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The back yard

July 24, 2023
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Sometimes, while driving through a neighborhood, I will see an old person, a retiree, sitting in a chair on the front porch, or in the driveway, just watching the traffic go by. It’s become a meme, much like the “Get off my lawn,” thing that shows up in single-panel cartoons. 

I have to admit, I am of that age, although I don’t find traffic that interesting. 

But after several years of being partially house-bound by the Covid virus, and at times suffering from cabin fever — to say nothing of the fatigue that comes with hours staring into an iPad screen checking out the news or watching cat videos — I have discovered the pleasures of sitting quietly in my back yard. It gets me out of the house and it reacquaints me with what I jokingly call “reality.” That is, the sense that there is a world without electromagnetic signals commandeering my attention, a world that has been there always, before my greatest-grandparent was born, and will be there when all the power grids in the world are rusting back into the soil. 

I can sit there for half-an-hour at a time, maybe 40 minutes, without thinking about anything and just watching this tiny bit of the world as it moves in the breeze, as the cardinals and mockingbirds swoop across it into the low tree branches, as a white butterfly flits over the irises and a rabbit lopes across the bit of lawn. 

Occasionally, there is a groundhog who will waddle into the yard, get about halfway across before noticing me sitting there; stare at me for two or three seconds before turning back and returning to where he came from. 

This morning a bumble-bee dive-bombed me briefly. I don’t think he was attacking me; more likely he didn’t even recognize I was there. 

After a morning of staring at a computer screen, or watching an iPad, it is important to move to somewhere so my eyes can refocus at a distance, perhaps to infinity. I watch the clouds and notice which direction they travel. I listen to the birds nattering, or hear the neighbor on the next block mowing the lawn. An airplane may cut across the blankness leaving a contrail, and dropping a rumbling jet sound that always seems to be coming from some distance behind where you see the plane. 

It may seem to some, in the rush of civilization, that nothing is happening, that sitting quietly and watching is the very definition of boring. But for me, it is not. Something is always happening. It may be subtle, but it is happening. The leaves wiggle, the sky shifts from sunlight to shadow as the clouds pass, a mockingbird lights on the top of the shed and repeats his mantra over and over; he seems to notice that I’m there, but perhaps I am no different to him from the patio furniture. 

But I have noticed, over the weeks I have been doing this, at least three psychological states I have found myself in. 

First, if I am distracted by other thoughts, or if I am not really paying attention, my relationship with the yard is that I am looking at nature, almost as if I was still staring at my computer screen. I may notice things, may enjoy what I see, but it is quite separate from me and is, as I look, clearly something in front of me. 

There is nothing wrong with this, but it isn’t why I go out each day and sit there. I consider it a failure when I can’t get to the second state. 

That second state is when I feel not that I am looking at nature, but rather I am in nature. That is, it is all around me, and what is more it exists behind as well as in front. It extends into the air and to the clouds; I become aware of the soil under me, the weeds to the right and the undergrowth beneath the tree branches. 

To be in Nature is to be taken away from the self and redeposited into the wider world. I can easily lose myself in this state and that is when the watching becomes something more. I can feel the space around me expanding to the rest of the earth and sky and my bit in it, however tiny, is plugged in. I feel alive in a live world. 

These two states of mind depend primarily on my mood. If I am tired or distracted, I cannot reach the higher state; it just doesn’t come. But when I can silence my brain for a bit, it is like the coupling of a locomotive to a train. There is a click and it all becomes connected. 

It is the same state you enter when you are absorbed in a book and the room you are in disappears because you are so focused. 

But I said there is a third state, and that comes only with something like grace. It is when I neither look at nature nor feel in nature, but rather am nature. 

The barriers between me and the rest of the world, even the universe, vanish and I realize that I am part of it all. No. I don’t realize it. It just is. The very idea of realizing, or thinking, ceases to have meaning. If I look at the rabbit, I know he looks at me, too. No, again. It isn’t a question of knowing. We look at each other. A recognition. The metabolism that takes place in the cells of my meat is the same as that in the green iris leaf. The motion of the clouds across the blue is the motion of my blood through my arteries and veins. “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

I disappear, except that I don’t. In fact, I am more present. It becomes one thing, and it is not that I am a part of the one thing, but that it is just one thing. 

