Birdfoot Chamber Music Festival 2013 - A Musical Feast at Madewood Plantation House

On Sunday, May 19, the Birdfoot Chamber Music Festival began its second year of festivities with A Musical Feast at the Madewood Plantation House.  Open rehearsals in the afternoon and early evening hors d'oeuvres with wine were followed by a concert of selections from works to be performed throughout this week. The evening culminated in a delicious dinner by Chef Stephen Stryjewski of Cochon, where guests mingled with and met the brilliant young musicians that have come from all over the world to share their talents with us.

The beautifully preserved and restored plantation homes of the American South enshrine a cultural history as rich and fascinating as it is difficult and deeply vexed, but the intense intimacy of chamber music as a genre is amplified by the antebellum grace of Madewood.  These are the chambers this music seems made for, and hearing it here is completely unlike any other music listening experience. High, shimmering notes sparkle in the crystal chandelier. Lush middle tones unfurl along scrolls and leaves of plaster molding.  The deepest notes billow and undulate in lace curtains draped against dusk-dimmed windows. Damasked wall paper, gilt frames, dark woods, and pale marbles all capture and resonate with the tapestry of sound, both broad and intricate, miraculously spun from empty air and woven into magic by a only handful of mortals with nothing more than wood, hair, ivory, steel, the skill of their bodies, and the passion in their souls.

But this is not the insulated opulence of wealth and rank, separated in a bubble from the vibrant, chaotic world outside. The stark, neoclassical lines of tall keyhole doors in this correctly symmetrical rectangle of a room reverberate with strange, unearthly harmonics and overtones, softened by the faint murmur of breeze through oak and Spanish moss. Flame-colored roses and carnivorous pitcher plants adorn each table, amid china, silver, and wine-filled glasses. And as the most ethereal music floats up to the ceiling, it drifts into the lost, lazy wanderings of a mud dauber wasp, buzzing drowsily from window to window. Everything here conspires draw together a civilized refinement and a wild swamp savagery into a union so unique to Louisiana, and so appropriate to this festival.

After all, at its essence, the Birdfoot Chamber Music Festival is not about keeping chamber music in the chambers of the elite. If A Musical Feast at Madewood evokes and brings to life an iconic and historical view of chamber music as performance for the privileged few in a luxurious setting, this week the Birdfoot artists and organizers will surely explode that stereotype in a variety of venues, from community center to university concert hall, and by mentoring and featuring many of New Orleans’ own young musicians. They will release chamber music from an insulated, Fabergé elegance, allowing it to fan out and flow like the Mississippi delta that gives the festival its name, to live and breathe in our often delightfully unrefined city, and to take root and grow in the minds and souls of a broader, brand new audience.

Do NOT miss this.

Gull Wings Gray

Gull wings gray
And gleaming white
As mist on foam
At silver-shadowed dawn,
The vast and hollow roar
Of immensity brought near
Rolling into shore
In a crashing tumble,
Salt and sand and spray
Cut clean through
By an aching cry,
Taunting, flaunting,
Arrogant above,
Aloft on knife-edge wings,
"Mine, all this is mine
And I belong
And every day I glide,
Riding the horizon line
Between serenity and storm,
Peace and passion,
Water and wind.
In a sudden swoop
I shatter the divide
Separating sea and sky,
Then, leaping into air again,
I am mastered and I am
Master of them all
And here I am complete."

Otto - Eight Great Years

The year 2005 was not a good year.  That was the year I made the decision to separate from my husband.  Our divorce was finalized two days before Katrina made landfall in New Orleans (I still lived in Houston, but the storm did not go unnoticed there).  So it stands to reason that Valentine's Day, 2005, would not have been a good day.  And in many ways, I'm sure it wasn't.  I don't really remember. But something good did happen that day.  That was the day that, knowing I would soon be on my own, I took myself down to CarMax in pursuit of a car of my own.

