This morning Sang and I were down at the college campus, listening to her former music prof David Schiff, who will be 80 this year, talk about his life as a composer. The program started with a performance of a piece he wrote for solo viola; continued with a conversation between Schiff and a longtime announcer from the classical radio station; and finished with a second performance of the same viola piece. I loved this format, and also the inclusion of coffee and pastries.
David Schiff grew up in New York in a not-especially-musical family that nevertheless met his request for piano lessons when he was four. Not long after, they subscribed to an offshoot of the Book of the Month Club that sent them a record each month. (Schiff’s parents had just acquired a state of the art Magnavox– AM! FM! three-speed turntable! –and needed to get some music for it.) The third or so record to arrive was Debussy’s La Mer, and David Schiff listened to it over and over and over, for years. As he began to compose, he was interested in music that somehow followed from La Mer, a new sound, whether classical or jazz. Public schools in the Bronx had good music programs then, and he kept going.
To follow the idiosyncratic loves that arrive in your life, follow them through decades, let them bring you together with fellow-travelers… making space for that for everyone feels to me like the opposite of fascism. And that is something I’m feeling for these days,–where to point my nose in the current moment when small and interstitial resistance is what seems possible. (Or maybe not that small: the hefty tasks of supporting public schools and libraries are part of it.)
Anyway, it was a beautiful sunny morning and the bathroom graffiti was wholesome as usual:
Refugees and asylum-seekers are on my mind, of course, and therefore so is one of my five favorite books read in 2024– Mishka, by Anoush Elman and Edward van de Vendel, illustrated by Annet Schaap, translated from the Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier.