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MCFA, MCBL, etc.

Further steroid and drug-use scandals rock the world of professional sports. I'm of several minds on this.

First, I don't really care. Sports are boring at best, dangerous at worst. But they are other people's problems.

Second, it must be awfully tiresome and difficult to work oneself up over where to draw the line, since any line prohibiting drug use must be arbitrary. Some drugs to increase performance should probably be against the rules, but all drugs? Of course not. Vitamins? Herbs? Where they draw the line will no doubt seem idiotic when you look at it. Hard-and-fast rules backed by arbitrariness will certainly lead to further problems, especially with compliance.

Third, rules against artificially developing one's body are there to protect those who wish to remain safe and pure. But what about those who simply want to be the best or perform at maximum level? These seem legitimate goals. Since risk-taking levels will vary from person to person, why not set up a Monsters and Cyborgs Football Association? A Monsters and Cyborgs Basketball League? Let the contenders put whatever they want into their systems, and then see which leagues gain viewers and supporters.

Frankly, current league rules seems nuts to me, even where drugs are not an issue. Why aren't there height rules for leagues in basketball? Giants dunking basketballs into hoops doesn't represent much of a skill contest. I find the constant touching of the rim — illegal in basketball when I was in high school, and maybe still is — vain and uninteresting. But I guess we now have a whole generation of viewers who love that sort of thing. Frankly, I'd like to glue shards of glass around the rim. Unfortunately, balls would pop. (Or maybe that could be an added attraction!)

But really, I don't care. The only issue that matters to me in sports is that no professional team or stadium be funded through taxes. The current competition among cities and states to secure professional leagues by giving away millions and billions of taxpayer dollars, that's far more indecent than anyone making himself a monster with steroids.

Designations   |   December 3, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ThinkingMatters

Sirius, seriously

I saw and listened to a Sirius Satellite Radio setup today. For the first time.

I've been curious about satellite radio, considering that the radio in my neck of the woods is terrible: one FM station worth listening to, and that a community station with more duplicated news and hillbilly music than I need or want. Satellite radio seems a good idea.

So I walked up to the device, a boombox on display, and started pressing buttons, searching for something other than sports. I found the three classical stations pretty easily:

• SYMPHONY HALL playing orchestral and chamber music
• CLASSICAL VOICES playing just what it says, and
• SIRIUS POPS with the lighter stuff.

Now, what was playing on the Pops channel was Berlioz, so I was pleased. (That means the programmers are trying to be serious, that is, not trying to get away with orchestral arrangements of pop tunes.) Something by Vaughan Williams was playing on the Voice channel; I quickly changed it for fear of freaking out the other people in the store (you know what I mean). But what was on Symphony Hall?

Martinu.

Symphony No. 5!

A better program for me could hardly be found. My appetite is Siriusly whetted.

I was impressed also with the simple technology the company had devised. The central receiver unit can be unplugged from your car, taken home and plugged into an adapter that is plugged into your home stereo, and also taken and plugged into a boombox. I have no need for a boombox, but with a stereo at the office and at home, and a car, I figured setup cost would be about $250.

If I were a kid, I'd have a serious Wish List fixation right now. As an adult, I just have to try to figure out if it's really worth it to me to chunk out nearly 300 more bucks on stereo, and then pay $13 a month for the service.

I'm pretty sure that the forthcoming presence of Howard Stern to Sirius isn't going to do anything for me and this decision.

Designations   |   December 4, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   BohuslavMartinuDiscussion

Lousadzak

Alan Hovhaness's great early work, Lousadzak, for piano and string orchestra, has recently been performed, for the first time, in the land of his ancestors, Armenia.

It was this work that gave Hovhaness his first enthusiastic review, from Lou Harrison. Harrison not only loved the work, he obviously enjoyed the fact that it fit into no ready category. As he put it,

The intermission that followed [Lousadzak] was the closest I've ever been to one of those renowned artistic riots. In the lobby, the Chromaticists and the Americanists were carrying on at high decibels. What had touched it off of course, was that here came a man from Boston whose obviously beautiful and fine music had nothing to do with either camp, and was in fact its own very wonderful thing to begin with.

