Issue 53

Sony Corporation laid out major management shifts in a recent press-release.  CEO Kaz Hirai, widely credited with the company’s return to profitability, began his career at CBS/Sony Music, worked through the video game division, and in 2012 replaced Howard Stringer, Sony’s first non-Japanese CEO.  In spite of a few successes such as the incredibly popular series of Spider-Man films, Stringer’s tenure as CEO was problematic and saw major losses for the company. Hirai’s tenure as CEO saw the company consolidating divisions and updating vital video game products; after a series of tough years, 2017 saw the company forecast and produce its highest profits in two decades.

This month Hirai stepped down as CEO, but was named “Director Chairman”—essentially, Chairman of the Board of Directors. The company’s CFO, Kenichiro Yoshida, was named CEO to replace Hirai. Hirai attended the American School in Japan and later attended school in Canada, and was viewed as more youthful and in touch with Western culture than his predecessors—ironic, as Stringer was British. Hirai’s preppy style and often-wry Tweets marked a major difference in style from his buttoned-down predecessors.

The appointment of the CFO Yoshida as the new CEO is viewed as an attempt  to extend the company’s streak of profitable quarters by imposing financial rigor on an organization that has at times been…impulsive. Yoshida is credited with implementing corporate restructuring that contributed to the company’s turnaround.

It will be interesting to see how Sony progresses.
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Watching the story of Gibson Brands’ woes unfold has become more reality television than reality.

At the same time that music magazine Paste heads an article, “Gibson Guitars is About to Go Belly Up”,  Nashville media quote a credit officer at Moody’s as saying, “Gibson is running out of time—rapidly”, and we reported the departure of the company’s CFO—Gibson Brands CEO Henry Juszkiewicz issued an “all is well” statement regarding the half-billion dollars in notes rapidly reaching maturity.

Nothin’ to see here. Keep moving. Except, this just in.…according to a report in Bloomberg, bondholders who hold more than two-thirds of Gibson’s debt are pushing to take over, and oust Juszkiewicz.

Film at 11.

I expect all of you will be well familiar with skiing, that glamorous sport that involves hurtling from the top to the bottom of a snow-capped mountain, while dressed in an impossibly chic ensemble in all the very latest colours.  And then there’s the après-ski, that exclusive mélange of cool parties, warm cocktails, and hot sex.  That’s downhill skiing, and cross-country skiing is not at all like that.  Cross-country skiing is what Russian snipers wearing white parkas do. [BTW, if a Russian sniper wearing a white parka is on your tail, you will never out run him.  You should just sit down and await your fate.  I saw a movie about that once.]

Downhill skiing requires a mountain, and, as you know, all mountains have snow on top of them.  Mountains are everywhere, so downhill skiing is more or less everywhere  …  except Florida, because it has no mountains.  Cross-country skiing, on the other hand, requires flat terrain and cold snow.  Very cold snow.  Lots of it.  This is why the sport is unknown outside of those places that are under permanent snow coverage for three or more months of the year.  Like Russia (with its white parka-clad snipers), Sweden, Norway, and the North Pole.  Oh, and Montreal too.

Now, downhill skis are attached rigidly to your ski boots, which in turn grip your feet like a pair of John Gotti’s concrete socks.  So your maneuvering is all done by subtle adjustment of your weight on the skis.  And so long as you believe that to be the case you won’t need to panic too much.  Compared to downhill skis, cross-country skis are much, much longer, and much, much narrower.  So balancing on them is much, much more challenging.  You attach them only to the toe of your boots.  The attachment is not rigid like a downhill ski boot, but floppy, as though someone had tied your big toe to the ski with string.  And your heel just sits loose.  Also, if you were to fall over, unlike downhill ski boots, they won’t automatically come off.  No, they will stay attached to your skis come what may.  Nobody has yet found a way to detach a cross-country ski-boot from a cross-country ski.

Real, proper, expert cross-country skiers will head out across the virgin snow pack, clad in Lycra with a backpack strapped on.  The purpose of the backpack is unclear, but from a distance it can look like a sniper’s rifle, which is probably the look they are going for.  The Lycra, too, is strange, since the temperature is going to freeze their nuts off, but it remains the look of choice.  I guess they cycle a lot in the summer, and favor the opportunity to assert bragging rights with their ‘Linford’s lunch-box’.  Unfortunately, at 20 degrees below zero, Linford’s lunch-box is quite a bit emptier.

