Playing Marquette How music shapes a community

By John Smolens

It is not difficult to imagine Marquette as an island — an island nestled between Lake Superior and the Forest Primeval. We have the sounds of the lake, the wind, the trees, the shorebirds, the fog horns, ships’ horns, the 3 a.m. train whistles. Even the silence here possesses unique qualities.

What one also hears often in Marquette is music. Choirs harmonize in churches and schools. Bands rip it up in brewhouses. Summer nights, Music on Third offers a smorgasbord of genres on the sidewalks in the Village, and groups perform on the steps of the Peter White Public Library, their beat ricocheting down Front Street.

There are concerts at Kaufman Auditorium and the Reynolds Recital Hall; Lakeview Arena has been rocked by the likes of the Beach Boys, Def Leppard, Rush, Joan Jett, and KISS (TWICE!). Buddy Guy, Rory Block, Samantha Fish, John Hammond and Duke Robillard, to name just a few, have brought the blues to Marquette.

Folk music fills the woods during the Hiawatha Festival, Da Yoopers sound like they just got back from the second week of deer camp, and Conga Se Menne will always be the world’s greatest Finnish-Reggae band.

The Rolling Stones, often touted as the greatest rock and roll band, once flew in to Marquette to pay tribute at the memorial for their head crew chief “Chuch” Magee. One of the first signs of autumn is the sound (which carries for miles) of the NMU marching band practicing outside the Berry Events Center.

In Marquette, you can’t go too long without hearing the oom-pah rhythm of a spirited Nordic polka.

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Ask local musicians why Marquette is so musical, and their re- sponses can be as varied as the genres and styles of music they play.

Jeff Krebs’s day gig is at Yooptone Music. He’s a member of the Union Suits, whose repertoire includes roots, blues, swing and folk tunes, and he also assumes the persona of Papa Crow when he sings and plays guitar for children at schools and parties. A master of understatement, Jeff attributes the importance of music in Marquette to “this relatively harsh environment.” And yet he adds, “You can’t beat an evening of jamming around the fire...I grew up in Yooper family- and friend-jams like that.”

Walt Lindala, who co-hosts The Sunny Morning on Sunny 101.9, and for more than 20 years has played guitar in the Flat Broke Blues Band, said that “Marquette is not only musical, but very creative in general, because of its proximity to Lake Superior.” The idea of the Marquette Blues Fest started at the Lindala kitchen table, and since 2004 Walt and his wife April have been instrumental (sorry, couldn’t resist) in the series of September concerts which commemorate the end of our brief, pastel summers.

“Every festival, when one of the headliners is on, I go for a walk around the grounds. It always blows me away that we pulled off another one. Walking out of the eye of the proverbial hurricane…gives me some real perspective into the magnitude of what we, as a collective group of volunteers, have done,” Lindala said.

Danielle Simandl’s musical career path has meandered far and wide. Raised in Marquette, she earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in violin performance from Lawrence University and DePaul University, respectively, and she now performs throughout the Midwest. She plays with orchestras and chamber groups in Chicago, Wisconsin, as far west as Iowa’s Quad Cities and in Marquette. For the last 13 years, she has served as the executive director of the Superior String Alliance (SSA), a Marquette-based non-profit that hosts a summer music camp for middle and high school string students, a strings club for elementary string students and a professional concert series through the SSA Chamber Players. Furthermore, Simandl is co-executive director of the Pine Mountain Music Festival, which hosts classi- cal music performances throughout the U.P. Why is music so central to Marquette culture? Simandl credits the educational possibilities available to children starting, as she did, at a young age.

“Marquette has an amazing music program in the public schools…there is a vast network of Marquette folks of many ages with musical skill sets who end up performing, attending performances and supporting the arts in Marquette,” she said.

