should Know #31 – Leonard Bernstein

    Leonard Bernstein
    1918-1990

    2018 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, and many of the world’s greatest orchestras are honoring the occasion by opening up their repertoires to display the dash and splash that was ‘Lenny’s’ compositional gifts of music to the world.  From the well known Broadway inspired cadences of West Side Story and Candide, to the more imposing Symphonies and Mass, Bernstein’s music evoked  American shades of 20th century classical music, albeit more profoundly evolved as a definitive American classical style by his contemporaries Copland, Thompson, Harris, and Barber.  His most famous contribution, West Side Story, is a synthesis of a triad of multi-genre genius, Bernstein of the score, Sondheim of the lyrics, and Jerome Robbins of the ballet.  The combination created a very modern unforgettably muscular American cultural creation that answered much like Porgy and Bess any sense of perceived inferiority complex of the American art scene against its more established European creators.  In addition to his music compositional creativity, Bernstein proved himself a polymath with concert level piano performance skills and superstar celebrity persona as conductor of the greatest orchestras, including his long tenure with the New York Philharmonic.   Leonard Bernstein, however, achieves on the 100th anniversary of his birth year status as Ramparts People We Should Know #31 most specifically for his most selfless gift to western civilization, his genius and lifetime contribution as a pedagogue,  delivering to multiple generations of performers, students and every day people alike, an unparalleled love and understanding of classical music as a critical pillar of our civilization, and distilling it into a form that all, regardless, of training or exposure, could profoundly enrich their own lives.

    Leonard Bernstein was born of Jewish Ukrainian immigrant parents on August 25th, 2018 in Lawrence, Massachusetts.  His prodigious musical talent showed itself early despite his family’s general passivity towards music.  He was recognized in school for both his performance ability as well as his musical intellect, and ended up despite his humble beginnings, studying music at Harvard, and eventually Curtis Music Institute in Philadelphia.  At a young age, he interacted with famous musical talents such as the composer Copland and conductors Serge Koussevitsky and Fritz Reiner, who recognized his singular talents and helped promote the unknown Bernstein. His initial fame was achieved at the conductor’s baton, substituting at age 25 without rehearsal and succeeding in melodramatic fashion for a suddenly indisposed Bruno Walter in front of the New York Philharmonic.  In rapid sequence, he reached equally epic heights with a series of well received compositions, Fancy Free (leading to On The Town), Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” Symphony #2, and eventually the superstar status of West Side Story.  The music carried the thematic structures of modern American idioms of syncopal rhythm and jazz, less defined by its originality as its ability to evoke modern American sensibilities as the new post-war superpower melting pot cauldron of influences, rather than the tired national strains of the dissembled Old World.  West Side Story was the music of youth, the multi-cultural rhythms of the streets, a muscular declaration of a unique American style.

    By the 1960’s Leonard Bernstein had ensconced himself as at a celebrity superstar level musical force, and was a much sought after conductor around the world.  He took advantage of his singular position to do something amazing on a relatively untested new medium that he believed could be a force magnifier for music popularity and understanding for the public at large, television.  As magnetic as he was on stage, in front of the cameras, he came off as welcoming, unpretentious, and never condescending in developing a complex topic.  He became famous for his patient and example laden teaching style he brought to the weekly broadcasts, Young Peoples Concerts with the New York Philharmonic on CBS.  From 1958 to 1972, Bernstein used the format of a classical music outreach concert to young people to develop their music intellect at the same time, with the concerts centered upon topics such as “What is a Melody?”, “What is a Mode?”, “The Sounds of a Symphony,”  and “Music Atoms: The Study of Intervals”.   He took apart complex compositions into digestible pieces that musical novices could appreciate, then re-assembled them into their musical canvas, enriching for everyone the hidden genius and life affirmations music can provide.  Through the bounty of YouTube, many of these master classes showcasing Bernstein’s special gift for making centuries old music come alive for the listener are available to us today:

    He recorded multiple symposiums in the development of music collected as The Unanswered Questions , on of the most famous was his five minute exposition on the entire development of Tonal Exposition we know as music:

    All was displayed to bring art to life for all to enjoy, in a medium that was accessible with a teaching style that was accessible.  Generations of Americans, and people the world over,  gained their willingness to make classical music a part of their life experience and learned to appreciate why western civilization could hardly be understood without music’s development alongside, replenishing and invigorating the cultural foundations of a healthy society.  Bernstein brought the artist’s lyrical brush to our understanding and appreciation of music, and likely saved classical music for another generation from being crowded out by modern technology’s assault that encourages shortened attention spans and the need for superficial gratifications.

    I heard Leonard Bernstein’s Fancy Free in a boisterous local performance of my local symphony orchestra this past weekend, along with Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Piano Concerto #5 and Ravel’s La Valse.   I can only imagine how ‘Lenny’ might have brought the whole concert to even greater life through a running narrative of what we were about to hear. One hundred years going, he was a proud defender of humanity’s most creative impulses, and a worthy recipient of Ramparts People We Should Know #31.