This -20 degree temperature aspect is quite important.  The reason is that the snow becomes hard, compact, and quite slippery at this temperature.  At warmer, more comfortable temperatures, it will be wet and slushy, and instead of gliding through it your skis will get stuck in it, much like they would in a field of cream cheese.  This is not so much of an issue when careening down the side of a mountain, but is much more problematic on the flat.  So cross-country skiing is done in Baltic temperatures, where you don’t have to ask if it is Centigrade or Fahrenheit, because they’re not much different.

For recreational cross-country skiing, there are trail parks offering ‘groomed trails’.  These comprise pairs of ski-width trenches in the snow which look and function like railway lines.  With one ski in each trench, you can shuffle off to wherever the track takes you.

Unlike with downhill skiing, where you hurtle along at ever-increasing speed until you either reach the bottom or hit something, with cross-country skiing you apply a gentle push with your poles, together with a not-too-aggressive push-off with your stationary ski, and you suddenly find yourself gliding smoothly along.  You’ll glide for about a foot – maybe two if you’re real good – but will then come to a halt and will have to start off again.  Real experts can time the push-off of one stride with the stop of the previous stride’s glide.  It’s a lot like walking, only slower, and with many more opportunities to fall over.

The train-track metaphor is a good one (or it could be a good simile, I’m never entirely sure), because, as with a train, you cannot actually steer a pair of cross-country skis.  They only go where the track goes.  So, if the track goes round a bend, you go round a bend.  The only real problem is when you come to a junction, because cross-country ski trails don’t have ‘points’ as such to switch you from one track to the next.  You just have to hope both skis take the same fork, otherwise you’ve got a bit of a problem.

Speaking of falling over, this is something that cross-country skiers must never do.  The reason is not at all obvious.  Sure it seems pretty much self evident that it must be exceedingly difficult getting up again with two 6ft-long slippery poles attached to your big toes – and it most certainly is.  But that is not the reason.  The reason is that in minus twenty degree temperatures, and dressed in Lycra, your butt-crack freezes over and you can no longer bend over.  So if you should fall, you will keel over like a mythological Greek adventurer staring into the face of the Medusa, and freeze to death where you land.  Perhaps your arms will drop off, Botticelli-style.  In any case, you’ll remain there until the spring thaw, when someone will pop over and collect the bits.  So don’t – just don’t – fall over.

I might have implied that cross-country skiing takes place on flat terrain, but you would be mistaken.  There are hills and valleys in cross-country ski parks, just like in any other park.  The hills are impossible to climb.  Every smooth glide forward, comes with an equally smooth glide backwards again.  The solution to this conundrum is to apply the exact correct grade of wax to the base of your skis, which provides the grip necessary to ascend.  Trouble is, there are different waxes for every different snow condition that you are likely to encounter, and you can be sure that you will be find out that you have applied the wrong wax to your skis.  This can be a cause of great anxiety at the start of every skiing session, as you agonize over which of the 175 available waxes is the correct wax for the conditions.  But it really doesn’t matter, because the right wax, even if you manage to identify it and apply it, will wear completely off within the first 20 minutes, and there will be none left by the time you actually need it.

So the only way to ascend the hill is to adopt a grossly duck-footed stance, with your feet (attached, let’s not forget, to 6ft-long wooden poles) in the ten-minutes-to-two position.  Adopting this posture, you can work your way up the hill in 3-inch increments.  Providing, of course, you don’t tear one of the dozens of tendons involved in this maneuver which, for reasons God himself only knows, are affixed right behind your private parts.  Even if you make it to the top of the hill, you will arrive exhausted.

But what goes up must come down.  And at the end of every uphill section comes a downhill section.  This is where you learn that those gentle glides you initiate with a casual push on the pole don’t always come to a grinding halt 12 inches further down the track.  No, with a bit of a slope to help, the glide will continue a little bit further.  In fact, it will gain speed, and will do so relentlessly.  At this point, you would doubtless find yourself reflecting on something you had probably picked up on earlier, but had not bothered to think too deeply about, because there hadn’t been much cause to do so:  There is no way to slow down on cross-country skis.  Nope.  None.  You just keep going, faster and faster.

