Stories on Myself

Like all musicians, even a dabbler like myself, I have a special, loving relationship with pieces I’ve played. 

Just a few years before Covid I stopped practicing classical guitar. For over fifty years I had played, badly I insist, without a trace of false humility. On occasion I had stopped before.  But I always resumed, especially since the turn of the century, when I regularly got up in the morning to practice for an hour or two.

This time, something else was happening. I just plumb gave up, and I knew it too. Something was wrong with my fingers. I sought out videos of aging performers, Segovia at 75, and tortured myself with remarks by legendary septuagenarians who kept at it. Then, three years ago, I found out that I suffer from Parkinson’s. I can barely button a shirt now.

 I suspect I was less of a musician and more of an attention addict. As I wrote, 

The incessant repetition of passages and the sense of solitude I attain when playing should place me somewhere on the autism spectrum, though I taught myself early  on to hide my solipsistic tendencies and be as socially functional as possible.  From A Repertoire of Sorts.

There are no presentable recordings of my work but here are links to some of those pieces I played, played by others. Those who find them appealing will have shared with me something of the many, many hours spent communing with them.

Here is the first one. Others will follow.

Tarantella, from Bardenklange (1847), Johann Kaspar Mertz. Played by Haruka Lee. https://youtu.be/1A5mWs_319k?si=mn6t49D1Nk4FyiLP

Score video by  Patel Kuktha . https://youtu.be/23m5FhA3EXc  Dad sent me the sheet music to Liberia, where I was living and teaching 1967-1969.

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Reprised here from Guitar Notes,  which imcludes:
My Library of Guitar Sheet Music
A Repertoire, of Sorts
Mickey Mouse Music
In Search of Bossa Nova
Flamenco Heaven
The Anticipatory Wake of Fiesta

 

Better, perhaps, the death of a loved one’s loved one be left without words. Instead I offer these paltry ones  of my own.

As my sister Nancy knows,  I never really knew my nephew Brian. But three moments are inscribed in my memory.

The first is the time when he was misbehaving in West Edmonton Mall, circa 1987. Nothing really, just the misplaced energy of a five year old.  Suddenly the ghost of Granny kicked in. Honestly, that’s how it feels. I grabbed his wrist, gave it a yank, twisting his arm.  He shouted out, more in surprise and than even simulated pain. But I got his attention.and he settled down. A recollection which bears more on my own surprise at having used force on him, plus a shadow of regret.

The second is more intense, yet more diffuse and also backhandedly personal. In 2000, when I was living in Tuscany, I learned about the car accident he had in which a jogger had died  in a collision. of a car he was at the wheel of. I was thousands of miles away but can recall  to this day details of the accident as related to me. 

But the reason I have such a vivid memory is I had had similar accident at the same age as Brian, 17, one in which someone  else died,. Like Brian, I was exonerated by the law. But perhaps not by myself.

The third is embedded in  a photo, I acquired in connection with my handing over to him Dad’s old guitar, which he is holding in it.

Brian was above all a musician, a lead man of the Austin group Hello Caller? In fact, the reason he gave for not accepting chemo and radiation treatment after he was diagnosed with fourth stage astrocytoma two years ago (and given six months to live) was that he didn’t want to risk losing himself before he had finished an album. He did finish it,  and was ready to do more.

In the future I hope to place Brian in what I call the contemporary Lang Maclaine family tradition of music. This disparate group includes, the patriarch Davo Lang, his son Ben and daughter Melanie, my cousin Red Dog and late brother Steve,  to name just members of the two generations which preceded Brian’s.

But let me now add only the three above anecdotes to the pool of memories others bring to celebrate Brian. My sister Nancy’s are the ones that count.