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(About the 2004 Solstice Concert)
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The New York Times, (About the 2004 Solstice Concert) >>
PUBLIC LIVES; And on This Farm He Had Some Gongs
By BEN SISARIO (NYT) Published: December 16, 2004
ONCE you get to Paul Winter's backyard, beyond the big house and behind the barn, the first thing you notice is the yurt. Big, round and squat, like some ancient wooden flying saucer, it's an earthbound treehouse for Mr. Winter's 8-year-old daughter, Keetu, built by a friend in the style of a Mongolian tent.
Up a long ramp to the second floor of the barn, Mr. Winter, the saxophonist and composer, swings open a wide door and surveys a cavernous room filled with Balinese gongs, wind chimes, various percussion instruments and a giant tree made of spiraling tubes of metal -- the Solstice Tree, decked with yet more chimes, ''spinners'' and bells.
''This is my playpen,'' he says with an earnest grin.
Grab a mallet, he tells a visitor, twirl a chime, bang a gong. Go ahead, feel that warm, gigantic sound. The gongs are a recent arrival, just in from Bali, where Mr. Winter picked out 20 or so and had them shipped to his bucolic 120-acre farm in the woods of western Connecticut.
On a crisp afternoon the gongs, like the Solstice Tree and all those twinkling percussion instruments, lay in the barn, but Mr. Winter was eager to bring them and plenty more out for his 25th annual winter solstice concerts at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, which begin today and continue through Saturday.
Mr. Winter has made a long and fruitful career of musical menageries. Besides his efforts to mimic the sounds of owls, wolves and even the Amazonian uirapuru bird with different instruments, he has recorded his soprano saxophone in counterpoint with the songs of whales and has flown in a glider alongside storks as homework for a musical tribute to their migration patterns.
''I think of our music in terms of our aspiration to celebrate the creatures and cultures of the earth,'' he says in his gentle professorial manner, referring to his group, the Paul Winter Consort. ''We're weaving a kind of earth tapestry from different cultures and different threads.''
Lean and trim at 65, with a wisp of white hair surrounding his head's shiny dome, Mr. Winter is a Santa Claus for the humanist holiday that is the winter solstice. Making music and clearing brush keep him in shape; as he walks briskly around his hilly woods, he never loses his breath or his footing.
Born in Altoona, Pa., Mr. Winter fell in love with jazz in the age of Stan Kenton. While a senior at Northwestern University in 1961, he won the Intercollegiate Jazz Festival, quickly got a recording contract with Columbia and almost as quickly was hired by the State Department for a six-month good-will tour through Latin America. In Brazil he discovered bossa nova and all sorts of sounds new to him. Invigorated by the prospect of spending his life exploring music around the world, he abandoned his plan to go to law school.
''I realized I could do vastly more with music than I ever could as an international lawyer,'' he says.
Though he says he now treasures the feeling of community at his annual St. John the Divine concerts, he found New York City lonely and uninviting as a young musician in the 60's. In 1967 he moved to Redding, Conn., where he found a peaceful alternative to New York. He also found his musical godfather on Umpawaug Road.
His landlady mentioned that ''another musician'' had once lived on that road: Charles Ives, the renowned Yankee eccentric, who composed joyfully cacophonous pieces and espoused a Walt Whitman-like philosophy that yearned for a ''universe symphony.'' Mr. Winter knew little about Ives at the time, but began to research his music and became a devotee of the composer, producing a concert for the centennial of Ives's birth in 1974. He plans to release a four-disc set of that concert next year on his label, Living Music, which has released 39 albums since 1980.
WHEN the Very Rev. James Parks Morton, then the dean of St. John the Divine, invited Mr. Winter in the late 1970's to become an artist in residence at the church, he looked for a theme to unite a fragmented city of many faiths, languages and cultures, and settled on the equinoxes and solstices as universal experiences.
''For countless millennia,'' he said, ''people in the northern zones have been aware that the days get shorter and weather gets colder and it gets darker. But with the humility that people had, they felt they needed to do something to ensure that life would regenerate. They felt they needed to build fires and light candles to beseech the sun to come back, and they brought evergreen boughs into their homes as a symbol of the enduring life spirit.''
To represent the holiday, he has turned to the Ivesian concept of musical democracy, inviting a motley crowd to the stage ''to create music in which everybody can do their thing full tilt at the same time,'' he says. Mr. Winter's group rehearses for the holiday concerts for only about three days, so that the events do not become too orchestrated.
Mr. Winter is particularly excited this year about the debut of the gongs. In his barn, they hang with yellow sticky notes identifying their pitch -- E flat, D, C and so on. Those are rough approximations, and the gongs constantly change tune with changes in temperature, so their roar can never really be tamed.
''They would drive a symphony conductor crazy,'' he says, ''which is sort of the point.'' 12/16/04
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