Found this quote this morning on Realitychex.com (a new web site I have added to my daily regimen):

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. — Howard Zinn, 2004

This fits quite nicely what I was ranting about yesterday.

Throughout the day yesterday I kept bumping into obstacles.

Someone had removed all my posters for my upcoming recital at church.

A woman at church asked me if I had any left. I think she was the one who took the others down.  I put up all my posters around town on Friday. I had none left so I had to borrow one to photocopy from a choristers folder.

The copy machine was left tonerless for the weekend so no copies of the poster and I was unable to do some of my prep for this morning and long range prep for the recital.

I managed to go online and print up copies of the ad I submitted to the paper thus circumventing the non-functioning copy machine by printer directly to another printer. The woman who asked me about the posters then put one up on the bulletin board at church.

The bulletin for today has several errors in it.

My attempt to correct something in my article resulted in a word in brackets. In my email, I had put it in brackets so that the secretary could easily see which word was different. I also bracketed an omitted comma and a missing “ing.” These for some reason luckily escaped the bracket in publication.  It’s a bit confusing to me that she managed to omit them and not the one around the corrected word. Hmm.

I also requested that she not print out the music for the descant verse for the congregation on the opening hymn. This would mean omitting a page of music in the bulletin which contained just the third verse and the descant printed above it. I suggested to my boss that she simply type out the third verse like a poem and add it to the bulletin. But instead she attempted to add the verse right under the other two in the music. Unfortunately she didn’t quite get all the words under the right notes.

I decided I needed to lay a board over my harpsichord as a sort of flat surface on which to put music. When I stopped at Menards, a young man who helped me find a board and cut it, quizzed me about music in general.

I’m not sure he ever understood what a harpsichord was. He thought it was an autoharp. When I described it to him, he looked doubtful.

I noticed that he merrily ignored my comments and began regaling me with an entertaining story of his own attempts at recording and studying music. I quickly just listened.

The board worked perfectly.

I didn’t tune the harpsichord yesterday so I have to do that this morning. I’m also thinking of making another set of string parts for a piece on the recital next week. I think it might be nice to have strings on our little closing valentine piece: “It was a lover and his lasse” by Morley.

So I better quit doing this and start doing that.

I  woke up in an odd mood. It’s like an old sci fi story. I live in a time of self fulfilling cynicism. It’s been almost a hundred years since Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, created an entire field of “public relations.” I watched his daughter on tape say that one of his pet peeves was stupidity. But he founded his entire career on the belief that people are stupid, blindly following their “animal” instincts as a herd. Literally this seems to be what he believed.

Now I live in that herd. People often do seem to be stupid. Over and over again I witness cynical manipulations in the way public people conduct themselves and lie. It becomes clear to me why I am such an outsider.

I recently watched the movie, “The Ploughman’s Lunch.”

This is a wonderfully depressing movie starring Jonathan Pryce as a shallow, hypocritical climber in Maggie Thatcher’s Britain. Thatcher was sort of like Reagan without the mask. The movie climaxes at an actual Conservative Party convention with shots of Thatcher ranting about the Falkland Islands.

I suppose it’s necessary to remind people that the Falkland Islands War  was a pathetic example of a dying empire reaching out to ruin a final situation.

This movie like the movie of your life is about the continual re-writing of history and facts. A “Ploughman’s Lunch” is a cold pub meal consisting  of cheese, bread, and pickles. In the movie, an aging cynical advertising executive reveals the fact that the idea was developed by the Milk Marketing Board in the sixties. Jonathan Pryce’s character is suitably astonished.

Obviously a “Ploughman’s Lunch” carried the cachet of tradition in the character’s mind. But it’s not a tradition. It was manufactured by people who thought nothing of deceiving the public.

This morning I am seeing stages in deception. First the elite deceive the group. Then we routinely deceive ourselves. We think that celebrity matters. We long for our own celebrity.

Not skill, but recognition. Not thought, but mindless play.

My problem is that I disbelieve in the liars but maintain a stubborn belief in people’s capacity for thought and good.

There’s no place for me in your movie. I think ideas matter more than appearances. I think beauty is real and important. I think fuzzy thinking is unacceptable (especially in myself, but in you too). And I think it matters how you treat the people you love, whether you are honest with them and yourself.

