peterography

We are spending the weekend at the estate of a friend on Cape Cod. My wife and her friend are both active in the greater Boston amateur chamber music community and every June we come here along with two dozen other musicians - plus a few non-playing spouses such as me - for weekend of wonderful music and food in a gorgeous beachfront setting. The house is large enough that we can have a piano quintet in the living room plus various string quartets, trios, or sextets scattered among the other rooms.

I’m not a very happy camper this weekend because I have a painful contact ulcer on my larynx and my doctor wants me to rest my voice. But how can I in such a social atmosphere, and especially given that I normally have an atomic-powered motormouth? So I’m being very bad about obeying doctor’s orders, and I’m paying the price in throat pain and delayed healing. I suppose there’s something karmic about the fact that it hurts for me to talk, since for years it’s often hurt to listen to me!

This is a bad setting to disobey doctors’ orders. I’ve never encountered any pastime that attracts so many physicians as chamber music. We may have a half-dozen doctors in the house right now. Recently at a workshop my wife, a pianist, was playing a quartet and all the string players were doctors. And when it’s not doctors, it’s professors, Harvard or MIT deans, business owners, research scientists, and other high achievers who seem to be attracted to chamber music. Why? Lots of hobbies attract their share of learned people but I’ve never seen such a concentration as I’ve seen in chamber music. It makes for wonderfully stimulating conversation at social gatherings and the average chamber music sextet abandoned on a desert island could probably re-create civilization.

To avoid talking I’ve banished myself, with my laptop, to the far corner of the vast pool room, while string ensembles play Brahms and Beethoven at the other end. The weather outside is bright and the yachts in the harbor gleam in the sunlight. In fact, the yacht club is supplying my internet connection, since they rent wireless access to visiting boats for a very modest fee and for their purposes right now I’m a yacht.

Here, in my lonely corner, I’ve been doing my little bit to stop the war in Iraq : I’ve created a parody of the movie poster for “The Endless Summer”, called “The Endless War”. And for more proof that this contact ulcer hasn’t shut me up, a couple of days ago I made my first YouTube video - . it’s just cutesy little woodland creatures around my office park set to music by Rossini. I just did it as a practice exercise for a new camcorder and video editing software I bought recently but that’s a topic for another day.