Corinth is the town so nice they chartered it twice. Most of Vermont’s towns were chartered from afar by New Hampshire’s Governor Wentworth in a mad rush to stake his colony’s claim to the area west of the Connecticut as a counter to New York’s competing claim. This he did in for Corinth in 1764. Then, for reasons not entirely clear to me but I suppose to hedge their bets in this contested political context and protect their individual stakes, the landowners obtained a “confirmatory grant” from the colony of New York in 1772. So I began the program with two sets of Mozart pieces, the first from the London Sketchbook of 1764, the second from the Twenty Minuets of 1772. The program also included a Chopin Nocturne written the year the East Corinth Church was built, Charles Johnson’s “Blue Goose Rag” in honor of the Corinth village of Green Goose, and Larry Unger’s contradance classic “The Curvy Road to Corinth”, which he wrote (I asked him) in reference to Vermont’s Corinth, specifically the village of East Corinth. I’m pretty sure the curvy way in question is Chicken Farm Road, which leads to the church.

Corinth’s modern claim to fame is as the location for the Beetlejuice movies, both filmed in the village of East Corinth. In the first film, Alec Baldwin’s character’s hobby is perfecting his scale model of the village, and it opens with a montage of true aerial footage morphing into “aerial” footage of the model. The village and its buildings are not just a background, but are woven into the film’s fabric. I realized I had to play something from the movie, which my wife and I watched for as long as we could bear, by which point I decided the opening titles theme was probably the catchiest music anyway. I did like Danny Elfman’s score, but our dog Winnie was not a fan and decided that I had played quite enough by this point in the concert.

Our local collaborator for this concert was Nathan Longo, currently of Calais but a native son of Corinth. He told the audience how he came to be a Corinthian: his father, born in Salerno Italy, worked in Boston as a cattle trader but also did odd jobs for the mob. One day he was sent to Chicago where he met Al Capone, at which point he realized just what a bad and dangerous lot he was working for. He decided he wanted out. Early retirement not being an approved option in the organization, he figured he could stay forever under the Mafia’s radar if he moved to rural northern Vermont. He fell in love with a Yankee nurse who was taking care of a patient in a cattle farming family he did business with, and the young couple eloped. Nathan’s mother was an amateur musician and played pump organ in the East Corinth Church for 50 years, so it was appropriate that we played the “Home Waltz” as our first number.

Nathan recounted boyhood mischief, how he and his brother and cousins would sneak into his grandfather’s bobbin mill late at night, start up the turbines, and…make bobbins. (Evidently he inherited his father’s temptation for the criminal life.) Nathan had a long and varied professional career, working as an auto mechanic, a precision machinist, and a psychotherapist. In retirement, he took up accordion repair and refurbishing, and now runs northern Vermont’s only accordion shop. He started playing at age 50 and composed the lovely “Jeannie’s Waltz” for his wife while commuting on Interstate 89 from Vermont to his machinist job in Waltham Massachusetts. Though this was a world premiere performance, the audience immediately latched onto the haunting tune. Nathan’s face as he realizes the full church is singing his song back to him is priceless.