Marion Scott, our map and guide

Marion Scott entered the 20th century with her ears tuned to the future, writes Pamela Blevins. As a violinist, she often programmed new music in her recitals. In 1908, she formed her own string quartet to champion contemporary British music, some so new that the ink was barely dry on the manuscript page. As a regular contributor to The Music Student from about 1911 to 1918, she enlightened readers about the latest chamber music and wrote extensively about the work of contemporary women composers and performers.

As the 20th century progressed and music moved in different directions, Marion moved with it, always staying open to new music that often stirred controversy and provoked outrage among critics and the concert-going public. Never one to dismiss a work because it strayed from accepted norms, she embraced the “radical” music of her day and wrote about it with an insight and clarity that opened the minds of her readers. She made the seemingly inaccessible, accessible. As a critic/commentator for the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Telegraph, The Observer, The Listener, the Radio Times and other publications, she introduced new works by Bartok, Webern, Tippett, Luytens, Dallapiccola, Britten, Messiaen, and many others to her readers.

One of Scott’s guiding principles in music rested in her belief that “Design in music is desirable, if that music is to be intelligible. Without it, great music is impossible. For design is not a machine-made pattern. It is the projection into the human consciousness of a divine and beautiful order. …Just as the laws behind natural phenomena do not die, so the realities behind music continue to exist whatever the changing phases of concrete music. Design is one of the hardest obligations for a composer to fulfill.” She found that design even in the most abstract music.

On an “arctic” February night in 1929, Marion attended the British premiere of Bartok’s third and fourth quartets performed by the Hungarian String Quartet. She regarded Bartok as “a composer who is a focal point in the work of his generation” and described his Third and Fourth String Quartets as “testaments in music’s new language”.

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, she observed: “On the whole the third quartet is the more approachable of the pair, even though ordinary listeners will feel in either that they enter upon the unknown region. ‘No map there, no guide,’ as Walt Whitman would have said. Yet though old maps are of little use, Bartok’s music gives evidence of powerful design throughout. It has the same kind of strength and sparseness met with in modern architecture.” In both quartets, Scott found “melodic material…in a minority” and that Bartok seldom used “more than the minimum necessary for thematic differentiation. …Of beauty in the sensuous style there is next to none”. Bartok “constantly employs harmonies drawn from the upper series of the harmonic overtones, and matches them by sound effects drawn from the non-normal kinds of string tone”.

But Marion found both quartets full of “harmonic character, exhilarating rhythm, patterned ideas, and swift logic. … Even on a first hearing it is possible to feel the strength which has bound all these elements of sound and modern mentality into firmly consistent works. Bartok’s style may be – and is – stark, but it is never dark, and never shallow. He has the dramatist’s, not the film producer’s gift.” She came to regard Bartok as “one of the greatest, and most dynamic musicians of modern times”.

She faced the challenge of Webern’s String Trio, op. 21 with an equally open mind. “Webern’s thin sounds, skewed phrases, and silences are about as much like ordinary string music as Shakespeare’s ghosts that did ‘squeak and gibber’ were like human beings. Even the programme note described the two short movements as ‘wraiths’. But this must be said: If they are wraiths, they are so in their own right; they are not phantoms of older music. Maybe that is because they have never lived. Will they later? – that is what matters. Is this exposition of Schoenberg’s theories by Webern the foreshadowing of a new era in music? Remembering that steam from a kettle and the twitching of a frog’s leg are now historic as first hints of steam power and electricity, must we regard Webern’s music as a portent of things to come? Time alone will show.” (No date.)

In 1929 Marion became the first person in England – as far as I know – to produce an in-depth study of Paul Hindemith and presented her findings before the Royal Musical Association. (Donald Tovey wrote his essay in 1936.) I think it is fair to say that some who attended her lecture were wary of Hindemith’s new music. After all he was regarded then as the enfant terrible of Europe, a composer who embraced atonality and whose music was too cerebral and abstract for some. W.W. Cobbett who attended the lecture admitted his "ignorance” of Hindemith and acknowledged that after Scott’s talk, he left “knowing” on the subject.

Scott had researched Hindemith’s life and studied his music, an odd choice for a lecture, it might seem, coming from a woman in her fifties who was standing on the threshold of becoming an internationally acclaimed authority on Haydn. Marion had read the entire scores of three of Hindemith’s early atonal operas with librettos so daring that she doubted they would make it past the English censor (one wonders how she got the scores into England). Marion observed that “Paul Hindemith is an apostle of Atonality and Linear Counterpoint. But he is also a real person in music -- a genuine composer who gives off music as a piece of radium throws off energy. That is what makes him interesting, and his music worthy of study.”

In drawing links between the musical designs of Bach and Hindemith, Scott observed that “composers of today, with Hindemith in the vanguard, have revived the structural designs of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. ...It may be said without irreverence that Hindemith’s masterful and quite terrible music for the mob in his opera Cardillac would have been impossible if he had never known Bach’s supreme treatment of the crowd in the St. Matthew Passion.” She held Cardillac in very high regard.

“Hindemith’s concentration and economy function at their highest power throughout the opera. …The contrapuntal parts, tingling, darting with vitality, are complex in appearance, clear in reality. Two of the most tremendous effects in the music are made by means so simple that one almost gasps on realizing how violently – on account of the context – one reacts to them. The first is the dead silence when Cardillac murders the Cavalier; the other is the long soft common chord of E flat on which the opera ends. For two hours Hindemith has held one…in a clenched fist, listening to his atonal, strangely staccato style. Then at last comes this diatonic, legato chord. The fist opens, one drops out, exhausted and amazed.”

Scott’s understanding and appreciation of Hindemith are clear yet she felt something was missing: “[Hindemith] is too radically a musician to evade for ever the great emotions that go with genius. If they thaw the little piece of ice that lies in his artist’s heart, the effect will be amazing.”

After World War II, Marion welcomed the opportunity to review concerts of contemporary music and found London “as music minded as ever, and infinitely more so than it was ten years ago”. She covered the “outstanding” Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in July 1946 that united countries so recently at war.

On Luigi Dallapiccola’s Songs from Captivity for chorus, percussion, harps and two pianos: “Only the last two movements were given at this concert [Boethius’ Invocation and Savonarola’s Farewell -- the first movement is Mary Stuart’s Prayer]. Technically they are distinguished by fine craftsmanship: and though not atonal they are fundamentally modern in their harmonic texture. But what winged the music straight into the sympathies of the hearers was its intensity of feeling. ‘These are they which came out of great tribulation’ one said to oneself.”

On Olivier Messiaen: “…another work was performed which also came out of captivity, but in this case it took the form of a mystical, apocalyptic quartet for violin, cello, clarinet and piano…called Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps. Here was a man to whom in captivity had come the vision of that transcendental freedom where Time is nothing and Eternity everything. His eight movements were each touched with a strange, unworldly quality; some were exceedingly lovely, and the scoring had often an almost ethereal frugality which yet was never untender, except where the composer intended fierce effects, as in the ‘Danse de la fureur’, which was plangently aggressive.”

“It was,” she wrote “a strange experience to come away from these concerts that had brought together so many nations, and then to turn up a little alley between shells of buildings and come suddenly upon a view of one of our own quiet griefs – a great devastated area…of open ruins…[where] now grew pink willow herb, wild fern and golden yellow weeds, in a great silence beneath a half moon…”.

For more on the music and life of Marion Scott, see Pamela Blevins' Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott, available from your favourite bookseller.

Marion Scott on British Music

Some reviewers of Pamela Blevins' otherwise acclaimed Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty have questioned the dual biography concept. One (male) critic seemed to wonder why Blevins was wasting so much space on a figure of 'modest interest' like Marion Scott. Another (female) wanted to know more about this remarkable woman and her numerous achievements. So for those in the latter camp, here is a piece on Marion Scott as critic and champion of British music.

Soon after Marion Scott embarked on her new career as the London music critic for the Christian Science Monitor, she began introducing readers throughout the world to British composers and performers in a way that no newspaper critic had done before. During her tenure from 1919 to 1933, the names Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Stanford (her teacher), Holst, Ireland, Delius, Smyth and the younger generation including Finzi, Howells, Gurney, Bliss, Bax, Gibbs and many others appeared with different degrees of frequency and intensity.