This a particularly troublesome issue because of one of the immutable rules of the cross-country ski trail: At the bottom of every hill is a bend.  Now, bends are not a problem, you will recall, because, like a train on a railway line, the skis just follow the track.  And that would be true, if not for the fact that, like with trains on a track, it only applies up to a certain speed.  If this speed is exceeded, all bets are off.  And at the bottom of every hill, just as you reach the bend, this speed is most assuredly being handsomely exceeded.  So why, you might ask, do they always put a bend at the bottom of every hill?  And the answer is simple.  It is to avoid that ****ing big tree that you would slam into if you were to go straight on.

So at last, your cross-country endurance marathon is almost over.  You have managed to avoid falling over.  You have successfully negotiated the bend at the bottom of the hill, and have even climbed the other side without doing irreparable damage to your marital prospects.  All you need to do is complete the last quarter-mile section which, although squirrely, has at least none of the major hazards which are now behind you.  Your quads, thighs, calves, groin and glutes are all ready to throw in the towel.  Even so, all you have to do is keep your skis in the tracks for five more minutes and all should be well.

But no.  All of the skiers who have come before you have also had quads, thighs, calves, groin and glutes which have thrown in the towel, and in the process of dragging themselves to the finish line they have managed to totally obliterate what was left of the groomed trail, of which there is now no sign whatsoever.  So as you approach that gentle downhill S-bend, knowing that all you need to do is focus on keeping your skis inside the tracks that lead home, and let your speed and momentum do the rest, it comes as something of a shock to observe that the groomed tracks have all been ground away to nothing, and that each of your skis is now accelerating in whatever direction they have a mind to head in.  One ski wants to go left.  The other wants to go right.  And in between is a ***ing big tree.

Oh crap.

Dave turned onto 13^th Ave that runs west out of Ames Iowa, and into the farm country for a Sunday drive with Penny.  Dave’s dad had recently bought a ’56 Chevrolet Bel Air hardtop, India Ivory over Nassau Blue.  Dad ordinarily would not have loaned Dave his new baby, but he liked Penny, and Dave had recently gotten a job at the mercantile on the corner of 9^th and Wilson showing the first the signs of responsibility.  Pop was feeling magnanimous.  Both parents had high hopes that when Dave and Penny graduated high school the following summer Dave would follow his dad into the feed business, marry Penny and settle into the sweet life of Ames.

Dave’s parents had a right to worry and do all they could to make Dave happy and get him grounded as he approached adulthood, which in 1956 Iowa came at 18.  Dave did not have the educational skills to go to university, and that was fine.  75% of the people who grew up in Ames never went to college and had for 150 years settled into the sound life of farming and farming support in Ames that had been good enough for generations.  But Dave was not happy and Mom and Pop hadn’t a clue as to why.  Neither, by the way, did Dave.

After the war the US had exploded with opportunity and wanderlust.  Dave’s generation was the first of teenagers that realized there was a huge world out there and all you needed was a car.  Breaking out from your parents’ world suddenly didn’t seem impossible and started to become necessary. 

Dave had a friend at Ames High who’d bought a 1954 Ducati Gran Sport and was planning to take the bike out to California when they graduated.  Spit Winkler, who was given his nickname because he earned it, was pretty wild and a year older than Dave because they kept him back in the second grade when Spit let the air out of Mrs. Desmond’s tires on her ’42 Studebaker.

But the idea had captured Dave.  As he drove out into farm country, with the wind through the open window blowing around strands of Penny’s hair, Dave went over the plan in his head for the 473^rd time.  He would work at the mercantile until graduation, which was in 8 months.  Old Mr. Owens would let Dave work as many hours as he wanted because his kids were worthless trouser shitters.  He gave Dave a really good wage of $1.80/hr.  He would have to quit football (which would cheese both his parents right out) but he could probably do 25 hours a week working 12 on Saturday.  In 8 months he could amass a fortune close to $1000 which would be enough to put him on some boss wheels.  He would have to become a monk, and he would have to lose Penny (another cheesy moment).  She was sweet and a great girl, but she was expensive.  This bird expected presents on Flag Day. 

“A penny for your thoughts, honey.”  This was her favorite joke.

“Nuthin Babe.  Just daydreamin.”

Let’s see.  US 69 would take me all the way down to the 66 east of OK City and just south of Muskogee.  Then.  Then Penny turned on the radio and Dave’s brain was dancing to Chuck Berry.  Suddenly the soft summer afternoon embraced them both with the sun turning the sky from Nassau Blue to cloud born patches of Matador Red.  The image of Route 66 became blurred when Penny asked him to pull the car over between some fields.

