Lessons from the Seed Whisperers
This week I profiled the composer Gabriela Lena Frank in the New York Times. I had known about her vibrant music, which draws on her Peruvian heritage. But much of her energy these days goes into her farm and her academy, which fosters new compositional voices.
Both are about planting the seeds for a more diverse and sustainable ecosystem. But in our interview, Gabriela also spoke about the necessity to uproot things a little. The jet-setting practices of the international music circuit, for starters. And the very notion of what makes for a desirable career in music.
If musicians developed more ties with local communities, for instance as teachers, Gabriela said, their careers would be more diverse. And they would be more resilient against a crisis like the current pandemic, which has laid waste to the concert circuit.
I wrote the article from Sedona, Arizona, where I am currently volunteering with publicity and outreach on behalf of my son’s school. Verde Valley School is a dazzlingly idealistic project founded by an anthropologist in the late 1940s. From the beginning, it integrated environmental stewardship, service and cross-cultural learning into the curriculum, building deep ties with Native American nations in the area.
The school has its own thriving organic farm, founded by Mike Spielman, a poet and painter turned seed whisperer. Yesterday he spoke to me about his work cataloguing heirloom seeds. Mike believes that saving seeds from each year’s harvest and replanting them year after year doesn’t just teach the farmer. The seeds learn, too.
Mike told me about an Iraqi variety of tomatoes he grows at VVS. The seeds were part of a collection of heirloom seeds smuggled out of Iraq at the beginning of Operation Desert Storm.
Mike was captivated by the story and gave them a try. But the first year the results were awful. The tomatoes were mealy, the yield puny. But he gave them another try. (“You plant for taste, and abundance,” he told me, “and sometimes you plant for their cultural history.”)
The second year was just as awful. But something made Mike give it a third try, planting a mixture of seeds saved from the first and the second year’s harvest. (His beautiful term for these generations of seeds is ascensions.)
The third year, something happened. The Iraqi tomato became the star of the farm. Flavorful. Plentiful.
In the midst of the political noise and overwhelm of this moment, it’s worth looking to Gabriela and Mike — both in their ways seed whisperers — for lessons in patience and faith and the power of story.
This week’s playlist plays with the subject of seeds and connection. The first piece by Anna Thorvaldsdottir unfolds “underground,” in the innards of a piano, where the sounds contain only the promise of piano-ness. In Gabriela’s own Sonata Andina, Peruvian transplants begin to blossom.
And next to Grieg’s homage to spring I placed a little gem by the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett. This week he revealed in the New York Times that he suffered a stroke that robbed him of the use of his left arm.
I owe Keith a lot. In a way, he seeded my career as a music critic. In 2008 I wrote a kind of love letter to his Köln Concert in the Wall Street Journal. He saw it and liked it and granted me a rare interview. That piece did much to establish me on the freelance scene in New York. I’m rooting for Keith to find a way to adapt and make music with his remaining good hand.
Bonus:
For a different perspective on ecology and the human psyche, dip into this exhibition at the Rietberg Museum in Zurick about Chinese art and nature. See how long it takes you to spot the skyscrapers hidden in one of the landscapes.