And the music does sound very different from Sessions or Kirchner or Copland or Schuman. It has an authentic alien element in it. It's not just exotic in some half-baked sense, a Ketelbey touch. Hovhaness's use of controlled chance elements, or spirit murmur, is probably the first successful, skilled uses of the aleatoric in Western fine art music. To my ear, Hovhaness's chance music never sounds unmusical, and that's understandable, for the aleatoric element is never total, but just one element that musicians navigate. Think of the strange attractor in chaos theory: Hovhaness in his spirit murmurs and sound clouds set up a controlled system the limits of which, and harmonic and melodic elements of which, are clearly defined; it's the interior rhythm of the passage that is uncontrolled and chaotic. And in Lousadzak, it is just one element among many, of course. The work is arresting in its melodies and harmonies as well as that hint of leavening, that natural chaos.

The recording I own of it, with Keith Jarrett at the piano, is perfect. The CD also contains a great Lou Harrison work, the wondrous Elegiac Symphony (No. 2) and Hovhaness's popular second symphony, Mysterious Mountain. These are all excellent performances. Necessary, in a sense. (Still, I would like to have been in Armenia for the ancestral land premiere.)

Designations   |   December 5, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   AlanHovhanessSociety

Flew's Leap: Does Famous Atheist Now Believe in Anything Stranger Than Black Obelisks?

The biggest news today was that famed atheist philosopher Antony Flew withdrew his support from atheism. On the basis of arguments popularly known as Intelligent Design, Flew conceded that a deity may be necessary to explain the origins of life. The author of The Presumption of Atheism and Atheistic Humanism abandoned atheism.

Now, this does not mean that he is rushing into the Church of England, or into the arms of the readers of C.S. Lewis. He would label himself a deist, he said.

I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins. . . . It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose.

Now, I've looked at some of the evidence Flew has been looking at, the evidence that has changed his mind. I haven't changed my mind, simply because I don't think we have enough evidence yet. But that doesn't mean I'm opposed to Intelligent Design (ID) theory in any strong, ideological sense. I think ID kinds of notions have to be advanced at every step of evolutionary explanation. Most of the time, I note, they get beaten down. But now? Maybe ID theorists will win the battle.

But that shouldn't be any comfort to Christians, Jews, Muslims, or anyone else with a myth to grind. The old Creation myths have been falsified so many times that they are simply not live issues. And with them, I think, the idea of despotic deities drifts down into the ash-heap of history. Indeed, anthropologists and sociologists and historians have good reason to discard the claims of the major religions. At their foundings, each are buried in obscurity, nothing like the clarity we should expect from Revelation. Religions evolve over time, sometimes slowly, sometimes in great leaps. But none of that leads to confidence in their Old Gods. Or should, anyway. Religion can tell us much about humanity's hopes and fears and imaginations. Not much about cosmic reality. (I'd have more confidence in The Anthology had said Book of Books included one passage asserting even the Copernican system, much less the astronomical cosmos we know of today. But The Anthology remained, as we all know, stuck in a geocentric view, with some authors of some chapters even evidencing a Flat Earth cosmology. Later additions and editions did not improve this any.)

It's heartening that Flew keeps his mind working at 81 — and that he hasn't made too big a leap into the morass of Faith. He still disbelieves in an afterlife, after all, and that says something important about his sense and senescence. He's simply honest enough not to be able to conceive of a natural, unplanned origin for life, based on current scientific understanding. So he posits a deity. Or something like such a deity.

But that alleged deity could have been any being with more knowledge than we, today, possess, and a strong desire to create or experiment with new self-regulating structures. It could have been a scientist working in Its lab, playing around with a new string of matter-energy, trying to jump start something interesting in another dimension. It could be one team among a civilization of such — and these could even have been the created servants of a long-dead evolved race, experimenting with the source of life simply to try to understand themselves and their ancient history. They could even have used as instruments something like the black obelisks of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Fantastic? Well, less so than the tenets of any major religion (or any dead one) we now have; their myths have all been falsified.

Intelligent Design speculation should be welcomed not because it will support religion — it won't. It should be welcomed when it plays by the rules of science, and because it will support science fiction — or, to be a tad more accurate, because it will continue the sciencefictionalization of life as we know it.

