Those piano lessons were not in vain

Music.  Right up there with food and drink.  As essential to life quality as a good night's sleep and the company of people with whom you share love and express affection.  I can go many a day without reading a book.  I cannot go a day without music.

I lucked out as a kid.  My parents sensed that I might take to the piano and my father went out and found an upright in a junkpile for $25.  At the age of six or seven I started piano lessons.  I believe they cost my mother $1.25.  That was back in the 1940s.  My piano teacher supplemented her living as an organist at the Second Congregational Church, complaining that the preacher got a whopping good salary for his contribution to the community and she had to supplement her meager church income by teaching tone deaf kids and telling them to keep their fingers out of their noses.

I was a dutiful student of hers, but it was clear I was never going to be a prodigy - or even anything more than somebody who could read notes and recognize key signatures. I steadfastly refused to practice my Czerny finger exercises and never acquired anything resembling virtuosity.  I did get good enough to get a job as a church organist for a time (I think they were at the point of desperation, but never mind), but I knew instinctively that, unlike my cousin Bernard, becoming a professional musician was not in the cards for me.  What I did get, though, from those early years of piano (and later organ) lessons was, if not a chance to impress the world with talent, something far more lasting - a love of music.  

My luck continued into my teenage years.  We had a music teacher who visited us once a week and taught us to sing.  She happened to be the organist at the church I attended and directed both the church choir and the high school glee club, which she sat me down in front of as accompanist. I also got jobs keeping time to the step-kick-plié efforts of the local girls' at ballet.   All small town musical activities that never quite made it as springboards to professional musical careers. 

No matter.  I am more than thankful to have had sufficient exposure to music to enable me today to fill the hours with the rich array of musical recordings available on YouTube, even now when I am confined to the house and cannot get to public concerts, the opera, or other musical events.  And I've often wondered if the same holds true for those little girls now sitting with their grandkids and snatching every opportunity to take in a ballet.

So much for trivial background information; what I'd like to put out here are some of the musical pieces that keep me going through tough times.  Let me dive in:

There are so many pianists I think one should become familiar with: Alexander Malofeev, the Jussen Brothers, Martha Argerich, Yuja Wang, Vyacheslav Gryaznov, and Garrick Ohlsson all come to mind, my favorites to listen to, and not necessarily pianists I would put at the head of the line. There is one guy I would, however, put at the head of the line, the Korean teenager Yunchan Lim.

Let me give you a couple reasons why.  Liszt and Chopin, as you probably know, were not only performers; they were also teachers and wrote pieces they called "practice studies" for their students. Liszt, I am convinced, was a sadist at heart.  Some of his "Etudes" as they are called, are not so much suitable for developing skills at fingering as they are exercises to show off your inadequacies.  He started out in 1826 with a dozen and went on to develop them into twice that many a decade later, although today the core of these etudes are known as the "Transcendental Etudes," and reflect the entirety of Liszt's career as a composer.  Here is Yunchan playing all twelve at the Cliburn Competition in 2022.

If you don't have the time or the interest to listen to them all - a little cake goes a long way - listen at least to Number Five, known as "Feux follets."  And remember, at this performance this kid is just eighteen years old!   

But as good as he is in this Cliburn Competition, I think he outdoes himself playing Rachmaninoff's 3rd Concerto with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, directed by Marin Alsop.  How often does a soloist bring a conductor to tears?  [a brief aside here: if you want to hear a good analysis of this performance and of the chemistry between Yunchan and Marin Alsop, there's this piece by Chopin expert Ben Laude.]

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Much as I am regularly captivated by piano music, I am equally enamored of the human voice. Here, for example, are two of my favorite tenors: Jonas Kaufmann and Dmitri Hvorostovski (the latter, alas, no longer with us), singing the famous duet from George Bizet's opera, "The Pearl Fishers."

Where I want to end up in this blog entry is not with arbitrarily selected pieces of music but with the observation that music enriches in all its many forms.

