Good Times in Norfolk, CT

It's a gloriously sunny day today in New York. Hardly a cloud in the sky, a gentle breeze blows through the streets, and the pavements seem particularly crap-free. There's a sparkle in the air and I'm relaxed and happy. Even the asshole truck driver who woke me up this morning by parking outside my bedroom window and beeping his horn non-stop for three minutes to attract the attention of the person to whom he wished to deliver his package rather than go to the bother of actually dragging his obese fanny* out of said truck and waddling up the six steps to the apartment block’s front door couldn’t take the sheen off my mood.  Since I am more neurotic than a busload of Woody Allens I expect this feeling to last for but a short while, and so have decided to document the circumstances surrounding my unusually positive attitude.

"So… Why so cheerful, Tim?" you may ask (or you may not. You self-absorbed jerk). And I shall answer you: I have had my soul nourished by a magical week in a lushly verdant pocket of the world tucked away in the heart of rural Connecticut. A tiny hamlet of lovingly maintained New England mansions, oldey worldey water mills, wide open streets utterly free of traffic,smudgy mists that waffle down from viridian hills,babbling brooks, blarping frogs, floofing birds, and sunsets that would make God weep. I have spent a week in Norfolk, CT. (Also there was free ice-cream).

More specifically, I have been one of the fellows at the Norfolk New Music Workshop, run every year since 1941 by Yale university. The workshop is a residency that is part of a larger music festival that takes place in the Ellen Battell Stoekel estate, a sprawling parkland that was once home to a philanthropically-minded gazillionaire by the name of Ellen Battell Stoekel (duh). Ms Stoekel left the whole kit and kaboodle to Yale university with the specific instruction that the ol' farm be used to host an annual music summer school. Seventy years later, it's still kicking along, and this year I was fortunate enough to attend (especially since there was free ice-cream).

For those of you who don't know what a residency is, it's pretty much a working holiday for artists. You send off an application, saying "look how good I am! Can I come and stay at your place and make some music/art/sculpture/interpretive dance based on the manufacture of dental floss?", and then the people who run the residency go "Sure! We'd love to have you along!" (or sometimes "No f&#king way! Your music sounds like a bagful of drowning cats! Go to hell and take this migraine-inducing crap with you!") and then you go and live there and do your thing and generally have a nice peaceful time of things. I've been lucky enough to undertake a few residencies and they're all different and awesome in their own way, but Norfolk was so great it'll stick in my mind for many years to come. The scenery was amazing, my fellow artists-in-residence were a stellar bunch of people, and the whole thing was run by two of my favourite folks, "nicest composer in the whole world" Martin Bresnick and "rip-roaring pianist" fellow Aussie Lisa Moore (plus there was free ice-cream).

So generally speaking, there are two kinds of residencies: one where you're required to demonstrate some kind of finished product at the end, and one where you're required to just exist and add a certain classy romanticism to the place (much like in the days of Byron when wealthy landowners would go to the length of actually advertising for, interviewing and hiring hermits on a contract to live in purpose-built ramshackle cottages strategically placed in discrete corners of the estate, so when the landowners were out wandering with their entourage they could wave vaguely at this utterly artificial addition and say "oh yes... that's where the hermit lives... poor mad fellow..." because nothing says "thrillingly romantic" like having an unkempt hobo squatting in your backyard. Wait... where was I...? Oh yes. Residencies.) So there's two kinds: ones where you have to do something, and ones where you don't (it's more complicated than that, but in a nutshell, there it is). The Norfolk residency was the former, and for this one we (the composers) had to write a piece before we got there that fulfilled certain criteria: it had to be for a specific ensemble (clarinet, trombone, percussion, piano, violin and double bass, if you're interested), and it had to make some reference to the work of the man who could be arguably called the Grandpappy of American New Music, Charles Ives (however there was no requirement to reference the fact that there was free ice cream).

So Charles Ives was, and still is, a pretty unique composer. He was doing his thing at the beginning of last century, and had this kind of "composer superhero" lifestyle... by day he was a mild mannered life-insurance salesman, and by night he was a mild-mannered composer who wrote some of the most wildly fantastic music you could ever imagine, so much so that of course in his day he was considered a joke, and even now there are some pieces that raise eyebrows. He did a lot of things that were considered bizarre and frankly unmusical in his day, like writing pieces in multiple keys simultaneously, or positioning performers all over the concert hall, but he is perhaps best known for his habit of mashing together pre-existing pieces against a completely whacko backdrop of sound. Essentially he was DJ-ing decades before anyone even thought to put those two letters next to each other (except in very sternly abridged dictionaries**). The man had a love of pastiche that makes the average hipster look Amish. So it was this aspect I decided to focus on my piece (and my free-ice-cream-eating habits whilst at Norfolk).

