News

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NCMF cycling jerseys are for sale in-store at Riverside Cycle with all proceeds going to the festival. Thank you, Riverside owner Tom Reinke! You can follow David live along the route and watch his pin inching along.

Today was really hard. Not only was it long – 95 miles – but most of it on wet gravel the texture of quicksand: brutal. We waited to depart at 10 am since it was still pissing rain; we didn’t arrive until 8 at night. You do the math.

But first, some business. On Wednesday, 27 May, we’ll roll into town into Market Square at Sea Level Oyster Bar (https://sealevelnewburyport.com) at 3:00 and it would be lovely to if as many of you as possible could meet us to celebrate the ride. The Mayor is coming along with many NCMF friends.

We roll out that morning at 9:30 am from the Aloft Hotel, 130 Worcester Road, Framingham, MA, 01702. Anyone who would like to join us for the ride or meet us along the route (using the live tracking  https://www.followmychallenge.com/live/david-yang-2026/?iframe  ) is welcome. For sure, we’ll be on the slower side and I’m guessing maybe about 14 miles per hour. This will be a no-drop ride and no one will be left behind.  

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We’ve now settled into a routine: roll into some shitty hotel by a highway in an anonymous industrial park in the middle of nowhere, Mona showers and starts the laundry while I shower with both bikes (yes, you read that correctly), then wash and dry them thoroughly, we charge our many devices, writing, dinner, sleep, wake, enjoy a revolting hotel breakfast, head back out in the rain for another day. Press repeat.

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Despite my kvetching about the weather, we’re having a great time. This feels a true adventure and the rain, adding to the suffering, make it feel all the more epic.  Almost 500 miles under our own steam! The welcome news is that it looks like the rain has stopped. Boy, was it a sloppy one today. All that gravel + three days of rain meant we were cruising through swamps although we wound up on some beautiful and very remote paths.
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For today’s musical look-back, I was thinking of how we performed Alban Berg’s string quartet Lyric Suite with Becky Anderson Rodman and Sharon Roffman (violins), me on viola, and Clancy Newman (cello) back in 2021. This is maybe the greatest quartet to emerge from the composers known as “The Second Viennese School” - Arnold Schoenberg, Berg, and Anton Webern. It is also one of the most difficult works every written (and was borderline irresponsible to attempt it on one week of rehearsal but when did that ever stop NCMF before?). At the premiere in 1926, people observed  that it felt like a story, one critic even calling it a “latent opera.” Even the six movement titles alluded to some kind of programmatic nature.

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But it was just music, as abstract as a Beethoven symphony or Schubert piano sonata. Or was it?

After Berg’s death, a researcher discovered cryptic notes written in code in the manuscript. Through painstaking research, he cracked the cypher, realizing it was the text to a poem by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire. Why would Berg put this in his score and then go to great lengths to conceal it?

Then, in 1977, a musicologist discovered a second score to the work that belonged to Hanna Fuchs-Robettin who died in 1964 and with whom, it turns out, Berg had a secret affair in 1925. The work's six movements tell a secret love story. The first movement, marked ''jovial,'' represents life before Berg’s infatuation. The second movement, marked ''amoroso,'' depicts their first encounter, in a park where she was walking with her two children.

In the third movement, ''misterioso,'' a flutter of nearly pitchless sounds, sighs and whispers describes a passionate interlude in which Berg and the woman proclaim their love for the first time. The fourth movement, ''appassionato,'' develops that first kiss into an extended love scene, replete with evocations of heavy breathing. Berg even wrote over this movement: ''You are my own.''Then things took a bad turn. The fifth movement alternates slashing, tormented passages, ''delirando.” And the sixth movement, ''desolato,'' gradually disintegrates in despair. Berg had been dumped.

In this second, hidden score, Berg scored this version of the last movement for string quartet and soprano (!), writing above the score an entire melody set to Baudelaire’s poem. In the actual published version of the quartet, the soprano line doesn’t exist – it was suppressed by Berg – but, astonishingly the full melody is fully present, weaving between the two violins, viola, and cello. In other words, every single note of the melody is covered in the instruments of string quartet in rhythm, if you know where to look. The song is completely there, just hidden in plain sight. Indeed, only one note is missing from the hidden melody and it occurs at the climax of the entire piece where the soprano would have sung a high G on the words “vast night.”

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The affair, as we now know, didn’t end well. Berg and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin (who was married to a close friend of Berg) both carried the secret to their grave too (Berg died young in 1935, Fuchs-Robettin lived all the way to 1964). It took fifty years before some dogged sleuthing solved a solution in search of a mystery.

‍David Yang, Artistic Director