That is, of course, a truism. Even Miss America might say the same thing through a Pepsodent smile. But just saying, or knowing it is not what I’m talking about. It is not knowledge I mean; it is the experience. I sit there in the back yard and it just is.

This cannot happen every time I sit in the back yard. And it isn’t necessary to have a back yard. It is just, as I say, a kind of state of grace, psychologically. 

What is required is receptivity, an openness without expectation. Paying attention. 

As I get closer and closer to the point when every atom belonging to me will belong again to the soil, I remember the lines in Thomas, that “it will not come by expectation, but it is all around us and we do not see it.” 

But once in a while, the veil is lifted and we can see. It is not what we see but that we see.

Do not be afraid

July 22, 2023
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Until relatively recently, 20th century concert music was a tough sell. It had the reputation of being dissonant, noisy, difficult, and unpleasant. It was a century that began with Arnold Schoenberg dispensing with harmony and Igor Stravinsky upending rhythm, followed by a World War that knocked the complaisance out of any rational being and told us that the coming century was going to be anything but calm and easy. 

A number of composers felt that music needed to reflect the mood of the angst-ridden age. 

But even Schoenberg admitted “There is still plenty of music left to be written in C-major.” He didn’t believe his 12-tone revolution would destroy all tunes to come, but was simply a logical conclusion to music history from Bach through Wagner, from tonality through chromaticism to atonality. And we shouldn’t blame poor Arnold for all the dreary ruckus that followed: His own music is quite emotional and beautiful, even if it often requires some serious commitment from his listeners. 

He was right about one thing certainly: There was plenty of music written in C-major, throughout the century. And F-major and D-minor. In fact, most of the music written in that century was based on familiar scales, albeit with plenty of playing around and trying new ways to use them. 

 It’s just that the music-industrial complex, so to speak, was hijacked around mid-century by a clutch of academically-minded composers — the “Darmstadt Mafia” — insisting that serialism was the only music to take seriously, and that the more unlistenable it was, the greater it must therefore be. (Some of these composers did write interesting music in that style — it wasn’t a complete loss — but they looked down their noses at anything that might stink of a tune.) 

And so, contemporary music turned its back on the concert audiences and those composers wrote only for other composers of their ilk, and audiences shrunk from any concert program that insisted they listen to the stuff. Modern music acquired a very bad reputation. 

But I find that after 60 years of concert-going and music absorption, I listen to 20th century music more than that of any other era. It is music that speaks directly to me. Oh, I listen to bunches of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, but the plurality of my music listening edges to the century in which I grew up. 

So, I wanted to create a list of representative compositions from the century in question and present them as a course in great music that anyone can listen to and enjoy. 

I went through my collection of thousands of CDs and chose 30 pieces to offer. I listened to each one, in order, to refresh my memory — and to flat out enjoy them all over again. 

The roughly chronological list begins with a surprising entry. Most people think of Ives’ music (if they think of it at all) as noisy, crashing, impish tomfoolery. But Ives was a well-trained musician, with a degree from Yale University. His Symphony No. 2 is pretty tame, except for his borrowing of familiar popular tunes, and a raspberry at the end. 

Here is my list:

1900-1920

Charles Ives (1874-1954) — Symphony No. 2 (1902; premiered in 1951) (42 minutes long). Performance listened to: Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded 1973.

Ives studied under the respectable, if stuffy Yale professor Horatio Parker, and after graduating in 1898, began working on his second symphony (the first was his senior thesis composition for Parker) and included bits from Camptown Races, Turkey in the Straw and Columbia the Gem of the Ocean run through a kitchen blender. He finished Symphony No. 2 in 1902, although, with Ives, he was never completely finished and continued tinkering until his death in 1952. The symphony wasn’t premiered until Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic played it in a radio performance in 1951. The house-bound but still cantankerous Ives heard it on his radio in Connecticut and his response was that he spit. 

I listened to Ormandy’s version from 1973. The recordings listed here are not my choices as “best” — although they are all good — but merely the ones I had to hand when I started this project. 

Frederick Delius (1862-1934) — On Hearing the First Cuckoo of Spring (1912) (7 minutes long). Performance: Thomas Beecham and Royal Philharmonic, recorded 1958.

Delius’ score instructs, “With easy flowing movement,” and the quiet, peaceful evocation of the countryside (presumably English) and its birdcalls, it is a calming balm for a tussled soul. Originally, it was one of Two Pieces for Small Orchestra, the other half being Summer Night on the River. Beecham championed the composer’s music and his performances of the music are definitive.

Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) — Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1916) (21 minutes long). Performance: Arthur Rubinstein, piano, Ormandy, Philadelphia Orch., recorded 1969.

Falla was an Andalusian composer and the quasi-Impressionist Nights in the Gardens of Spain functions as a kind of piano concerto, with three movements, each describing a different Andalusian garden. Rubinstein heard it first soon after its premiere in 1916 and performed it regularly after that.   

Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953) — Classical Symphony (1918) (13 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded 1961.

Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 is the Sara Lee of symphonies: No one doesn’t love it. It is a jaunty, energetic gloss on the Classical-era symphonies of Haydn, seen through the “wrong-note Romanticism” of the composer’s style.  

Gustav Holst (1874-1934) — The Planets (1918) (50 minutes long)

 Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1975.

Marketed as “space-age music,” the intent of Holst’s seven-movement suite is astrological, not astronomical, and each movement is a musical description of a psychological type. It has become enormously popular, and it has been recorded more than 80 times, first in 1926 with the composer conducting.  

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) — Pulcinella (1920) (39 minutes long) Performance: Claudio Abbado, London Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1979.

Stravinsky took some old compositions by 18th century composers and reworked them into bright, colorful Stravinskian cogs in what Leonard Bernstein once called “Uncle Igor’s Asymmetry Machine,” giving them new life as a ballet score, complete with voices. 

1920s

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) — The Lark Ascending (1921) (16 minutes long) Performance: Zina Schiff, violin, Dalia Atlas, Israel Philharmonic, recorded 1989.

Poet George Meredith wrote of the lark in his poem from 1881, “He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound…” and Vaughan Williams gives us the violin and orchestra version, with the British pastoral, And whose primary intent seems to be the creation of simple beauty.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) — La Création du Monde (1923) (17 minutes long) Performance: Simon Rattle, London Sinfonietta, recorded 1986.

European composers began hearing jazz and they loved it. Milhaud even moved to Harlem for a while, to soak it all up. One of the best translations of jazz to the classical idiom is his Création du Monde, with its resonant  saxophone solo at the beginning. 

Arthur Honegger (1892-1955) — Pacific 231 (1923) (6 minutes long) Performance: Charles Dutoit, Bavarian Radio Symphony, recorded 1985.

A steam locomotive begins to move, gathers speed, churns along and comes slowly to a stop, in this propulsive tone poem to modernity. Trains have been a theme in 20th century music, from Duke Ellington’s Happy-Go-Lucky Local to Villa-Lobos’ Little Train of the Caipira. Chug-chug. 

Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) — The Pines of Rome (1924) (20 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1958.

There were no flying humpback whales in Respighi’s original score; blame Disney for that. But what you do get are rousing tunes and some spooky catacomb music, with a grand finish, the kind that gets you out of your chair cheering. 

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) — Symphony No. 7 (1924) (22 minutes long) Performance: John Barbirolli, Halle Orchestra, recorded 1966.

Sibelius’ final symphony is also his shortest, being in one movement, but by some accounts his best. My old teacher said when he was young, he wanted to play the French horn, because it had all the great solos. But he wound up with the trombone, which “only plays supporting material,” he said. But in this symphony, the trombones get the big tune, the one you will most likely remember and hum after it’s over. 

George Gershwin (1898-1937) — Piano Concerto in F (1925) (32 minutes long) Performance: Andre Previn, piano and conductor, Pittsburgh Symphony, recorded 1998.

Who was Arnold Schoenberg’s favorite composer in America? His frequent tennis partner, George Gershwin, who was much more than a Tin-Pan Alley songster. At the time, there was a big rush to figure out how to incorporate jazz into concert music. Well, here’s how. 

Leos Janacek (1854-1928) — Sinfonietta (1926) (23 minutes long) Performance: Claudio Abbado, Berlin Philharmonic, recorded 1989

What grabs you at first are the 14 trumpets, four horns, trombones, tuba and euphoniums. But the rest of the music pops with chunks of memorable tunes, piled like crabs in a bucket, and the way Janacek uses musical “jump cuts” to go from one to the next. 

1930s

Howard Hanson (1896-1981) — Symphony No. 2 “Romantic” (1930) (29 minutes long) Performance: Gerard Schwarz, Seattle Symphony, recorded 1989.

