just because they say it's music doesn't make it music; but it's not music because i say it's not music!

A few days ago, Alex Ross posted a piece by Amadeus Regucera called  obscured-distorted-redacted, performed by the great JACK Quartet. 

Blogger A. C. Douglas not only took exception to the piece itself, but also to Alex posting it as music. I can think of no non-subjective (or extremely prescriptive) definition of music that Mr. Regucera's composition fails to meet, and Mr. Douglas offers no support for his assertion that that it is not in fact music.

As to the piece itself, It's got some very good stuff in it, especially in terms of texture. It may be a little long for what Mr. Regucera wants to say, but that's a quibble, and hardly definitional.

At any rate, a tip of the hat to Mr. Ross for posting the piece and to Mr. Douglas, for making it essential listening.

worth reading, to say the least

This is the first of what will likely be a very occasional series, pointing you to some stuff I thought was, well, worth reading.

Alex Ross on pop culture and power. Key sentence: "Between them, Adorno and Benjamin were pioneers in thinking critically about pop culture—in taking that culture seriously as an object of scrutiny, whether in tones of delight, dismay, or passionate ambivalence."

A conversation with Richard Powers. Key sentence: "You can listen to music for millions of different reasons, and if you consider the fundamental components of music—melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, timbre, form—there are styles of listening that emphasize each of those."

Leonard Pierce on Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master.  I disagree with an important premise of Leonard's, but his insights are important and his engagement with Anderson and his film vital. Key sentence: "The emotional weight of the film, the tenor of feeling it achieves when it starts throwing roadblocks instead of opportunities in front of its protagonists, is exceptionally well-delivered."

anton webern

Webern in repose

A recent article in the Guardian features brief statements from a variety of musicians about their favorite piece of 20th century concert music. Characteristically, Alex Ross, whose The Rest is Noise inspired the festival that prompted the article, names Anton Webern's Six Pieces for Large Orchestra, Op.6 (1909). Ross cites "the first great sonic maelstrom in musical history" at the end of the fourth piece. Read the whole thing.

And while you're thinking of Webern, read Phil Freeman's post on Webern in commemoration of the composer's birthday. One of Burning Ambulance's central concerns is with jazz, and Phil relates some comments a jazz musician made to him about Webern's influence. Again, please read the whole thing.

Tough Times

Tallahssee, Florida (June 19, 2011) -- The City Council of Tallahssee (FL) voted yesterday to attempt to balance the city's budget by removing the third "a" from the city's name. A council spokesperson said that there were numerous attempts to save the letter, but to no avail. Church leaders were happy, saying they had "never liked [the letter] in combination with the two letters after it". The change was effective immediately, but critics say most of the savings were spent changing of the books in local libraries.

Florda Governor Rick Scott, speaking in Tallahssee, said he was following the capital city's lead, and would ask the Legislature to return to Tallahssee for a special session to consider removing the "i" from the state's name. Citing the fact that many people don't pronounce the "i" anyway, the Governor also said that the new name would help foster the populist image the multi-millionaire former health care executive spent 70 million dollars in the campaign to build: "I'm a two-syllable kind of guy, and Florda will be a two-syllable state as long as I am Governor."


(h/t to Alex Ross)

Step One

I don’t know for sure that I’ve ever made it clear here what I think about public (government) sector arts funding. I might have, but like I said, I’m not sure. So, I want to make as clear a statement on the issue as I can.

I’m agnostic about public funding of the arts.

I used to be someone who would offer a full-throated defense of Public Sector Funding of the Arts (PSFA) at the slightest provocation. A powerful case can be made for PSFA, and I’ve made it before and, when confronted with certain arguments against it, I’m willing to make it again.

Back in 2007, an Op-Ed piece in the Tallahassee (FL) Democrat (for which I wrote concert music criticism at the time) railed against PSFA in terms everyone with an interest in the subject has seen innumerable times: I don’t want my tax money spent on art I find offensive; I could do some of that stuff PSFA pays for; if its any good the market will support it; we can’t afford it (more on that one later).

