I had a grueling High School musical rehearsal last night. Many kids were absent so I had to constantly try to cover parts so it made sense enough so that the people there could attempt their part. The piano kept cutting out. The director let us out fifteen minutes early. Whew.

Got up this morning and put a homework key online for my students since I did not return their corrected homework yesterday (it was sitting on my printer).

Ironic how much I’m looking forward not only to seeing my daughter Elizabeth and quasi-son-in-law Jeremy but also getting AWAY.

I don’t have much I have to do today: meet with the priest, make sure check requests are in for my subs, teach a couple of lessons this evening.

I came home last night and Eileen was madly packing and was trying to figure out what carry-ons are allowed. We are flying on both Continental and ChinaAir and they seem to have some mutually exclusive policies. Like ChinaAir says lock your luggage and Continental says do not.

Also we were hoping to just have carry on luggage but ChinaAir only allows 11 lbs worth and we have some stuff that is a bit heavier than that, heh. So I guess we are going to check on bag.

I am planning on attempting to travel very light.

The problem of course is books. Heh. I am taking a history of china to Elizabeth. I want to take my Oxford Beginner Chinese dictionary. I would like to take one book to read. How much do these all weigh? Heh.

Anyway. I’m sure it will all be fine in the end.

So let me get this straight.

An Arizona man’s sentence to 200 years in jail for possessing 20 kiddy porn pics is not a constitutionally excessive punishment….

But punitive damages to Philip Morris are…..
Read about here (Arizona case) and here (Philip Morris).

I forgot to bring the corrected homework to class today. This necessitated laboriously going through the answers with people not having the questions in front of them. This took a huge chunk of my class time. Moved on to review. Then finally the topic for the day of human song as found in Schubert lieder, A Schumann song cycle, a Sudanese indigenous sounding song and an example of Pygmy polyphony. By the time I reached Pygmy polyphony I was dieing.

Sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you.
It definitely ate me today.

O well.

But there is an
upside:
there was
a package
in my box
with the
new edition
of the
text I use (that’s
the cover on the
right).

Hey.

I’m credited in
the list of
“battle-scarred
music-ap-prec
instructors”
who made
suggestions.

It says
“Stephen Jenkins,
Grand Valley State University.”

Maybe it’s silly,
but this cheered
me up a bit
today, since
I died in class.

Another funny thing
is that I as I teach
I continue to think
of things I meant
to point out to them
about this text and
failed to mention
in my report.

The photographs from China were excellent. The one above was from the “Shanghailanders (series)” by Lu Yuanmin. It was a series of portraits in sepia tones with excellent subjects and composition. That’s one of his at the top of this entry. It is in light sepia tones…. notice the people in the mirror. Very cool.The picture in my Feb 25th entry below is huge! The people are almost life-sized. It was a collection of several photographers from the late 20th Century.

Eileen especially liked this one.

Again, it’s a huge photo. Taken in the nineties Eileen wondered where this sixteen year old
was now.

Got up early this morning and transcribed string parts out of a Thomas Tallis choral anthems.

Church went pretty well this morning. The secretary once again left something out of the
bulletin (a line of hymn…
making it impossible to use).
No big deal. We just left it out.

I am relieved to have my
final church service before
China done.

Eileen and I are going to
walk over to Hope College
and see
the Smithsonian Traveling
exhibition of photographs
from China.
The new American Guild of
Organist Magazine (yes
I still read it) had an Oxford
U Press ad which offered single copies of five anthems. There were about ten on the ad so you had to indicate which ones you wanted. I got online and researched it a bit and decided which ones to circle.

Today I rest. I need to take some time off. It’s been kind of a crazy week for some reason. I guess it’s partly the extra service on Wednesday evening. Also I had musical rehearsals on Monday and Tuesday evening. Last Sunday, I had a dinner engagement which left my head spinning a bit. This was all extra stuff in an already hectic (for me) schedule.
I got up more rested today than I have been. Still very tired but a bit better. I put Pablo Casals recording of the Bach Cello Suites on to sooth me a bit.

I first heard these while watching an old Inmar Bergman film. This would have had to have been in the late sixties or possibly early seventies. I mention this because I have a poignant association with these pieces. I subsequently became interested in Casals and read his autobiography. He influence my understand and love of Bach quite a bit.

So sitting in my kitchen years later listening to a dead man play music written hundreds of years ago and sipping coffee has a soothing effect.

I sat down and played through several movements of Bach’s first English suite this morning as well.

Elizabeth called from China. She and Eileen chatted until it was time for Eileen to go to work.

Then I got to talk to her awhile.

While sipping coffee this morning I was working my way through the New Oxford Begginer’s Chinese Dictionary exercises. It got very interesting this morning as the exercises walked me through understanding how Chinese words sometimes mean combinations of other words or syllabic meanings and sometimes they are adaptation of Western sounds.

For example: the word for train is really a combination of the words for fire and vehicle….. the word for the chinese violin, er hu, simply means “two strings.” The er hu has two strings. Whereas the chinese word for internet combines the word for network with two syllables that sound like the first two syllables of the english word [yin(1) and te(4) + wa(3)ng network or netting ] And so on.

