Last night Arne and I rode the train into Copenhagen to attend a free concert--unheard of!--at the Black Diamond, the new addition to the Royal Library. The Black Diamond, which opened in 1999, is covered in glass and Absolute Black granite, stone that was mined in Zimbabwe and then cut and polished in Italy. When the sun is right the building throws its elegant shadow right over the canal toward Christianshavn. In addition to more archival space, the Black Diamond features a
lovely cafe with seating along the canal, a fabulous small bookstore, a gallery (where a show of Sally Mann's work opens next month, eat your heart out), and a gorgeous and acoustically perfect auditorium. It was here that we enjoyed a debut concert by Danish composer Peter Due.
Due grew up just north of where we live, in Hillerød, and then went on to the Fynske Musikkonservatorium in Odense where he studied violin and composition. From there he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and in the last couple years he's been in Los Angeles studying film music. A respectable crowd came out for his music, many of them family and friends, judging from the number of folks who walked onto the stage at the end with bouquets of flowers and bottles of champagne, and judging also from the man sitting beside us who took pictures throughout the concert, even of Due himself who came out between numbers to attend to the arrangement of music stands.
One of Due's interests is astronomy and that interest has influenced
his music. The first piece of the evening was a brand new composition
for computer called “Sub-Limit” that featured two competing
“melodies”--the first a thrumming note from deep space that was
insistent and almost grating, and the second “melody” reminiscent
of insects on a spring day--the two melodies working against and into
one another. The second composition, “Han Den Det - Scene 6,”
featured three singers, a saxophone, trumpet, slide trombone, piano,
violin, cello, and two fellows on a variety of percussion
instruments. Oh, and two water glasses. The music was eerie and
soothing, returning in waves to the tonic but exploring atonalities
on the way. Here is what it sounded like:
thththhhhh mmmm thk thk thk rrrrrrreeeeeeeeththththhhhh
phthkphthkphthk mmmmmm
The third piece featured a whole string orchestra (14 violins, 6 violas, 4 cellos, and 3 basses) and two flautists (one the composer's sister). This music drew its inspiration from the two-star system in the constellation Leo called Gamma Leonis. These two stars have an orbital period of some 500 years which means that since they were first seen we've only witnessed a fraction of their orbit and therefore know little about them. The music hinted at the power of these two stars (having a luminosity 23 and 10 times greater than our own sun) but the hints matched the incompleteness of our knowledge about them. And what virtuosity on the flutes! The musicians had to hum and play simultaneously, blow and suck air through their instruments, and use the keypads percussively, all of this in quick succession with traditional playing intermingled.
The last piece before intermission featured Due's music for a short animated film by a Danish film student, and when we came back from the break we heard a longer piece for the string orchestra, one flute, harpsichord, and computer. This last piece made me realize how a baroque sensibility underlay all of these compositions: a fugal, linear method brought into the 21st century by a wide-ranging experimentation with the sounds that can be made from the instruments.
We walked back to the central station by way of the moat surrounding Christiansborgslot, the sprawling white castle and outbuildings constructed in the 17th century by King Christian IV, the inspired one-eyed king and member of the Order of the Elephant. Stars shone brightly above us, their music thrumming in our ears.
At a pond near the fjord, the world teems. Tall trees, elms and beeches, surround the pond, and a whole crow development has gone up high in the branches where the crows now perch near their enormous nests where the chicks have probably just barely hatched. Down in the undergrowth we spotted a moorhen, a black bird with a red beak and white along its wings and below its tail. The moorhen is a solitary creature, I've read, generally shy, nothing like its crow neighbors making a racket above. And in the pond itself we watched a pair of coots with their brood of five fluffy chicks. The adults dove and surfaced, snuffling away down among the reeds for lunch. If the chicks were close, when the adults dove, the chicks would bounce on the wavelets their parents created. Isn't that just the way with children, being buffeted, gently or boisterously, by their parents' pursuits?
It was in this pond that Arne and Anika and Otto found millions of frog eggs last weekend and retrieved a tub full to study in our yard. Now they've all hatched and are tiny swarming black sperms wriggling toward their tadpole selves. At the pond, we watched these tiny creatures, just one part of a busy community in and on the water: insects, a salamander, a snail, flying, swimming, striding, all busy in the sunshine. I watched a tiny perfectly round bright red something swim well below the surface. It never came up for air. I fished it out on a twig, but it was too small to discern the presence of legs. Was it insect? Back in the water, it went on about its zig-zaggy wanderings. I found myself wondering if this creature had a home. Was it headed away from home or toward home? Did it have a sense of direction, or was it wandering as its wandering took it?