I also knew I wanted this piece to be for Blair. Blair passed away only a few days after I had started work on the piece, and in the aftermath it became glaringly obvious that this piece absolutely had to be for him, especially since the date of the concert at the end of the residency was June 25th - Blair's thirtieth birthday. I'm not a huge believer in fate or coincidence, but this was too weird to ignore. So I knew this piece was to be for Blair, and I wanted to write a piece that he would enjoy listening to. The problem was that in the entire time I had known Blair he practically never professed a bold love or dislike of any music. Plus he was so unfalteringly positive that I could have beaten him over the head with a trumpet and he would have said "mate, I love it! Totally original and clever! Not so hot on the beating, but what do I know?" The only piece of music I could ever recall him saying he enjoyed was a song I wrote for him for Death's Waiting Room (created by Danielle Harvey, script by Sam Bowring. Friendship obligations satisfied) called "Weed". In this show, Blair played a confused transvestite called Marie Antoinette. Confused because she longed to be a man, despite the fact that biologically she was male. Even though I wrote the music for this song waaaay back in the day before I had even considered composition as a career, I still think it's a pretty kickass tune, and it has an awesomely dark little harmonic progression in the chorus. So I used that as a basis for the piece - pretty much throughout the whole deal this harmonic progression is referenced in a bunch of permutations and guises, all dressed up in Ivesian pastiche to sound like a celebration of an awesome guy (and I'm struggling to think of a way to seamlessly mention free ice cream at the end of this paragraph).

The performance was awesome. The musicians were incredible. The whole concert was brilliant. It was a great day. Amongst the thickly forested hills of Norfolk, in a huge New England music hall made entirely out of Californian redwood, "Good Times" premiered in front of a small but completely devoted audience. This alone is reason for me to feel that this residency was a wonderful success. But there was more... during the course of the week, listening to the musicians work on the piece, and talking to the other composers on residency with me, and having time out just to sit and think about my music and Blair and where I've come from and where I'm going to, I had an epiphany: this was my sound. This is my thing. This is the music that I can write that is completely and utterly me. Unsubtle. Raucous. Theatrical. Like two circuses colliding on an enormous jumping castle, elephants and lions and acrobats and all. For an artist of any ilk this is a wonderful moment. It clears the away some of the uncertainty and gives a clearer direction to head in. It suddenly makes you proud of your work and prepared to defend it to the death. It's like being reborn, and virtually nothing in the world can beat that.

Except free ice cream.


* Before you begin sending me links to wikipedia pages outlining the anatomical difference between men and women, remember that in the USA “fanny” means “buttocks”. I’m trying to blend in.

** I totally stole that joke from Terry Pratchett, but it fit perfectly so I couldn't resist. Totally Ivesian.

I've yet to receive the recording from the concert. As soon as I do, I'll update the blog, so keep your eyes peeled!

This is a fence.

The forest behind the estate

An olde worldey water mill.

The mansion on the estate, known as "The Whitehouse". It was pretty extravagant. The dining room ceiling, for example, was upholstered in elephant leather. No shit.

If ever a picture was worth a thousand words, it's now.

Jaqui Kolek, a mutual friend of Blair's, and I (and Andy, Jaqui's BF) enjoying some post-concert Veuve in honour of Blair.

The gang (from L-R): Me; Preben Antonsen (composer); Tim Hambourger (composer); Julia Seeholzer (composer); Adrienne Pope (violin); Mark Broschinsky (trombone); Victor Caccese (percussion); Gleb Kanasevich (clarinet); Thibault Bertin-Maghit (double bass); Nick DiBerardino (composer); Edward Neeman (piano); Julian Pellicano (conductor). At the front we have Lisa Moore and Martin Bresnick. Good times!

The night I called 911

The night I arrived back in the US after my most recent trip to Oz I met up with my friends from Australia, Christian and Hedy. They were in town for only a short time, and for months we planned to spend a much more substantial time together than we did, but Blair's death (which is still such a surreal statement that it has no actual real-world meaning) meant that we really only had that night to actually hang out. So we did. We hung out. And hung out. And huuuuung out. So a million drinks later I bundle the pair of them in a cab and I'm walking home. I'm thinking about Blair; he's pretty much all the three of us talked about for the previous four hours.

I come around the corner of my block and the first thing I see is a guy about my age slumped on the pavement, with some chick about my sister's age (but FAR more immature) standing on the nearby stoop saying, "Sir...?... Sir....?... Are you okay?". This guy was clearly not okay. He could barely speak his own name, let alone answer as to whether or not he felt in complete control of his faculties. This girl was making an effort to see if he was okay, but not a particularly effective effort. (Like most people, myself included, this girl was sincerely concerned with the condition of her fellow man, but she tempered that with earnestly polite detachment).