It got me so interested that I started looking up words that weren’t in my little dictionary and ended up finding a very good online resource. Unfortunately, I think it combines traditional and modern characters….. but still very interesting. This dictionary also shows the Chinese (mandarin?) pronunciation and also the Cantonese and the Japanese Kun and Japanese Kin.
Not sure exactly what the Kun and Kin are but can surmise they are Japanese variants.

So when I looked up the chinese for piano, I found that the characters really mean “steel lute.” Glancing over the “lute” character information I see that the Japanese Kun pronunciation for this same character is “koto.” Koto! Hey I know what a koto is…. it’s one of them thar Japanese zithers….

Anyway. I am finding this fun if not rententively informative.

Elizabeth and I chatted about this kind of thing and other stuff like the bombardment of western culture in China and how it is often misunderstood in funny ways.

I am beginning to really look forward to this trip. Not the least of it will be conversations with Elizbeth, Jeremy and Eileen.

Good article in a recent Nation: “White History 101” by Gary Younge

Regarding Black History Month, he writes about the passive voice as used by people who describe the history of racism: “Leaders ‘get assassinated,’ patrons ‘are refused,’ ” and so on.

He points out that the perpetrators of racism (i.e. white people) are largely left out of the discussion. And that it would benefit us to have more exposure of this side of the equation.

I particularly liked this:

The very notion of black and white history is both a theoretical nonsense and a practical necessity. There is no scientific or biological basis for race. It is a construct to explain the gruesome reality that racism built. But logic suggests you cannot have black history without white history.

It’s 9 AM and I have my lecture for today pretty much prepared.

I am frustrated because I am having to fight the emotional hangover from last night at church. The service went splendidly. I got lost once in playing and conducting the Brahms motet but recovered quickly. We performed a movement from my old cantata “ash Wed.” I’ve never done this piece in liturgy before and I found it satisfying.

The Hindemith postlude went surprisingly well. (It’s not all that easy). And we did a spanish type Taize piece with guitars, conga and flute…. I thought it was cool.

Before the service a couple of choir members were very angry with me. One of them left during the service.

This stuff drives me a little nuts. I hope it’s not inappropriate to at least mention it here. I woke up at 5 AM this morning and lay in bed and couldn’t get my mind off these people’s anger. I think this is “old guy” stuff. Ever since my forties I have found it more difficult to shift gears emotionally. It seems that all I can do is wait it out. Good grief.

This is nuts. A fanatic shot and killed
the Punjab social welfare minister
of India. The New York Times described
the shooter as “a fanatic
opposed to women in politics.”

Reuters India story

This morning
I played
through a
couple of movements
of Hindemith’s
First
Piano
Sonata.
This evening, I am playing a movement from his first organ sonata (I think it’s the first one) for a postlude.

I guess I just have his sound on the mind.

Also.
received
a book of poetry
in the mail
yesterday by
Sesshu Foster (right)
City Terrace:
Field Manual.

(excerpt.)

I really like this guy’s writing. He also wrote Atomic Axteca.

I have been keeping written journals for over thirty years. Not consistently. But I often turn to the page to write out my thoughts. It helps me process them.

I see blogs in a similar way. Since they are immediately public, I try to write only what seems appropriate. I still turn to my private journal for complete freedom of expression.

Also, I see blogs are sort of verbal busking. What I mean by that is that I throw out my ideas (sometimes recordings or poems or what-not) into the big soup of the Internet. If people run across them, they are welcome to them. If they want to respond, I am glad to hear their responses.

This last part is one of the reasons I am using this format for my blog now.

… Our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly become the principle place. In the end they come to fill out completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognize to which we listen.”

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

Aha! I’m at school and have turned in my mid-term grades!

It’s very helpful to keep a running tally of student’s points. To do mid-terms, all I have to do is figure the scale and fill in the grades. Hah!

Now I wait eleven minutes then I drive home.

Thank you, YouTube, he said saracastically. They have removed the perfect little scene from Don Giovanni that I used with my class last term due to “terms of use violation.”

This just drives me nuts.

In order to protect their little DVD they pulled a three minute excerpt that would help me show my students how sexy and interesting the aria “La Ci Darem La Mano” can be. Consequently, this group of fifty
students will be one hair less
likely to support opera in the
future. Don Juan is sung by
Rodney Gilfry (shown on the right).

His web site has a zillion photos of himself.
And buying the DVD and showing them the excerpt is a pain because I would have to queue it up just so…. and of course buy it out of my deep adjunct pockets (more sarcasm).

Wow! I hope it’s not inappropriate for me to express amazement that every student in my Music Ap class handed in their first concert report on time.
Usually someone manages to hand it in late.

I do enjoy reading people’s comments about concerts.

It never fails that two people will express completely opposite reactions to the same experience (e.g. one person will say they liked a certain piece this most… another person says this was the worst piece on the concert…).