I knew that the CarMax I was heading to had a Honda Civic that was dark green, just like the Accord I'd wrecked the year before.  I loved that car, and was hoping for something as close to it as possible.  I test drove the green one, but something just didn't feel right. I had a second and third option picked out from the website, so I asked to drive the white one next.  The white Civic felt GREAT, and I decided, since there's no going back, it was time to move forward.  I put half down and drove my new car off the lot.  In that first week, I fell in love, so much so that I decided for the first time that my car needed a name.  In that instant, the name that came to me was Otto.  I swear it's because I'd been reading Willa Cather for grad school, and there were characters in the stories named Otto.  I didn't see the pun until half a minute later, and I laughed out loud, sitting there in my car in the dark, on Sunset Blvd. near Ashby.  That pretty much settled it.

I moved out.  I lived in some friends' spare bedroom. I moved into my own apartment, in the same complex as my first very own apartment, back sophomore year in college.  I went to work. I went to grad school. And Otto got me where I was going.  The first months weren't all smooth road, though.  In exchange for a ride up to Caddo Lake after the semester was over, a friend offered to let me stay at his family's lake house for a few days. The sun on the cypress trees and the smooth lake water covered by lilies, the quiet magic of Caddo, was just what I needed, wound tight by end of term finals and my own personal demons.  After a couple of days, I felt myself again, and more at peace.  And it's a good thing.

We'd been out on the Cypress River on the boat, up to Jefferson, TX for chicken fried steak. When we got back, the winch to raise the boat out of the water wasn't working. We had noticed smoke on the shore, and now we realized it was coming from very near the house. We hurried up the slope to find that a tree limb had fallen into the driveway, taking out the power to the house.  The live lines had set a retaining wall for the parking area smoldering, and the upper limbs of the branch had engulfed... my car.

Otto meets a tree! - Near Caddo Lake

Really, we got off easy, Otto and I.  If I'd parked six feet closer, the main bole of the limb would have landed directly on the roof of my car, causing major damage.  The large dents and scrapes caused by the smaller limbs required quite bit of body work, and explaining to the insurance company how a tree limb fell onto my car on a clear day of calm weather was pretty amusing (the agent thought my speculation that it might have been a squirrel frat party was hilarious).  Still, there was no damage to the frame or structure of the car, and the body shop fixed my Otto up just like new.

Later that year, we got a chance to really bond.  Katrina was a horrible, horrible disaster, so when Rita threatened to head to Houston, way more of us than really needed to hit the road out of town.  My mom was between houses and my sister was in her freshman year up at Texas A&M, so I headed north to Bryan, where my godparents live.  Or I tried to.  I threw a box of Poptarts and three 2 liter bottles filled with water into Otto and hit the road early in the morning.  Over the next seventeen hours, I ran the air conditioner as little as possible.  I ran out of power in my cell phone. I went crazy quietly in my car. I heard someone else go crazy loudly in a car up ahead of me. I became entangled in a Keystone Cop style farce trying to evict a tree cricket from my back seat while traffic was stopped, only to have to suspend my efforts when traffic began to move again.

I reached Plantersville, TX at midnight, and there everyone else when either right or left, and I took the road less traveled, and went straight.  Thirty minutes later (after a final, successful stop to get rid of George the tree cricket), I was finally in Bryan at my godparents' house. And after a full day of idling and about a hundred miles of travel, Otto still had a quarter of a tank of gas left.

That was our first year.  We've been all over Texas together, from Houston to Big Bend.  In 2009, Otto came with me to New Orleans.  He got his brake tag and a plate with a pelican on it. We've had our break downs here and there, but he still gets 34 miles per gallon on a good day, and no less than 28 on a bad.  I've kept him well maintained, and he's been something I could count on while I went through so many other changes.

