Polo!

Men riding around on horses and hitting a ball.  Long breaks, where British people drink tea and make snarky remarks about everyone else.  Stamping down the divots in the turf.  That was polo for me before today’s Yale-Stanford match-up.

Stanford in red, checking out the arena before play

Stanford in red, checking out the arena before play

While Yale got stomped by the Stanford team, I feel the victory.  I learned that polo is not just a men’s sport, but according to the Yale women players in the stands with us, they don’t ever play co-ed.  “The men are more aggressive,” one said, also acknowledging my query about bruises.  Yes, the play involves pushing into your opponent, playing defense, as well as riding all out to hit a little ball with a mallet.

Yale was in blue

Yale was in blue

The object–to score a goal by knocking the ball into a marked area at each end of the arena, while riding full tilt.  It is definitely harder than it seems.  We saw our share of air-swings, balls once struck that sputtered and went nowhere, balls that ended up knocking around between horses’ legs.

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They bunch up during play

The rules have built-in forms of protection for players and horses, but these are so obscure that even the players don’t quite understand them.  Here’s one.  When a player hits the ball, that forms an ‘imaginary line.’  Yes, imaginary.  You, and the horse, have to envision this line that now you cannot cross.  If you do, foul!  The other team gets to take a foul shot.  This rule supposedly prevents collisions.

“But…,” I said, “but.”

“Yeah,” replied a player.

“It’s imaginary?  Then how…”

“Yeah.”

To make things more complicated, this imaginary line is redrawn every time the ball is hit, too.  Um, okay.

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The father of one of the Yale team, a polo player himself, explained.  “You just get it when you’re out there.  Some horses even get the line and know how to work it.”

I tested this idea out on the women players.  One’s eyes sparkled as she said,”Yes!  The good ones definitely know the line.”

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So you think everyone would want that horse, right?  Well forget it.  The Stanford team traveled across the country for 90 minutes of play (4 chukkers of 6 minutes each, with breaks), so they certainly don’t bring horses with them.  They ride the Yale horses.  And after 2 chukkers, the teams switch horses, to make sure there’s no favoritism.

The visiting players don’t know the horses, their quirks, other than what a handler will tell them before the match.  The players do have a few minutes to canter around the playing field, and that may help some.  There are four players per team, with 3 playing at a time, 3 chukkers each.  So the players rotate horses and teammates.  it’s a game that moves in all kinds of ways.

2015-11-15 12.32.16Oh, by the way, the rules are different when played indoors, as we saw today, versus playing outdoors.  Don’t ask.  These rule changes are too complicated for my simple-poloish mind.  They have something to do with changing which goal is whose after scoring, and, well, you probably have to go to Yale or Stanford to fully understand the rules.

Even so, it was just fun to watch the play, which became noisier as the competition heated up.  At first, the play was so quiet, we could hear the horses’ hooves when they shifted into a gallop.  Then the coaches started calling instructions, and whoops burst out with goals.  I think you’ll hear it all in this video:

Gentlemen to the end, the Yalies and Stanford victors shook hands after the final whistle.  It’s all good fun at the collegiate level.  The summer may call me to a professional competition, outside on a polo green.  I might even get out and do the divot stomp.

Cooling down after the match

Cooling down after the match

The closest I'll ever come to playing polo!

The closest I’ll ever come to playing polo!

Charlie’s World

Every walking tour adds something fresh to the now familiar streets of downtown New Haven and the old Yale campus.  Today, Charles Ives provides the layer added to the history cake.

Who knew that the experimental composer and dour organist was actually a party-hardy type at Yale?  Tracing his lineage to a New Haven founder William Ives, Charlie was a fourth generation Ives to attend the university, where he studied music.  His father, a Civil War band leader, pushed him away from his athletic prowess toward his other passion for music, after his son broke his nose playing football. Charlie was a star pitcher and probably would have relished playing at Yale’s indoor baseball field.  But he kept his word to his dad.

Jim Sinclair, right, and Kendall Crilly, Music Director, Center Church

Jim Sinclair, right, and Kendall Crilly, Music Director, Center Church

 

 

Perhaps you know Ives’s music well enough to remember the melancholy quality much of it has.  Jim Sinclair, our guide and Orchestra of New England conductor, attributed this wistful tonality to the death of his father, just weeks after Charlie arrived at Yale.

 

 

 

 

 

Wolf’s Head, Yale campus

Still, Charlie Ives was a popular, funny, frat boy, who joined a secret society, the Wolf’s Head, and generally made the most of Yale’s social life.  He played ragtime and musical stunts on the piano.  One I wish I could have heard was his 1897, two minute musical version of the Harvard-Yale football game, with Yale’s surprise victory.  He wrote songs for the frat shows at the Hyperion, with the om-pah-pah drinking song “Pass the Can Along” becoming a crowd favorite.

Knowing this biography helps me understand how pop culture music made its way into his symphonic works, along with the familiar patriotic anthems his father must have played that wind through pieces like “Fourth of July.”

Charles ives lived here for four years, in dumpy Old South Middle, now Connecticut Hall

Charles ives lived here for four years, in dumpy Old South Middle, now Connecticut Hall

 

As you might imagine, Charlie wasn’t the best academically.  Apparently, he was a “gentleman’s C,” meaning a D+ student.  Just not where he genius lay.