The music of the 40’s and early 50’s had begun to morph into what would become known as rock, or jump blues or rockabilly, starting believe it or not, with Hank Williams in the late 40’s.  I spent a considerable time looking for the early guys and it’s a very murky period in music history.  I’m going to put first this Williams song from 1947 because the kids born in the mid 30’s that would become the stars of rockabilly would have heard this song on the radio when they were in early teen years.  From 1947, ‘Move It On Over’  with a vanguard guitar solo that had rockabilly written all over it.  Zeke Turner on guitar.

Ok all you Texas Swing guys just sit back down.  I get it.  But dude.  That guitar solo.

Music would go 4 years before turning in a rock tune written by Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner with Ike’s Kings of Rhythm band.   That’s right, that Ike.  I know, I know, the argument about the first rock song/band is fraught with idiots and jester philosophers with their claims and boasts.  Remember my threat of a posse in my last piece.  I submit this because there’s a great story and it was early.

And, enter Sam Phillips.  This  is how shit happens.

In their haste to get to the studio in Memphis the band had an amp fall out of the back of the trunk.  When they got in the studio the amp appeared to be broken, emitting the fuzzy distorted sound of a busted speaker cone.  Philips went to a diner next door, got some paper and stuffed it into the cone, resulting in the sound we have here.  Soon Everybody wanted to know how to get that sound.  And the band played on.

Appropriately enough named for a car, from 1951 ‘Rocket 88’.

Um, sorry about the cuts to the girl getting dressed. [OMG! Bettie Page!!—Ed.]  Ok maybe not as sorry as interested.  I thought MY g-g-generation invented that weird irrelevant video shit.

By 1954 there were bands and guys all over experimenting with this sound and there was a groove around Memphis called Sun Studios that was sucking in Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, BB King etc.  Here’s another ‘this is how shit happens’ story.  It is truly amazing how many of these stories involve flippin Sam Phillips.

In July of 1954 Phillips had put together a backup duo for a young kid named Elvis Presley.  Presley had recorded a ballad for Sam to give to his mama, and after some ‘convincing’ from a secretary (of course) tried Presley with a local guitar player named Scotty Moore who brought in a bass player from his band, Bill Black.

The session was not going well and they were about to break it up for the night.  To paraphrase Scotty Moore because I lost the flippin quote:

“Elvis started cutting up.  We were all tired and Elvis just started goofing around, playing an old Big Boy Crudup blues tune but up tempo.  Bill joined in slapping his bass around.  The door out of the studio must have been open because Sam stuck his head into the studio and said, ‘What are you guys doing?.  We said we didn’t know. Sam said, ‘Well back it up, find a spot, and start again”.

What happened, and again Bill Black is probably not the first, but a true rockabilly sound with that ticking slap bass.  Keep in mind here; there are no drums.  Elvis and Scotty on guitar, and Bill Black slappin the willy out of that double bass.  Moore called it ‘rhythmic propulsion’.

From 1954, ‘That’s Alright (Mama)’.

Scotty Moore guitar, Bill Black rhythmic propulsion bass

Now all hell broke loose.  Especially from Mom and Dad’s point of view.  By 1955 everybody was recording and releasing this unbelievable sound.  I could go on forever (right Leebs?) but I’ll trot out a couple of real influences.

In researching the next guy I was trolling Youtube looking for this tune and there was a comment from one of the listeners.  I’m not sure from what time period this guy was from, but it really doesn’t matter.

“I had just started junior high in Highbridge the Bronx, 7th grade I was 12 and on leaving school there was a crossing guard who stopped traffic and a car full of teenagers was stopped with radio playing “Maybelline” ancient to me seven years old but I loved it instantly, the crossing guard yelled at the teenagers to turn the radio down, and they cranked it up all the way, I loved it all!!! Nobody wanted to back down but the teenagers gave the crossing guard the finger and he finally gave up, I loved it, teenagers were people to be avoided but I thought God Damn I’ll be one some day too! “

By the way the original recording of this at Chess has Willie Dixon on bass.  More on dat dude later.

From 1955, Chuck Berry’s first hit ‘Maybelline’.

Chuck Berry was swimming in a pool of talent with names like Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Duane Eddy, Jerry Lee Lewis; the list is endlessly gifted.  But Chuck was certainly an influence in the genre he called “a music of teenage wishes fulfilled and good times (even with cops in pursuit).”