Otto takes me home - Near Medina Lake

It had been in my head last year that I might buy a new car in the next couple of years.  Well, a used car, new to me, at least.  When some friends mentioned they would be selling their 2006 Prius, I had to start doing some hard thinking.  When they made me an absolutely fabulous deal on it, the decision pretty much made itself.  I was getting a new car.  And I would need to find a new home for Otto, knowing that any trade in offer I got would probably be auction block prices, and he might just be sold for scrap.  I didn't want that.  Call me sentimental, but my Otto is still a damn good little car, with 70K miles left, easy. That's a good five or six years, give or take, with continued maintenance.

Otto on our last trip - Near Big Bend National Park

I have a friend who didn't have a car, and took public transportation or had to bum rides or walk wherever she went.  I could only see this as an opportunity to get a little return to put towards the new car, and give someone else, at a great price, what Otto has been for me since the day I bought him: independence, safety, and freedom.  My friend was more than happy to buy my little car.  Yesterday, ten days short of what I've always considered his birthday, Otto got a new home.  Today he is titled and registered under someone else's name, with brand new plates and everything.

I'm liking my new car a lot, but it doesn't have a name yet, and I'm not sure it ever will.  I don't know if any car will ever mean to me what Otto has.  We've been through too much, during the hardest time of my life.  But I know this was a good... no... a GREAT decision, because now I know that this great little car has gone on to mean just as much to someone else.

Isaac ~ It begins

The wind gusts get stronger and stronger, and there is a constant patter of rain.  Sharp through these sounds, I hear a frog croak emphatically from the courtyard next door.  It's such a vast, turbulent world in my eyes, and I am a giant to this frog.  I hope he shelters safe in his little nest, and I shelter safe in mine. Today has been tense.  Fitful showers and fickle breezes under a gray sky all day.  The first rain shower began just as I left Matassa's, where I was picking up some last minute supplies.  That was about 8:05am.  The air was hot and sullen and the rain sporadic and light most of the day.  It seems now like it has decided to storm in earnest, but for now I do still have power.

I keep thinking of baskets with too many eggs.  Like the two window panes beside my bed, above the back door.  My drawing board is now wedged flush against the wall, between those panes and my night stand.  Like the shutters that I had to wedge shut and couldn't latch because I couldn't open the window from the inside.  They're now tied tightly with an octuple thickness of twine, in addition to being wedged.  The walls tremble now in the stronger gusts, but I remind myself that this house and its neighbors have been around for worse storms, and are still standing.  We're going to be fine.

I wanted to get some sleep in before the worst began, but I'm just too keyed up.  I listened to the radio for a while, trying to get some info on what to expect, but it just made me irrationally nervous, so I turned it off.  I've started a jigsaw puzzle.  I have my Nook fully charged, and a full library to read by candle light.  I may nap on the couch for a while, too.  I some extra hours worked and had a relatively calm evening, with all my preparations made.  I'm as ready as I'm going to be.

I believe I'll post this now, while I still have internet.  I'm sure I'll have more to report down the line. I expect to be up most of the night, and completely drained by the time we next see the sun.  Better rest as much as I can while I can!

Isaac ~ Pre-Storm

The early morning sun is bright in a brilliant blue sky and the air is clear as crystal and eerily still, except for the occasional fitful stir, making light silken flags and delicate fronds twitch nervously, but leaving all else still.  The office buildings stand silent, giants locked in still waiting by some curse. I see more people on my walk, but they are all strangely mute, speaking in hushed voices, except for those rambling with illogic and unreason on the corners.  As I reach a stretch of street where the traffic thickens, I realize the stillness that has me on edge has been deepened by the dearth of traffic on more distant streets, Rampart, I-10, thoroughfares normally gently humming on the edge of hearing at this time in this place, but now virtually silent.  The city knows what is coming, and even the pigeons are mostly absent.  It's such a pretty morning, and so surreal.

The day passes as all days do, with talk up and down the corridors about plans to leave, plans to stay, staying safe either way.  On line updates are my brain-breaks, and towards the end I turn my thoughts to what I can take with me. What I can work on without internet when the power goes out, as long as my laptops have some battery left.  What I need to get at the store. Checking again to see when and where the storm will hit, how big it might be.