My response, which the Democrat printed, went along the usual lines of return-on-investment, enrichment, etc.:

A . . . direct argument for public funding of the arts might go something like this: A culture expresses and communicates what it really is, for itself and its posterity, through its art. In a market-driven society such as ours, the best-seller lists, box office receipts, and top 40 offer one version of our artistic output. Public financing of artistic work can offer another perspective, one that is not market-driven and wholly subject to the desires of the buyer.

My thinking on the subject started to change[1] when I read Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. From my review:

This triptych of chapters [covering 1933-1945], one each on music in Stalin’s Soviet Union, FDR’s America, and Hitler’s Germany, shows what can happen when politics becomes entwined with art. Ross doesn’t specifically make an argument against government funding of the arts, but these are, at the very least, cautionary tales. These chapters abound with villains, but there are no heroes.

I explored this area further in an interview with Mr. Ross in the same issue of The High Hat:

SDH (me): Right after I finished reading the central triptych concerning music under Stalin, FDR, and Hitler, a friend played a passage from Ottorino Respighi’s Feste Romane (to illustrate a point about cymbal technique). I could barely stand to listen to it — after what I had just finished reading, it sounded like fascism. I’ve gotten past that since then, and I was wondering if you had any similar experiences while you were working on this project.

AR: I have a difficult time listening to one recording in my collection — a performance of Richard Strauss’s Friedenstag in Vienna that Hitler actually attended. It’s one of Strauss’s least inspired works; you can  sense him trying to find his place in Nazi culture. It’s also hard to deal with the music that Shostakovich wrote for the scene “Stalin’s Garden” in The Fall of Berlin. But in general I don’t believe that music is “stained” by the events that surrounded its creation. It can always be reshaped in listeners’ minds — bent toward good or ill or back toward good again.

SDH: Another thing that struck me after reading that middle section and for the rest of the book is what seems to be an incredible irony that continues to haunt us today. The Soviets, especially, demanded that their composers produce music that was close to the people, music that was accessible. This was also the case in other totalitarian countries, in the East and the West. The irony comes with the fact that music that is produced in response to the desires of the audience, or more ominously, in response to the market, similar in style and stance to that required by totalitarian governments. Do you agree with this? If so, what, if anything, do you think it means?

AR: This is more or less true, and it’s a haunting fact, but I don’t read too much into it. Totalitarian dictatorships are those that submit to the will of one ruler, and if the ruler’s taste is that of an ordinary music-lover, then naturally the music he demands from talented composers will appeal to ordinary music-lovers everywhere. However, I think it’s a mistake to believe, as many advocates of modernist music have suggested over the years, that there is something deeply amiss with the kind of mural-like populist composition pursued by Copland, Shostakovich and others during the 30s and 40s simply because totalitarian regimes appropriated that aesthetic. Again it’s that logic of the “taint” or “stain” that I reject.[2]

At the beginning of the Public Broadcasting System’s (PBS) recent telecast of the Metropolitan Opera production of John Adams’ Nixon in China[3], during the recitation of the funders, the slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was read:

A great nation deserves great art.

This slogan crystallized my current thinking about PSFA. It, PSFA, is always beneficial to the nation/state/county/city doing the funding. Always. Period. In purely economic terms the return on investment is impressive—most analyses show that for every dollar spent on PSFA between 6 and 18 dollars of economic activity are generated.[4] PSFA (even on a minimal level, which is all we’ve ever done) allows TV slogan readers to say things like “A great nation”, etc., with a minimally straight face.

The problems with PSFA for the arts themselves are well-known, if not always exactly agreed upon:

• Projects funded are too high-profile or too big or too well-known—how many regional opera companies (for example) could mount productions with the money the NEA provides the Met?
• Projects funded are too low-profile or obscure—shouldn’t funding go to events more people will see?
• There is too much emphasis on re-creation (performance, etc.)/dissemination of existing works, not enough on creation of new works.
• There is too much emphasis on giving money to individual artists to create art, not enough to bringing art to audiences through performance or dissemination.
• Too much money goes to people with connections or to prominent institutions.
• Not enough money goes to people with connections—I voted for this so my husband could get funded.
• The imprimatur conferred by government funding stamps the work as the art of the establishment—a tool of the Man.
• Too much money goes to artists who question the foundations of our system.
• The art produced isn’t worthy because it wasn’t subject to the rigors of the marketplace.[5]
• Well, I could have done that.[6]

Again, all of these issues are problems for the art world, not for the funding entity. The funders still benefit from the funding, regardless of which of the above factors come into play. These factors can, however, be serious problems for art, calling into question, at least for me, the value to art of PSFA.[7] There are benefits to the arts in all of this, without a doubt, but are they worth it? I really don’t know.