Not just classical, but simple melodies, and sometimes accompanied by plain everyday emotions as well.  Longing, for example. Consider these pieces which, although quite simple, have stood the test of time. I'm talking about Judy Garland's rendition in the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  And a second piece from Weimar Germany, the 1920s tune, with an analogous sentiment, Somewhere in the World, sung by the Comedian Harmonists, a group which had to disband because of nazi persecution.  The music lives on in Weimar nostalgia.  Here's Max Raabe singing it.  And here it is again, with a chorus of lovely young voices.  And again, sung by Jonas Kaufmann.  

I find musical joy and satisfaction in almost all of its several forms (short of hard rock): instrumentally, or through the human voice, in complex classical forms, jazz, gospel, blues, choral, folk songs and simple harmonies.  I love it when it lifts me out of my seat and makes my arms and legs move, and I've listened to "Sleep my little prince, sleep" at least 1000 times. 

Guilt vs. Shame

My niece, Amy, and I got into a strong difference of opinion this morning over the difference between shame and guilt and whether either or both were feelings that one should encourage or reject.  Our differences reflected the vastly different ways we were defining those terms.  Amy maintained that she was not speaking so much out of personal experience as she was reflecting the views of an author she had just read, but I sensed (possibly mistakenly) that she had internalized the author's perspective, so that in effect I was arguing with her.  What follows is a kind of p.s. to our discussion this morning.  I hope she realizes how very much I value having her around to talk about serious topics with.

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The point, I repeat, should not get lost that our argument was entirely dependent on how the terms guilt and shame were being defined.  Your author, you said, claimed that while guilt had utility, because it could lead to action-to-repair, shame is a destructive term because it involves assuming the person feeling the emotion is motivated to translate shame into self-loathing.  In other words, guilt is tied to action, while shame is a function of being.

But that's putting the cart before the horse.  Guilt is to doing what shame is to being only if you choose to define the two terms that way.  I have never defined them that way.

Way back when I first began my quest to understand the difference between Japanese and American national cultures, I encountered the claim that Japan was a shame-based culture while the U.S. was a guilt-based culture.  The reason, so the theory went, was that Japanese were inherently collectivist, that the individual Japanese was subjected (or subjected themselves) to the collective. The Japanese way of expressing this phenomenon is to say "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down."  The saying is so familiar that one need not say the whole thing.  Just mentioning deru kugi - the nail that sticks out - is enough.  Mothers teach their children not to be a deru kugi.)

In contrast, so the theory goes, the individualistic American culture reflects the Protestant view that each individual has a personal responsibility to God and to no one else.  Right and wrong are therefore not determined so much by community standards as by individual conscience.

Never mind that this social theory is oversimplified, reductionist and overgeneralized and should not be considered anything more than suggestive; for a time I internalized it because it was widespread and could be found in almost any book you might pick up on the subject of Japanese culture. And to this day, I still believe there is more truth in the cultural analysis than overgeneralization.  And this affects the way I define both guilt and shame.  Except that (possibly because I have never completely shed my Protestant cultural values) I see guilt as useful because it is at the heart of one's conscience and the motivator for doing the right thing in the end, once you have awakened to responsibility.  And I see shame as a useful tool for making someone else want to straighten up and fly right.  

In the end, neither guilt nor shame are ends in themselves.  You need to shed guilt the moment you sense it rising up within you and replace it with a sense of responsibility, by which I mean a resolve to "fix" the harm or damage you've done. As quickly and as cleanly as you possibly can.  Shame is a form of embarrassment, the feeling you get when you get caught with your pants down. It usually passes with time and you don't need to do anything about it.  Just make sure you're not mixing it up with guilt.