I leave work and the sun is wandering vaguely in a drift of high cloud.  The sky is gray, the air hot, and the sporadic breeze of the morning has become more intense, more insistent, more constant.  I get home, and for hours I'm closing shutters, stowing potted plants, making lists, taping windows, checking the lists to make sure I'm not forgetting anything, returning calls to my mother and some friends, reiterating my plans, reassuring everyone that I expect to be safe, that I've done what I can, that we've been told to shelter in place, that this is not Katrina, that I'll text everyone on Wednesday when the storm has passed.

Finally night falls, and I've done all I can think to do for today.  Tomorrow I will hit the store one more time, since they expect water pallets in the morning.  I'm tired, but I can't wind down just yet.  I grab my camera, and prowl the streets.  After a trip to the river and a glance at Bourbon Street, it's time to go home.  There is laundry to finish, lists to check again and update, and a printer to move even farther from the windows.

And then sleep.  If I can.

Birdfoot Chamber Music Festival, 2012

This week New Orleans has hosted brilliant musicians from all over the world as part of the very first Birdfoot Chamber Music Festival, an endeavor spearheaded by friends of mine from the New Orleans dancing and musical community.  Tonight I went to the first evening concert.

Chamber music.  A chamber, a room, but somehow more intimate.  A space only the privileged few might enter, and to enter that small auditorium and be awash in unparalleled music created so close by felt intimate, and was a privilege.  When you listen to an orchestra from the mezzanine or balcony, most of the sound reaches you, the purely music part of the music experience.  But up close, you hear the touch of horsehair to heartstring, the breathing, the thud of heel to floor that punctuates music as a physical art.

And the physicality of music seems most evident in the playing of instruments that are people-sized or larger.  The pianist's shoulder blades jut out with a tension suspended in the breadth of the chord he pounds out from the keyboard.  Each knob of his spine is the next step in an arpeggio.  The cellist must hear the notes she draws from her instrument not only with her ears, but with her knees as they embrace its body, and in the resonant throb beneath her breast like a second heartbeat.  The cutaways in the back of her strappy black gown reveal the muscles straining to express the visions of the mind in tones that both rive the soul, and mend it.

Violin, viola, violoncello, the syncrony of their bows is a dance in unison, with now and again one dancer stepping out with a spring and a flourish, then merging seamlessly back into the chorus steps, until all diverge into reels of their own, only to rejoin suddenly, intuitively, into the shared pulse that moves them.

This is a music that speaks of Life.  Not just the life of a single person, though that's there, but LIFE as it is created in the space amid people.  The four on the stage.  The eighty in the room.  The hundreds, the thousands that brush against and bounce off of each other every day like Brownian particals in a sunbeam.  The billions that flush the face of the earth with living blood and hearts beating each a rhythm of its own.

The music is the briefest of conversations between strangers, as riffs call and answer from one player to the next.  It is the intimate discourse over years of friendship when a melody is split and shared, when each player expresses only some of the notes.  It is the reflection that comes alone in thought, almost unaware of the discourse that surrounds and informs it.  And it is the teeming of individual thoughts as they unspin unshared but simultaneous and harmonious... or discordant.

This music is life, each bar containing the unexpected, in spite of the illusion of notation on a page.  Anything could happen in spite of, because of, the best laid plans.  And as the music jerks into silence and you wonder if it can ever go on, with a gasping breath, sudden and literal, the musicians are jolted back into meter with all the drama of electrical cardioversion.

And as the magic unfolds, there is, all along, the page turner, solemn and correct, performing the stately, reverent ritual that marks the measure of each eternal moment, reminding all caught up in the endless ecstacy of a sublime phrase that this, too, shall pass.  Time is a process not to be stopped, and the most divine music is a march, slow or fast but always inexorable, toward it's end.