Last weekend I made a whirlwind trip back to the US in order to share in celebrating my parents fiftieth wedding anniversary. In Morris, I stopped at our house to drop off winter coats and to pick up a couple items. The space was familiar, it was my house, but it did not feel like home. I wasn't coming home to that house, I was just stopping by. I drove around town and had the strangest feeling of this place being utterly and totally familiar, like looking at the back of one's hand, but in a couple days I was going to leave, and anyway, my family were not there. It was familiar; but it was not home. My sister and her sweetheart and I made a pilgrimage to our childhood home: 720 Minnesota Avenue in St. Peter, the house I grew up in from second grade until marriage. What had been home, the place I returned to, and in fact, sometimes still return to in my dream life, is no longer home. And of course, now I'm back in Himmelev, with my family, in our temporary home.
Perhaps we have told ourselves that the nest is all there is when we think about home. Unlike the tiny red circle of sentience with its few square yards of pond home, we humans today wander in a “home” that is huge, global, and yet we're failing to think of Earth as home. Perhaps that is the new story we're beginning to tell about ourselves. Earth is home, the only place we ever leave, the only place to which we return, wandering as we are within it, following where our wandering takes us.
My son, Otto, has brought together two of his interests--music and technology--thanks to a nifty computer program he discovered while surfing the web: Fruity Loops Studio 7.
Here are his first results!
Sabbatical has been good to us all, there's no doubt about it.
Our neighborhood grocery store is in a small shopping center that includes two banks, a shawarma/pizza joint, and a bicycle store. Occasionally a truck pulls up beside the grocery store and sells fresh and smoked seafood. And in front of the grocery store, no matter what time of the year, are racks of fresh flowers in bunches or in pots. Today, on sale, a small pot of jonquils for only 5 kroner! ($1US) So of course, we picked up a pot on our way in.
There are two parts to the grocery store. When you enter, if you turn to your left you pass through a mini-shop of flowers in bunches and pots and even bulbs to plant in your yard, come to a display of magazines, and behind the counter booze and cigarettes, and at the far end is the bakery, where today you can buy a jordbaer taerte (strawberry tart). The baked goods come from Slagelse, on the other side of the fjord, and every single thing we've tried has been just fabulous. You can buy three kinds of rye bread in whole or half loaves, as well as a wide variety of other breads--Italian, French, peasant, corn, trekorn, filone, and on and on--as well as several varieties of rolls (French, Canadian, morning, ciabatta, etc.). And you can splurge on goodies like Napoleon's hats or nut horns or Florentinos. We haven't yet tried everything, it's true.
If, when you enter the Super Best, you go straight ahead you enter the grocery store proper, where today, the special item was pine last boxes of strawberries from Spain. The provenance of all the produce is indicated. The selection, in most ways, is more or less like what you'd find in a good grocery store in the US. Two items do stand out though: the mushrooms and the greens. Last fall, during the height of mushroom season, you could find all sorts of crazy and mundane mushrooms (no morels). Many of them come with the part of the stem that is underground and includes the surrounding dirt. Oh, does that ever smell good! In the greens section the selection is just endless, with arugula (rucola here, rocket in the UK), and all sorts of lettuces, cabbages, and the sharper greens like mustard greens. Salad lovers, eat your hearts out!
Note that if you've gone straight ahead in the local grocery store you haven't come to a single snack food or prepared food or corn syrup based food or candy. No, the good stuff comes first.
Arne and I did a little shopping this afternoon in anticipation of a delicious smørrebrød dinner: shrimp, a nice aged cheese, brie, fresh strawberries (as above), half of loaf of softkerne rugbrød, and a few other sundries, and the pot of jonquils. So, with milk and kærnemelk (turned milk, sort of like buttermilk) and pickles in the backpack, most of the rest in bags, and the bread and flat of strawberries held in my two hands, we headed home. Just past the shopping center is a lovely after school program where a bunch of boys were playing soccer, and across the way a big field where a bunch of elders were playing croquet. We passed a young father with his two small children on a bicycle pulling a wheeled carrier as well as several adults on bicycles laden with their groceries.
In short, the Danes are outside, enjoying the near-spring weather, and doing what they do so well: moving their bodies outside, no matter their age.
The whole way home I enjoyed the rich smell of the strawberries and the rye bread!