Designations   |   December 10, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   ThinkingMatters

Virginia's governor's limit

I am a supporter of term limits for legislative and executive elected office. I am ambivalent about limits for hired bureaucrats and other officials. As for judges, I simply throw up my hands and shrug. I don't know what to do about judges.

Now my support for term limits is understandable. I don't consider them a panacea. I just consider them one important element of republican governance.

The lack of support for term limits from most politicians, too many journalists, and quite a few advocates of extensive government, is just as understandable. Term limits amount to an attack upon the governing class. If you wish to govern in a big way you don't want limits. As a person living in modern times and in the West, you may have to put up with some of the forms of republican democracy. But that doesn't mean you have to like them. And it certainly doesn't mean you want to add anything new that would hobble your hopes and dreams for bureaucratic tinkering forever and ever.

Virginia allegedly suffers from the most stringent term limit in the nation: a one-year term for its governor. Oh, how horrible! Actually, it does seem a bit too strict. But I hope Virginians don't get sucked into rashly abandoning any term limit, or even going for the usual, two-consecutive-terms limit. There are more creative reforms possible. I considered one today, for Instead of a Blog.

Meanwhile, the most extreme term limit proposal, that imagined by L. Sprague de Camp in his fantasy romp The Unbeheaded King, never gets serious consideration. Oh, there may be Virginians who, after their last two governors, might gleefully throw the notion around. But only in jest.

Behead the king and then appoint a new one? How barbaric!

Also, Public Choice theorists might note that allowing a king almost anything he wants, with just that one limit, doesn't really encourage good government. What if he could be a really good king, and not abuse the privileges of the office? Under the beheading rule, there's no reason for the man to develop that side of his personality. Now, if torture were thrown into the mix . . . what if a king, after his year, were tortured for one week and then beheaded? If the people, by plebiscite, could nullify the torture in special cases, the king might then rule well, having a peaceful death to look forward to, not a torment unimaginable. See? De Camp's imagined term limit has been improved by an additional disincentive and the possible democratic removal of same.

Isn't political theory fun?

Designations   |   December 10, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

This morning's dream

It seems that the lead tree on a conifered hill has evolved not to like skunks. If the tree smells a skunk too near, it will quickly bend down and "zap" it.

This important fact about trees was not known until recently. My colleagues and I set up cameras to capture the tree in action. My grandmother was there, for some reason, and asked questions about a particular tree that grew out of a stump. She seemed skeptical of the whole camera-and-picture-taking enterprise.

The tree was very effective in finding the skunks. Or people who smelled like skunks. It didn't kill anything or anyone, but simply whipped them. The image of a hundreds-foot high tree reaching down to zap a skunk with its top branches is breathtaking.

Later, this ability of trees to zap things came especially handy in fighting hovering UFOs. It didn't harm the UFOs, but it did limit their time hiding in forests. Apparently, UFO operators didn't like getting thunked by otherwise harmless-looking trees.

After a thorough on-site review of conifer skunk-zapping — and its adaptation for UFOs, too — I proclaimed to the team that It's all based on water, folks!

All in all, a happy dream, unless you are a skunk or a UFO pilot.

Designations   |   December 11, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

To Vishnu

Alan Hovhaness was not one of those composers to eschew the beautiful for the sublime, or the lovely for the difficult. And yet much of his music makes direct connection into the depths and heights of the awesome, and within a breath moves from the sincerely simple to the thorniest complexity. Hovhaness united the lovely, the pretty, the beautiful, and the sublime, and united them successfully, in work after work. True, much of his music reverences the simple; and yet he managed, in some of his best works, to demonstrate a head for the awesomely complex — as well (excuse the tired metaphor) as the heart for it. Few of his works demonstrate this as well as his nineteenth symphony, subtitled Vishnu.

