The Green Wave

Good gracious! I am still recovering from the excitement of stepping outside my usual territory as a musician and into the wildlands of jazz and pop. Monday night, at the urging of my friend, the brilliant guitarist Steve Rapson, I “played against type” and sang a version of Donna Summer’s song, “Hot Stuff,” as well as the old jazz standard “Cheek to Cheek.” What fun to explore this brave new (to me!) world. I feel opened up, freshly interested by the great world of songs, ready to explore and embrace them.

At the same time, my home country of native instincts and preference remains unchanged: Irish traditional song and my own brand of original story-song. These do not feel diminished by the safaris out to visit pop and jazz, but enriched in almost the same way that travel abroad can make home feel more mysterious, more worthy of exploration. These days I feel even more excited about the possibilities of combination, of collaboration, of juxtaposition. And not just in music, either, but in poetry, in scholarship, in friendship, in ways of living in the world. Everywhere I go these days, I see beautiful evidence of crossings-over, of cross-pollination, of things that seem separate opening up to include fresh references.

I’m keeping my musical citizenship, but am sailing out into new seas. Bon voyage to all of us!

Last evening I spent on the Thomas E. Lannon, a beautiful schooner that sails out of Gloucester Harbor. It is sheer pleasure to even look upon that gleaming green hull with its red and gold detaiing around the prow, the blond wood of the bowsprit, to say nothing of the three sails and the intricate rigging. No wonder at all that people fall in love with boats. I’m smitten with the Lannon – a dashing vessel if ever there was one.

Add to that the pleasure of being a musician among musicians and you have the makings of an excellent evening. All of us – musicians, sailors, and guests – were gathered there to benefit the Boston Celtic Music Festival,an amazing gathering of local talent that takes place now every January in Cambridge and Boston. In high spirits we sailed out, glad of the fresh wind, the clear sky and a bit of chop in the sea. Our dancer for the evening danced a slip-jig on an angle, at one point clutching the lines to avoid dancing down into the drink! There were songs and tunes, glasses of wine and bottles of beer, chat and the making or renewing of acquaintance.

For me, the highlight of the evening was the people, which reminds me yet again that we make music out of local ingredients – in other words, the people who gather to be with us. Tara and John, two old friends of mine, came on-board and warmed me with their presence. There’s something special about singing for people with whom you share history, and even more so if that history includes songs. I always love listening to my friend Michael O’Leary sing. His beautiful tenor voice is perfect for the job of encouraging the sailors to hoist the sails. And he’s often joined by piper, whistle-player, and singer David de la Barre, who adds a lovely rich note to any song. We also had the pleasure of hearing fiddler Eric Merrill sing along with his banjo, a rare treat. And my friend and Irish student, Andy Collins, joined us on guitar and added so much to all the tunes and songs. James Hamilton on flute and Cara Frankowcz on fiddle rounded out the crew.

I like thinking about how this one night of music is unique in all the world, never to be repeated. The music last night was assembled from the sea and salt, the wind, the ship dog (an adorable lab pup), the welcome of the captains, Tom and Kay, the evening light, the energy of our little group, and the spirits of the people who came to sail and listen and help. There is no such thing as a solitary star. We work best in constellations, I think, lending our light to something larger. But unlike those grand and ancient pictures that have helped mariners find their way through night seas, our constellations shift and reform depending on who we are and where we are. They are temporary guides in a local cosmos, one-of-a-kind and precious.

Here is our typical lesson. I come in, throw my school bag on the floor and immediately root in the ornate candy dish for my sweets of choice, all the while keeping half an ear on the lesson in progress in the other room. The sound of the piano is interrupted by Miss Roberts’ voice and rarely by the voice of the child struggling to produce a coherent line of music. At last the agony is over and the student is released from the shadowy house into the sun. Very likely she will only touch a piano if someone compels her, and another lesson will find her mildly surprised to be sitting at the upright with Miss Roberts, both of them dismayed.

I enter the music room and find, miraculously, that two mint milanos await me beside the piano. “Eat these,” she instructs. “Good for your brain.” And indeed, she knows me better than I know myself, drained after school and too far from lunch. I am only too happy to comply with this professional advice and do feel a surge of energy and interest in the world. “Play me your new song,” she tells me, and I play her whatever new little piece I’ve composed during the week. She is my first real listener, and even as I write this, I feel a welling-up of fierce gratitude to her, for she listened with her professional ear and with the ear of a priestess who hears my desire, my love, my hope. She liked my songs. “You’re like Chopin,” she would say, “with your quick fingers.”

And that’s usually where we went next, to Chopin or to Dvorzak or even “Rhapsody in Blue.” Then there were scales and arpeggios, chord progressions, and practice pieces from Hanon or Czerny or one of the other yellow Schirmer books. But starting there, with my own music, gave me a confidence in my own instincts and in what I knew my fingers and brain could do when they followed them. And Miss Roberts’ approbation and encouragement opened a door to me that no one else knew how to open – an opening into a world of music. I live there now, thanks to Miss Roberts.

In many ways, we all should have been more surprised to find Miss Ruth Olive Roberts living and teaching piano in Saco, Maine. True, she grew up there, the daughter of a Protestant minister, living a somewhat privileged life in the grand Victorian house, but in many other ways her life was remarkable. For one thing, she was a wildly accomplished pianist whose gifts included a sensitive and emotional approach to music coupled with brilliant technical mastery. Her arpeggios rippled, her chords thundered and glimmered, her bass hand was a marvel of activity and precision. On the rare occasions when she played an entire piece for me, I stood behind her watching her hands lift and fall like mighty white birds, her arms and shoulders fully engaged, and her whole body radiating concentration and intensity. She seemed to truly mean the music, to give herself to it completely, and in some sense to become it. I was young, but even then I was awed by her power.

She shone equally playing Chopin or Bach’s Etudes as she did in her heart-wrenching version of “Stormy Weather.” Her purview was large enough to encompass influences from Jan Padarewski and Fats Waller, Arthur Rubinstein and Hoagy Carmichael. She listened to live performances by many of the great musicians of her time, and shook hands with a great number of them, even meeting Leonard Bernstein in a music teacher’s waiting room in New York City on one occasion. She told me, pleased, that she had addressed him with auntish familiarity: “Hello, Lenny.” He must have been a good twenty years her junior at the time.

She was engaged as ship’s pianist to travel to England on the Queen Elizabeth II and remembered with particular pride the captain’s insistence that she dine with him at the head table in the evenings. This chapter of her life was one of travel, education, exploration. Her music enabled her to travel to London, to Paris, and to Rome where she performed, met with great musicians, or received further training. She recalled being lost in Rome and, by way of educating me, told me that she had coolly kept her head and asked directions, and found herself safely returned to her hotel. Given that she was born sometime in the late 1880’s or early 1890’s, her freedom, her accomplishment, and her access to an elevated artistic world set her in quite a different world from most of the women around her. I wonder if that was lonely sometimes, or if she was simply so taken up with her love of music and her desire to play well that she didn’t stop to consider such a thing.

In any case, she became a fixture on Main Street in Saco, Maine, educating generations of young pianists who came to her doors willingly or not, inflamed with music or else marking time. And like so many unthinking people, we didn’t stop to question how this amazing woman had landed among us or why we were being taught to play major-chord scales by a genius. We took her talents in our stride and Miss Robert’s life outside Saco remained as dark to us as the forbidden rooms upstairs in her vast house.