Summer nights, Joe Rayome can often be found playing his own compositions on local stages, and he wrote and recorded NMU’s student recruitment song, “Everything I Ever Learned.” Though much of the year he lives in the Big Apple as a working artist and musician, his song lyrics of- ten draw from life in the north woods, and many of his paintings depict Marquette’s architecture and waterfront. He considers Marquette “an artistic crossroads. Wherever inspiration meets creativity you’re bound to find paintings, poems, sculptures, stories and songs. Perhaps the real question is how could Marquette not be musical? The music has always been there. We’re just tapping into it.”

Some of Marquette’s most dedicated musicians are only occasionally heard in public. Nevertheless, that is no true measure of their commitment to their art. Dr. Greg Sulik, whose medical offices are on the corner of Third and Ridge streets, rarely misses a day when he plays classical pieces on his restored Bechstein baby grand piano, built in Berlin in 1932. Given a chance, he will play for you a composition by one of the “Three Bs” and intermittently pause to discuss the beauties of a particularly intricate passage or the connections he sees between Bach and DNA.

“The simple answer is that the arts reflect nature, but it’s more complex, eh?”

He suggests that living in the U.P. causes us to “value things that are more in tune with the guttural and elemental side of life. Trivial things concern us less. Music and other forms of art provide an outlet of expression, not available on a verbal level, reflective of the raw power we witness on a daily basis, just by being here.”

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Marquette is an island. A magical, musical place, where, as with all islanders, we have to make do, and part of that involves creating our own culture. Our geographical separateness

(some would call it isolation) tends to pull us together. Music is but one of the catalysts. It’s the musicians who play for tips across the street from the post office; it’s three young jazz musicians, the McKenzie Arquette Trio, at the Landmark, paying homage to American standards composed generations before they were born; it’s walking by Dr. Jack Kublin’s house on a pastel summer evening when the windows are open, and the piano chords and arpeggio runs sweeten that warm lake air. Music helps us see — and, of course, hear — who we are, where we are. The responses from the musicians I spoke with were as varied as their styles of music; however, they have one thing in common: they all love playing Marquette.

John Smolens’s new novel A Cold, Hard Prayer will be published in the fall.

By Scot Stewart

Top, all reflections on the middle branch of the Ontonagon River offer an array of color. Right, a fragrant water lily of the purest white in bloom. Opposing page, top left, red maple leaves with drops of dew. Top right, a Blackburnian Warbler sports a bright plume of orange. Middle left, yellow marsh marigolds show off their brilliant color. Middle right, it’s not just living things on earth, but minerals that provide a wealth of color, such as this green malachite. Bottom left, a blue tree swallow alights on a slim perch. Bottom right, a purple passion flower in full bloom.

Author’s Note: This is Part One of a two-part series, which made me take a huge leap into physics. It seemed like every sentence needed another one to explain it. I flunked physics the first time I took it in high school, so you know where this is going. Go slowly as you read it, skip over parts you don’t need, and ponder the wonderful phenomenon you have seen.

“It takes sunshine and rain to make a rainbow. There would be no rainbows without sunshine and rain.” ––

Roy T. Bennett

Winter lasts a long time in the Upper Peninsula. It offers special challenges, like shorter –– yes, much shorter –– periods of daylight. It removes much of the life we love so dearly during the other seasons, like insects, (well butterflies and bumble bees for sure), leaves, many of the singing birds and so their songs, flow- ers, even fragrances. In short, winter seems to change things in ways most don’t find to their liking. It steals many of the colors of the outdoors.

At the heart of this is light and color. Those two go hand in hand to provide joy for most. Light, ah light. It is something so familiar to those with sight, but trying to explain it is a totally different matter. Light is a form of energy that travels in waves. The best known, natural energy-producing light comes from the sun. The waves themselves come in different sizes, called wavelengths, and have both electric and magnetic characteristics. These waves include not only visible light waves, but also radio waves, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays, infrared and ultraviolet light, all outside the limits of human vision.

