Classical Music and Corncobs

I intentionally skipped the news today.  It was driving me crazy.  Instead, bright and early in the shack, I poured a cup of espresso and put Beethoven in the CD changer.  Ludwig von was born 250 years ago, and because of that the discount CD catalog I get featured his stuff.  I bought a couple.  I hadn't gotten around to listening to them.  Somehow, I decided today was the day. 
  
While talking to a friend a couple years ago about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and saxophonist Art Pepper  I mentioned CD’s.

“You mean real and actual plastic discs you play on a mechanical device?  I’ve heard people still buy those, but I didn’t know who.  So, it’s you.  You never heard of Spotify?”

“I’ve heard of it sure.  But I have good speakers in the shack, mounted at ear level, with a subwoofer in the corner.  Its better than what comes from some little sound bar.”

“I suppose you have a turntable for vinyl too.”

“I do.”

“That’s nostalgic.”

“Not really.  A needle on a vinyl record makes a warm silky sound.  You should try albums again.  When you hear the sound, you’ll remember.”

“But that means you can only listen in the shack.  You’re tied to a fixed place with your collection.  Spotify travels with me.  I can hear almost anything ever recorded anywhere, anytime.”

”I know its old technology, but I don’t mind.  The shack is all wood.  Eleven and a half foot square, with a vaulted ceiling.  The acoustics are good.  When I turn up the volume I imagine I’m listening from inside a giant guitar.  Maybe a big cello.  I don’t mind being tied to it.  Someday when you’re in the neighborhood you should drop in.”

“I will.”

He probably won’t.  He lives in Los Angeles.  I’d love to have him for a visit, but I doubt a trip to Illinois is in his future.

As it got light out this morning, I put the Beethoven CD into my set up.  Turns out Ludwig wrote music especially for string quartets.  The Artemis String Quartet was two violins, a viola, and a cello.  I thought they could have used the nice low sound of a big doghouse bass in the mix, but they didn’t.   

This Artemis group recorded Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 1 in F major and String quarter No. 12 in E flat major.  Long liner notes came with the CD, printed on glossy paper in English, German, and French.  Unless I’m mistaken, you don’t get liner notes with Spotify.


Commentators on classical music write very differently from say, the stuff written in a Bob Dylan album.  You don’t need much to catch the highbrow flavor of it. 

After talking about the development of “the quartet genre”, throwing in words like Rococo, and dropping the names of not only Haydn and Mozart but also some rich Prince Lobkowitz, the classical expert finally got down to the music.
  
“The entire movement derives from a short, strongly rhythmic motif and coils around a single note.”

But does he tell us what the note is?  Where to find it?  No.  He goes on. 

He went on to create a sentence where he included not only the words “contrapuntal, augmentation, and diminution” but also “adagio, affettuoso, and appassionato.”


But my favorite line was this.


“…the scherzo has the effect of a satyr play-it scurries along and is notable for its syncopations and pungent grace notes.” 

Wait.  Did he say pungent?  Pungent is an adjective used for taste or smell. The writer is German.  Maybe he got crossed up with his translator.  But pungent?  Vinegar splashed on ham and beans is pungent.  Spicy peppers roasting in a hot cast iron skillet are pungent.  But pungent musical notes? 

Imagine sitting around listening to some great and unforgettable modern album like Wake of the Flood by the Grateful Dead.  You know the album.


The front cover pictures a hooded old person with a scythe and a shock of wheat.  Behind the person, framed in a circle, are bands of blue; dark blue water with light blue sky above it.  Laughing crow on the back.  Oh, sorry.  You only listen to Spotify.  You don’t know about the nice art found on old 12x12 carboard covers.



Anyway, you and a friend are listening to “Eyes of the World” on Side 2, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter.  It’s a breezy song that lifts you up and carries you along.  Jerry Garcia plays a repeated guitar lick that always makes you happy when you hear it.  You smile.


But it’s unlikely you would turn to your friend and say “Did you hear that guitar?  Pungent don’t you think?”


“I agree wholeheartedly.  Quite pungent in fact.  One finds oneself enthralled.”

I played Beethoven because I wanted beautiful instrumental music only.  No lyrics.  I took a day off completely from both the news and the virus: the politics, the death, the science, the heartbreak, our ruined economy.  Not only did I shut out the news, I shunned spoken words entirely.

The sound of four good musicians playing Beethoven’s soothing and mellow chops for strings helped get my mind off the world around me and onto the small world of my stove, my woodshed, and the fuel I burned this Illinois season.  I was out to write a story about my relationship to fuel.


I heat my shack with  a wood stove from late September to early May.  At the beginning of fall I had a fair bunch of oak stacked in the woodshed, which had previously hung dead on a nearby tree. Oak is my favorite fuel.  It’s the go to, hot burning, long lasting stuff.  I hired a guy with a boom truck to take big limbs down off a tree by the ravine because I feared they would fall on the shack.  After the limbs were cut to length and stacked, I was not entirely convinced it would get me through the winter, but I was hopeful. 

I have several kinds of fuel.  Woodworkers bring me boxes of scraps from their shops.  It is dry and good for getting the oak going.  Sometimes they include small chunks of walnut or other fancy hardwood, which seem wrong to burn.  But what do you do with wood, no matter how fine, when it is that small?  That’s why the woodworker parts with it after all. 