There are two Birdfoot events left.  Party in the Piazza tomorrow, 5/25, 5:30-8pm at Piazza d'Italia, Lowes New Orleans Hotel, 300 Poydras St. for $10.  The Gala Celebration, Saturday, 5/26, 8pm, Dixon Hall, Tulane University, $25 for adults, $10 for students.

Go, listen, live.

Saturday Night at the Myrtles

This past weekend I spent a wonderful evening and morning with some amazing women out at the Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana.  In addition to being an absolutely gorgeous property, the Myrtles is chock full of fascinating history, and is really, rather, quite haunted.  Now, this was, in fact, a bachelorette party.  But I'll let someone else immortalize the randier details.  I want to talk about the spooks!

We arrived at the Myrtles just in time to check in and deposit our baggage in the Coco House, a spacious cottage brought over from the Coco Plantation, and head across a wide lawn to the courtyard amid the main buildings for the mystery tour.

After a brief history of the building's construction and the lives of the first two owners and their families, our tour guide Zach began leading us through the rooms.  First he led us into Mrs. Stirling's day room, where the third lady of the house would conduct her day to day business and take her daily nap.  This is apparently the favorite room of one of the house's more active haunts, a slave girl named Chloe, who was mistress to the second owner, Mr. Woodruff.  Zach told us of a time when re-enactments were staged on Halloween, and a young woman hired to play Chloe was so terrified by the apparition of a woman confronting her as she paced the room rehearsing her lines that she turned to flee to the safety of... the adjoining bathroom.  The door slammed itself shut before she got there, she ran smack into the door, and fell to the ground screaming, swearing she'd never set foot in the house again.

From there we visited the haunted mirror in the foyer.  The custom in Victorian times, as Zach explained, was to lay out the dead for viewing in the comfort of their own homes instead of in funeral parlors.  While the body rested in the house, all mirrors would be draped with black cloth to prevent the soul of the departed from being drawn into the mirror and trapped there.  But someone must have missed this mirror at some point, because you can clearly see the image of what looks like a face trying to get out on one side of the glass.  Along the other side are what appear to be a child's fingerprints, and an eerie weeping or drip pattern in the middle.  These very same markings have reappeared multiple times, within weeks of the mirror being disassembled, thoroughly cleaned, and re-silvered.  This mirror is the only area of the house were photographs are permitted, and I got some good shots of the markings.  Others did as well.  More on this later.

From the foyer with the mirror, Zach led us to the dining room.  Here it was that some of the other active presences suffered the hurt that parted their restless souls from their earthly bodies.  Remember Woodruff's mistress, the slave girl Chloe?  Chloe had been brought into the house as a nanny for the Woodruff children, but fell suddenly out of favor when she was caught eavesdropping on her master's important business meeting.  As punishment, he had her ear cut off and banished her from the house.  But Chloe had an absolutely fool-proof plan to get back into the family's good graces.  She intended to win back their favor by nursing the two Woodruff children back to health from severe illness.  And not one to wait for chance ailments, she made them a cake infused with oleander.  Sounds like a snap, right?  Well, Chloe misjudged, and the cake ended up killing both children, along with their mother, while Mr. Woodruff was away on business.  When he returned and learned the truth, he had Chloe hanged from a tree on the property.  Today many visitors have reported seeing a dark, young woman wearing a turban, with a fold of cloth draped over the left side of her head, just the way Chloe wore her head scarf, to hide her missing ear.  Such a figure has even been photographed on the property, along with the shadowy images of two children.

From the dining room we were taken to the ladies' parlor, where the ladies would withdraw after a meal.  Zach reported that every medium that visits the Myrtles finds this to be the psychic center of the house's mystical energy.  The bedroom above is known as the doll room because of the antique dolls that have adorned the mantle piece over the years.  As if dolls weren't creepy enough on their own, there have been stories about them, as well.  As we listened to these tales, I felt something brush along the back of my arm.  I turned to see that the nearest people behind me were strangers standing over a foot away.  I gave a mental greeting to anyone who might be a bit closer than them, the gesture was not repeated, and all in all I'm proud to report that I was not actually wigged out.  It really wasn't very dramatic.  I might have simply been in the way, or maybe someone was feeling friendly to their visitors.  The room was really too lovely and comfortable to feel creepy.  I have to say that the few encounters I've had with the departed have been domestic and soothing, and that's really how this felt.