I got some information out of him. His name was Danny and he lived in Brooklyn. That was about as useful as saying his name was Mr. Smith and he lived on Planet Earth. Then he passed out utterly; in the half hour that followed I checked he was breathing by watching his belly bloat in and out of his sweater.

I suggested to Jillian (the chick going "Sir...? Sir...?) that we call an ambulance, initially because I didn't want to be woken up at 9am by a coroner's ambulance screeching around my front door to pick up a gradually cooling alcoholic's corpse from the front step of the apartment building ten doors up. But perhaps more so, I suggested we call an ambulance because Blair's death had made me incredibly conscious of how I treated other human beings, and while I was never a callous person, I feel as though it was not beyond the realms of possibility that I would walk past a guy in obvious alcoholic distress rather than try to take some responsibility for the situation. It was 3am after all, and I was pretty hammered and emotional.

So I dialled 911. A first! But I passed the phone to Jillian because I wasn't confident my Australian accent could convey the seriousness of the situation to an unsuspecting American call-center person...

Imagine if I did:

ME: Oi want to reepoirt a possible alcah-hoilic een deestress.

911: ...A what, sir?

ME: An alcah-holic een deesTRESS!

911: ...I'm sorry, who's wearing this dress?

ME: Noie, an alcah-holic! Hee neids hailp!

911: ...an alcoholic with broken knees...?

ME: NOI!!! What's WRONG with youi?! There's a pissed bloike on the steps of this apaahrtment block who neids meidicahl attinshun! (Note how thick my accent has become in the heat of the moment).

911: Sir, if you've had an allergic reaction to some kind of shellfish, which has cause a thickening of your tongue thus making it unintelligible to my nuanced American ears, then perhaps it would prove beneficial to both our interests if you gave the phone to someone without a debilitating allergy.

ME: (To Jillian) She wants to talk to you.

So the call was made. It was an uncomfortable waiting period. Jillian was young, and I could tell that she didn't often encounter tall, dark strangers from overseas (i.e. she totally had the hots for me. Who could blame her LOL ^-^) I didn't know what to say to her. So I started with local knowledge... I recalled something my landlord told me in an uncharacteristically communicative moment: a few years ago an apartment building down the street burnt down because some kid was playing with matches and set a bunch of rolled up carpets on fire, resulting in his death and the destruction of the building. I was expecting polite enthusiasm for a gruesome story.

"That was my nephew," she said.

Awkward.

So I panicked. The only reason I was stopping for this passed-out drunk guy (or so I believed) was because of my good friend's recent death. I thought I didn't give a flying fart as to whether or not this pissed guy lived or died; I just wanted to make my own life worth living. So I told Jillian about Blair. I told her of his sudden death and his philosophy on life. I was wearing my "good times" badge and I showed her that. I didn't spend much time talking about Blair, but I just wanted her to understand that I wasn't an insensitive schlub making stupid conversation. The futility of the effort and the apparent duplicity of my motives hit me like a hammer and I cried in front of a stranger over the passed-out body of another stranger.

I calmed down. She made soothing noises from behind the gate on her stoop. Eventually an ambulance showed up. (It's important you know that an ambulance in the US is not like an ambulance in Australia: we take for granted that an ambulance will take you to a hospital; as far as I can tell, in New York, you're lucky if an ambulance takes you to the corner unless you can prove you have ample private health insurance).

"Is he going to be okay?" Jillian asked as the ambulance drivers slipped their gloves on and pulled Danny to his feet.

"Yeah, we pick him up almost every night," said one indifferent ambulance dude.

"He was in handcuffs last night," said the other, and they tossed him in the back of their ambulance van like he was a sack of potatoes and drove off.

Sigh.

I don't really know why I'm telling you this story. I thought initially it was going to be an uplifting tale of humanity helping humanity. Maybe that's what I wanted it to be, but it didn't turn out that way. Instead it turned into a fucked up story of me trying to do good in the name of my friend and a flawed healthcare system got in the way. But since I've written this story I've come to the conclusion that if I (or anyone) is going to truly, TRULY learn something from Blair's death, it's not going to come from twee yet contemporary morality tales of helping drunk munters on the street outside my apartment. It's going to come from thinking about Blair's fairly unique combination of passion and compassion. Of caring about life, and caring about others you encounter in your life. I can't say for 100% certain that Blair would have stopped in the street to help Jillian deal with Danny, but I can say that Blair had a great deal of concern for the people in his life. Their successes were his successes, their losses were felt just as keenly by him as by them. And he always came out the other end looking for the silver lining. I'm not sure yet what my silver lining was in this weirdass night, but I'm keeping my eyes peeled.