On the other hand, there is one area where PSFA is absolutely essential: Education. On every level. Students, from pre-K through (at least) undergraduate should receive meaningful training in the arts.[8] I’m not an educator, by any means, so I don’t have clear ideas about how this should be done, but there are people who do, and we should give them the resources to figure it out, test, and implement their findings.[9]

Florida State University has one of the leading, strongest set of arts programs in the United States. The problems and possibilities listed above are all in play there. Every year, the University sponsors an arts festival that, for me, embodies the problems with PSFA—the roster consists largely of middlebrow acts designed to appeal to an affluent middlebrow audience, and to meet them in their comfort zone.[10]

On a day-to-day basis during the academic year, and to a lesser extent during the summer, FSU and dozens of other institutions like it provide a thorough, ongoing festival of art in all its variety. Hundreds of performances, countless lectures and presentations, and numerous exhibitions (and, on the FSU campus at least, an impressive collection of sculpture around the campus)[11] make these institutions ready loci of arts education. Let’s find a way to use them, to systematically extend the art making into the rest of the community, region, state, and nation. This will take funding, to figure out exactly what is to be done, how to do it, and to get it done.

I was tempted to end the previous paragraph with: “And do it we must.” But we know that in today’s environment, we aren't compelled. We can’t afford it, we’re told about everything except war and upward redistribution of wealth through the tax code. We’re in a “budget crisis”. Well, that’s just a lie. It isn’t true. The money is there. In fact, the money is there for anything we as a nation want to do. It just so happens that right now we want to fight unending wars and shovel money to those with money already. On the one side we have politicians who cut arts funding during a made up budget crisis, knowing the cuts won’t make a difference in the budget (because the amount is so small), but being too cowardly to make the cuts they want to make during more clearly flush times. And on the other we have a feckless opposition, who bend to the first because they want to be seen as “serious” by an out-of-touch corporate media.

John Adams, the President, not the guy who composed an opera about a President, wrote his wife, Abigail:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Looking at this as a blueprint for America’s future is sad, because it’s difficult not to conclude that we are still on step one, and that we are there by choice. We’re in a struggle for what we are to be as a nation, and I’m finding that there really are no agnostics in foxholes. “A great nation deserves great art”? Maybe, but that seems inadequate at this point in history—a great nation needs great art.

---

[1] Though I still agree with everything I wrote in the Op-Ed piece.

[2] I think Alex dismisses the relationship between the financial/political circumstances of the creation of art and the created art a little too easily, but that’s a huge subject, best left for another post.

[3] I’m still not the world’s biggest John Adams fan, but Nixon had some terrific stuff in it. For example and off the top of my head, the characterization of Richard Nixon (both as written and as performed by James Maddalena) is rich, complex, and nuanced, and the banquet scene at the end of Act I is musically exciting and theatrically effective. Also, it was moving to me to see an American composer take the podium at the Met to conduct his own opera.

[4] Most analyses land in the upper end of this range.

[5] If you don’t laugh (or at least smile knowingly) when you read the phrase “rigors of the marketplace”, having seen the products, cultural and otherwise, of markets, you just aren’t having enough fun.

[6] No, you couldn’t. Really. You couldn’t. Just. Shut. Up.

[7] Private funding of the arts presents its own set of problems, but there’s far more room for navigation there, at least in my experience.

[8] I promised an answer to the “we can’t afford it” argument. It’s coming. Trust me on this one.

[9] I can hear it now—why just throw money at the problem? The public schools don’t do their job as it is! Well, if the Pentagon performed like the public schools we’d triple their budget, not reduce it.