Sports and music were his gifts.  Ives was a professional organist by the age of 13, and when he arrived at Yale, he played for Center Church, founded along with New Haven in 1638.  He had more freedom to experiment there than he did as a music student at Yale.

We were treated to one of his student compositions on the Church’s organ, 2014-03-08 11.52.31two generations removed from the smaller and boxier one Ives played.  The three minute “C Minor Fugue” seemed like it could have been written 200 years earlier, following all the traditional compositional rules.  Nothing would indicate the kind of work he was to produce.

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Kendall Crilly plays C Minor Fugue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tonight’s concert will feature Ives’s more playful college work, as well as fragments that survive, including one inspired by sunrise at East Rock.

1872 engraving of East Rock in New Haven

 

For all his liveliness, Ives could be shy, too.  He ventured with his fiance Harmony Twitchell to meet the parents in Hartford.  Her father was friends with Mark Twain, as they had been innocents abroad together.  So the family went to see the venerable author, sitting with him on his porch.

Twain recognized how uncomfortable Ives was and did nothing to ease the awkwardness.  Instead he stared.  Which only made things worse for Ives.  Eventually, Twain reportedly said, “The fore’s okay.  Let’s spin him around, and see the aft.”

Harmony and Charles Ives

 

The young couple transcended that memorable moment and grew old together.

 

 

 

 

Stories like this one turn the icon into a man.  Jim concluded the tour by commenting on the “humanity that permeates the music” of Ives.  With new insights on what can be difficult music, I hope to listen with new ears.

Another discovery:

Cornelius Vanderbilt built this dorm with its luxuriant gates for his sons' comfort while attending Yale.  Cole Porter lived here later.  This dorm is adjacent to the much more modest housing Ives inhabited.

Cornelius Vanderbilt built this dorm with its luxuriant gates for his sons’ comfort while attending Yale. Cole Porter lived here later. This dorm is adjacent to the much more modest housing Ives inhabited.

Looking in corners and out of the way places

In an interesting juxtaposition, I explored unexpected corners and spaces today.

Starting on the Hartford Belle, a boat sailing 2013-10-05 11.22.14the Connecticut River near Hartford, surprises were there in this pretty unsurprising city.  Who would expect this Russian onion dome on the Colt’s Firearm Factory?

I love origin stories and learned that the name Connecticut is a Dutch-ified version of an Indian word that means “long tidal river.”  Those Dutch!  They came as early as 1614 to explore the 410 mile long river, which runs all the way up to the Canadian border.  The river has a two-foot tidal variation each day, even as far up river as Hartford, 40 miles from Long Island Sound.

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The river is the first of the “Blue Way” program for cleaning up polluted, historic rivers.  Now little commercial traffic travels up the river.   Still, Hartford is prettier from the river than on site.

 

 

The afternoon saw me off the boat and on foot, back in New Haven.  This tour explored the corners of buildings on the Yale campus.  We were snooping out carved spouts and grotesques on “gargoyle-infested buildings.”  In contrast to the guide of the Woolworth Building, this author-architect Mathew Duman defines a gargoyle as a figure-caricature that also works as a channel for rain water.  Grotesques can be inside or on the exterior of a building, but are purely decorative.  No funnels there.  We can watch the architectural historians battle it out, or start our exploration.

2013-10-05 16.49.43What’s fun about the gargoyles around Yale is that they play off of student life, as well as showing dignitaries from its past.  The sense of fun, irony, and satire are consistently present, on all types of buildings.

Here’s a carving from the law school  Can you make out the charismatic teacher and his sleeping students?

 

And Calhoun Hall is named for a man who is shown as a student sleeping over his studies, not as a great benefactor.2013-10-05 15.41.06  Love the monkey grotesque, who seems to single-handedly hold up the building.

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Hilariously, this grotesque with the wooden stone on Bingham refers to a prize awarded to the Yale student who eats the most.

And as a critique on gluttony, two grotesques on Davenport show the roasted fowl and Faust (get the sound similarity?).  They satirize the gluttony of food (fowl) and gluttony of power (Faust).

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The bulldog Handsome Dan is the campus mascot, and bulldogs are all over the place on building facades.  I particularly like the bulldog nerd.

Also a “yale” is a fantastical figure that can resemble a goat, a unicorn, or a hybrid with a human.  It can be embellished with an elephant tail, polka dots, or horns that go in separate directions.  Lots of latitude in portraying a yale around campus.  We saw a baby yale, but don’t get too close!  They’re supposed to be vicious.  Here’s a pair of yales in the bright light of the old art building.

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Don’t look so scary, eh?

Check out more of my favorites in the slide show below.  Don’t miss the screenwriter and the painter (although he is missing his brush)…

What was so great about the tour, too, was being able to go into the locked courtyard of a resident hall.  We got a bell concert, commemorating the new president induction at Yale today, while standing in the Brother’s Immunity (a literary society) courtyard of Branford College.

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I definitely felt like I was in a rarefied place, but really, this is a dorm.  Yes, really.

You can hear some of the bell tower concert in this video of the main courtyard at Branford.

 

 

Here’s some more images for you:

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