“Color helps to express light — not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist’s brain.” ––

Henri Matisse

For humans, visible light rays make vision possible. The white light from the sun contains a spectrum of wavelengths and a whole array of colors. Seeing those different colors, however, is another matter. Human eyes have retinas, which in turn contain a trio of proteins called opsins, which are found in the retinas’ cones. Ed Yong’s book, An Immense World, provides an amazingly simple description of how these proteins assist vision to determine colors. He describes how these three proteins react to the exposure to long (red), medium (green) and short (blue) waves of light. From this contact, two different processes occur. One involves the interpretation of these colors, but more importantly, the colors are also compared by the three proteins. This comparison provides for additions and subtractions of these basic colors to identify subtle differences and is called opponency.

The colors of objects are formed when light of different wavelengths strikes those substances. When it comes to the familiar colors, red is the longest wavelength, on one side of the spectrum near infrared light, and blue is the shortest, near ultraviolet light side. Each color of light has its own frequency –– the number of waves passing a point in a given amount of time. Different materials have their own chemical formula –– the types and amounts of different atoms. The atoms themselves have electrons, tiny particles moving around the center or nucleus of those atoms.

Light waves are actually made of photons. Photons contain invisible areas of energy that can act as waves. The waves are larger than electrons and protons of atoms. When light, these waves of energy, strikes a given atom with electrons having the same natural frequency as a particular color, it sets that atom’s electrons vibrating and the light of that frequency is absorbed, and that color will not be seen.

That color is absorbed and the energy from that color is converted to heat energy. Black substances absorb all light waves. It is why dark clothing and dark roadways can frequently get so warm. They convert more light energy into heat energy. Colors with different frequencies are reflected back out if their frequencies are not absorbed. When that reflected light carries only one color, that one is visible and that is the color that is seen.

Materials can interact with light waves in two other ways. White objects usually reflect all light back. Transparent and translucent materials allow some or all light to pass through them. Glass, like stained glass, and those rose-colored glasses absorb some wavelengths of light and allow others to pass through, depending on the impurities in the glass.

Water can act a lot like glass. Depending on the angle it can reflect the whole spectrum of visible light and ultraviolet light too. It is hard to beat the bright silvery reflection on a lake of sunlight streaming through the dark clouds of a nearby storm. The angles of the water’s surface can also pro- vide a jigsaw of white reflected light and a view below. Sunlight hitting the surface of shallow water on a rippled sand spit can light up the sandy bottom and bounce off the edges of the water lapping over the ripples below. It can create a network of jagged, connected white light patterns with a golden tinge from the sand below.

“The meaning of a word to me –– is not as exact as the meaning of a color.” –– Georgia

O’Keeffe

Wherewould the world be without color? Like a 1950s TV show, right? Color brings life to the world and helps separate much of what is seen into more easily identifiable parts. It brings joy to the eyes, especially in the winter months in the far north. But color is much more involved in the workings of nature.

The relationship between light and color is exquisite. One needs to look no farther than a rainstorm to watch the airborne droplets perform their mandatory function as those tiny prisms magically divide the white streams of light from the low-sitting sun into an arc or archway or two of color in the form of a rainbow, proving the mix of all the colors makes the white light of sunlight. That sun must be below 42 degrees above the horizon for the droplets to accomplish their amazing feat. Those rainbows are spectacular finales to dark and often thunderous events before them. While rare, there are rainbows early in the day when the sun is low and the rain is off to the west, usually oncoming, but not seen nearly as often.

When the sun is closer to the horizon, the path its light makes through the atmosphere is longer. Water vapor, dust, smoke and other particles in the atmosphere scatter the shorter wavelengths of light –– particularly the blues –– and make the visible light warmer with beautiful pinks, corals, oranges and reds.

“Color Vision Deficiency isn’t the end of the world. It’s just a different view of it.” –– Karen

Rae Levine

Some people do see colors differently. There are several different types of color blindness. It can be caused by a recessive genetic condition passed through a family on the male, X-chromosome. Men need only to inherit the gene from their mother’s X-chromosome, so they are more likely to have it. About 8% of men have a form of color blindness. Women must inherit the gene from both parents. Other color vision issues can come from glaucoma, macular degeneration, other diseases like diabetes, or from taking some medications. Special glasses or contacts can sometimes reduce the effects of a condition. Some may have difficulties distinguishing between red and green or between blue and yellow. Others may not see the colors as brightly or have difficulties with various shades of a specific color.

