Author: Mark Berry

A Mess of Mushrooms in Nova Scotia

Apparently, Nova Scotia had gotten a lot of rain before we arrived for our visit, creating perfect conditions (moist, dark, and cool) within Truro’s Victoria Park for mushrooms. This one was my favorite: 
This one was striking: 
There were a lot of this kind: 

Here are some others:

No one else seemed as fascinated by their presence as I was, but I just don’t remember seeing such an array of mushrooms in the park, or anywhere else in Truro. If you know the names of these, I’d love to hear from you. 

"So Short, So Tight": A Yuja Wang Sexy Dress Round-Up

I just spent the last hour or so catching up on all that was written about the form-fitting orange mini-skirt Yuja Wang wore earlier in August at a Hollywood Bowl performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The Well-Tempered Ear has a good discussion going. Worry Later notes that, when you Google Yuja Wang, the second autocomplete suggestion is “Yuja Wang boyfriend.”

For reviewer Mark Swed, the dress, “so short, so tight” was the triple-X highlight of his evening.

In an article in the Los Angeles Times (which cites some books on the subject of fashion and music), organist Cameron Carpenter, known for his own outrageous outfits, was quoted as saying that “What people are missing here is that Yuja might want to be seen to be making, as many us do, a personal statement without having played a note.”

WQXR posted a podcast and slideshow; flipping through the WQXR photos, it looks as if what is scandalous is youth.

There’s more on blogs hosted by the Washington Post and LA Weekly, and on the Los Angeles Times‘s Culture Monster blog.

Our Latest Trip to Truro’s Victoria Park

Every time we go back to Nova Scotia, my family and I make a point of visiting Victoria Park in Truro.

The centerpiece of the 400-acre park (with another 600 acres of protected woodland surrounding it) is Joe Howe Falls, named for the journalist, politician, and one-time opponent of Confederation best known for his successful self-defense on a libel charge in 1835.

From Victoria Park, Summer 2011

I’m probably a bad dad for letting (making) my children climb the 175 steps of Jacob’s Ladder, but this was something I looked forward to do when I came as a kid.

From Victoria Park, Summer 2011

Here’s the photo album of our latest sojourn to what is probably the most spectacular municipal park in the province (and that includes anything in Halifax):

Victoria Park, Summer 2011

Lawrence House: The Best Little Museum in Nova Scotia

There are a lot of museums, historical sites, and memorials in Nova Scotia; it seems you can’t drive five miles without running into one. Of the ones I’ve stopped at, my favorite is Lawrence House in Maitland.

Back in 1967, the Nova Scotia government bought the one-time residence of shipbuilder W. D. Lawrence from his granddaughter, Abbie. On this day in 1971, it opened as a museum, commemorating a more prosperous time for the Fundy region and Nova Scotia as a whole.


I went down to Lawrence House this afternoon with my wife and children to join in the 40th-anniversary celebration. We spent about two hours there with the remarkable, knowledgable staff, and learned a lot about the man who lived there and his time.

W. D. Lawrence’s claim to fame was his building  of the 250-foot, 2,500-ton “great ship.” Many of his contemporaries derided the Irish-born businessman’s plan to launch the W. D. Lawrence, not necessarily because it was a wooden leviathan powered by sail at a time when steam ships were emergent, but simply because the vessel was so big.

The ship, which set sail on its maiden voyage in 1874, is long gone, but the house is still there, as are the furnishings from the period, tools from the yards, and photos of the W. D. Lawrence in dry dock.

Fiercely proud of Nova Scotia–he built The Great Ship in part to showcase the province’s maritime might–Lawrence entered politics as a member of the House of Assembly in 1863. He was, along with Joseph Howe, a fierce opponent of Confederation (wise men).

Unlike Howe, Lawrence never came around to accepting Nova Scotia’s place in Canada. He always maintained that Confederation was “an idle vision calculated to check the future growth and prosperity of our country.” “Our country” was Nova Scotia, and those who wanted to join Canada were “traitors.”

Better Know a Composer: Harry Partch

In 1952, Mills College students banded together with professional musicians from around Oakland, taught themselves how to play Harry Partch’s array of strange, self-made instruments, and put on the composer’s King Oedipus.

Oedipus garnered a surprising amount of national coverage (surprising in that it got any at all), including (most likely) the newsreel footage that Open Culture posted on its website yesterday.

In this report, the announcer identifies cloud-chamber bowls “derived from atomic research” (!) and a 72-stringed kithara as byproducts of Partch’s search for “the elusive tones that exist between the notes of a regular piano.”

Whether you think Partch was “kooky,” as Open Culture puts it, or not (see the comments following the article), this newsreel is intriguing in that it takes Partch’s search for new musical resources seriously. The tone is not jokey or disbelieving, but straight-up, delivered with the same seriousness as the latest update on the virtual front of the Cold War.

Better Know a Composer: Clara Schumann

Her husband gets more attention today, but back in the 19th century Clara Schumann (1819-1896) was the star in the family.

With a performance career spanning six decades (she made her solo debut in Leipzig at the age of 11), Clara was Germany’s reigning “Queen of Pianists” throughout most of the 1800s. Chopin, Liszt, and Mendelssohn dedicated works to her, and no less a cultural kingpin than Goethe was an enraptured fan of her playing.

She also served as Brahms’s confidant, musical adviser, and muse from the time they met in 1850, when Brahms was an up-and-coming twenty-year-old, until her death.

She was a first-rate composer, although she was personally insecure about her skill at writing music. Clara’s most popular piece during her lifetime was the Piano Trio, which she wrote in 1846. Only months later, her husband completed his inaugural work in the genre, and she often paired the pieces in concert. Here’s the last movement, which includes a fugato section much admired by Mendelssohn:

Steuermann’s Schoenberg

Last week, Russell Sherman gave a recital of Schoenberg’s piano music. In his remarks to the audience, he made a point of noting that his teacher, Schoenberg acolyte Edward Steuermann, never taught these works to him. According to Sherman, Steuermann told him that “this is your music.”

Steuermann recorded Schoenberg’s piano music in the 1950s; here’s the Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11:

You can read my essay on Schoenberg’s piano music here.

Who Needs a Publisher?

So, you want to be a novelist? Go ahead. John Locke (I don’t believe this is his real name) took the bull by the horns and published his own books through Kindle Direct Publishing, and today Amazon.com announced he’s the first independently published author to have sold a million e-books.

This past weekend, The New York Times Magazine published an article about Amanda Hocking (I’m pretty sure this is her real name), who recently signed a $2 million book deal with St. Martin’s Press on the strength of the sales on her self-published books.

Reading about how St. Martin’s went after Hocking to exploit her personal success building a healthy niche audience reminded me a lot of the major record companies’ approach to bands back in the early 2000s, when they didn’t want to touch groups unless they brought an audience with them. We know how that turned out.