Month: July 2017

Twice now, Hawaii Chamber Music has presented a concert featuring Professor Rick Benjamin, whose life’s work revolves around the music composed to accompany silent films. We People of a Certain Age have likely not gone to many movies in which there was not music. The emotional impact of the music can be powerful: think “The Mission,” or “Romeo and Juliet.”

Professor Benjamin noted that daily life in, say, 1915, in the United States was comparatively devoid of music. One did not wake up to music on a clock radio, listen to “Morning Concert” on the car radio going to work, hear Muzak in the elevator, or work in an office where soothing background melodies filled the air. At home at night, there were no TV programs—even the news—featuring distinctive compositions for each.

To hear music in 1915, one went to church (if the denomination allowed music), to a band concert in the park, or to the movies, unless one was taking piano lessons and making one’s own music in the parlor. At a typical movie house, there were music makers playing music suggested by the moviemakers as appropriate to specific scenes, an orchestra of eleven if possible, a piano and drums at least. There was musical variety to communicate danger, pathos, and adventure. The music could be martial or tender, and by its sounds, the audience knew what they were expected to feel.

Music is so present in our lives today, as compared to 1915, that often we need to reminded to listen to it. The beautiful song of a Shama Thrush made me pay attention as I was leaving a school campus near Diamond Head recently. Sometimes we need something unexpected to remind us to be aware.

I have had the lyrics of a song provide the reminder. “Oh-oh-oh, listen to the music” sang the Doobie Brothers in 1972. The Cascades in 1962 urged us to “Listen to the Music of the Falling Rain.” The Phantom extolled the beauty of “the music of the night.” As long as you have rhythm, music and my gal, who could asked for anything more?

There is something elemental in music. When in human history did a mother first sing a lullaby to soothe her baby to sleep? How early in history did people sit around at night drinking spirits and putting their exploits into song? Were American slaves the first people to accompany their hard labor with songs detailing their plight and their hopes?

When did our species begin to dance? To what?

Without doubt, forms of music shift over generations. Our music of the 60s, with its British invaders and the persistent drums of rock and roll, was as alien to our parents as rap and heavy metal have been to me. Phillip Glass compositions will hardly be confused with those of Beethoven. Tastes change. Some compositions live on. Others fade. But there is always music.

When you were in grade school, was there a piano in your classroom, a songbook with standards like “O Columbia the Gem of the Ocean,” and regular periods during the class day when the students and teachers sang together? Whatever happened to music in our schools?

How recently has a bird’s song broken into your consciousness with its melody as the Shama Thrush did for me?

I was socialized into music and raised to sing. Dad sang the lullaby at our house. Mom played records, partial to Big Bands. At church every Sunday, we sang hymns, listened to the anthem, and marveled at how the organist got such wonderful sounds from all those pulls and keys and pipes.

Mom’s love of music was evident. She had a Bose that played four CDs over and over each day, twelve hours a day, for the last 18 years of her life, at least, as background in her house. (She would change the four CDs from time to time). Turning on the music was her first act of the day, before coffee. Those tunes played through her passing until my sister turned off the Bose and would have been the last sounds Mom heard.

As a kid, I had a metal toy xylophone on which I hammered out my own unique tunes. Then I was in a church choir, a school choir, Madrigals. My primary musical failure was to give up playing the trumpet after fourth grade to my mother’s disappointment. I think she hoped for a family Al Hirt or Louis Armstrong.

Judy and I have spent more money than we care to count acquiring first vinyl records, then tapes, then CDs so that we could play our favorite music whenever we chose. Before long, we will, no doubt, convert to the more modern forms of personalized musical selections.

We grocery shop at a Safeway that plays music on the “Safeway Internal Network,” or whatever its real name it. Segments of our 10:00 p.m. TV news are introduced by dramatic graphics and snippets of special music. Have you been on hold on the phone recently and NOT be blessed with tinny music?

Like the moviemakers of the “silent” era, the people charged with keeping customers happy use music to impact how we feel. I’m not troubled by that.

Still, I need the Shama to sing for me from time to time.