From there we were shown the gentlemen's parlor, where the... fourth? owner (or possibly the third) was shot in the chest by a stranger who rode up to the porch on horseback one dark night.  Legend says that he reeled back into the room, turned, and with his young son, with whom he'd been playing in that room, fled deeper into the house.  He made it up the first seventeen steps of the central stair, where he collapsed, just short of the top, into his wife's arms, and died.  To this day, visitors sometimes hear his faltering steps on the stairs.

In the final showroom, the children's dining room and later the game room, we were shown the photo of Chloe between the general store building and the main house, and the shadows of the children on the room by the dormer window of their room, and our tour was concluded.

As we were enjoying a relaxing dinner in the Carriage House Restaurant on the grounds, a woman who had been on our tour came to our table to show us a photograph she'd taken at the haunted mirror.  I was unfortunately away from the table, so I didn't get to see it, but she promised to e-mail it to us, and I can't wait.  Apparently she'd caught Natalie, one of our group, in her shot of the mirror, and, clinging to Natalie's side, was the apparition of a small child.  I think it's significant that Natalie is the member of our group who has a little girl of her own.

After an evening of nuptial talk, bachelorette games, and wedding cake vodka, we all went to our beds for the night's repose.  Only one of us, though, had anything like a restful night.  I dreamed all night that I was lying awake in bed, afraid that the haunts were coming.  At one point in my dream, a small, ghostly white puppy came over and wanted to play, and I reached to touch it.  It felt so real, and when I looked over at Nathalie, she said she could see it, too, but I knew it must be a ghost puppy, because it was playing tug'o'rope while hovering a foot off the ground.  Then I dreamed that I was laying stock still under the covers, knowing Chloe was in the room, but if I stayed still, she'd let me alone.  In all of these dreams, the details of the room itself and my sleeping arrangement, on my back or on my side, and Nathalie on the other bed, to the left of mine, were exactly true to reality.  I only knew they were dreams because I'd wake up from them, realizing I wasn't actually afraid, and didn't actually sense any presence.

Jayna reports that she dreamed of ghostly figures materializing around her, coming nearer and nearer, while she was unable, in spite of every effort, to reach over to wake Ellen, her bedfellow, or even move or speak at all.  Ellen, in turn dreamed several times of turning over to look at Jayna, and seeing a corpse with shining blond hair.  Nathalie's dreams intrigue me most.  She dreamed that the little girl came to her, and that she spoke soothingly to the child, telling her what a happy place this home was, that the owners took beautiful care of it, and that this was a good place for her, and she did not need to come home with Nathalie, but should stay here!  The girl in her dream, she says, was around six or seven.  I had thought the Woodruff girl was younger than that when she died, but when we questioned our guide for the history tour the next morning after breakfast (Zach again), he told us that the boy was nine and the little girl seven at the time of the tragedy, a detail that had not been in his tour the night before.  Eeeerieeeeee!

The history tour had more info on southern, antebellum customs and architectural details of the house, which was wonderful.  Afterward, as we lounged in the row of rocking chairs on the front porch, we called Zach over and got him to tell us more stories of the ghostly goings on.  In spite of the terrible night sleep we all of us except for Jeanne had, the ghosts are much more playful than terrifying here, by all accounts.  This place is very most definitely worth a visit and an overnight stay.  If staying in the main house is too potentially scary for you, there are cottages like the Coco House and Caretaker's House, as well as a block of rooms in a new building behind the Carriage House Restaurant.

But I'd definitely like to come back myself and stay in the main house at some point.  In... any room but the doll room, though!