I have often made the case for Hovhaness as an important composer. Like Darius Milhaud and Bohuslav Martinu — two other of my favorites — he composed a lot, a tremendous amount, a vast oeuvre of the strange and beautiful and . . . the sometimes mediocre. Until recently I placed Hovhaness on the level of Milhaud, as a superb miniaturist whose biggest works usually evidenced a saddening failure. Now I'm changing my mind. Hovhaness may, like Milhaud, write flawless music most readily in chamber music and in shorter pieces, but a few of his works of the larger scale are so exquisite, so impressive, that we should forget the half-failures and rank Hovhaness up a notch in the pantheon of composers. Right up there with Martinu, perhaps.

In Milhaud's case, it's his later symphonic repertoire that doesn't impress me that much. Hovhaness has a similar problem, with a lot of nice but mostly unimpressive later symphonies. But Milhaud did produce, early on, L'creation du monde and L'Homme et son desir; and Hovhaness has produced Fra Angelico and the Saint Vartan Symphony and . . .

Vishnu.

Why I've ignored this latter work for so long puzzles me. I've owned the Hovhaness-conducted performance of this on CD for some time. But I rarely listen to it. Why?

I have an idea. It is not in any sense light music. It does not begin by beckoning you with loveliness, with the shameless beauty of, say, Mount St. Helens Symphony or Celestial Gate. Immediately it thunders chaos at you, and you either give in totally or . . . set up a barrier. You can't take sublimity every day, and you can't listen to Vishnu as background music.

Sometimes, I'm just not in the mood for the sublime. I don't listen to Beethoven's Fifth at tea, or read Four Quartets each morning at breakfast. There's a time and a place for everything. And so: often it is that the works we take to heart are those that beguile more than awe. Or awe only after flirtatious beguilement. Yes, that's the case even with me. I listen to music on the stereo, and too often I'm doing something else. So even the Greats can suffer demotion to the soul's Muzak. Egads.

I can't do that to Vishnu, though. Its roars and its tranquilities are impossible to assimilate as anything other than an Important Statement. You have to give it time and respect, from the get-go. I did that last night. Twice. And was impressed. It holds up. It commands the respect it demands.

It is also Hovhaness's most thoroughgoing use of controlled chaos, the technique of oriental aleatory that he began in Lousadzak and used extensively well into the '60s. This time it is used loudly as well as softly, and frames other sections, the grand total of which is a huge hymn to creativity in nature. Creativity in Nature, I suppose, complete with capitalizations. My interest in the Hindu metaphor, however, is not great. My interest is in the greatness of the music.

I would like to hear another performance of this work. It's a tragedy that it hasn't been recorded multiple times. It seems that this would be a great test of any orchestra and conductor, since virtuosity and improvisation and tasteful transitions to and from the senza misura and the precisely written amount to a huge challenge. Igor Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps has rightly become the test of orchestras and conductors, yielding many recordings. Hovhaness's Vishnu should become the same sort of touchstone work.

Until I hear another recording, I'll reserve any criticism of artistry in performance, and conclude (here) by stating my awe of Hovhaness's skill in creating something so amazing, sublime, and impressive as the Vishnu Symphony. It may be his greatest work, though none of its themes are as quite as memorable as the theme of the similar construction, Fra Angelico. This latter is more accessible, with a quiet mystery building to Revelation. And yet Vishnu, upon repeated listenings, will grow on the listener, I bet. So you know where to start — and know where, now, to go next: from Fra Angelico to Vishnu.

Designations   |   December 13, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   AlanHovhanessSociety

An impious fool

Another nutball Alabama judge has trotted out the Ten Commandments as the moral basis for American (or maybe just his state's) law. The judge had the famous ancient law embroidered onto his judicial robes and walked out into court, sat down, and proceeded to do law. Unsurprisingly, there were objections. And still, so many Christians wonder why so many non-Christians show disrespect to their religion! Folks, when you have standard-bearers like the current publicity-seeking Circuit Judge, that's what you should expect. The man has unwittingly proved himself a fool of a legal authority and an impious Christian, to boot.

This essay continued on Instead of a Blog . . .

Designations   |   December 17, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

Alongside the Ten Commandments

Placing ancient mottoes on court walls, arches, or on stelae outside of American courts is, to me, a fine thing, so long as the emblazoned principle is exemplified in American law. The trouble with the Alabama jurists who keep pushing for the Ten Commandments to be prominently placed is that they witlessly do not realize how far from the spirit of our laws the bulk of the commandments are, as I explained a few days ago. When it gets right down to it, only one out of the ten principles is worth putting up anywhere near our courtrooms. (Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. That's a great principle for a courtroom, no?)