The author you cited who claims that guilt is good and shame is bad has it completely backwards.  Consider how these words are used in public.  When we are outraged at a crooked politician, we don't shout "Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!"  We shout "Shame! Shame! Shame!"  That's because we instinctively understand guilt to be something for an individual to work through in their own time, and shame to be something to shed light on.  In that sense, you don't shame yourself; you shame others who do wrong.

Bottom line: Neither guilt nor shame are positive notions.  Shame others if they've done something wrong and you have half a chance of tweaking their conscience.  Never take it on yourself if you can help it, and if you feel it, wait and let time take care of it.  And don't waste a single moment on guilt.  Move directly to responsibility.  It's the adult thing to do.

Long live the king

I'm sure there are some Americans who don't like the British Royal Family, and far more who couldn't care less one way or the other, but most Americans I know are pretty gaga over this undemocratic institution. Queen Elizabeth's popularity took a brief dip when she fumbled that flag-lowering decision when Princess Diana was killed, but it's back up now to where it was most of the time: she was viewed favorably by more than eight in ten Americans. And her son's visit to the U.S. recently shows that a surprising amount of that affection has been passed on to him.

I could be wrong about this, obviously.  I'm not coming from a neutral place. I grew up partly in Nova Scotia and slept in a bedroom with Queen Victoria's portrait hanging on the wall.  And even in Connecticut, when Elizabeth married Philip, our school shut down classes, and we all went to the auditorium where a TV set was placed on the stage for us to watch the wedding live. And I don't remember anybody finding that out of order because she was not our queen.

The next thing about the Windsors I remember was when Prince Charles was born.  His birth was the feature story in our Weekly Reader when I was in the fourth grade, and that event too was taken as a matter of course.

It was only many years later, after I had developed a socialist consciousness, that I began making snarky remarks about the royals. I took it a step further, not so much making fun of their elite status as feeling sorry that they had no say in how their birth had sealed their fate and made them give up any hope of having a private life or eating a normal meal in a restaurant.  I still hold that view, even more firmly now that I have lived so many years in Japan and got to watch the women of the imperial family have nervous breakdowns.  There is something inherently wrong about giving somebody status and wealth they didn't ask for just so you could have a bunch of living dolls to play with.

I just listened to Prince Charles deliver a speech before the German Bundestag.  And before that, last week, I listened to him address the U.S. Congress.  Brilliant address!  Just brilliant.  And I thrilled at his reminder of the importance of NATO and of helping Ukraine get out from under the Russian invasion; I loved watching Trump sitting behind him applauding away and pretending Charles was not making a fool of him.

There is something we could do right away to lessen the chances of a repeat of this ugly Trump phenomenon.  We could separate the role of head-of-state from head-of-government, the way most modern nations do it. Much as I want to feel sorry for King Charles and other members of the British royal family, I understand that they provide a place for Brits to locate their love of country.  Whether you do this by establishing a constitutional monarchy, as in Holland or Norway or Britain and give up expecting politicians to behave in their personal lives, or do something similar to what Germany does by having a president and a prime minister, both elected, the country's name gets to keep its dignity unsullied and out of politics entirely - more or less.

Maybe it's not Charles that's bringing all this credit and prestige to the British crown these days; maybe it's his speech writer.  He still deserves the credit, in my book, for knowing how to pick his speech writers.  And admit it: once upon a time he came across like a goofball, but these days he's showing a lot of class.

They don't all have it - class.  Prince Andrew (correction: ex-Prince Andrew) blew it by playing around with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.  But most of them do.

Before you need to show some class, you can be adorable - Check out Prince Louis, William and Kate's youngest, and grandson of Charles (now there's some serious future shock!). Makes even the most dyed-in-the-wool advocate of abolishing the monarchy think twice.

Charles the First lost his head; Charles the Second might have done likewise if he had had more success bringing governance of the English church back to the Bishop of Rome, and if he had not had the great misfortune of being king during the Plague (1665) and the Great Fire (1666).  But Charles III - at least so far - seems to have turned all that bad luck around.

God save the King, I say.