My friend Joe brought me buckets of cherry wood three or four inches in length.  Someone gave him cherry logs just a tad too long to fit into the wood stove in his living room.  He cut off the ends to fit, saved the chunks, and when he saw my little shack stove said, “I’ve got some wood at home for you.”


I take everything.  As word of that fact got out, I ended up with left over paneling, some finished laminate flooring, particle board, the fronts of old cupboards, you name it.  That is the kind of stuff you save for a while in your garage, sometimes for years, before finally saying to yourself “What am I ever going to do with this?”


In addition to wood, I was fortunate to also receive pinecones from friends and relatives.  Pinecones, especially the bristly ones that have spread out and dropped their seeds, are wonderful fire starters when laid on top of brown paper bags.  I had gobs of them, five big black plastic garbage bags full at least.  I thought I would never run out.  They lasted till the middle of February.


I also have a corn cob angel who stocks me up every other year or.  Seems the land she owns alternates between beans and corn and when its in corn she gathers cobs for me.  When she dropped them off it seemed like a mammoth amount of cobs, two garbage cans full.

I use the corn cobs to extend fires.  When you need more heat but don’t want to burn more wood, like at the end of the day, nothing is better putting a stove full of cobs on top of a bed of coals and waiting for that big whoosh when they catch.  Cobs burn hot and fast.  Its May.  Beside my stove is a five-gallon bucket half full of cobs.  That is the last of them.


Fuel consumption depends on more than the weather.  While it was not the coldest winter, I was here for almost all of it.  I missed a cold ten days while in El Salvador on an eye care mission, but due to the pandemic I had to cancel my road trip to Florida in the Buick and a leisurely return home.  That trip usually results in two weeks of a closed up and cold shack, which is the beauty of a shack with no plumbing.  Shut the door and forget about burst pipes.
  
It seems as if I have been in this shack every day since I made it back from Central America.  Not that that is a bad thing.  But because of that I burned more wood, pinecones, and corn cobs than normal.

Lucky for me my brother helped.  Denny brought six long 5x8 pine posts to me at the end of summer.  When he first acquired those posts, he pictured them as perfect for a woodworking project he was carrying around in his head.  He probably saw not the posts at all, but pieces made from it, all planed, cut with a band saw, spun on a lathe, sanded, stained, and lacquered.
  
Either something about the project or something about the wood made the image of that finished project incompatible with reality.  At the very moment Denny concluded that, the future of those pine posts was transformed from furniture to fuel.


He brought the timbers to me.  They didn’t look like much on the outside, gray and weathered, but they split up and burned like a dream.  Clear dense wood with no knots.  Pine does not have near the BTU’s of oak mind you, but this pine caught quickly and burned hot.  Those pine posts heated the shack for quite a while.  I burned them up at the beginning of the cold weather to conserve oak.

When I began to get low on scrap lumber looked again at the stuff in the pile I was reluctant to burn.  Leftover tongue and groove fir planks I floored the shack with, tongue and groove cedar siding, flooring from the old chapel in our church that came out in a remodel.  I found rafter tails and other 2x lumber left from framing the shack.  Some of them had my daughter’s handwriting on them, or mine, pencil notations of cuts and angles, from when we built the shack 9 years ago.  I got sentimental over them, saved a couple, and burned all the rest. 
  
I resorted to looking through my own garage.  For some reason I saved wood handles from tools I’d broken.  A handle from a hoe, the busted off handle of a long-handled shovel I pried on too hard, a pitchfork handle that couldn’t take the strain.  Why did I keep them?  I have no idea.  They were cut up and burned in the shack stove just this past week, their existence converted to heat and a little smoke up the stovepipe. 


The list goes on.  The old mailbox post I patched together repeatedly after it was hit by the snowplow.  Wooden handles painted red from the old wheelbarrow that rusted through.  Various short pieces of 4x4 or 2x4 I thought I might use someday but never did.  One block of wood I remember tucking away because I thought it would be perfect for putting under a car jack on a soft gravel shoulder.  Hadn’t touched it in twenty years.  That block of wood and everything else ended up in the stove, converted to new energy.  It was liberating.


However, some wood survived because of its own stubbornness.  My neighbor Bill finally cut down his dying blue spruce tree.  Must have been 30’ tall.  Trunk straight as a string.  I coveted the logs.  His son cut them up into three-foot lengths for me.  I’ve had them stacked by the woodshed for two years.  I kept thinking I would hit them with the splitting maul and theywould fall apart like butter.

No such luck.  All those branches radiating out from the blue spruce trunk locked the grain of the wood together tighter than wallpaper.  That logs just sit there, waiting for a bonfire.  I don’t think the spruce locked in them will ever see the inside of my stove.
  
Thankfully, the temperature continues to rise.  Soon, I will forget about fires in my stove and get out the fan.  Just as the shack lacks plumbing, it also lacks air conditioning.  Fuel and heating will be the farthest thing from my mind in July.
    
But sometime before fall I will need a plan for acquiring more fuel.  That means dedicated and thoughtful deliberation or, failing that, a mad scramble of some kind before it snows.  Either way, getting away from the news is a good way to start.

And beautiful music helps.