So I see myself opposed to falsity which seems to be the substance of much if not most of what passes for contemporary society and culture. Our public rhetoric has devolved from a cynical manipulation of the herd (Bernays, “The Ploughman’s Lunch”) to total dishonesty in public platforms such as politics, television, pop music and the movies.

Avatar is a good example of a movie I don’t want to be in. It’s insipid music score frames a story told many times before and in better ways. Also, the Pocahontas plot is a mini Falkland’s Island white man’s condescending idea that he can “help” “primitive” people. In this case, the “primitive people” seem to be a hippy dippy idea of what culture can be. And I can’t help but smile at the fake “unobtainium” substance the bad guys are after. This movie is contrived from start to finish. But it is popular. Not only popular but hailed as one of the best movies of the year.

These are lies I can’t believe.

I’m not angry about all this. In fact it calms me down because it solves riddles that I ponder. Like why people don’t seem to know things. About history or literature or music. I feel like a character in a Ray Bradbury story: isolated from the present but connected to larger ideas and story.

At the same time I have a strong compassion for people. I think Bernays and political consultants are pathetic. They are wasting the greatest gift which is the gift of being alive. Every human gets this gift and every human has the possibly of transcendence and love.

These ideas won’t fit into a PR campaign or an advert. They are real ideas.

So I think I am happy to hover on the sidelines, loving my family and loving music, literature, poetry and ideas.  I know that I can be interpreted as a grumpy out of step old man. Okey dokey. Leave me out of the movie please.

Thursdays seem to be turning into a good day in general. I meet with my trio and my boss on this day.  Both are a delight.

The trio walked through music for Sunday and the upcoming 2/14 recital. I consulted with them about trimming the number of pieces on the recital down a bit.  We decided to do one of the Gibbons Viol Fantasies instead of two. We ran through a little transcription I did of William Byrd’s Wolseys Wilde (without the viola).  I had them listen carefully with me to how I am playing the second violin part in the Lotti Sanctus. We are doing this piece Sunday as well as a movement from a Lotti trio sonata. In each case my right hand is playing the second violin part.

Bach does this with some of his Flute sonatas.  The problem is that the modern instruments are much louder than my old klunky harpsichord. After some listening and discussion, Amy and Dawn helped me decide to double the R.H. in the choral piece but just play it normally in the “trio.”

I tuned my harpsichord before our rehearsal. After my meeting with Pastor Jen, I sat down and played for about an hour. I find that making adjustments (which is a royal pain) does pay off. I did some switching of jacks and adjusting the lengths of the plectrum yesterday.

I played Bach’s A major suite all the way through. This is something because I find that Bach’s music exploits the harpsichord in a way that if it’s not in top running shape is quite frustrating. Yesterday not so much frustration. Nice.

Went grocery shopping afterwards. Came home and made wraps for Eileen and me for supper. Peanut Butter and Apple for her, homemade guacamole for me. Mmm mmm.

This morning I did one of my errands sitting at the computer. I contracted with the local paper for an Ad for my concert. I do like doing it that way.

Called my Mom and invited to take her to lunch (she usually pays, but I drive, heh). She was game  so that’s the plan. Also planning to distribute posters for my concert this morning and take her to Dittos (the used shop) this afternoon.

Hey life is good.

Yesterday afternoon found me sitting at a piano in a high school band room going over Real Book tunes with some high school students.  Actually I was playing from some scores that seemed to be for Music minus one type playing, by that I mean playing with a pre-recorded CD. Each score has neatly printed on the top how many choruses one takes. It’s a weird blend of spontaneous and restriction.

I’ve always felt that improvising needs to have a strong element of the moment in it. Relying on previous tricks is something to be avoided. Using a completely worked out dealy changes the nature of what you are doing from improvisation to composition. Paul Manz who recently died was a big Lutheran church guy. He had been know to play an “improvisation” that was note for note something he had written years ago.

I do question the whole nature of Jazz and it’s continued presence as a performing art.

It reminds me of improvising as sometimes taught to organists and others. It must be done within strict parameters. Dupre developed an entire pedagogy around essentially improvising music that could have been written in the 18th/19th century.

I find it ironic that people get stuck in Jazz because the whole aesthetic is one of evolving. But now that evolving seems largely stuck in amber to me.