Daniel E. White

July 24, 2017

Our newspaper related the facts. A Big Island farmer, 43 years old, a pillar in his community, an activist in behalf of efforts to combat the coffee berry borer, married to an American woman, father of three, a regular payer of income and property taxes, faces deportation because, at age 15, he crossed the border from Mexico without permission and stayed. Proceedings against him began in 2010 but he was granted a stay in 2014.

His community is outraged that his upstanding behavior on their behalf counts for nothing.

What a great example of the tension between the letter and the spirit of the law!

A lot of great literature has evolved from this tension. Start with the Christian Bible as Exhibit A. Billy Budd and Jean Valjean, to name just two, are widely known literary manifestations of this archetypal conflict.

It is easy to have sympathy for both sides. “We are a government of laws, not of men” is an oft-heard proclamation about our nation, standing in stark contrast to countries where law is changeable, depending upon one’s relationship with the government.

There is also the view of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who wrote, “The life of the law is not logic but experience,” in commenting on what he viewed as the unjust, though legally prescribed, sentence of a young offender. Shakespeare had an opinion, too: “The quality of mercy is not strained.”

My Dad, the preacher, used to categorize people to me as “Old Testament” or “New Testament.” I asked him what he meant. He said that the Old Testament was about setting basic conditions for a clan of people and was quite explicit about do’s and don’ts, especially the don’ts. Rules were set—about food, dress, behavior—that helped to mould the people into a community of the faithful.

Following the literal, physical law was the price of belonging.

In the New Testament, Jesus changes things. When challenged, Jesus did not select one of Moses’ ten commandments as the greatest. He came up with a new one about loving God and one’s neighbors, one that would subsume the others.

He said that following spiritual law was supreme. Love replaced obedience as the primary test of faithfulness. So, what happens when love and obedience are in conflict?

Herman Melville and Victor Hugo wrote novels that end with different resolutions to the tension between the letter and the spirit of the law. Billy Budd, a person without blemish, is unjustly accused by John Claggart, the ship’s master-at-arms, of conspiracy to mutiny. There is reason to believe that Claggart has acted out of envy; many see him as a man of “natural depravity.” Billy Budd stutters. When confronted by the accusation, he cannot get out the words he wants, and, in frustration, he strikes Claggart a fatal blow.

Everyone on board, including the captain, believes Budd to be morally justified. But, the captain is concerned about keeping order on the ship, and the law calls for any blow, fatal or otherwise, to be punishable by death. So, Billy Budd is hanged.

Jean Valjean served a twenty-year prison sentence for theft, despite the fact that he had stolen bread to keep his family alive. When he is released, the law requires him to carry his parole papers on him at all times which Valjean knows will condemn him to a life of poverty. Who would hire a convict?

He discards the papers, creates a new life for himself, becomes Mayor, serves others, fathers a beautiful daughter; in short, he reforms and lives a productive life.

His unmasking even is the result of an act of kindness that leads his jailer, Jauvert, to find him out. And so the contest between the man of the law, Jauvert, who has lived a blameless life as servant of the law, and Valjean, who has served an unjust sentence but tossed aside his parole papers while becoming an exemplar of virtue, begins.

Jauvert comes to realize that Valjean is beloved by all who know him. That drives Jauvert to madness, and he commits suicide to escape what, for him, was a world turned upside down.

People of a Certain Age, we are all at some point along the continuum between the two poles: “The law is the law. If you do not like the law, change it.” And “The life of the law is not logic but experience.”

As the Big Island deportation case illustrates, this tension is nothing abstract. Nor does it lend itself to a right answer in the same way all of the time.

There are four words over the entrance to the Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. “Equal Justice Under Law.” It is justice that can mitigate the stark contrasts. “Do justly,” commands the prophet Micah and, we could surmise, those who built the building.

What is just, one well might ask?

Therein lies the question that must be answered by all of us. In sharing our answers and acting upon them, we may find a path that allows us to be a nation of laws that uses experience to breathe life into the law.

Daniel E. White

July 15, 2017

We had to persist to find the Barley Mow. We had tried a couple of roads in Clifton Hampden without finding it, and we were now in a residential area, clearly not the setting for a pub. The last option was across a one-lane bridge with traffic-control stoplights.