All those American symphonies written in the 1930s and ’40s have been largely forgotten, despite their quality, but when Ridley Scott used Hanson’s music during the closing credits of his 1979 film Alien, it resurrected this “Romantic” symphony, which developed a second life. Scott did it without Hanson’s permission, which pissed off the composer, but Hanson never sued, probably because of the boost it gave his music with audiences. 

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) — Piano Concerto in G (1932) (21 minutes long)

Performance: Samson François, piano, André Cluyten, Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, recorded 1959.

The French were just as taken with jazz as Americans were, in the 1930s. Lots of composers attempted to weave the syncopations and blues notes into their work. Ravel did it twice, with each of his piano concertos. But this one has a slow movement of such hypnotic ethereal peaceful beauty that you feel in a trance, broken by the explosion of the finale. 

Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936) — Saxophone Concerto (1934) (14 minutes long) Performance: Marc Chisson, saxophone, José Serebrier, Russian National Orchestra, recorded 2010.

Glazunov was exiled to Paris when he wrote his own jazz-influenced concerto for alto saxophone, which is perhaps less jazzy than Russian, but is nevertheless probably the best concerto ever written for the instrument. 

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) — Adagio for Strings (1936) (8 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1957.

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin made a movie in 2003 titled The Saddest Music in the World, about a contest to find such music. Well, he needn’t have worried: Hands down, the winner (ignored by the film) is Sam Barber’s orchestral transcription of the slow movement of his string quartet. Unbearably beautiful, it is near impossible to hear it without weeping. 

Colin McPhee (1900-1964) — Tabuh-Tabuhan: A Toccata for Orchestra (1936) (17 minutes long) Performance: Howard Hanson, Eastman-Rochester Orchestra, recorded 1956.

McPhee heard Javanese gamelan music on a visit to Bali and then moved there. He became an ethnomusicologist as well as composer and wrote his own gamelan-influenced music full of the percussive tintinnabulation that is so catchy. Tabuh-Tabuhan is his most popular work, meaning it’s pretty much the only piece most people know, McPhee having otherwise fallen into undeserved oblivion.

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) — Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 (1938) (7 minutes long) Performance: Bidú Sayão, soprano, orchestra of cellos, conducted by Leonard Rose, recorded 1949.

The composer was fascinated by the long-line melodies that Bach sometimes wrote and came up with his own. Originally a single movement for soprano and eight cellos, it was recorded that way in 1949 by Bidú Sayão in a recording of singular beauty and power. It is very difficult, as the final third of the movement is required to be hummed through the nose, with the mouth closed, and ending on a nearly impossible octave leap. He later wrote a second movement, but this recording of just the first is so exceptional, it has to be heard. 

1940s

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) — Symphonic Dances (1940) (35 minutes long) Performance: Leonard Slatkin, Detroit Symphony, recorded 2002.

It is sometimes hard to realize that Rachmaninoff is essentially a 20th century composer. And all his later music (the Paganini Rhapsody, Third Symphony and this, the Symphonic Dances) is rife with irony and astringency. Heart no-longer on sleeve, but with unforgettable tunes and absolutely brilliant orchestration. These Dances were his final composition, and for my money, his best. 

Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) — Violin Concerto (39 minutes long) Performance: Ruggiero Ricci, violin, Anatole Fistoulari, London Philharmonic Orch., recorded 1956.

Khachaturian doesn’t get much love. His music is catchy, tuneful, and never very deep. And so, the Music-Industrial Complex (i.e. German musicographers) turn their noses up. But what is music if not melody? And bright arresting orchestrations. At some point, the world will catch up with Khachaturian and realize there’s room for music that is simply enjoyable, with no philosophical baggage attached. 

Bela Bartok (1881-1945) — Concerto for Orchestra (1943) (47 minutes long) Performance: Fritz Reiner, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1958.

Bartok was ill and in hospital when Serge Koussevitzky visited him in 1943 and presented him with the commission for this orchestral masterpiece. Bartok had fled Hungary because of the war and was dying of leukemia, but he got out of bed, left the hospital and wrote what became his most popular work, essentially his symphony, a five movement piece featuring brilliant solo work for pretty much everyone member of the orchestra. He died two years later. 