In addition to writing reviews, Marion also wrote numerous feature articles and in-depth profiles of musicians. The first among them was a three-part series on the musical and poetic wells-springs of Gloucestershire (July to August 1919), the home turf of her friends Ivor Gurney, Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams. Her references to Gurney in this series were not the first time his name had appeared on the pages of the Monitor. In 1918, through her connections with the newspaper, she had arranged for the publication of excerpts from two of Gurney’s poems from his first collection, Severn and Somme - “Firelight” on 22 May and “Song at Morning” on 28 May.

Although Marion used her position to advance the careers of her friends (particularly Howells) and associates, she was a fair and discerning critic who possessed the remarkable ability to get right to the core of a composition that she was hearing for the first time often without benefit of a score to follow.

After attending the premiere of the Elgar Cello Concerto, she observed that the work was too big “to analyze or appraise quickly. The most that can be done after a single hearing is to record the salient impressions received.” Scott found Elgar’s conception of concerto form “totally different to that of the majority of composers. With him a concerto is not a public oration, nor a pyrotechnic display, but a psychological poem. He feels the solo instrument to be as much a person as Browning felt his characters to be real in the ‘Dramatic Romances and Lyrics’, and exactly as the characters speak for themselves – unfolding their ideas through his poems – so does the concerto deal with a subjective drama, the solo instrument expressing a sensitive, intimate train of thoughts in the language of music,” she wrote. “This necessitates a wholly different attitude in soloist, orchestra, and audience from that usually taken toward a concerto, and while Mr. [Felix] Salmond understood and acted upon it perfectly, one had a sense that the London Symphony Orchestra [conducted by Elgar] only partially apprehended their role in this work, fine as they are and well though they played”. (For the complete review published on 13 December 1919 look here).

Marion Scott was undoubtedly the first person to introduce her readers outside Britain to a young Gerald Finzi when she reviewed his Violin Concerto in May 1927. She and Finzi would eventually work together (not necessarily in harmony) to preserve Ivor Gurney’s musical and poetic legacies. Marion had attended the 4 May premiere of the second and third movements of concerto in a performance by violinist Sybil Eaton with Malcolm Sargent conducting the British Women’s Symphony Orchestra.

“Of late years composers have been chary in writing for solo violin,” she observed. “So, when a new violin concerto is announced…the mere choice of medium seems to promise independence of thought….Independence is certainly a quality of the violin concerto by Gerald Finzi. Finzi is among the younger men in British music. His work is uncompromisingly honest, yet restrained, disdainful of advertisement, unafraid of solitude,” she continued. Noting that the concerto was in three movements, she felt it unfortunate that the complete work was not presented as the opening “must surely be heard to give full meaning to the second movement…in the manner of an introit with its soaring phrases of melody for the solo violin against the liturgical counterparts of the orchestra…But even starting from zero the introit established itself as an individual and often really beautiful movement…Its youth, vitality and the natural independence of the moving parts produced harmonic clashes as crude, clear and attractive as blades of fresh spring grass.”

Marion featured Gurney occasionally in Monitor reviews but never wrote a long profile on him as she did for Howells, Thomas Dunhill, Vaughan Williams and others. She did not let friendship cloud her opinion. If she believed a work was flawed she said so. Upon hearing the first performance of Gurney’s War Elegy in 1921, she wrote: “…a war elegy by Ivor Gurney is comparatively short but produces an impression of great aims. The themes are heartfelt and sincere, their treatment is grave and sensitive, and the opening and closing sections of the work are eloquent. Toward the middle, the music loses its grip and wanders around rather than holds the direct onward flow. It will probably gain by being rewritten.”

She found much to praise in Gurney’s Ludlow and Teme in a review published on 25 December 1920. “There is a fine, clear, out-of-doors ring about the setting of ‘When smoke stood up from Ludlow’, she wrote, ‘and one could well imagine the tune upon the lips of any ‘young yeoman’ as he ‘strode beside his team’; while the second song, ‘Far in a western brookland,’ is a pure efflorescence in music of that poetry of the ‘windless night time’ alluded to by Housman, and expressed here by the composer with tender truth and beauty of melody.’ ‘The lads in their hundreds’ and ‘On the idle hill of summer’ are equally rich in imaginative qualities: also virile in style (as the words demand), while ‘When I was one and twenty’ is a good little thing in the folk style as one could wish to meet anywhere. The unexpected and fascinating run of the tune delighted the audience. ‘The Lent Lily,’ with its beautiful melismatic passages, brought the cycle to a close, and the composer to the platform.”