A totally different condition involving the brain can affect people’s experience with color too. Synesthesia is a rare condition involving a cross-over of the senses. For some, the mention or thought of a word connects a person with a particular color. Grapheme-color synesthesia is a condition connecting people with a direct tie between certain words and numbers and specific colors. While this condition is rare in adults, slightly more that 4% of children are thought to have it.

“Bubbles have more colors than a rainbow.” –– Tom Noddy

Surprising, spectacular colors can show up in very unusual places. How is it possible that a bubble can contain as many colors as a painter’s palette? Layers of soap sandwich around a layer of water to make up soap bubbles. As sunlight, with all its different wavelengths of colors, bounces around the layers, a property called “thin film interference” occurs. This is similar to the phenomenon where big waves bounce off a breakwater and rebound to meet incoming waves, creating even bigger waves. The wavelengths of light combine to create different colors seen coming from all different angles. The thickness of the water layer essentially determines the colors the bubble produced.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LIGHT AND COLOR IS EXQUISITE.

Because of the ephemeral survival of bubbles, they usually disappear quickly. But while they are shining in the sun, they can also act as a lens to produce images of the surrounding trees, people or clouds. It is like a double exposure with so much to contemplate before it pops. They are intoxicating and there is a sudden need to see more to further explore the colors and the reflections. The hope is there is something there to create the next bubble. After a while the kids will wonder why the adults are still playing in the soapy water.

“There are colors we can’t see, but they’re connected to the ones we can. There’s a connection between everything.“ –– Wayne

Shorter

Whatis it about that rainbow? With its neatly arranged alignment of seven colors, it provides a pleasing, and, at its peak, a brightly lit palette of color across the sky. When that rainbow is set against the dark clouds of a passing storm, it only stands out even more brilliantly, more determined to announce a joyous return to normalcy. The image creates a feeling not unlike the one felt on seeing a bright set of Christmas lights outside in the depth of a dark December evening.

The aurora borealis –– the northern lights –– offers a similar, but even better experience because of the uncertainty of its existence and presentation. At the heart of it is, of course, energy. From time to time, there are great eruptions of plasma, super-heated materials from the outermost part of the sun, its corona. These eruptions are usually connected solar activity of sunspots. The explosions fire out protons and electrons, subatomic particles, and a magnetic field. As this ejection reaches the earth’s atmosphere, the particles interact with its oxygen-producing red and green light and nitrogen atoms, creating blue and purple light. There is nothing in nature that comes even close to this light show as it creates a supernatural thrill, shaking viewers right to the bone.

When the aurora appears, its duration and activity in the sky are different ev- ery time and can be extremely difficult to predict, making it even more exciting and mysterious. It can faintly light up the sky with small low arcs of light or illuminate the night with huge gyrating curtains waving across the sky that some say will crackle and creak. Eventually, a lively aurora will recede into an overhead vortex, shooting down from directly overhead then fade away. It can last a few minutes or most of the night. Once a person has seen it, they are hooked and are willing to stay out for hours in the cold, glad they wore their long underwear, with the hope the aurora will fire up again.

“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”–– Wassily Kandinsky

Seeing all the bands of color of a rainbow neatly lined up against each other in a perfect spectrum opens a door to understanding the inner workings of physics and joy of thrilling sights all at the same time. On one hand, it seems so odd that if all the colors are added together, it creates white. Take all the colors away and it’s black. Just the opposite of crayons.

Color television changed the way people looked at entertainment and the world. It brought the color of nature, the color of the universe into the living rooms of millions of families and helped them see the world around them in a new way. It helped them see the wonder of life and the connection they had with that world when they felt that wonder, exhilaration, and joy erupt inside them.

Mm

Scot Stewart has lived in Marquette long enough to be considered a true Yooper even though he was born in Illinois. He is a teacher and loves to be outdoors photographing and enjoying nature.