[10] Even so, one recent President of FSU, who clearly saw his position as being CEO of a minor-league football team, derided the festival thusly: “My idea of an arts festival is a John Wayne double feature and a box of popcorn.” This is offered as proof of what academia is really like, in contrast to the idea of the groves of it being a haven for liberal elitists. At any rate, anybody who knows me knows how much I love The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, but with all due respect, Fuck you, sir, and the horse you watched the Duke ride in on.

[11] The same President mentioned earlier was known to have contemplated getting rid of the sculpture collection. See the end of footnote 10.

Falling, Gently

Listen to This, by Alex Ross. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2010. 364 pages.

BRAHMS: Violin Sonatas (Complete). Stefan Jackiw, violin; Max Levinson, piano. Sony S70397C/88697637692. 71 minutes.

There’s a brief passage near the end of the first movement of Johannes Brahms’ Third Sonata for Violin and Piano (d minor, Op. 108, 1887) that crystallizes for me why I’m drawn to his music.

Brahms’ melodies frequently are made of short, sharply-characterized motives that are pregnant with developmental possibilities. In this passage, the violin focuses on a short motive that, in its first appearance (Figure 1), emphasizes the two most important pitches in a piece in D (major or minor)—D itself (the home, or “tonic” pitch) and A (the “dominant” to D, the pitch that most supports the “D”-ness of a piece in D).



Figure 1


This motive (and melodic lines derived from it or related to it) characterizes the entire movement, through repetition, development, and by implication, in both the violin and piano parts. At the end of the movement, (beginning in the fifth measure of Figure 2) the violin plays the motive in three different octaves, each time lower than the previous one. Because the repetitions overlap (see for example the first measure of the second system in Figure 2) the impression is of a falling, a slow motion tumble, towards the conclusion of the movement, which ends with the violin on its lowest A natural.



Figure 2

This kind of gentle falling is an important aspect of Brahms’ art. So is the clever technique involved in the tumbling, with the overlapping playing of the motive in different octaves. This particular combination of expression and technique, almost a tension between the two, is central to the art of concert music.

In the concluding essay of Listen to This (“Blessed Are the Sad”), Alex Ross argues that this melancholy (which is not limited to the composer’s late works, which are often celebrated for their autumnal atmosphere) is an identifying characteristic of Brahms’ music, and it seems to me that he is on to something. Brahms believed he was at the end of a line of concert music (Ross relates an anecdote about Mahler refuting this idea in a conversation with Brahms) and his music has a summing-up quality, and the melancholy cast to so much of his music is in line with this feeling.

Not so incidentally, the motive discussed above has a good bit in common with the bass line Ross devotes an entire essay to in Listen to This ("Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues"). This lamento bass line informs, as Ross richly illustrates, an astonishing variety of music throughout history. While the motive is not used as a bass line in this Sonata, it does fill in the musical space between D and the A below it, as does the lamento bass. And it surely does fall.

Stefan Jankiw’s debut CD (with pianist Max Levinson) is a recording of all three Brahms Sonatas. He and Levinson have very clearly studied and lived with these pieces for a long time—their reading of these mature, searching pieces (all three sonatas are relatively late works) is assured and expressive. The recording evinces a thorough understanding of Brahms’ particular sadness (what the novelist Walker Percy once referred to as a “sweet, rinsing sadness”) and an ability to transmit that understanding through performance.

One could do much worse of a midwinter’s evening than spend it with Ross’ book and Jankiv’s and Levinson’s Brahms.

Meme!

Ann Powers commemorates the availability of The Beatles on iTunes by listing her 15 favorite tracks by the Liverpudlians. Alex Ross responds with his own list, and thus a meme is born. Here are my 15 favorite Beatles tracks, as least as of right now:

15. "Back in the USSR" (The Beatles). Beach Boys-influenced rock 'n' roll, with clever and darkly ironic lyrics.

14. "All You Need is Love" (Magical Mystery Tour). With its quotations and trippy, layered texture, this prescriptive anthem is almost a pop Hymnen.

13. "Getting Better" (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). The texture thins for most of the last verse of this plea for undertanding from a guy who's trying to change. After a list of transgressions, the band (led by Paul McCartney's driving bass) storms back in, arguing for redemption.

