An interlude on Vliet Street

There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own mind have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest; and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal…The larger links of the chain run thus --Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichols, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer.

Edgar Allan Poe The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Zig zag zig zag wanderer
You can huff, you can puff
never know what I have found
You can zig you can zag
Whoa I'm gonna stay…gonna stay around…

Captain Beefheart

Driving west on Vliet Street and approaching 39th Street, I decided to give C. Auguste Dupin’s strategy a try. It had been a long time since I had been amused and there was something fanciful about the green-domed building, long ago a tavern called The Interlude, on the corner. The light turned red and gave me time to study the structure and make a list.

The mental landmarks that my mind zagged and zigged to when sparked by that curious place were not as exotic as those described by Dupin. No Greek philosophers or constellations were there; but this is not a contest.  The images that flowed to my mind managed to connect themselves and carried me back to a remarkable place. Sometimes it is good to go back and remember.

The nostalgic catalogue assembled at the stoplight was this:  Dome, Richardson Romanesque, Grant Street, pale green, Schott editions, olive wood, sopranino recorder, Praetorius, Augusta. 

Not Poe’s Auguste, but Augusta! And not the place either, but Augusta the musician. Augusta herself! So clear and forthright was her visitation, that when I looked at the building, I was almost convinced that in the interlude since her death six decades ago, this is where she now was. Why let death stop you from teaching Gervais, Claudia Sessa, and the old music of the Lowlands?  Dying should not put an end to proselytising such a splendid repertoire.  When the landlord on Grant Street told her it was time to leave, she made a sensible move.  Her teaching-studio was now, so it appeared to me, located on 39th and Vliet on Milwaukee’s west side. 

Augusta Bleys was my mother’s recorder teacher.  To firmly cement 17th and 18th century Flemish music into my consciousness, we would every Tuesday morning board the steep stairs of the Number 13 bus and go west through Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood to her lesson. Miss Bleys was an austere Dutch woman. She both lived and taught in a blood-red and multi-arched “Richardson Romanesque” on Grant Street. The building itself may have been shaded and dark, but inside, in the lesson room, abundant sun managed to make its way in to lighten up the speckled wood and piles of music. For me, it was a remarkable place, for I was convinced that the room itself was constructed out of the innumerable music scores that lay about. To my young eyes, the walls were made out of Schott Editions from London; a gentle and light green colour that had the look of decaying plaster on an eastern dome. The ceiling was supported (how could it be?) by stacks of consort music, obscure and erudite collections from Budapest, Oxford and Amsterdam. A child's perspective is at once both skewed and insightful. To me, these columns of music were so immense that they touched the far away ceiling in that old Denver home. This could not be, but in a circuitous, if not crooked way, my vision touched on the truth. The collections might not have supported the rounded roof, but they certainly came to the aid to Miss Bleys herself. She was a frail creature, too weak, it seemed, to stand on her own. As delicate as a boxwood recorder, she crossed the room by leaning on her handy collections of Gervaise and Dr. Bull. With the help of these piles of music, her motions, like her fingers on the recorder, became deft and sure. Without them, I knew with a child's certainty, that Miss Bleys would collapse and her room, with her music, would turn to dust.

What brought her to the provincial western city of my 1950’s childhood? A failed love affair perhaps and she decided to stay on; not only stay on but do more, to teach as well. For if she didn't teach Van Eck divisions and Dowland in that provincial place, who would?  Far away from the Oudegracht and the charming canals of her native city, Miss Bleys became a missionary for St. Cecilia to the unconverted. She swept my mother into the fold, and I, both helpless and fortunate, had no choice but to follow.

It was in that room bound and held together with scores of consort music, that I first heard and took to my heart the sounds of the Renaissance. And now, more than half a century later, when I play those clear sounds, I not only hear, but I also see. Beyond the strettos and the points of imitations, I look all the way back to my early times, to Miss Bley's house. She is there: angular, with a wooden flute in one gaunt hand, drawing back the drapes of her studio to let in even more of the morning light. And then, so transparent is the music and the vision, that I can see the dust of that tune-laden room, swirling from the quickness of her motions. It settles on the shelves and columns of music; on the Lupo, the Alfonso Ferrabosco, and on the audacious proclamations of Captain Tobias Hume. Now nourished, she grows tall, so tall that she can reach to the highest shelves that I thought were beyond reach. How could there be music there? But there is. It is the shelf saved for Praetorious. In that room, how could there not be Praetorious? Miss Bleys touches the music and begins to bring it down. But now she stops and looks out the high window. Outside it is no longer Grant Street and the elms of old Denver that she sees, but the the hobnobbing of Vliet Street on Milwaukee’s west -side.

She has moved, but the interruption and new landscape has not stoped her from her pedagogical work.  She has taken rooms on the second story above The Interlude Tavern. and the Praetorius section had been in her traveling bag. She continues to reach up, one hand still holding the boxwood flute, takes the music and brings it down from the highest place.

It is tempting to stop, go up those steep stairs and sign up for recorder lessons with this formidable scholar. Will she take on a new student?

The stop-light turns green and I go on my way.