I told the kids yesterday I never know what jazzers expect. By that I mean I can’t really “play-in-the-style-of” the great pianistic improvisers. I basically just play my own stuff.

The young drummer tried to reassure me that they were basically new age anyway. Whatever that meant.

I think my improvisations threw the sax player off a bit. A bit too free form or something.

So once again I’m sitting in a room with musicians and am the weird guy. Now I’m the old weird guy instead of the inexperienced goofy wet behind the years weird kid. Some change.

I read a few years ago where some jazzer dude (Pat Metheny)  said that it was no longer the time to play from the Real Books.

In case you don’t know what that is, these books evolved  from illegal Fake books of tunes jazzers improvised on. Now they are text books in college classes. And high schools.

The drummer yesterday was curious about my Real Books so I let him look at them. Apparently I am filling in as the pianist for a high school jazz quartet. the director has ordered them a set of Real Books. At least that seems to be the case. Hard to tell what’s going on.

I feel out of my depth posing as  a jazzer.

However I think I play interesting enough improvs. I’m just not as into it as I figure you’re supposed to be. I like Jazz but I also like other kinds of music. And seem to have a need for something that has been written (or improvised) from a contemporary point of view. I called it music by people who are breathing.

Even my little upcoming mostly Renaissance/Baroque recital has a piece by a living composer.

I chose a postlude for Sunday yesterday as well. Since we are singing a setting of the Sanctus I thought it might be fun to play a couple of French Baroque Mass couplets based on the Sanctus. I chose a couple of movements from Couperin’s Mass for the Parishes.

The reason for all this Sanctus stuff is that the first reading of the day Sunday from Isaiah quotes the Sanctus text. This paved the way for me to choose a charming little setting by Lotti of the Sanctus from his Mass a Tre.

We will play an instrumental piece by Lotti for the prelude (and also at the recital). It’s actually a trio sonata. But since my many instrumentalists in the pew at this church choose not to be available for performing I have been working with only a violinist and a cellist.

It struck me that I could render the second part of the trio sonata with my right hand. This is the way Bach has written a couple of his Flute Sonatas (and I suspect this is what is going on in some of his Violin sonatas as well). So that’s what I’m planning.

Unfortunately my harpsichord is not terribly loud. So I’m not sure how it will come out in the long run. But it’s certainly a coherent approach.

I changed my harpsichord pieces for Feb 14th. At this point I am planning on playing Dowland’s Lachrymae set for harpsichord by Thomas Morley and Morley’s La Volta set by William Byrd.

And I want to do one piece which would include my viola player. I was thinking of arranging the Irish Ho-Hoane but decided yesterday there is a bit more meat to Wolseys Wilde by William Byrd.

Interesting how I am involved in Jazz and Renaissance music. Somehow it seems pretty logical to me.

Anyway, this morning I am planning on finishing up my arrangement (basically a transcription) of Wolseys Wilde for violin, viola, cello and harpsichord.

I am thinking I might have a bit too much planned for this recital. Will discuss with my violinist and cellist at today’s rehearsal.

Immersed myself in Schubert piano sonatas yesterday.  In between I took my Mom to the doctor and fielded her financial matters. The latter entailed a trip to the bank to mess with CDs and Money Market accounts.

Made bread. Whole wheat this time. It was baking while I was giving a guitar lesson in the living room last night.

Feeling a bit isolated lately. Realize how little I seem to have in common with most local music types. Feeling seems to be largely mutual. Ah well. This is probably just good old fashioned self pity. But I have lived here for over twenty years and still haven’t seemed to connect with the local college and church musicians. I know that a lot of this is my own doing by insisting on going my own way. Wouldn’t do it any other way actually.

On the other hand, I did get an vague email invite to consider playing a benefit for Haiti. More encouragingly a young high school student recently contracted me to play a Valentine’s day dance with a little jazz pick up group. We rehearse today at Zeeland High School. I have a feeling everyone else in the group will be in high school. This is just fine with me. So many people over twenty seem to be locked in a kind of amber around here.

Not everyone of course. But I do find myself seeking out the passionate ones in nooks and crannies where they linger or occasionally appear. Often I am alone in a nook. Alone, but I still have Schubert and company.  And my fam of course.  Poor me.