12. "For No One" (Revolver). Intense emotion and rigorous technique. Sounds like art to me.

11.. "I'm Down" (Past Masters, Vol, 1). Old school rock 'n' roll screamer, which McCartney does almost as well as John Lennon in

10. "Rock and Roll Music" (Beatles for Sale).

9. "Yes It Is" (Past Masters, Vol, 1). Gorgeous vocal harmonies in a song about the inability to move on.

8. "Julia" (The Beatles). Simple, direct, haunting.

7. "A Hard Day's Night" (A Hard Day's Night). As Alex said, there's that chord. Not only that, but an energetic song about being out of energy.

6. "Let It Be" (Let It Be). This entire project has been criticized for overproduction, but I really dig the prominent roles given to three very dixtinct keyboards. Make sure hear this version, because in some versions the fine guitar solos are buried in the mix.

5. "Help!" (Help!). Rounding out the trio of movie themes with Lennon's call for assistance.

4. "Something" (Abbey Road). It's always seemed to me that neither Lennon nor McCartney were half the songwriter alone as they were together. On the other hand, George Harrison.

3. "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" (Beatles for Sale). I've always loved this song; can't give a rational defense. Note, however, the wonderful vocal harmonies.

2. "She Loves You" (Past Masters, Vol, 1). An ebullient expression of pure joy. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

1. "Ticket to Ride" (Help!). The percussionist in a musical organization is often the best musician therein. Ringo Starr makes his case herein. Note the different fills in front of the last two occurances of the tagline ("And she don't care") as well as how he recomposes the groove behind different verses. Also, again, the vocal harmonies.

Feel free to post your own lists in the comments (or links, if you have already posted somewhere else). Better still, some commentary on why The Beatles don't deserve the attentio would be very interesting.

On the Outside

I’ve been grazing through last year’s A New Literary History of America (Belknap/Harvard, 1095 p., edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors). This fascinating, informative, and sometimes moving book is a history of the United States told in essays about the cultural artifacts produced by Americans and, in a few cases, about America or Americans.

This broad definition of the “literary” is fleshed out in an Introduction:

Thus this broadly cultural history—a history of America in which literary means not only what is written but also what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form. (p. xxiv)

“[I]n whatever form”? Strong words. Did Messers Marcus and Sollars write a rhetorical check their editing asses can’t cash?

The focus is on the whole range of all those things that have been created in America, or for it, or because of it: poems, novels, plays, and essays, but also maps, histories, and travel diaries, sermons and religious tracts, public speeches and private letters, political polemics, addresses, and debates, Supreme Court decisions, literary histories and criticism, folk songs, magazines, dramatic performances, the blues, philosophy, paintings and monuments, jazz, war memorials, museums, book clubs, photographs, comic strips and comic books, country music, films, radio, rock and roll, cartoons, musicals, and hip-hop: “Made in America.” (p. xxiv)

This list is pretty comprehensive—the essay on porn star Linda Lovelace can be included under “film”, for example, so let’s see if there are any form of literary artifacts “that have been created in America, or for it, or because of it” that are left out. (Hold on, I’m reading.) OK, no concert music or concert dance (ballet or modern), either. A reading of the Index shows only fleeting references to composers like John Cage, Charles Ives, and La Monte Young. And no choreographers, or at least none whose names I recognized.

There was no explanation of the omissions. Was it an oversight? I really don’t know. They could have covered both with a discussion of Appalachian Spring or with the work of Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan or with the epic Cage/Cunningham collaboration. This not to mention what could have been contributed on either concert music or dance alone. I don’t know why they were not included.

Greg Sandow wrote this weekend about people who claim that classical music is inherently superior to other musics. Sandow need not worry about such claims, except to the extent that they are horrible marketing devices. It’s clear from this book as well as countless other cultural conversations taking place on and off the web, that concert music and its equally-unloved artistic sibling may be the least-important artforms going.

If concert music is on the outside looking in, and there’s plenty of evidence that it is, the ongoing conversation about the issue is extremely important. What I haven’t seen is a great deal of thought about what it means to be on the outside; to be, as Alex Ross has correctly put it, counter-cultural. Are there advantages to being on the outside? The disadvantages are clear, but aren’t there good things about it, too? Can part of our art be inside and part out? These are questions that should be asked, and suggestions tossed around. And now’s a good time to do it, since nobody’s paying attention.