Editor’s note: Check out the April 2023 edition of MM for Part Two

The Color of Nature: Animals, Plants, and Fungi.

Barley An ancient grain with a versatile playbook

By Katherine Larson

Stephen Maturin “had rarely felt a more general irritation nor less certainty of being able to control it, and he plied his spoon as though salvation lay at the bottom of the soupplate. In a way it did: the barley-broth, glutinous and lenitive, helped to bring his inner man more nearly in harmony with his outward appearance ...”

If Patrick O’Brian (here quoted from Desolation Island, the fifth of his magisterial 21-volume Aubrey/ Maturin series) is right, then surely barley soup is the proper subject of this month’s “At the Table” column. For now it is March, that irritating month when literature tells us to expect spring but Mother Nature reminds us who’s in charge. We are tired of being cooped up. The once-pristine snow looks tawdry, smeared with car exhaust and road salt. The soups and stews and braises that have carried us along for so many months are, frankly, getting to be fairly boring, but springtime fare is far away.

Surely we too need something glutinous and lenitive to help us find salvation at the bottom of our soupplates. Or at least lenitive, meaning soothing; glutinous is okay too, but it’s the soothing we want.

I had a stash of pearled barley left over from adventures a few months ago in first-century Palestinian eating, and in the face of some general frustrations it seemed time to give barley soup a try.

I started with what Guindon Farms sells as a “soup bone,” although candidly there is at least as much beef as bone on this cut. Taken from the beef shank, it yields meat that is both tender and deeply flavored, plus a broth that is almost velvety in texture. To achieve this, after seasoning the meat lightly with salt and pepper, add a little olive oil to a large pot and then, on high heat, sear the meat on all sides until it’s well browned. Set it aside on a plate, reduce the heat to medium-high, and add three large car- rots, a large onion, a couple of ribs of celery, all chopped into dice of a size suitable to fit into a soup spoon. Cook this, stirring, for about five minutes until lightly browned, and then set the vegetables aside as well.

Why? Why do we keep emptying the pot? Because the meat will have to braise low and slow for perhaps three hours, while if the vegetables braise that long they will end up as flavorless mush. We’ll do this initial cooking to give them color and flavor — and to pick up all the good brown bits left in the bottom of the pot when the meat was seared — then set them aside, to be added back in at the suitable time.

What is suitable to be cooked now is that hunk of beef bone, so back it goes into the pot along with about three quarts of stock. If, like many of us, you keep homemade chicken stock in your freezer, use that. If, more unusually, you keep homemade beef stock in your freezer, by all means use that. But if you are using a commercial stock, choose chicken: a good brand will be actually made from chicken, while most commercial “beef” broth gets what flavor it has from a yeasty simulacrum. Add a couple of bay leaves and some herbs — me, I like to put some dried thyme, dried parsley and whole peppercorns in an old tea ball to steep while the soup is cooking and to fish out with ease when it’s done. Bring it all to a simmer and let it simmer gently for about two hours.

Where’s the barley? That, like the vegetables, is added later, after those two hours. Ideally, we’d add a cup of pearled barley at the two-hour mark and the vegetables half an hour later, with everything done after three hours. If that’s too fussy for you, go ahead and add the vegetables with the barley, which will need a full hour to cook. This is also a good time to add garlic: at least four cloves, to my taste, but then we’re all garlic-heads in my family.

When everything is done, take out the tea ball and the bay leaves. Remove the soup bone, take off the meat (which should be falling off the bone) and cut it into spoon-friendly pieces, discarding fat and connective tissue; then return the meat to the pot.

At this point you can serve it. Or you can decant it into suitably-sized containers for freezing, saving out just what you want to eat today or tomorrow. What you don’t want to do is let it sit for an extended period in the fridge, dipping into it from day to day, because the barley would absorb too much liquid and the whole thing would take on an unpleasantly gloppy quality. As it is now, however, there is only one word: superb. Or maybe three words: glutinous, lenitive and superb. Ply your spoon briskly.

With that barley soup, how about some barley beer? Actually, beer made from barley goes back thousands of years; there are even linguists who argue that the word “beer” comes not from the Latin infinitive bibere (“to drink”) but rather from the Proto-Germanic word beuwoz — derived from beuwo — meaning “barley.”

Soup I know, but about beer I need- ed an expert, and I found one in Mike Miller of Escanaba, a devoted brewer from whose garage, in five-gallon increments, comes an astonishing variety of delicious beers. All from barley.

Miller calls barley the “soul of beer,” explaining that it is one of the most critical ingredients in the beer-making process, along with good water. Indeed, most beers are made from barley, the main exceptions being wheat (or “weiss”) and gluten-free beers. Any bottles and cans that might currently be in your refrigerator are probably barley-based.

That barley, of course, does not show up as kernels. First it is “malted,” a process involving wetting the grain, germinating it, drying it out and then kilning it. It is the kilning which, via variations in time and temperature, yields a huge variety of different malts — well over 400 available to brewers worldwide, Miller said, giving them “quite a broad palette to choose from when brewing.”

The base malt is the most import- ant part, comprising 90% or more of the malts involved. Beyond that, the brewer will pick a secondary malt which will influence the beer’s “character and color,” and perhaps also a finishing malt to help with such matters as “head retention and mouthfeel.” Miller added that the finishing malt can often be another grain, perhaps oats or wheat, but both the base and secondary malts are typically barley. An essential part of the brewer’s skill is in knowing what, and how much, to pick.

Miller himself can use that skill to imitate well-known commercial beers: Anheuser-Busch’s Budweiser uses flaked rice as a “secondary adjunct” for its beers, for example, while the giant Miller Brewing Company (now owned by Molson Coors) uses flaked corn instead. Mike Miller, as an artisan and beer enthusiast, takes note of the vigorous disagreements exhibited by aficionados of those two commercial behemoths, and chooses to follow his own personal path.

That path includes buying most of his malts from Briess, a small company in Chilton, Wisconsin, that supplies many Upper Peninsula breweries. “It’s close and they offer very good products,” Miller said. And, just as with grapes used for wine-making, barley used for beer-making is strongly affected by “terroir — the soil and the climate in which the grain is grown make quite a difference, and even vary from year to year as weather conditions change. All from that one little kernel.”

So what sort of beer would Miller make to serve with beef barley soup? He pondered. “I’d serve a nice hearty Munich-style beer, a Bock or an Oktoberfest or a Märzem.” Märzem seemed to me to be peculiarly suitable for this soup and this article, given that the word means “March beer” in German; it is a medium- to full-bodied lager with origins in Bavaria.

Why “March?” Because a Bavarian regulation dating back to 1539 forbade summertime brewing since the danger of explosions from overheating kettles was thought to pose too high a risk during the warmer months. March beer, then, was the last batch to be brewed before the process could start up again after the feast of St. Michael, September 29. And, since beer takes some time to ferment — Miller won’t drink his own beer before two or three months have passed — the March beer was what was available during Oktoberfest celebrations.

We, happily, do not have to work around sixteenth-century regulations, and so we can enjoy our own robust barley beers with this delectable soup.

And what to serve with it? Let’s stick with barley! Alex Palzewicz of Northwoods Test Kitchen at Barrel + Beam makes crackers from the brewery’s spent barley. Other uses for spent barley, Miller says, include pretzels, pasta, pizza dough, cookies, muffins, dog treats and food for both livestock and wild game.

In Patrick O’Brian’s seventeeth book of that same series, The Commodore, Jack Aubrey offers Stephen Maturin some beer. Maturin is grateful: “If you please. I particularly need a light, gentle sleep tonight; and beer, a respectable ship’s beer, is the most virtuous hypnotic known to man.” Filled with barley soup and barley beer, we too may enjoy a light, gentle sleep and a better tomorrow. MM

Katherine Larson is a writer, teacher and former lawyer. In her opinion, Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, which begins with Master and Commander, comprises some of the world’s finest literature plus a lot of good food writing.