In the same year Bill Haley and the Comets released a song and became international stars.  It’s hackneyed, but I include it here because of the guitar solo alone.

The guitar on the original is Danny Cedrone who died in a fall down a stairway in 1954 so he never saw his solo become one the classics in rock.  Classic coolness.

By 1960 rockabilly had morphed into doo wop and early rock and the rockabilly guys were eking out a living on the nostalgia circuit.  In the late 70’s the genre was revived within a style incongruously called New Wave.  At least we thought it was New Wave.

“You won’t find a hotel room anywhere for the next 300 miles.”

We had stopped in a town called Glasgow, Montana, to gas up. I hail from Glasgow, Scotland, and I was curious to visit the namesake of my hometown. It was nothing like home. Glasgow, Scotland, is a dynamic city with over a million people. The one in Montana has about 3,000 souls, and looks like many small towns across the West, rather run down and past its prime. It was founded as a railroad town in the late 1800s but before that the plains around Glasgow were known for extensive buffalo and antelope herds that fed the nomadic Native American tribes.

This was our third cross-country trip. You have no idea of the scale and magnificent beauty of America until you drive across its endless prairies. This trip took us from New York to Philadelphia to Eastern Ohio, to Chicago and up to Madison, Wisconsin. South of Madison we picked up Route 18, a back road that goes west for over 1,000 miles to Casper, Wyoming. Our destinations were serendipitous, usually decided by the number of miles we wanted to drive that day. We would choose a destination, find a hotel, book it, and head off into the horizon. Using this method, we spent a night in Mason City, Iowa. At first glance it is just one of many Midwestern towns sprawling across the cornfields, but on arriving downtown we booked into a fully restored hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In addition to the hotel, Mason City has quite a few examples of Prairie School architecture, a style developed by Wright and some leading architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A famous son was Meredith Willson who wrote, The Music Man, and modeled River City on it. Who knew?

We continued on to Casper, Wyoming, and caught a rodeo there. We watched “cowboys” (mostly college students) chase, rope, and truss a calf in less than eight seconds. Amazing! Onward from there we went to Jackson Hole, also in Wyoming, where we hiked in the Grand Teton National Park. From there it was over the Teton mountain range to Boise, Idaho, where we met up with a couple who have a ranch a few hours west of the city. On the ranch our friends raise organic beef cattle that thrive on the rich range grassland. One day when out riding, I asked my host, “Where does your land end?” She pointed to the horizon and said, “Somewhere over there.”

From there we went north up to the panhandle and the Snake River. We passed stores with names like “Survival Solutions” and “Survival Enterprises”. We stopped at one grocery store and were met with silence and suspicious looks. Perhaps our old Jaguar with New York plates and blacked out windows had something to do with this. While there I picked up a local newspaper, which apart from being badly written, had an article about the recent bombing at the Boston Marathon. It talked about the search and capture of one of the brothers who had planted the bomb. There had been a manhunt and a lockdown while the police searched. The paper described them as “the jackbooted Boston Police” going door to door in their search. I realized that some of the people who lived there had no idea what life in the East was like. Conversely, we had no idea what their life in Idaho was like.

In the middle of the panhandle, we entered the Nez Perce Indian Reservation, a people who used to inhabit most of Idaho, Oregon, and Montana, but had been relegated to a small part of Idaho. We gassed up at a general store and noticed that everyone who worked there wore t-shirts with a likeness of Chief Joseph, a revered heroic figure who had stood up to the army but eventually, to save the remaining members of his tribe, surrendered and agreed to move to the reservation. This happened in the 1870s. It seems that memories are long in this part of the country.

We passed through eastern Washington state and into Montana. At one point our GPS mistakenly took us up a back road that soon turned to gravel and then to dirt. We passed a long-abandoned silver mine, and also some houses ringed with tall fences topped with barbed wire. Large dogs prowled the perimeter so we did a quick U-turn and got the hell out of there. It took us 200 extra miles to get to our next destination in Montana where we visited a friend of ours, Gary, owner of a hi-fi store in Scottsdale, AZ. He was single-handedly building his dream house in a secluded wood near Thompson Falls.

