The Planets

     I heard the planets last week—not the music of the spheres but Holst's famous suite, The Planets, with the Rogue Valley Symphony Orchestra.

    Holst wasn't depicting the planets as the heavenly bodies astronomers study, I learned from the program, but as the ones astrologers study. It would be hard even for us, with our more scientific knowledge, to depict the celestial bodies in music without resorting either to astrology or to Greek mythology: Mars as the "Bringer of War," Venus as "The Bringer of Peace," and so on.  

    I found Holst's interpretations delightful.

    But Martin Majkut, the RVSO music director, had gone two steps beyond the music. Scientifically, he brought in Ashwin Vasada, a NASA scientist working on missions to Mars, for a pre-concert conversation.

NASA photo of Mars, from Rover

Vasada added to the music the honest-to-goodness planet that scientists know. He was fascinating.

    Artistically, Majkut brought in Adrian Wyard, to project his, Wyard's, video accompaniment to The Planets on a screen behind the orchestra as they played. Wyard's collages of his original animations and NASA media of each planet were perfectly synced with the music. The visuals were spectacular—the real planets, real space photos, perfect animations to match the music. It was a great show. 

    But we are a vision-dominant species. Given simultaneity of what is to be heard and what is to be seen, we will always give our first attention to the visuals. While the imagery did "add a new dimension to the experience," Holst's music did not "retain center stage," as described in the program. Instead of hearing music with visuals as an added effect, I was watching a video show with musical accompaniment. I enjoyed the experience a lot, but now I want the orchestra to play the music again, without the video, so I can let the sense of hearing dominate and the sense of sight, for a few hours, recede. I want to see what my imagination would hear in the music.

Making Coffee

    In many households, as in mine, the coffee grinder is one of the first noises of the day. But here in my house, it is not a harsh electric sound but the mechanical grinding of an old-fashioned iron-and-wood coffee grinder.

    This beautiful antique used to sit on a shelf in my childhood home, not as a kitchen tool but as a picturesque curio. When I was a child, my mother bought ground coffee or, if I remember right, even the horror of Maxwell House instant coffee. After my parents' deaths, I took the coffee grinder home as a quaint antique and childhood memento. I wasn't even drinking coffee at that time.

    My son, however, is a coffee aficionado. He roasts his own beans, is particular about the green beans he buys, and can wax rhapsodic about different kinds of coffee the way other people talk about wine. Once when he came to visit, bringing his own beans but not his electric coffee grinder, he took down my old-fashioned coffee grinder and, without doing anything more to it than wiping off the dust, ground his beans. After all those decades, it didn't need a thing to make it work. Such is the simplicity of a coffee grinder.

    Now I use it myself as part of my morning ritual, turning the iron handle that turns the mill inside the box, grinding the beans between iron grates. The turning motion and the grinding sound are mesmerizing and meditative, returning me to households of my ancestors, who must have ground coffee in exactly this way, those women in their kitchens, I in mine.

    Suddenly the sound changes, breaking my reverie. No more beans are falling between the teeth. The crank turns more easily; the sound is lighter. I stop turning the crank and open the wooden drawer at the bottom of the grinder.

The aroma of fresh-ground coffee tingles my nostrils. I scoop my grandmother's silver coffee measure into the ground coffee beans and make my coffee. Tomorrow I will do it again.

   Building a fire in the stove every morning, grinding spices in a mortar with a pestle, grinding coffee beans in a wooden box—these tools, these actions connect me in my modern life to days, even centuries ago, when many things were slower and quieter. I like starting my day with that reminder: that slower and quieter can still be acquired and are still good for the spirit.