Rachmaninoff

My mother was more for Chopin and Liszt and we had a lot of that, especially as sheets and books, but also on 33-1/3 LPs, eventually in stereo. So, growing up, we had at least one Rachmaninoff, the Preludes and Variation on a Theme by Paganini, perhaps. And also the Second Piano Concerto. But I never knew that until I read Atlas Shrugged in high school and my 11^th grade American history teacher told me that that particular work was one of Ayn Rand’s favorites. I listened to it often while reading Atlas Shrugged through twice. To me, it is the soundtrack for the book and the soundtrack that the movie should have had.

Rand mentions it and Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in The Fountainhead, at the beginning of Part IV. We see an anonymous young man in the woods. Recently graduated from college and seeking a path for his future, he responds to the beauty of the world around him and yearns for something within himself to answer the promise in the music. 

 

Rachmaninoff was an icon in the society in which Rand matured. In Dr. Zhivago, Yuri, Lara, Komarovsky, and Pasha are all at the very fine party in a sparkling home, while in the background, Rachmaninoff plays for the guests. 

 

It is not that I don’t care for music (see Hallelujah here), but that I have a slight hearing deficiency. The piano worked well enough for me because you hit the key and you get the note. As open instruments, the coronet and French horn were impossible for me. In the third grade, we took a “music readiness” test in which we had to identify higher and lower notes; and once they got close, I could not tell them apart. But music is a language; and I am good at languages, dialects, and accents. I have two cassette tapes, Rachmaninoff Plays Rachmaninoff and Gershwin Plays Gershwin. You can hear covers all over YouTube and the performers are accomplished professionals. But these are not just different performers with their own subtle interpretations. They are the right way to play the music because there is no substitute for creation.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Labor Day Celebrates Productivity 

Love, Loss, and Redemption in Atlas Shrugged 

Autobiography of a Worker 

Reflections on the Passings of Comrades 

The First Dagny

We met in the student lounge through a friend of hers.  Another friend of mine from Young Americans for Freedom had handed me Anthem as we passed between algebra classes. After I read it, I gave it to Jan. 

  

Prom Night 1967

 In 1966, Janet M. Matyas was my high school sweetheart.  She was a year younger than I, and in the “major work” program of Cleveland Public Schools for gifted and talented students.  (I was not. I went to summer school to catch up.)  She played the violin.  After Anthem, we went on to read all of the existing books. I subscribed to the Objectivist Newsletter and took the “Basic Principles” class.  Several of our friends also had read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead.  High school romances are transient; and I changed schools the following year.

Cleveland as seen from Lakewood

For that year, we had the steel mills and trains, a high rise apartment for viewing the city from the lake and some penthouse parties (though no Penthouse Legends) with our friends.  At a spring dance that year, we were there with everyone else and happy to be on a date, but oddly enough, the band played "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" which is in 6/8, and we danced it as a waltz -- not a big deal, but, when we were done, we looked around to find the floor empty, except for us.

Winton Place is the tallest. At the left in front is
Edgewater Towers where we lived
(but not where I grew up).

Janet and I cringed at the classical architecture of the banks.  We had great universities, corporations dedicated to electrical research, and John D. Rockefeller as the model of the hometown boy who made good.  Riding into downtown on the Rapid, we entered beneath the Terminal Tower, staring hard and deep into the many tunnels into which other train tracks disappeared.  The Terminal had a concourse with a tobacco shop.

 

It does not get more romantic than this.

About 1989, we found each other through FidoNet.  We exchanged a few letters. The last I heard from her was in 1996. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Anthem as a Graphic Novel

Atlas Shrugged Opening Show

The Influence of Ayn Rand's Objectvism

Autobiography of a Worker

Engines of Creation

I told him how much I wanted to be paid if I was successful.  He locked me in his business on Friday night. …   When he came back on Sunday, I had the solution wrapped and ribboned.

The folks at Code.Org created a video with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and others, encouraging kids to learn to program computers.  That much is laudable.  Disgracing the video, with an odd anti-capitalist mentality, is a segment by Drew Houston of Dropbox about how much fun it is to be a programmer.  (View from the 3:00 minute to the 4:00 minute mark of this 5:44 announcement.)  Was it the fun of 48 hours in three days to solve a tough problem?  No, it is the fun of skateboarding in the office, playing ping pong, and chatting with your fields.  The segment also touts free food including gourmet cooking three times a day.  But where do these come from, if no one works?  Blank out.  (Firms are not launched with perquisites, benefits, and privileges--but more on that in another post.)

From the 3:17 mark: “… to get the very best people we try to make the office as awesome as possible."  Fantastic chef, free food, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, free laundry, snacks, even places to play, and scooters. “All these interesting things around the office: places where people can play or relax, or goto think or play music or be creative.”

Back in the 80s when the concept of a “Dot.Com Meltdown” was inconceivable on several levels,  working as a technical writer for a software start-up I was paid a salary of $400 per week for a 40-hour week. I would come in on my own time on Saturdays and find most, if not all, of the four programmers there, also.  This was neither the first nor the last time that my co-workers and I at that company or for some previous or subsequent job worked “for free.” 

It was not unusual. Computer programming was the quintessential brain work that people did because they loved it.  As well as we were paid, getting paid was a bonus., a secondary consequence.  Thus, hackers created Open Source software and formalized it with the Open Source Foundation.  Unix became Linux and GNU: Gnu is Not Unix.  Freeware and shareware abounded.  Companies made money selling it.  Individuals made money creating it and marketing it.  But we did it because the "fun" - the ecstasy of creation - was in the work.

“But first, I want you to think and tell me what made me give years to this work. Money? Fame? Charity? Altruism?... You see, I’m never concerned with my clients, only with their architectural requirements. I consider these as part of my building’s theme and problem, as my building’s material—just as I consider bricks and steel. Bricks and steel are not my motive. Neither are the clients. Both are only the means of my work. Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action …”  (Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Plume edition, 1994; page 604)

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(A jump lead walks into a bar.  
The bartender says, "I'll serve you, but don't try to start anything.")