While gassing up my 15-year-old Jaguar in Glasgow, something happened to the pressure in the pump, and I got splattered with gas. After I cleaned up we started a conversation with the owner who told us that because of the boom at the Bakken oil fields down the road (150 miles away) in Williston, North Dakota, no hotels were to be found for hundreds of miles. We asked if there was anything in town. He sent us to a large hotel but there was a railroad convention in town and they were fully booked. (It had never occurred to me that there were enough railroads in the US to hold a convention). I asked the receptionist if there was anything available nearby. She sized us up strangely and said, “You look like you may like the Fort Peck Hotel which is about 20 miles from here.” I called them up and a very friendly woman said she did have a room with a shower if we wanted it. It seemed an odd way to describe the room but I told her we would take it.

The drive to Fort Peck was spectacular. We were on US Route 2, a back road that runs from Everett, Washington, to Duluth, Minnesota, a distance of around 1,700 miles. We had picked it up earlier after spending a night in Glacier National Park. While there we hiked to Gunsight Lake then took a boat ride on Lake McDonald with a guide who was full of facts about the park. As always the National Park Service employees are extremely knowledgeable and courteous. They are truly a national treasure.

Having driven over 3,000 miles from New York, we were now on the way back east. As we approached Fort Peck, we passed buffalo, deer, and elk. We also saw many different types of birds, and as we had done for most of the trip, admired the endless and breathtaking scenery.

In the 1930s the WPA (Works Progress Administration) decided to build a dam in Fort Peck. The WPA was set up by FDR in the depression to provide work and wages for the unemployed. At one time it  employed millions of people and was, in large part, responsible for pulling America out of the depression. It focused on public works like bridges, dams, parks, but also gave jobs to artists, actors, musicians, dramatists, and directors. At one point over 10,000 people worked on the Fort Peck Dam, which, in damming the Missouri river created the Fort Peck Lake.

The Fort Peck Hotel was built in the late-1930s as accommodation for the dam workers. It looks like buildings you see in the Adirondacks: a brown wooden structure with a grey roof. On entering the lobby we were warmly welcomed by the owner. The furniture was rustic and worn, but in a good way. There was a bar, a fireplace with a large seating area; the walls were festooned with taxidermy. All sorts of critters were staring straight at us. The owner explained that we were lucky to get a room because only that day she had kicked out all the residents, rowdy oil workers from Williston, for disrespectful behavior. They disobeyed the rules and used hot plates, which overloaded the old wiring in the hotel. They were now gone and the hotel was very quiet. Our room was tiny and basic: two single beds, a nightstand, and a lamp. A toilet and a shower (obviously later additions) were squeezed into a corner; other rooms had no toilet and no shower. The hotel had been a dormitory when first built, and now it was just one stage above that. We didn’t care as we now had a bed for the night, and were totally seduced by the hotel itself.

We went down to the bar and met the owner’s husband, Carl Mann, who was charming and talkative. Unlike many innkeepers you meet, he was genuinely interested in where we came from and what we did. We asked about his life in Fort Peck. He told us he was an outfitter. Where I come from this means a haberdasher, but out here in the West, this means a man who takes you hunting. If you want a deer or an elk, Carl is the man to help you get it. He was so interesting that we hung around the bar talking, and instead of going out to eat at the only restaurant in the area, we stayed and ate bar food instead. One of the tales he told was about a group of “gentlemen” from New Jersey. They had sent ahead cases of red wine, and every evening after the hunt they would eat enormous portions of food, and drink gallons of wine. Even though they were all rather portly, they were expert shots, and killed quite a few deer. The kill was taken to a local man who butchered, vacuum-sealed, and froze the meat. On the day they left, they put the meat in their suitcases and took it to the airport. If he thought this was strange, he never let on.

He also is a big supporter of the Wounded Warrior Project and takes small groups of wounded veterans, from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, hunting. This affords them the opportunity to bond with other former soldiers, and helps in the healing process and the transition to civilian life.

One of Carl’s many skills was taxidermy; all the animals and birds mounted on the walls were shot and processed by him. My wife asked to buy a bird and we now have a stuffed Gambel’s quail sitting in our living room.

The next day, after a sumptuous breakfast we started driving east on Route 2. About 50 miles down the road, the vista changed dramatically. For two weeks we had been driving through some of the most exquisite scenery in America, and suddenly everything changed. It was like a James Bond movie where 007 goes over a ridge and suddenly an enormous industrial facility stretching out to the horizon comes into view. There were derricks and pipes and warehouses and RVs and pre-fab buildings strewn around at random. The rutted roads were full of large trucks. There were billboards advertising housing—one-bedroom apartments for $2,500 per month, this in rural North Dakota, not New York City. The devastation before us was the result of rampant fracking. The damage was so intense that we decided to leave Route 2 and head south towards Fargo, North Dakota. Because of the density of the traffic (most roads were just two lanes) it took us three hours to leave this tiny town.