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) — Symphonic Metamorphosis on a Theme by Weber (1943) (22 minutes long) Performance: Wolfgang Sawallisch, Philadelphia Orchestra, recorded 1994.

So much of the century’s music seems to have been written as gloss on music of the past: Stravinsky’s Pulcinella, Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody; Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony — even Ives’ symphonies constantly quote old tunes. Hindemith’s most popular piece (popularity not having followed the composer into the 21st century) is his recasting of melodies written by Carl Maria von Weber. It is brilliant. Hindemith should be played more. 

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) — Appalachian Spring (1944) (24 minutes long) Performance: Leonard Bernstein, New York Phil, recorded 1961.

When the century’s music seemed to becoming more intellectualized and abstruse, Aaron Copland developed a simpler, more audience-friendly style, best captured in this hugely popular ballet score. Copland became the American composer. Originally for a chamber group, the orchestral version is now a standard concert piece. 

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) — Violin Concerto in D (1945) (24 minutes long) Performance: Jascha Heifetz, Alfred Wallenstein, LA Philharmonic, recorded 1953.

Korngold was a prodigy once compared to Mozart, came to America and became the Ur-film composer (three Oscar nominations). But after WWII, he tried to reestablish his bona fides as a serious composer, with this most beautiful of 20th century violin concertos, now in the standard repertoire. It begins with a startling two-octave run in just five notes. Championed by Jascha Heifetz, it is now in every serious violinists repertoire. 

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) — Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell (“Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra”) (1946) (17 minutes long) Performance: Ormandy, Philadelphia, recorded 1974-1978.

Another gloss on old music, Britten wrote his “Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra” as a means to teach about the instruments, along with narration.  But much better without the sometimes condescending talking, it is a brilliant showpiece for the orchestra. 

1950s

Joaquin Rodrigo (1901-1999) — Fantasia para un Gentilhombre (1954) ( 22 minutes long) Performance: Manuel Barrueco, guitar, Philharmonia Orchestra, Placido Domingo, conductor, recorded 1996. 

Rodrigo reworked the music of 17th-century Spanish composer Gaspar Sanz, in another retro work, mixing the old dance music with eminently listenable modern orchestra colors.  

Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) — Mysterious Mountain (Symphony No. 2) (1955) (19 minutes long) Performance: Fritz Reiner, Chicago, recorded 1958. 

Hovhaness wrote 67 symphonies and sometimes it is hard to tell them apart: His style was his style and he stuck to it. But his second symphony, called Mysterious Mountain, is his most popular and a perfect introduction into what you get with this Armenian-American stalwart. 

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) — Candide Overture (1956) (4 minutes long)  Performance: Leonard Bernstein, London Symphony Orchestra, recorded 1989. 

The best overtures are bouncy, tuneful, catchy and bright. It is almost as if Bernstein had absorbed all of the best overtures of the past and wrapped them up in his ultra-brilliant Candide overture, certainly the composer’s most-often programmed work. 

Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) — Piano Concerto No. 2 (1957) (20 minutes long) Performance: Christina Ortiz, piano, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond., recorded 1989.  

The composer write this late concerto for his son, Maxim, to perform. He didn’t have a very high opinion of the work, thinking it a throw-away piece, but it is his most accessible concerto, with a second movement nearly as hypnotic as the Ravel. It may be lightweight Shostie, but it is nothing to sneeze at. 

In going through these recordings, some of which had to be dug up out of the lower shelves of my collection, I have redoubled my admiration for the music of the previous century. 

It could be verse

July 12, 2023
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“You’ve gone all mellow,” Annie said, teasing me. 

In the past, I have had some rather unforgiving opinions about the poetry I was force-fed as a youngster — you know, the Victorian stuff about the light brigade, or Barbara Frietchie. And now, I was reading it again. On purpose. 

At college, I foolishly took a Victorian Lit course and hated every second-hand tick of the classroom clock. Turgid, sentimental, maudlin, and unbearably prolix. (I had been primed to hate the stuff since the time I was  forced to read Oliver Twist in eighth grade and hated every word of that — I still can’t read Dickens. I know: My loss. But you shouldn’t be forced to read stuff before you are ready for it.) 

In that Vic Lit course, I found Browning asphyxiating, Tennyson hollow, Christina Rossetti cloying. I could see no difference in the verse of these hallowed poets from the mewlings of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Edgar Guest. It was all a smear of treacle and oh-so-earnest goo. 