From an early age Marion Scott willingly entered into the spirit of contemporary music. She never shied away from writing about “radical” composers nor did she dismiss new trends. She believed that “time alone” would render the final judgment but she always stood ready to enlighten doubters. In 1929, she wrote a comprehensive study of the young Paul Hindemith, probably the first of such depth to appear in Britain. Later she would write insightfully about the music of Webern, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Tippett and many other “new” voices.

In a future post, Pamela Blevins will share some of Scott’s comments on the music of composers who were quite different from Elgar, Finzi and Gurney, including one Scott described as a “genuine composer who gives off music as a piece of radium throws off energy”.

Discovering Ivor

When I first became aware of Ivor Gurney in 1983, I never thought that one day I would write his biography. At the time I was only interested in him because he had been part of Gerald Finzi’s life. In 1982 I had founded the Finzi Society of America to promote wider interest in Finzi’s music and life there. The following year I wrote a brief article about Gurney and Finzi for my newsletter. I didn’t think much more about Gurney after that. To me he was little more than a footnote and Marion Scott was like a leaf on the wind, seen one minute then blown away and forgotten!

In 1984 I attended the Summer Weekend of English Music, a Finzi event held at Oxford, where I met Joy Finzi for the first time. Over dinner one night, my life was about to change in ways I could not imagine. Joy had read my article and started talking about Gurney and his family without any prompting from me. She told me about the work she and Gerald had done to preserve Gurney’s legacy and a little about some of the people involved. I don’t remember the details because they faded into the background when she launched into a description of the tailor’s shop run by Gurney’s brother Ronald in Gloucester. With her artist’s eye for detail and her poet’s sensibility for atmosphere, she described how the opening and closing of the door sent a breeze into the shop’s dark interior that lifted the corners of bolts of cloth giving them the illusion of ‘bats fluttering about’. It was an image I would never forget.

After our first meeting, Joy and I corresponded regularly and I would see her when I visited England. Inevitably she would turn to Gurney in her letters and in conversation. We never discussed Finzi. Was I being directed to look more deeply at Gurney, I began to wonder?

I decided that perhaps there was more to him than I realised so I re-read Michael Hurd’s biography, bought P.J. Kavanagh’s excellent edition of Gurney’s poetry, found a few recordings (LPs in those days) and enjoyed getting to know Gurney better.

When I was in England in 1988, Joy insisted on taking me on her own tour of ‘Gurney Country’. We set off on a dismal wet and windy September morning, coincidently the thirty-second anniversary of Gerald Finzi's death. As we headed west the rain stopped, leaving the landscape cloaked in a lingering white mist. I could see only hints of what lay in the shrouded distances. When we neared Gloucestershire, the sun broke through almost as if on cue. With Joy as my guide, I saw for the first time Ivor Gurney's Gloucestershire: the Cotswolds, Birdlip Hill, the city of Gloucester with its cathedral so central to Gurney's early life, and finally at the end of the day, the Parish Church of St. Matthew at Twigworth where Joy, tired by now, sent me off alone in search of Gurney's grave in the overgrown cemetery. I remember well the abandonment and neglect that then pervaded the church building, bordering on eerie with its cold stone façade and unkempt grounds. I felt unsettled. It was not a place of comfort.

Outside the church grounds I saw sheep grazing in a field and beyond that the pale blue line of the Cotswolds. Then I turned and saw May Hill with its distinctive cap of trees and I felt that Gurney was at least lying between the hills he loved. The grave itself was overgrown with grass and weeds, the marker pitted and covered with lichen. It was not what Marion Scott had in mind when she wrote to Gerald Finzi that ‘there is something tranquillising now in the thought of him lying at peace in Twigworth Churchyard’ in ‘an oak coffin lined with elm and cushioned with white satin’, after a burial that ‘befitted a poet’.

