So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.
— Wisława Szymborska
Johannes Vermeer was 26 and Rembrandt van Rijn 52 the year the Kingston Stockade was built. That was 365 years ago, and the woman in the painting by Vermeer in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is still pouring milk from her pitcher into the bowl.
Meanwhile, the concert hall with the gambrel roof off Maverick Road built by Hervey White in 1916 is in the midst of a new season of luminous acoustics. On Sunday, July 16. a concert there by the Escher String Quartet would have knocked my socks off had I been wearing them.
Seeing something seems to go to a different part of the brain than hearing things. The woman pouring milk “will” still be pouring it next time I look. Though I can play Bartok’s 1928 Fourth String Quartet on YouTube whenever I want, I’ll be dealing with time, which is continuous and irreversible — except in science fiction — rather than with space.
On Sunday, the Bartok was sandwiched between two longer quartets written by much younger famous European composers who were dying.
Mozart’s radiant second last string quartet, his 22nd, was written when the composer was 34 in 1791. That was the year a former stone Old Dutch Church in Kingston was expanded, only to be a few years later torn down to accommodate the present structure.
Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet written in the mid-1820s and first performed in 1828 when the composer was in his mid-twenties. That was the year Isabella Van Wagenen, later known as Sojourner Truth, entered the Ulster County courthouse on Wall Street in Kingston and successfully sued to rescue her son from slavery in Alabama.
A study of the most frequently played pieces in the chamber-music repertoire at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan ranked Death and the Maiden in its top spot by a country mile.
Of the three pieces the Escher Quartet played at Maverick, the Bartok, written in the troubled years when central Europe was turning toward fascism, was the most troubled: jarring: dense, hurried and dissonant. One sympathetic listener has described it as a 20-minute panic attack.
Sympathetic vibrations
“In a sense, art and music feed off of each other and complement each other to create a more meaningful, reflective, and emotional experience for the beholder,” blogger Thomas Nelson has written. No more earthy a corroboration of that perspective can be found locally than at the Woodstock Artists’ Cemetery, where visual artists, musicians and other creatives lie side by side in apparent harmony. There are plenty of all persuasions, and they seem to get along with each other peacefully.
“Encircled by the everlasting hills, they rest here who added to the beauty of the world by art, creative thought, and by life itself.” So reads the well-known inscription on a slab of bluestone at the cemetery. Its legend was composed by Dr. James Shotwell, eminent historian, Columbia University professor, part-time Woodstock resident and human-rights promoter, on a 15-ton slab of bluestone moved from a Saugerties quarry by sculptor Tomas Penning.
Creative life not only adds beauty to the world but it also keeps the world going. As long as there’s creative life, maintained poet Szymborska, the world hasn’t yet earned its end.
Though Woodstock is best known as an arts colony for well-known painters and sculptors, it certainly has had its share of musicians (and movie-makers, publishers, writers, graphic artsts and ceramists, among many others). A number of graves contain etched images of keyboards and string instruments, the latter thoughtfully provided with bows. The newest section features the first image of an electric guitar.
Music penetrates
Founded in 1915, Maverick Concerts off Maverick Road in West Hurley boasts of being the oldest, continuous summer chamber-music festival in America, “celebrating over a century of world-class music in the woods.”
The barn-like, rectangular building with its gambrel roof was built by hand as part of the Maverick colony in 1916 by the utopian writer Hervey White, one of the three founders (with Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and Bolton Brown) of the Byrdcliffe art colony in the hills above the Woodstock hamlet. All three founders are buried in the artists’ cemetery. .
With a roof of wood shingles and a frame of heavy timber, to which the walls — sheaths of wide planks — were nailed directly, the wooden construction and luminous acoustics create an environment perfectly suited to the intimacy of live chamber music.
Why is it that music attracts trouble the way honey attracts bears? Art sits there. The worst its enemies can do is to deface it. Music penetrates its listeners. Moments produced by those who make music can be conveniently hijacked in service of those who seek to destroy its message.
Why is it that magical moments become marred by their opposites? Long before disastrous Altamont Speedway in California followed transcendent Woodstock at Bethel, the joyous summer Woodstock festivals of the 1920s on Maverick Road, where artists dressed in costumes, danced around bonfires, and picnicked in the woods, became so enmeshed in drunkenness, gate-crashing and violence that they had to be discontinued after an alleged rape in 1931.
Celebration can have its downsides. The week of July 4 is statistically the week of the largest number of mass killings in America. Large gatherings, alcohol, rowdy behavior and violence seem as American as apple pie and ice cream.
Szymborska wrote a now-renowned poem entitled In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself. Its first stanza read:
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.
One community
According to the printed programs of the Maverick concerts, cellist Horace Britt played almost weekly in the earliest years. The programs were often short, and played by the same rotating group of local musicians: Inez Carroll (wife of painter John Carroll) at the piano, Britt, Pierre Henrotte (concertmaster at the Metropolitan Opera), Leon Barzin (music director of the New York City Ballet), Paul Kefer (first cellist for the New York Symphony), and a few other string players.
Britt was a member of the Hans Letz and Mischa Elman quartets in the 1920s, played in Spain with Pablo Casals and the Barcelona Philharmonic in 1927, and in 1932 toured extensively in the United States with flutist Georges Barrere and harpist Carlos Salzedo.
In 1924, Barrere, the best classical flute player in the French style in the world at that time, bought a house in Woodstock and summered in it for 20 years. An enthusiastic supporter of new music as well as first flutist of the New York Philharmonic, Barrere is today probably best known for commissioning a piece called Density 21.5 — the density of platinum divided by the density of water — from composer Edgar Varese in 1936 on the occasion of Barrere getting a (mostly) platinum flute.
Barrere and Britt later formed the Barrere-Britt Concertino in 1937, which toured extensively. Barrere suffered a stroke in the autumn of 1941, and another in 1944. He died at Benedictine Hospital in 1944, and like Britt, who died in 1971, is resident in the artists’ cemetery.
Programming at the Maverick Concerts has expanded in recent years: jazz, folk and contemporary music of various stripes, and Saturday morning family fare. Some 31 events were scheduled this year. Federal and state funds, money from the gate, and income from Maverick Concerts’ modest endowment pay the bills.
The community of musicians who performed so reliably and valiantly at the Maverick was inseparable from the community of artists for which Woodstock is best known. Even when not connected by family ties or common background, both groups were engaged in a common creative lifestyle. In the Woodstock of the past, art and music, in ways so profoundly different from each other, did indeed feed off each other and complement each other, making their joint contribution to the beauty of the world.
For a full schedule of Maverick Concerts events, visit maverickconcerts.org.
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