Although I had grown up in an industrial city, the shock of witnessing the rape of previously pristine land after travelling for weeks through unparalleled beauty, depressed me profoundly. With heavy hearts, our wounded souls turned towards the East and headed home.

Choose your parents carefully.

That’s probably the best advice anyone can offer a young person who wants to become a composer. It helps a lot if your mom or dad is okay with you taking up a career that demands major training—the expensive kind—and no guarantees whatsoever of wide recognition, let alone financial reward. You have to love it, and you have to be really good at it.

Not just the notes-and-rhythms part. Also the believe-in-yourself part, the constant-self-promotion part, the make-influential-friends part, the can-I-sleep-on-your-couch-tonight part. Fortunately there’s more support now for struggling young composers than there was a hundred years ago. You no longer have to be the son of a court musician (Mozart, Beethoven, Richard Strauss) or the son of someone very rich. You don’t have to be anyone’s son.

Last month I got around to hearing more Icelandic music, which provided a further awakening. The young composers represented on Recurrence (Sono Luminus DSL-92213) are Thuridur Jónsdóttir, Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Hlynur A. Vilmarsson, and Daniel Bjarnason. Yes, three of them are women, including the best-known of the lot. As Iceland’s patronymic naming tradition reminds us, they are daughters.

For the record, it’s a terrific record! I was particularly drawn to the tracks from Jónsdóttir, Sigfúsdóttir, and Vilmarsson. Right now, the cliché out there is that Icelandic music is All About Landscape. Maybe so, but each artist brings her own distinctive stylings to it. In his liner notes, Steve Smith of National Sawdust says that Jónsdóttir’s Flow and Fusion, “with its seamless blend of acoustic and electronic sounds, conjures the ineffable chiaroscuro of Iceland’s sky.” I prefer to think I’m hearing luminescent, fine-textured sheets of sound that continuously morph into new colors, interspersed with occasional crunchier interludes:

For Smith, “the barbaric jolts, judders, slides, and shrieks of Vilmarsson’s bd suggest the seismic forces that shaped . . . Iceland’s profile.” Well, I liked that it has a beat. Close your eyes, turn it up, see what these sounds suggest to you.

Vilmarsson played in rock bands and learned new tech tricks at the Reykjavik Media Lab. Sigfúsdóttir also has a “band,” amiina, and writes film and dance music. You will remember Thorvaldsdottir, at 40 not quite the Grand Dame of New Icelandic Music (Björk is twelve years older), from her album In the Light of Air. Hmm, maybe she brought The Dans to Reykjavik to record this collection in Sono Luminus’s usual glistening, spacious sound. Bravo.

Also from Sono Luminus: the Jasper String Quartet’s Unbound (DSL-92212), featuring seven works all written since the turn of the new century. I especially liked Missy Mazzoli’s Death Valley Junction (2010), her tribute to a strange little “town” on the California-Nevada border. One of its three residents, Marta Becket, restored a crumbling opera house there fifty years ago and performed one-woman shows weekly until her retirement in 2009. (She was 86.)

The Jaspers—two women, two men—focus on promoting and performing new music. Besides Mazzoli’s piece, Unbound includes engaging pieces by Caroline Shaw (Pulitzer Prize, 2013), Annie Gosfield (a Jaspers commission), David Lang (Pulitzer Prize, 2008), Judd Greenstein, Donnacha Denney, and Ted Hearne. The composers contributed their own unusually helpful program notes. Great sound, of course. If you’ve ever wondered why composers are still attracted to the string quartet, give this a listen.

Incidentally, Caroline Shaw was neither the first nor the most recent woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music; she shares the honor with five others—see a list here. She was the youngest person ever to win it, though. Her mother was her first teacher; she got her Ph.D. in composition from Princeton; she has co-produced several tracks with Kanye West, crafting remixes that highlight her vocals; her great-great-grandfather was Chang Bunker. Fun facts, right? (Somewhere an aging Princetonian is wondering why his brain hurts.)