Of course, for historical, educational purposes, putting up a stela isn't a bad idea, so long as it is clearly labelled as Void Where Prohibited By Law or somesuch.

And shouldn't everyone know the Ten Commandments? So placing up a commemorative stone doesn't bother me that much. But add a proviso! Or, why not place it on one side of a stela, with The Code of Hammurabi, say, on the other? That would make clear that the purpose is educational, not religious or (horrors) legal.

Were people to see The Ten Commandments in contrast to Hammurabi's older, more specific code, they'd be . . . thankful, I think, that they live in America, in the 21st century. And that's not a bad message to send to the citizens, eh?

Still, it's not as if there are not a few principles embedded in Hammurabi's laws that we can think on, today, as we prepare to revise our own:

• If any one ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death. [This treats victims' rights a bit better than our laws do, if to extremity. Still, loser pay in civil trials and police compensation for unwarranted arrest in criminal proceedings are worth looking into.]


• If a judge try a case, reach a decision, and present his judgment in writing; if later error shall appear in his decision, and it be through his own fault, then he shall pay twelve times the fine set by him in the case, and he shall be publicly removed from the judge's bench, and never again shall he sit there to render judgement. [Talk about accountability!]


• If any one break a hole into a house (break in to steal), he shall be put to death before that hole and be buried. [Punishment not so much to fit the crime, but to fit the location of the crime!]


• If fire break out in a house, and some one who comes to put it out cast his eye upon the property of the owner of the house, and take the property of the master of the house, he shall be thrown into that self-same fire. [Talk about quick justice!]


• If a man rent his field for tillage for a fixed rental, and receive the rent of his field, but bad weather come and destroy the harvest, the injury falls upon the tiller of the soil. [A reasonable division of responsibility, no? No loose or vague ideas of liability, here!]


• If a man take a woman to wife, but have no intercourse with her, this woman is no wife to him. [Sexual activity is a defining feature of marriage. Think about this when talking about marriage law revisions, such as gay marriage.]


• If a man adopt a child and to his name as son, and rear him, this grown son can not be demanded back again. [Rearers' keepers.]


• If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out. [Tooth for a tooth!]


• If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. [Strict liability, for sure!]

Much of this is barbaric, by modern standards. All the talk of slaves and status (not listed here) will rightly strike modern readers as weird and appalling. But, hey, it's all very educational. I say, allow Alabaman judges to erect all the Ten Commandment stelae they want, so long as Hammurabi gets equal time. It would be for the greater good.

Designations   |   December 19, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

The Top Ten, Ten Years Ago

Jesse Walker, on The Perpetual Three-Dot Column, continues making up Top Ten Best Movie lists for years long past. I just looked at his 1994 list, and agreed with his first two picks. My list looks different starting with number 3:

Top Ten Films of 1994:

1. Pulp Fiction
2. Crumb
3. Red
4. The Madness of George [III]
5. Ed Wood
6. The Shawshank Redemption
7. Heavenly Creatures
8. Little Women
9. Shallow Grave
10. Tom & Viv

Like Jesse's, mine is pretty provisional. For one, I've not seen a number of the films on his list, and though one of those films, Hoop Dreams, may be a masterwork, I have almost a zero interest in sports so I'll likely never see it. And of course all such lists are more than a tad arbitrary. Do they represent good memories? Repeated viewings? Confidence in recommendation? An arbitary combination of these. That's about right. Clerks and Speed were two more favorites that somehow didn't make it on my list. Why not? Maybe because I want to rewatch Shallow Grave and Tom & Viv sooner than I want to see those two, yet again. Oh, well. It's interesting to look at the complexion of the list: a documentaries and four biopics/docudramas. And one of the best titles of the year, Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, gets no placement at all! A list of films I never want to see again would prominently include The Mask, a 1994 Jim Carrey vehicle that somehow annoys me just to think about.

So why go back a decade to concoct a list? I've seen very few of this year's films yet. It's that simple. So far, my favorite remains Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Designations   |   December 20, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala

The (m)adman's funny bone

From previews of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, I am already familiar with several of the jokes in the movie, though it hasn't hit a theatre near me yet. One of the jokes stuck out, not as being especially funny, but as a light moment. The Bill Murray character is holding a press conference, and vows to kill the shark that killed his partner. A gentleman from the audience asks, What scientific purpose will be achieved by killing the shark? Bill Murray pauses, and then answers deadpan, Revenge.

Not a bad joke. A light moment. The idea of revenge fulfilling a scientific purpose is mildly funny.

But when this snippet was put into a commercial, one crucial word of the question was taken out, the word scientific.

Q. What purpose will be achieved by killing the shark?
A. Revenge.

There is nothing funny here.

Advertising and marketing people occasionally wonder why they are derided and hated. This instance provides a pretty good reason.

I'm sure some executive somewhere said the word scientific suggests to Joe Six Pack that this is an art film. Big turn off. We can't use that word on television. Some lower-level adman suggests just taking it out: The joke works fine without it. The low-level flunky gets a pat on the back, the exec makes sure that everyone knows that he himself objected to the word scientific, and will take credit for a larger-than-expected turn-out (if such a thing happens) for the film on that basis.

I've no idea if, because that one bit of intellectualism was excised from the commercial clip, enough Joe Sixpack Zombies will go to the film, offsetting the decrease in attendance from people — marginally smarter — who expect the jokes they hear to be funny.

In a way, I almost hope not, even if the film turns out to be a work of pure genius. It would be good to send a message to know-nothing admen who obviously have far too much power in Hollywood.

But, don't even Joe Sixpack Zombies expect jokes to be funny? Do they really see Bill Murray and start laughing? Is a beer, Bill Murray, and a telephone book enough? And do they really hate science? The mere mention of it?

Designations   |   December 20, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   FilmFlam

If on a winter's night, a chord

Einojuhani Rautavaara's style long ago mutated from neo-classicism through an eclectic serialism to a dreamy Romanticism. But his dreams are not 19th century dreams. Indeed, he treats Romanticism rather like Arvo Pärt treats medieval music: as the high ledge over the abyss from which to levitate in ecstatic meditation.

I am listening (as I write this) to his Violin Concerto. It is an astounding work. The first movement begins with fine wintry music. Since it is now officially winter (though I think of it as mid-winter), it seemed appropriate.

What is wintry music? Music that somehow elicits the same feel that one gets from the oldest Christmas carols, the lovely transcending to the sublime. Renaissance music often does it, Corelli does it, and . . . yesterday I discovered that John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano does it!

A crystalline feel. The recording of Rautavaara has moved on. Angels and Visitations now. The ecstasy of crystalline presences engulfs. I am reminded, for a moment, of Hovhaness's sound clouds of controlled chaos. Indeed, as the brass enter and then the strings follow, intoning some secular hymn (or is it a sacred dance?), Hovhaness's Fra Angelico comes to mind. But this is Rautavaara. No comparisons are necessary.

As Rautavaara's music ascends to extreme orchestral complexity, I should take a few steps back. What I am calling wintry music is rarely complex. Indeed, I can elicit that feel with one chord, my mystic chord, a carefully spaced subdominant eleventh:

Here's it's sounded three times, ripe for resolution. But how do you resolve this chord? Simple, really, but I'll leave it for you to work out.

On that note I leave this blog for several days. To experience this crystalline winter without mediation.

Designations   |   December 21, 2004   |   Wirkman Virkkala   |   AlanHovhanessSociety

Addendum: The second definition of wintry in my computer's dictionary is lacking warmth or enthusiasm. Not what I think of as wintry music! Why? In no small part because I am enthusiastic about the season. I like it for the crystal-clear nights, the occasional snow, the winds, the amazing spectacle of the last non-hybernating newt crossing a chill, rain-drenched road. And the music. The Christmas carols. Anything written before Mendelsohhn, almost. And harp music, and the celesta in The Nutcracker, and the idea that art can capture the dangerous beauty of cold winter while still warming us as well as a hearth fire.

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