Also some of the students’ observations about performers are astute and would benefit the musicians if they could hear them. One guest Jazz performer apparently breathes very loudly and distracting throughout his performance (many comments on this)…. and it always interests me when students find things too long.

I believe that often we musicians are not as attuned to the audience as we could be in this regard. Granted some ideas take a while to develope and demand a great deal from listeners. But most of the music I hear and play doesn’t actually fall in this category.

Often when audiences are restless a musician just doesn’t know how to keep the listener interested, when to stop or how to say what he/she wants to say in a reasonable length of time for the modern sensibility.

One of the Sticky Idea brothers has developed an approach to textbooks called Thinkwell.

This is from the Thinkwell FAQ entitled “Tell me in 58 words how it works”:
Students buy the Thinkwell package at the bookstore and register into your personalized Thinkwell website. Instead of reading a textbook, students watch 10-minute video lectures on CD-ROMs and then complete online exercises at your website. Armed with the feedback of how well students have comprehended the topics, you are able to conduct your class time accordingly

Unfortunately, they don’t have any music books and I don’t think it’s set-up so you can design the whole thing yourself.

Not sure how I feel about not having students read.

It’s like lectures. I sometimes have difficulty inspiring class participation (especially without a gimmick or activity). Then I just talk. It crosses my mind that this kind of delivery could be put on a DVD or an online video.

But still I resist. I think it has something to do with being in the room with people even if they are not saying words. They still communicate with you. There is an energy (or lack thereof) in the room.

And I guess I feel pretty strongly that people need to keep their reading skills. Reading enables pondering and integrating subtle understanding that is not engendered by good videos and visual presentations. At least that’s my opinion. Of course, I could be just the victim of my own limitations regarding words and ideas.

Last night, I sat at a table and listened to a family reminisce
about their memories of themselves as family. As I listened, I thought a lot about Proust. He has some strong ideas about how we experience life stronger in memory than in the actual experience. By processing an event, we can actually come more in contact with it and understand it and even feel it more clearly. In the quick moment of experiencing it we are too busy to get it all. As I listened to the conversation last night, it was so interesting to hear what people proposed as a memory and then worked back and forth in terms of what each of them remembered. In some little ways this conversation seemed to help them shape their own understandings.

Sarah J. mentioned that in Explorer my pics from Stan’s Cafe performance group were covering up some of my text.
So here’s the comments that go with the picture of the piece of rice in the hand:

So…there’s a performance group named Stan’s Cafe that does this show called all the people in the world. They make mounds of rice with each grain representing one person. Each mound represents a specific statistic, like all the people who live in gated communities (8.5 million) or all the people who live in the Americas (16 tons worth of rice). Cool Idea.

Maybe it would be better if I put pics in separate entries. I have been trying to use more visuals in order not to be tooo boring… heh.

Was listening to an interview with Chip and Dan Heath about their book, Made to Stick. (Subtitle: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)

They caught my attention when they started describing the “curse of knowledge.” Essentially (or what I got from the interview) was if you know too much about something it makes it hard to put yourself in the position of knowing little about something and trying to understand it.

They have a little demo where people are given a song to tap out and other people have to listen and figure out the song. They point out how hard is if you are just the listener and conversely how much information is usually in your head when you tap (the sounds of the song, the instruments, even a specific singer).

Looking at their site, they seem to be one of those business self-help cottage industries. (Actually one of them is a professor in the Business Department of Standford Grad school… this figures). Looking at their pictures they seem so young and assured to me.

I watch my ideas not stick to people all the time. I’m sort of to the point where I think it’s unhelpful when I barrage people with a bunch of ideas (barrage is how my brain often works…. but I feel okay about barraging on my blog… heh) so I try not to talk about them too much unless asked.

So it interests me…. knowing what helps ideas stick….

This book seems a bit reductive. But what isn’t these days?

They come up with six handy ways to make ideas stick.

I’ll write them here to help me think about them.

From the online excerpt:

Principle One: Simplicity
Principle Two: Unexpectedness
Principle Three: Concreteness
Principle Four:Credibility
Principle Five:Emotions
Principle Six: Stories

I was talking recently with another church musician who is deciding to become clergy. This notion confuses me. I wonder why people are attracted to the priesthood from the point of view of the musician. It must be something in them that is dormant and they have denied and are finally coming to grips with.
I find that I have so many misgivings about church that the idea of fastening myself more clearly and directly to the notion of Christianity is something I don’t entertain for an instant.

I also suspect that I have had a skewed experience of church leadership. And it is interesting the number of priests I have known that have ended up in scandal. Quite a few really.

Listening to: Lyle Lovitt – “I Love Everybody”

I think I wore myself out yesterday. This morning, Eileen and I walked to church and when we got there my fatigue suddenly hit me. I did my stuff and all was well. But I could tell that I was tired.

Today is my grandson’s birthday so we webcammed the whole fam over there. They seem to be in good spirits.

Read the New York Times for a bit then finished grading Thursday’s quizzes from my class. recorded these grades.

We actually have a social engagement this evening. A parishioner has invited us to his house. It should be fine. His daughter is also an Episcopalian church musician and will be there.