Speaking of daughters, here are two more: Lisa Bielawa and Roxanna Panufnik. You may know Ms. Panufnik (b. 1968) through her collaboration with British violinist Tasmin Little. She contributed Four World Seasons, a concerto for violin, string orchestra, and Tibetan prayer bowl, to Ms. Little’s recent Chandos recording (CHSA 5175) of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Ms. Panufnik’s father was the renowned Polish composer Sir Andrzej Panufnik (1914–1991), who defected to the UK in 1954 and shortly thereafter became conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony, among other things. Roxanna was the happy product of his second British marriage, to author and photographer Camilla Jessel (some family photos here).

Lisa Bielawa (also b. 1968) is the daughter of composer Herbert Bielawa (1930–2015), active in the Bay Area for many years; you can read about the community values Lisa absorbed from her dad here. Incidentally, like Caroline Shaw, Kati Agócs, Sylvia McNair, and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, she’s a violinist/singer. Has that become a Thing? (Only if you’re good enough, I suspect.) Bielawa and composer Kati Agócs are both soprano soloists on a recent SACD from Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Kati Agócs: The Debrecen Passion (BMOP/sound 1046).

Lisa Bielawa got her own double-disc collection (BMOP/sound 1017) out of a three-season residency she held beginning in 2006. One disc is taken up by 15 Synopses, brief solo sketches made for and with individuals in the orchestra that explore the range and character of an instrument—and often the personality of the player as well. Each gets a six-word title inspired by Hemingway’s famous “For sale, baby shoes: never used.” Here’s I Don’t Even Play the Bassoon, written for violist Kate Vincent:

Program annotator Robert Kirzinger notes that Bielawa initiated the Synopses “as a way to enrich . . . her relationships with core members of the orchestra.” These were eventually folded into a culminating orchestral work, In medias res, where they served as “flashbacks” or concertino sections within a large-scale concerto for orchestra. Also on the other disc are Roam, a tone poem inspired by a passage from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and a Double Violin Concerto for the Silk Road Ensemble’s Colin Jacobsen and violinist/singer (!) Carla Kihlstedt. The process reflects Bielawa’s embrace of her colleagues as the “direct source of the contexts and content of her work.” She is a born collaborator, a nurturer of communities who translates her interactions into new music. It doesn’t seem wrong to add that, in doing so, she is playing a role more often associated in Western culture with women than with men. Here’s a bit of In medias res:

Whereas Bielawa typically builds musical sentences and paragraphs in steady, low-key fashion (the NY Times once described her work as “ruminative and . . . slightly tart”), her younger colleague Kati Agócs (b. 1975) draws upon a headier mixture of cultural references—she’s Canadian (born in rural Ontario), American (educated at Sarah Lawrence and Juilliard inter alia), and Hungarian (via her father’s family). The music on her BMOP collection is correspondingly more dramatic, spicy, and culturally specific.

Agócs’ album is available on YouTube, the first track and biggest work being Debrecen Passion. Just as Bach’s Passions use diverse textual sources (the Bible, old German hymns, operatic recitatives and poetically subjective arias), so does Agócs juxtapose the work of Hungarian poet Szilárd Borbély, a Kabbalistic prayer, a Medieval Georgian hymn, and other Medieval lyrics, including a joyful parody of the old Latin sequence Stabat Mater Dolorosa. (See complete text here.) But whereas a traditional Passion setting attempts to assign meaning to the suffering and death of Christ, Agócs goes for a mystic but universalizing celebration of ways in which life and hope are renewed, implicitly focusing on the work of bearing and raising children. This music is indeed spicy and dramatic enough to make her celebration enjoyable even if you can’t follow the texts—you’ll hear a mixture of Messiaen, Bartók, Ligeti, and Gregorian chant that somehow emerges as pure Agócs. It’s about 20 minutes long, so you may want to start with a highlights reel: begin at 3’20”, a colorful instrumental interlude that leads to 3’55”, the Stabat Mater parody, which builds to an ecstatic climax at 7’15”, which leads to “En nem tudok…” at 8’40”. Further along, listeners are rewarded with an even more ecstatic, loopy finale that shows off the vocal talents of the all-female Lorelei Ensemble in a breathtaking manner.

I could finish by telling you about one more daughter, Milica Djordjević (Wergo WER 6422 2), but we’re over the word count already. It’ll have to wait. In the meantime here’s a taste of her “non-communication for solo contrabass,” Do you know how to bark?!: