The evening light was a sickly sepia. The haze from the wildfires gave the clapboard houses on the steep hillside above one of Ithaca’s many gorges a simultaneously antique and apocalyptic cast. Down below in the valley extending south from Cayuga Lake, the town seemed two-dimensional—a flat, fugitive memory soon to fade completely away.
The tonality of the light may have suggested the past, but everyone knew that it was the future that was rolling in across the Allegheny plateau, not on little cat feet, but scorched hooves.
Nearing the top of the hill, we arrived at the Eddy Gate at the southeast corner of the Cornell University campus. Built in the last years of the 19th century, the handsome monument of brick and stone is spanned by a wrought-iron arch with a medallion of Ezra Cornell at its center. Peering through the smog as if puzzled by the strange smog, Ezra silently muttered the wise words inscribed on the gate:
“So enter that thou mayest become more learned; more thoughtful; so depart that daily thou mayest become more useful to thy country and to mankind.” This motto is said to be derived from a similar phrase found on a gate at the University of Padua, which was established in the 13th century. By drawing on these words of wisdom, Cornell sought to establish its own intellectual lineage, especially as it had been founded only in 1865, just a couple of weeks after the end of the Civil War.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, a motion picture industry flourished in the area, and a scene from “If Women Only Knew” of 1920 by Cayuga Pictures shows the gate and its surroundings in their former glory.
In the movie, smartly clad students stream through the portal into the pleasant street in the section of Ithaca known as Collegetown. Looking at the footage now, one could almost imagine that the young men of yore are fleeing the smokey menace.
The Eddy Gate is now set in rutted asphalt. The view towards the gorge when looking in from the scrappy corner of Collegtown at present ends in a chain-link fence on the edge of the Cascadilla Gorge.
The gate was restored in 2018, but its reclaimed elegance only highlights the blight that now surrounds it.
We passed through this entrance to campus. Our clothes were soaked with sweat. We could taste the smoke at the back of our throats. On this of campus along the shoulder of the gorge is university’s first completed building, Cascadilla Hall, a student dormitory. This time of year, a dumpster just outside the residence is full garbage: furniture, poster, plates, beer bottles, minifridges.
Just uphill from Cascadilla Hall is the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. Completed in 1989, it was designed by the famous—to some, infamous—British architect, Sir James Stirling. The complex is a hulking modernist riff on an Italian renaissance church: unornamented pediment; a bell-less belltower; a baptistry-like bus-stop whose only function is one of coy reference.
The building has not aged well over the last three decades and some. Many of gray-and-white marble panels that cover the façade are stained with algae and mildew. A terrace runs length of the building and would give onto the gorge if the building were closer to this natural wonder. Cornell’s architectural approach is militantly opposed to responding to, never mind communing with, the canyons that border the central campus. The terrace is covered with the same marble squares and for years have shifted dangerously under the feet of visitors entering the building. A recent adhesive job seems to have stabilized this hazard—at least for now. The green paint of the metal balustrade—a winking reference to the green stone of the Siena Cathedral—is peeling, rust taking its place.
We lingered in the smoke-bleached shadows of the maples along the gorge, then made our way up the steps to the performing arts center. The weird light conjured one of those 1920s Ithaca screen comedies like the one shot just below at the gate. It was as if the world had become an old movie, not seen on the flat screen—a version of real life quite in three dimensions.
We went inside the building to a concert of late 18th and early 19th-century music played on old keyboards: an American copy of a Viennese piano from 1800 and two original instruments—one built in Vienna in 1835, and another Parisian model made in 1868, coincidentally the same year that students first arrived at Cornell.
The performing arts center—as befits the name of these one-stop arts emporia—houses different spaces for theatre, dance, and other offerings, though cuts in the university budget during the Great Recession reduced the program significantly.
Stirling lavished much attention on the proscenium theatre of 450 seats. The space has a flattened horseshoe shape. Its light fixtures evoke vintage lamps that could almost have candles behind the shades. The oak-veneered paneling and brass handrails strike a classy note, as do the balconies divided into what could be boxes in a European opera house. The pastel pinks, greens and purples of the color scheme strive for a louche refinement.
The concert comes in the midst of a festival that has brought musicians from around the world to perform on instruments in the Cornell collection. The university’s rich and diverse holdings span the piano’s three-hundred year history.
Wednesday evening’s concert was a celebration of the renown fortepianist Malcolm Bilson, who taught and Cornell for several decades and is soon to celebrate his 90th birthday. Several of his students, now distinguished musicians in their own right, played music suited to the instruments: Mozart and C. P. E. Bach on the Viennese-style piano from 1800; Debussy on a Parisian grand from 1868; Schubert on the 1835 antique.
Set on the big black stage, the old pianos with their warmly variegated veneers of rosewood and maple looked lonely in the surrounding post-modern opulence. They seemed and sounded far away, marooned in an alien environment. Stirling’s evocations of 19th-century grandeur out in the auditorium did not pull the pianos towards the listeners. Maybe it was the smoke outside that had affected my vision and hearing. Or maybe it was that fact that the repertoire was conceived for the salon, the intimate bourgeois drawing room or the somewhat grander aristocratic one, not the concert hall.
Bilson was last on the program, though I’d heard that he’d thought about withdrawing since he was having issue with his hands. But he did play—the first three of Schubert’s Moments musicaux, just after one of his students had done the final three numbers of this same, cherished six-piece collection.
Bilson drew us in. The old piano came close. The world vanished, the theater with it. Old familiar themes were greeted with warmth and wit, melancholy and hope. Bilson holds an uncanny sensitivity to the personalities of these melodies, an ever-renewable appreciation of the colors of the harmonies, magically conjured by his 89-year-old hands from this wing-shaped box of wood and wire.
Outside, night had fallen. The smoke lingered, caught the streetlights. Bilson’s Schubert followed us down the hill.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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