Finished re-reading Kate Atkinson’s “One Good Turn” last night. Comforting somehow to re-read a well written crime novel. Now I’m sipping bad coffee in the dark morning listening to Mozart.

Life’s not so bad. In fact, it’s pretty good.

I have to get up the gumption to write my weekly bulletin article on the music at the service. Also, pick out a postlude and submit it. I need to put an ad in the local paper for the upcoming Feb 14 recital.

In the meantime Mozart and coffee and the lingering night sky.

I tried to take a day off yesterday. That is, I tried to do a lot of nothing. I guess I sort of succeeded. I went over and got my Mom’s internet working again. She seemed to have a dozen or so open Mozilla and Explorer windows that had completely confused her laptop.

I deposited money from accompanying. Spent quite a bit of time playing Scarlatti, Schubert and Bach on the piano.

I continue to ponder how people relate to music and literacy.

I can see that my own interest in historical music stems easily from an early fascination with Bach. I say early, but I’m not really sure when I first heard of Bach. I would imagine my father had mentioned him to me at some point.

I do remember my cousin, Jerry, playing a recording of the Bach inventions for me in his living room in West Virginia. Hard to say how old I was. Probably early teens.

I was thinking of the first Bach cantata I performed this morning and realized it was before I had most of my musical training. I was in my early twenties and running a delightful failing bookshop with my wife, brother and  his wife. I had had a year or two of piano training before I switched courses, left my first wife and began playing bar music for money.  Interesting to me at this point to realize how rootless and undirected (by others) most of my life has been.  At the same time I have been inexorably drawn to music and literacy. I’m not sure exactly from whence this comes.

I used to think it was a desire for beauty in general prompted possibly by “nature walks” a woman called “Sister Elizabeth” was supposed to have taken me on as a toddler. I only vaguely remember any of this.

Now I just feel the connection to beauty and art is cemented into my personality. I assess my abilities as about average or a bit below. However, my determination has been pretty high at points. Interestingly usually divorced from any coherent or otherwise ambition.

I have noticed recently that fewer and fewer young people I cross paths with seem to be that interested in beauty and art and literacy the way that I am. I often feel that many perceive a musician as a sort of idiot savant or human loudspeaker.

I was reminded of this Sunday as two reasonably bright young people were blissfully unaware that I was trying to make beauty within a few feet of them. At least I suspect they weren’t too aware since they were talking a bit louder than I was playing.

My experience of this kind of “blind spot” reached its peak at a July 4th celebration when I was asked to play marimba in a park. There were multiple sound environments competing. But the funniest (saddest?) was the fact that I was stationed near a blasting P.A. speaker over which they played music or fed the sound system of nearby electrified live music. Repeated requests to turn the music down were of course ignored. They did, however, pay me and indicated they wanted me to play again the next year. I respectfully declined.

Besides this slightly morbid musing, I listened to Obama’s public discussion with the Republicans on Friday and then watched his Youtube interview.  I find myself wondering if Obama is genuinely trying to do something a bit different as he reaches out for a less extreme driven discussion. I don’t agree with him (much less the Republicans) on much of the agenda. A lot of it I simply realize I don’t understand enough about. Especially money issues. But I wonder if he might pull off a change in tone. Probably not. But still it’s interesting to watch.

I do think he uses language differently from the way I am used to hearing public political figures recently in the U.S. His mind is obviously engaged. I thought he danced around the Republicans mostly because it was difficult for them to find a reasonable response to reasonableness that didn’t undermine their own political needs. Very interesting to observe.

The youtube interview was pretty much waster. I was hoping Obama would fill in some more of his ideas from the State of the Union. But that not exactly what he did.

Fittingly, Eileen and I listened/watched to the first of four parts of “Century of the Self” on Google Videos. I actually had no idea that the nephew of Freud was instrumental in advertising and government manipulation in the twenties. This is a four part BBC series that really bears checking out. I tried to embed it, but it didn’t work. It worked better for me to go directly to Google Video anyway. Here’s a link:

link to The Century of the Self on Google Video

I found this video almost shocking to observe the cynical simplistic thinking behind manipulation of the masses. Shocking to hear that Freud “hated” America and that his cynical view of humans became more intense as he aged. I find it interesting that believing that humans barely are able to repress their darker “animal” urges might be an example of individualism at its extreme. After all, Freud obviously probed his own animal stuff (hence the fixation of penises, heh). So how did he repress his stuff in order to arrive at his insights?

I know, I know, another naive dumb question from jupe…. heh

After not blogging for four days, I think it’s time for a post. Heh.

Saturday and Sunday took a lot out of me this weekend.

Saturday I drove an hour and a half to Grant Michigan to accompany five students at the District Solo and Ensemble Festival.

My first player managed to get pushed up to 8:08 AM, so I left the house at about 6:15 AM. It was a beautiful night: a dark deep sky with a huge magnified low full moon.

I arrived early. I noted that since my last visit to this school for the same event, Google had corrected the name of the cross street in its mapping. Nice to see. Last time I took extra time determining that the last cross street had two names: one where you turned and one for the address of the school. Had to stop and ask someone at a grocery store.

But not this time.

Four of my five students played before lunch and I basically whisked from one performance to the other. The tuba player played an interesting little rag by Arthur Frackenpohl called “Tubarag.” I actually did my worst playing due to a mixup with the page turns (it had repeats and DSes and Codas…. ). But the player remained “unflapped” and did well.

My two string players played learning concertos.  These pieces are ones that I have been exposed to through my accompanying. Apparently the composers carefully think about the positions and ease of the part they write and compose pieces that are just challenging enough for a mid-level player. The music is a bit showy and doesn’t have a lot of content. But it’s fun to play. My viola player’s piece was  a bit more interesting. I pointed out to her a rhythm she was playing incorrectly in the course of our rehearsals. It was satisfying to me to hear her nail it in performance, even I realize that this is not always possible with young musician’s learning curve on relearning sometime. More distressing was watching her and the others go through the extreme pressure this kind of event puts on the players.

I usually point out to anyone who will listen to me (after the fact) that this is some of the most stressful playing musicians do in their lives due to the juxtaposition of the pressure and that time of life when you are so off balance.

The other two players were clarinetists, one advanced and one less so. They both played well. And they both played some interesting music. The advanced one played two movements from a surprisingly effective violin concerto transcription by Tartini. The other played a lovely Fantasy for Clarinet by Schumann which I have mentioned in the blog before.

So I madly jumped in the car and drove home to tune the harpsichord and prepare for the next day’s service and rehearsal.

I have been spending a lot of time preparing music scores with Finale lately.

Last week I put several pieces into files for my string players. On Saturday evening and early Sunday morning, I made performance scores for myself.

I took the many pages of the Tallis piece we sang yesterday and reduced them to three pages by omitting the four staves of the singers and just entering the piano reduction and the words. That way I could see clearly what they were supposed to be doing but still could manage the pages and conducting from the harpsichord. Which is what I did.

This came off pretty good in church. Due to the nature of our reduced rehearsal times (one stop shopping Sunday AM service plus rehearsal), I am less able to shape the blend and subtlety of performances. But this approach seems to be the ticket these days in a time when it is hard for people to give more time and commitment. But as I mentioned to the group yesterday, we gave our best performance in service which is always the goal.

I also prepared a version of the Lotti Sanctus we are learning for me to conduct from. I reduced the size of the lines I wasn’t planning to play (1st violin, Soprano, Alto, Baritone) and retained the larger size for the two I was (2nd violin & cello).

I know this is one of those posts which is mostly shop talk but it’s what’s on my mind.

I also performed Ned Rorem’s Sarabande in G# minor. This is a lovely piece and several choir members commented on it. But the young acolytes were totally oblivious to the fact that I was playing the prelude and sat and chatted loudly right next to the piano. I managed to keep most of my concentration despite this and do the interp I had planned.

I lost this score this week for a couple of days so I didn’t get to rehearse it as much as I wanted to. I had accidentally straightened it away with a bunch of choral music. But it is one that I quite like and basically had in my fingers.

I found my energy ebbing in the post service rehearsal. Usually I try to keep others’ energy up, but I had difficulty just keeping my own up. We rehearsed with the violinist and cellist for the pieces they are playing on and then managed to get through the music we are planning to perform at the recital on the 14th. The group’s morale seemed good despite my own exhaustion.

Well that’s enough for today. I have some serious goofing off to do. Heh.