A sudden insight. The Barley Mow shared history with Jerome K. Jerome’s book, Three Men in a Boat, about his time on the Thames. The bridge crossed the Thames. So did we, and found the Barley Mow, lauded by Jerome as the “quaintest most old world inn on the river.” Established in 1352, it has a thatched roof, latticed windows, and a large fireplace, perfect for a pub.

We sat on a bench in the bar, front row seats to watch Chris, the publican, do his dance, pumping the tap, stopping the flow just as the brew head hit the rim, uncorking the wine, taking the food orders. He was gracious, humorous, and efficient. He seemed to know most of his customers.

Across from us sat a couple our age, their Golden Retriever on a leash at their feet. The publican brought the dog a treat or two. We surmised that the couple were regulars who had walked to the pub for dinner and that, in petting the puppy, the publican was greeting another old friend.

Two middle-aged men came to the bar and ordered their pints. They sat at a table beside us and reviewed the events of their days. When the pints were drained, they ordered another. One of the charms of the pub is that the customer orders everything at the bar. The wait staff delivers the food but ordering requires getting out of your seat and interacting with the publican.

Behind us was a family group of ten, ages ranging from six to seventy. Their dog lay quietly beside their table, too. They were surely there for a special celebration, a birthday perhaps. It would be natural, if one’s house were smallish which, it seems, most English cottages are, to go to the local gathering spot for celebrations.

From out in the garden came two young girls in summer frocks, sensibly dressed for the 86 degree, humid weather. They chatted with one of the wait staff and, from what little I could hear, seemed to be talking in a familiar way about something—perhaps the school term just over—one of the girls had just finished. Laughter from the tables in the garden, less hot now because the sun was lower in the sky, accompanied the girls to the bar.

About then, we began to hum “where everybody knows your name,” compared the publican to Sam Malone, and expected Cliff and Norm to show up any time. What a comfortable, embracing place this was. Even we, sitting on the same bench for the second night in a row, having ordered the same bowl of vegetables topped by a meat or fish of one’s choice, enjoying libations associated with pubs, felt how the Barley Mow could be a home away from home for folks in the surrounding communities.

People of a Certain Age, don’t we all need places like the Barley Mow where the ambience is relaxing, the “feel” reassuring, the people old friends or friends in the making? Doesn’t it help if the setting is ideal, matching the picture in our heads of where our community would naturally meet? Don’t we as a nation of rugged individuals actually crave community and a sense of belonging?

After dinner the second night, we chatted up Chris. We noticed a corporation’s name on the sign outside, above the pub’s name. Yes, the publican said, the pub is one of 2000 owned by Green and King, the largest beer maker in England. Yes, he was the pub’s manager as an employee of Green and King with all of the appropriate worker benefits. Yes, the menu was more or less standard for Green and King pubs, and yes, most of the beers on tap were made by Green and King.

No, he said, not many independent pubs have survived in England. What independent publican could replicate the benefits package from Green and King? How many could survive if catering only to the locals? Purchasing was less expensive because of bulk and economies of scale. The Barley Mow was not a franchise operation, like McDonald’s. It was an outlet of the parent corporation that took the profit.

Well, that will take the romance right out of a fantasy. Corporate Britain wins again.

Except.

The feel was real. The welcoming good humor of Chris was genuine. The couple with the dog was actually on one of the long boats traveling up river; this was their first time ever at the Barley Mow. But the biscuit was just as delicious for the dog. And those two girls in summer frocks and the two blokes dissecting the day over their pints, and our delicious dinners and the good beer—none of that was fake.

This is not 1352. With times, forms have changed. There are 2000 pubs owned by the corporation because the corporation has figured out how to keep the pubs profitable so that they remain a staple of English life.

What has not changed is that it takes people to create communities and other people to create circumstances and settings where communities can thrive. So we can be grateful that somebody makes it possible for the Barley Mow to be across the bridge for us to find, and in which to lift a pint to our newly-found favorite pub.

Daniel E. White

July 3, 2017