loud music and sage

I drove all the way up to Los Ange­les for an organ recital last night. I knew I was in for trou­ble when the usher handed me a pro­gram and offered me a pair of earplugs. But more on that later.

John hates the idea of me to tak­ing my scooter to LA, so I grudg­ingly drove the gas-devouring Jeep. But to turn the sit­u­a­tion to an advan­tage I stopped by the Tree of Life Nurs­ery in San Juan Capis­trano. It’s a few miles east of I-5, but ten ten min­utes of dri­ving off the inter­state beats an hour and a half each direc­tion from San Diego.

I’d been plan­ning on doing some­thing with the unclaimed zone between my house and the neigh­bor behind me, and I wanted some native plants to fill in the zone. This would be a good chance to pick up some plants with­out the ridicu­lous commute.

at-the-tree-of-life-nursery_0001The plant­i­ngs around the nurs­ery fea­tured some vibrant spring flow­ers, includ­ing this stand of Cal­i­for­nia pop­pies and vivid vio­let phacelia.

at-the-tree-of-life-nursery_0002at-the-tree-of-life-nursery_0003

And this traf­fic cone mal­low was pretty spec­tac­u­lar as well (prob­a­bly desert mal­low, Sphaer­al­cea ambigua).

While there I picked up some plants for my project, includ­ing some more plants of white sage (Salvia api­ana) and a clone of pur­ple sage (Salvia leu­co­phylla ‘Amethyst Bluff’). I’ll post more on that project later in the week.

Nego­ti­at­ing LA rush hour traf­fic can be an ordeal, and doing it with a dozen plants in the back of the car wasn’t any­thing I was look­ing for­ward too, espe­cially if I had to jam on the brakes. But traf­fic was fairly light and I got to my des­ti­na­tion with plenty of time for a relax­ing din­ner before the concert.

And now, on to the con­cert: When the lights dimmed, a man got up to intro­duce the per­former for the evening. Charle­magne Pales­tine was one of the fig­ures active in the avant-garde music scene, first in New York around 1970, and slightly later in Los Ange­les. The man intro­duc­ing him apol­o­gized that dur­ing ear­lier rehearsals they’d blown three fuses on the organ, and that they might need to inter­rupt the con­cert to replace more fuses.

The con­cert loca­tion, the First Con­gre­ga­tional Church of Los Ange­les, claims to have the world’s largest indoor church organ, a mon­ster with well over 20,000 pipes. What would the sound be if you got sev­eral thou­sand of them going at the same time? The audi­ence got to find out about an hour into the piece.

What had started out as a wispy cloud of del­i­cate sus­tained notes had grad­u­ally gown in inten­sity as organ stops got added. When the composer/performer finally did a face-plant into the key­board around the 60 minute mark and remained there unmov­ing for a good ten min­utes, the hall shook with a throb­bing earth­quake of sound that with zero doubt was the loud­est, most intense, most jar­ring ten min­utes of any­thing I’ve ever heard in my life. (There’s a record­ing of Schling-Blägen, the piece Charle­magne Pales­tine per­formed in con­cert, but that in no way gives pre­pares you for the phys­i­cal assault that the you’ll expe­ri­ence live.)

When the piece ended, I was still shak­ing. I wasn’t sure I could drive home very reli­ably, and I was glad I wasn’t on the scooter.

As I opened the car door, the smell of sage escaped from plants behind the back seat. It’s said that sage tea is good for calm­ing the nerves, and the same could prob­a­bly be said for the aroma from the plants. With all my nerves still fir­ing on over­load, it was prob­a­bly the per­fect rem­edy for what I’d just expe­ri­enced. When I got home two hours later, I lay down, and went right to sleep.

PS: I’ve only talked about the loud­ness of the piece, but in the final analy­sis there was a lot of beauty and del­i­cacy in it as well. I loved it. Music can take you many places. This piece took me some­where I’ve never been.

March 17 2009 10:18 am | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: • • •

2 Responses to “loud music and sage”

  1. Greg on 22 Mar 2009 at 5:50 am #

    Wow, what an experience.

    It comes as no sur­prise that your new plant friends were there to help restore some calm­ness to you after such an invig­o­rat­ing (?!) experience.

    I do love the way those col­ors of the poppy and phacelia play together: delightful!

  2. lostlandscape on 22 Mar 2009 at 8:28 pm #

    Greg, yeah, I thought their plant­ing looked a lot like your fence gar­den last sum­mer, with a fun col­lec­tion of whatever’s bloom­ing mixed together…

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply