Mark Violette, who facilitated the first-ever PET “away” concert in
Brownington
as well as concert no. 11 in
Westmore,
connected us with Mead Hill Farm, the home of John and Jill Castle and family and also a community space they make available for all sorts of wonderful events.
Mark too lives in Holland and was my performance partner.
click any image to enlarge
A “private” space freely open to the community, including even groomed ski trails
The venue and (across the road, in background) the field where Mac’s Party went down in 1973
The crowd gathers
The chimney, with an (unaltered) Vermont-shaped centerpiece culled from the fields
Mac’s Party, 1972 & 1973
In 1972, Ronald “Mac” Worth organized a grand rock festival in the neighboring town of Charleston (the town I played the day after Holland). The run-up to the event was fraught, with concerns expressed about the impact of such a large gathering in such a small town. The issue of sheer numbers was inextricably intermixed with the local, largely conservative population’s anxieties about sex, drugs, rock ’n roll, and counterculture more generally.
After months of charged debate, which extended to the state level, about permissions, restrictions, and policing, the event went smoothly—a win for peace, love, and understanding.
The next year, Mac planned a second festival, this time in Holland. Despite the experience of the previous year, tensions and local opposition again ran high. The festival proceeded nonetheless, larger than the first—estimated attendance ranged between 10,000 and 30,000—but this time not so peaceably. Conflicts arose, not between hippies and locals, who as it turned out got along well enough, but between gatecrashers and festival security. Nine people were shot (none grievously injured), bringing unwelcome
national attention and nearly leading to a statewide law that would have put heavy restrictions on large gatherings.
So Vermont had its own little Woodstock one year, followed by its own little Altamont the next.
The remarkable coincidence here is not that the two Mac’s Parties took place in two towns I played back-to-back, but that our host John Castle’s family was directly involved with both. I knew before I arrived that the 1973 festival was held in the fields across from Mead Hill Farm, then the only house in the vicinity. I did not know that John’s family ran the East Charleston General Store, the site of some problematic encounters during the otherwise copacetic 1972 event.
But as John explains here, the next year his family had the “protection” of several local hippie communities, who acted as ambassadors between festival-goers and John’s social activist but relatively “straight” family.
The most violent incident John witnessed was between a laboring Angus heifer and a beleaguered sheriff’s deputy.
John on “Mac’s Parties” of 1972-3
The Dutch National Anthem
John on the barn & the Rev. Robert Castle
A tradition of activism and advocacy
John, currently the Executive Director of the Vermont Rural Education Collaborative, one of many mutual aid or advocacy groups he has led or worked with,
spoke briefly about the barn where the concert was held and about the man who had it built: his father, Rev. Robert Castle.
An activist Episcopal priest, a friend and champion of civil rights leaders, he was a colorful character who (to pick just one example) not only founded one of the first AIDS hospices, at his church in Harlem, but then joined the picket against himself when workers protested for higher wages. He was also an “accidental actor” with roles in films including Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia.
(More about him
here and
here.)
Father Castle’s activism did not endear him to the Episcopal hierarchy, and his trouble getting an assignment led to the family’s relocation to Vermont, where they have carried on the tradition of community organizing.
In recognition of that work, the program included a favorite song of Robert’s, “This Little Light of Mine” plus my amalgam of tunes of peace, protest, and celebration, “Happy Birthday Martin”.
Another piece I just had to play in Holland—the Dutch National Anthem—turned out to carry a message of resistance as well, as you can see in the video above (watch till end).
The program
Scarlatti Sonata K.102 in G minor
Rehearsing “Stars and Stripes” with Mark Violette
Another locally keyed piece was Chopin’s Nocturne in F minor op. 55, written the year Lucy Hall, a physician and pioneer in hospital administration and public health, was born in Holland. Mark Violette and I gave a 4-hand rendition of John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” written (this was unintentional!) the year that the barn’s Emerson piano was manufactured. In yet another P.E.T. coincidence, two days after the concert I was talking with Col. Michael Colburn (ret.), former director of the “President’s Own” Marine Band, founded by Sousa, who told me that there is reason to believe that the “Stars and Stripes” was first played in a sort of try-out by a town band in the Brattleboro area, where Sousa was a frequent summer guest.
A bit smaller than Mac’s Party, yet the crowd spilled out the open doors
Emerson serial no. 62232 was manufactured in Boston between 1895 and 1900. (When I said above it was built “the year that” the Stars & Stripes was written, I was taking a bit of a poetic license. S&S was composed on Christmas Day 1896 and first played in 1897; the odds are semi decent that the piano was made in one of those years.)
The piano once had a self-playing mechanism, now removed.
Keen listeners may have heard that familiar pieces sound darker and deeper than usual in the clips above. The piano was tuned a full whole step below pitch in 1976 (according to information penciled on the pinblock by a prior technician). Why that was is unclear—most likely it had gone very flat, and the tuner back then felt it would be too much of a shock to the strings and pins to bring it up to standard pitch.
This in any case is the determination Rick Erwin made when he tuned the piano for this concert. So (for instance) Chopin's Nocturne in F minor was, in this performance, the little-known Nocturne in E-flat minor.
Like any piano of that vintage that has not been thoroughly and recently rebuilt, it has some limitations. In particular, the bass strings do not damp completely, and vibrate sympathetically with strings in the higher registers too, leaving a persistent sheen of after-sound which is not unpleasant, but which renders a true staccato impossible.
But Emerson was a quality builder during an age of great piano craftsmanship, and a grand old upright of that era almost always has a more complex and inspiring tone than most small, precision-built modern uprights.
Emerson was noted in particular for the fine woods and elegant craftsmanship of their cases, both exhibited beautifully in this instrument, whose exterior is in pristine condition at 130 years.
Play Every Town
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