Joy Finzi's tour had come to a bittersweet climax. When we reached the motorway, rainbows began arching over the landscape. Sometimes we seemed to drive into them. They were all around us. Marion Scott, a metaphysician, would have interpreted them as a ‘sign’. Maybe they were, I don’t know, but by the time we returned to Joy’s home, I knew that Ivor Gurney was going to be in my life for a long time. - Pamela Blevins

Pamela Blevins' dual biography of Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott is available now from all good booksellers - you can read an extract here. For more information about Gerald Finzi, read Diana McVeagh's acclaimed biography and visit this website. The Clock of the Years, compiled and edited by Rolf Jordan, is an anthology of writings by and about Gerald and Joy Finzi.

Meet the Princes

Pamela Blevins, author of the forthcoming Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty, looks at some of Marion Scott’s ancestors – including the “family witch”:

One of the joys of writing a biography is the adventure of playing detective – stumbling on information, following leads that either fizzle or turn to gold, finding clues in odd places and eventually solving mysteries about your subject’s life. Most of Marion Scott’s life was a mystery except the limited public one: “friend and mentor” of Ivor Gurney, biographer of Beethoven, acclaimed authority on Haydn, founder of the Society of Women Musicians, and the troublesome and stubborn “mulish old maid” and “fragile fool” of Gerald Finzi’s too-often quoted experience.

Scott presented quite a challenge until I learned that her ancestors were from Salem, Massachusetts. I’m originally from Massachusetts and Salem was one of those historic places we visited on school trips when I was a child – seafaring community, famous for the witch hunts of 1692, inspiration for the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I soon discovered the roles that Marion Scott’s maternal ancestors - the Prince family - had played in that history.

The first members of Marion’s family journeyed to America from England in the 1620s. They settled in Salem, then called Naumkeag, a small coastal community of crude, one-room, thatched dwellings that stood alongside the bark wigwams and log dugouts of the Indians. Two Prince brothers had started life in the New World as indentured servants but gained their freedom and went on to become businessmen and landowners.

Marion’s great great grandfather Henry Prince I (1764-1846) was a bold, ambitious man who rose from working in a distillery at 15 to becoming a ship owner and sea captain. He sailed from Salem to Sumatra, explored the Indian Ocean, opened trade routes to the Philippines and Zanzibar, and made huge profits in cinnamon, coffee, pepper, hemp, sugar and slaves. He built the West India Goods Store, which is today an historic site under the jurisdiction of the U.S. National Park Service.

Henry’s son Henry II (1787-1854) followed reluctantly in his father’s sea boots, voyaging to South America and the ports of Europe and Russia. He fought in the War of 1812, was a hero in a battle with a British ship (we won’t say what happened to that British ship), eventually settled on a career in the U.S. Revenue Service (now the Coast Guard), but met an inglorious end when he was dismissed for “intemperance”.

Henry’s son George, Marion’s grandfather, spent most of his life in St. Petersburg, where he went at the age of 16 to work in the family mercantile business, William Ropes & Co. By the time he was 21, he and his cousin were managing a thriving commercial fleet of nine American supercargo ships that criss-crossed the seas from Russia to India and from China to New England, the southern ports of the United States and the West Indies with cargoes as diverse as feathers and Franklin stoves. George stayed in Russia, where he and his English wife reared their children, including Marion’s mother.

And I must not forget the family witch. Sarah Osborne, a distant aunt through marriage, was the first woman arrested in the Salem witch hunts of 1692. “An agent of the devil”, she was tried (in a tavern), convicted and sent to a Boston jail where she died chained to an oak post before she could be hanged. She was arrested by the great great grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I doubt that Marion knew about this chapter in her family history.

Marion was very fortunate in her parents. Sydney, a solicitor and gifted musician (he worked with Walter Bache to gain wider recognition for Liszt), and Annie Prince Scott, were progressive thinkers and activists (suffrage, temperance, rights for servants) who nurtured their three daughters in a can-do/nothing-is-impossible atmosphere charged with liberal doses of freedom of thought, expression, attitude and behavior. They instilled in them the belief that they were capable of being and of doing whatever they chose in life.

The more I learned about Marion Scott’s background and about Marion herself, the more I came to recognize how significant a role her heritage played in shaping her character, attitudes and values. I also understood why she dared to go where no one had been before, why she had no fear of failure, why she was such a skilled and visionary leader and why others were so willing to follow her. It was in her blood.

Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty will be published by the Boydell Press in November.

Finding Annie Drummond

Ivor Gurney might finally be receiving the recognition he deserves: Chosen Press’ Philip Lancaster is working on a complete edition of his poems with Tim Kendall; BBC Radio 3 will feature his music in their Composer of the Week series next year; and in November Pamela Blevins publishes a dual biography of the poet-composer and Marion Scott, Gurney’s greatest advocate and among the most influential and respected women of he generation. Here Pamela writes about tracing Gurney's lost love, Annie Drummond:

When I began writing about Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott, I had no idea that parts of their stories had roots in my native Massachusetts. Ivor’s lost love Annie Drummond had emigrated there in 1921 and Marion was descended from the earliest settlers in Salem, a place best known to the world for the witch hunts and trials of 1692. I’d like to say that my dogged research led me to this information but the truth is I stumbled on it more by accident than design.

The first inkling of these connections came in 1989 when I was working in the Gurney Archive in Gloucester. I came across a brief note from Drummond’s mother to Marion informing her Annie had emigrated to the United States, where she married and was living in South Natick, Massachusetts, practically in my backyard.

Once I returned home I was able to trace Annie very easily even though I only had two pieces of information: her married name and an address. All I had to do was visit the Office of Vital Statistics in Boston. Even in those days before computers, Massachusetts had a marvellous system of public records that was incredibly easy to use and efficient. Within 15 minutes I had found details of Annie’s birth, marriage and death.

At the time of her death in 1959, Annie and her husband, James McKay, were living in Wellesley, a suburb west of Boston. That information led me to Annie’s friends and neighbours and through them I was able to locate her daughter Peggy Ann in California. Soon Peggy Ann and I had the first of many conversations. She had known nothing of her mother’s relationship with Ivor Gurney but she had seen his name and wondered who he was. I had the answer.

After Annie’s death, she had found an old leather suitcase of her mother’s “most treasured possessions” hidden away in a cupboard. Among the random memories of a lifetime, Peggy Ann found two items that puzzled her: a copy of Poems of To-Day inscribed to Annie by Ivor and a copy of the score of his Western Playland, a work he had dedicated to Annie although that was not clear from the dedication which reads “To Hawthornden”, one of Gurney’s names for her. Gurney had met Annie in 1917 when he was a patient at the Edinburgh War Hospital. He fell in love with her and she seemed to share his feelings but something went wrong and the relationship failed. But Gurney never forgot Annie and continued to write poems dedicated to her along with the Western Playland. Even during his asylum years he tried to contact her; thus the letter from Annie’s mother.

Peggy Ann shared the story of her mother’s life with me and kindly sent me copies of photographs and documents relating to her mother’s past. Sadly, Annie Drummond McKay’s life was marked by tragedy and her last years bore a resemblance to Ivor Gurney’s. Shortly after her arrival in Massachusetts nearly all of her belongings were destroyed in a fire. She managed to save the book Gurney had given her along with her nursing certificates. Annie and her husband married in 1922 and had a son John in 1924. He was playing in the front garden of their home when a run-away truck crashed into the McKay’s property killing their only child. Peggy Ann was born in the early 1930s when her parents were both in their 40s.

Friends remembered Annie as a talented, “lovely-looking woman” whose artistic nature found expression in the beautiful gardens she and her husband created around their home. Both were avid birdwatchers. Her husband was the head carpenter at Wellesley College and Annie was active in her adopted community, enjoying memberships in various organisations and winning local fame for her special cakes and desserts. But then something started to go wrong. By the early 1950s, friends began to notice a dramatic change in Annie. She was becoming increasingly withdrawn and seemed to be “losing touch with reality”. The last eight years of her life were agonising for her family and friends as she slowly slipped into a world of her own. By 1958, she had taken to wandering from her home. Her condition deteriorated and her family reluctantly had her hospitalized in a facility for the mentally ill where she died on 21 May 1959.

The story of Marion Scott’s American heritage reads like a page in a history book but I will save it for another time. Let’s just say it involves wigwams, the family witch, slave trading, cinnamon, hemp, Russia, and Whistler, the artist.