End of an Era

In a way.

The development of the concert music blogosphere can be dated from when Alex Ross began blogging at The Rest is Noise back before the internet cooled. Now Alex has effectively closed TRiN and opened a new blog, Unquiet Thoughts, under the auspices of The New Yorker, for which Alex is the concert music critic.

I wish Alex well in his new corporate digs and I look forward to his blog posts, articles, and books, and I remember the words of Jean de La Fontaine: "People who make no noise are dangerous."

Free Music!

Alex Ross, writing in the 2 February 2009 issue of The New Yorker:

The image of the classical concert hall as a playground for the rich is planted deep in the cultural psyche. When Hollywood filmmakers set a scene at the symphony, twits in evening wear fill the frame, their jaws tight and their noses held high. The monocle returns to fashion for the first time since the death of Erich von Stroheim. One day, an intrepid art director will come to a concert and discover that the classical audience is well populated by schoolteachers, proofreaders, students, retirees, and others with no entry in the Social Register. They can afford to attend because classical events aren’t nearly as expensive as most people assume, especially in comparison with the extravagant pricing schemes for élite pop acts.

Here in Tallahassee, there is an incredible amount of good concert music-making available for free or close to it. This is true of any city, regardless of size, that is home to a college or university with a major music school.

There is far more inexpensive to attend music here than there was in the far-more-populated Research Triangle area of North Carolina when I lived there. Even so, I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least a handful of free or near-free concerts every week of the academic year/music season.

To be sure, the music-making at a music school is not going to be world-class, though doctoral performance recitals can be very good indeed. At traditional music schools (like Florida State) the programming tends to be onthe conservative, standard repertoire side, though less so than when I was a student.

Most of the over 450 concerts given at Florida State every year are free, but the publicity for these concerts and recitals would require a serious upgrade to be graded "poor".* Part of a music school's responsibility these days is to teach students how to market themselves and the music they perform, using the new media that are very likely familiar to these students in their personal lives. In addition to teaching these ideas and techniques, the schools should model more aggressive marketing strategies for their students. Concert music is, as Alex Ross demonstrates in his article, generally less expensive to hear in performance than the more popular mainstream genres, but we have to let people know it's here. How else will potential audiences become actual audiences?


________________________________________________
*A particular bugaboo for me is that it is extremelt difficult (damn near impossible, in fact) to find out in advance of a concert exactly what music is being performed. The fact that an event is a flute recital will draw flute fans. If it was publicized that the program includes Density 21.5, the Varèse fans would be there, too.

Messiaen

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen (he died in 1992). What stays with me about his music is its brilliant color and the sheer exuberance of it, bordering on ecstasy, and often crossing that border.

One of the great privileges of my life as a musician was to lead a performance of the composer's Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds) with the extraordinary John Salmon as pianist. The short concert (the rest of the program was given over to chamber music of Morton Feldman, who produces his own kind of ecstasy) was held in the sanctuary of the Episcopal Student Center in Tallahassee--the design of which is kind of a Scandanavian Modern, with lots of stone and curved walls. The reverb was intense and Messiaen's birds had plenty of room to take flight.

An article I wrote on Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the end of time"), can be found here.

Alex Ross has details of Messiaen 100 celebrations here and here.

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Alex Ross, winner of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellowship. The honor is very well-deserved.

I wonder if he has 20 bucks I can borrow until payday.

Elsewhere

Daniel Felsenfeld points to a fascinating blog called The Detritus Review, s a meta-critical look at music writing. In his post about the blog (which has been added to the blogroll), Dan rightfully calls on the bloggers to drop their anonymity, which seems only fair given the nature of the subject. I imagine they will do just that in due course.

Alex Ross posts an appropriately bleak photograph accompanied by some lines from Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man". Brazenly, I take the opportunity to mention that my solo piano piece, A Mind of Winter, title taken from the same poem, is part of Daniel Wolf's album of pieces written in response to the season, which is long past in these parts.