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” Who came up with this stuff? 

Now, Anne is reminding me, I am waxing enthusiastic about the selfsame verse to her, quoting lines and rhymes with affection. I have gone mellow. But what has changed? 

I grew up in a time of ascending Modernism, an era of “less is more,” of irony sidelining sentiment and of skepticism in place of belief. When I was just on the cusp of turning adolescent, Modern art was still widely dismissed as something “my kid could do.” And in the eternal wheel of generations, I was signing on to the new version and leaving the old to such fuddy-duddies as my parents and teachers. 

(At least, I saw it that way. In reality, my parents were as much a product of Modernism as I was — my father was born the same year that the Bauhaus was founded and that Marcel Duchamp painted a mustache on the Mona Lisa. But the Modernism that affected his life was one of wars, electrification, washing machines and radio. Artistic matters mattered not at all to the solid, middle-class parental units.)

  And, like all such newly-awakened youths, I saw through the lies and hypocrisies of the elder generations while surpassingly blind to my own. My generation was going to fix all the botches those fools had made of the past. 

I read all the most current novels, ate up contemporary poetry (and all that written after Prufrock), regularly made my pilgrimage to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and preached to all near and far the supremacy of the new.

In short, the modern was true; the old was a lie. A pretty lie, perhaps, but a lie nonetheless. As H.L. Mencken put it, “it’s essential character lies in its bold flouting of what every reflective adult knows to be the truth.” 

And all that verse: Mencken really had it in for poetry. He said, roundly including everything written from Chaucer to e.e. cummings, “Poetry represents imagination’s bold effort to escape from the cold and clammy facts that hedge us in — too soothe the wrinkled and fevered brow with beautiful balderdash.” 

That certainly summed up my take on Tennyson: “balderdash.” 

H.L. was not one to hedge his opinions. He went on to call poetry, “a series of ideas, false in themselves, that offer a means of emotional and imaginative escape from the harsh realities of everyday. In brief, poetry is a comforting piece of fiction set to more or less lascivious music.”

But it is that “lascivious music” that caught me short. No doubt Mencken rather misses the point, but it is the music of the old poetry, the poetry I so despised, that has brought me back to it. Let me explain — and apologize. 

It started when I recently came across a set of McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, compiled beginning in the 1830s by William Holmes McGuffey. The books were the most common grade-school texts for nearly a century, and are still the preferred books for many current home-schoolers. 

They are popular now because of the unrelenting Victorian religiosity of them for Christian home-schoolers. Every lesson seems to have some biblical homily to teach, training youngsters to be pious, faithful, honest, loyal, earnest, frugal and industrious. McGuffey, himself, was a preacher, in addition to being an educator and college president. 

But what is often lost in the haze of piety, is just how progressive McGuffey was for his time. Most education was then mere rote memorization enforced with the rod; McGuffey thought that instead of just giving kids lists of words to master, it would work better if the words were embedded in stories, and that new words in one story would crop up again for reinforcement in later stories. He taught an early version of phonics, to parse out the sounds of written words, and followed each story-lesson with a short set of questions to test comprehension. 

Really, aside from the heavy Jesus-ness of it all, it was really very forward-looking. 

I valued the reprints I own for their classic typography, for the quaint illustrations that go with the stories, and for the insight the whole gives me into that formidable century. 

And in amongst the stories of boot-blacks making good, mothers dying, little orphans learning the virtues of truthfulness and the importance of being generous to the poor, McGuffey included many old poems. Some are just versifications of Bible passages, but others are the old standards that I once made fun of. 

For instance, in McGuffey’s Eclectic Third Reader, I came across an old chestnut I had not encountered since I was a boy: The Moss Covered Bucket, by Samuel Woodworth. It’s one of those that most people have some vague recollection of, but perhaps not where the lines come from or what they mean. 

“The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, the moss-covered bucket, which hung in the well.” 

But as I began reading it, I found two very surprising virtues. The first was how much sense-memory there was in the poem — the noticing of small physical things that connect us with the world and that readers can almost feel, taste, or smell as they read the lines. 

It is a poem about remembering the things of youth, and there is a scent of sentimentality to it, but the memories evoked feel genuine. Sometimes, reading a pile of “O thou art…” poetry you wonder if a poet has ever actually seen a nightingale, let alone a “knight with burning brand,” but have merely read about such things in other poems. But here, I believe Woodworth really knew “the orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wild wood…  the wide spreading pond, and the mill which stood by it; the bridge and the rock where the cataract fell; the cot of my father, the dairy house nigh it, and even the rude bucket which hung in the well.”  

Noticing — as I have often repeated — is essential to art. To life. 

But the second thing I found in the poem was the “lascivious melody.” Woodworth’s prosody was finished and refined, the meter and rhyme made the lines sing. Maybe not quite the level of Milton, but a danged good ditty. 

He describes coming in from working in the field and dropping the bucket down into the well “to the white pebbled bottom it fell,” and then how “dripping with coolness,” it rose from the well. “How sweet from the green mossy brim to receive it, and posed on the curb it inclined to my  lips! Not a full blushing goblet could tempt me to leave it, though filled with the nectar that Jupiter sips.” 

It moves with a forward-thrusting momentum hied on by the meter. 

I’m not trying to make too great a case for the old oaken bucket. It is not earth-shaking poetry. But it does afford a moment of pleasure as you read it, the way you get pleasure from a memorable tune. 

There were other poems in the Reader that now sang to me in ways I had formerly ignored. Byron’s “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, and his cohorts were gleaming with purple and gold…” 

In the Eclectic Fifth Reader, compiled some years later by McGuffey’s brother, Alexander Hamilton McGuffey, you find the familiar, “Under the spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands; the smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands; and the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.”  

There is through all of the Readers a level of maudlin sentimentality that cannot be overlooked, but if you can wade through that, there are some true gems to enjoy, if primarily for their lascivious music. 

This discovery led me to another old book, one I have owned since I was a boy, but had hardly looked at in 60 years: Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse. First published in 1861, the book was an anthology of “the best English songs and lyrics,” and included Palgrave’s selection of verse written by poets of the past — his past; Palgrave made the decision not to include any poetry written by living poets, so, no Tennyson, no Browning. 

The book was originally divided into four “books,” one each per century from the Elizabethan era to the 19th century. There is a good deal of Shakespeare and an equal measure of Wordsworth, but all the usual names are included, and some that have largely been forgotten. Thomas Grey, William Cowper, Thomas Wyatt, Josuah Sylvester (no, that’s not misspelled). 

Having put aside my McGuffeys, I took up my Palgrave and read it from cover to cover. I found myself enjoying page after page, for the music of it more than for the sense. A good deal of the early verse is highly conventional in sentiment. Everyone had a version of “carpe diem,” many birds are extolled — I haven’t counted the skylarks, but there be many — many women described with coral lips and alabaster skin. It all gets a bit thick.

But listen to the music instead. “Whenas in silks my Julia goes Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows That liquifaction of her clothes.

“Next, when I cast mine eyes and see That brave vibration each way free; O how that glittering taketh me!”

There is a perfection in the meter, rhythm and rhyme to Herrick’s little stanzas. Felix Mendelssohn wrote “Songs Without Words,” but Herrick has turned that around and written a song without the sheet music. 

Throughout my Palgrave, I came across piece after piece like that, with a flow of words as natural in metrical expression as a stream rushing over its rocky bed. 

“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.” 

“A chieftain to the Highlands bound Cries, ‘Boatman, do not tarry! And I’ll give thee a silver pound To row us o’er the ferry!’ ‘Now who be ye, would cross Lochgyle, This dark and stormy water?’ O I’m the chief of Ulva’s isle, And this, Lord Ullin’s daughter.” 

The marriage of word and rhythm, with the fulfilled expectation of rhyme make these verses trot along like a tune sung well in time. 

It is the pleasure of tennis being played with a net. 

One listens to music for the pleasure it brings. Yes, there are mighty symphonies and Wagnerian music dramas meant to express deep emotional and philosophical things, but most, like a Mozart serenade or a Cole Porter tune, are meant to delight, devoid of any extra-musical sense. And that is what I am finding in this old verse I once so roundly denounced. 

If you don’t need to have profound thoughts as you read the words, then you can find the melody for its own sake and revel in the ear and craftsmanship of the poet. 

Yes, I’ve gone mellow in my senescence, and there is a touch of sentimental remembrance for the poetry I was fed when a boy. I guess I share that with those horrible Victorians. That is my apology.

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