Readers may have noticed that yesterday’s blog had no pics. I find that I have a bit less time for blogging these days and curtail my morning’s efforts by omitting the time it takes for lengthy searches for just the right pic. When time returns, I will probably go back to that.

Yesterday I came closer to a finished score of “Dead Man’s Pants.” I am trying to resist obsessive composing day and night. I fear I will burn myself out quickly if I give in to the impulse to work constantly on this project.

Nevertheless I seem to be finding time to do the work. I think it is coming along. The piece timed out at around 9 minutes yesterday. Which for the number of instruments (12 plus vocals), is a whole lot of writing. At this point there are 314 measures in the piece which consists of several sections.

I also composed a light musical setting of a piece of service music for the Eucharist yesterday, the “Holy, holy.” This text used to be known as the Sanctus of the Mass and is now part of the ritual of any liturgical Christian church I can think of.

Service music has dogged me all my life. I watched several hymnals make choices about what service music to provide for people who use their hymnals. This includes the Episcopalian 1982 Hymnal.

Writing ritual music in a lighter more understandable and usable musical style has given rise to a ton of trivial sounding stuff. I wonder how possible it is to write this kind of thing successfully. I have attempted compositions in most styles however and gave this kind of thing a good try yesterday.

My idea is to write a piece to be sung in the weekly prayer that captures and facilitates this community’s current theology which I would say is a sort of moderately intelligent socially committed not too serious one. I have chosen to write music that is rhythmic and has some cleverness in the congregational melody itself. I am hoping the cleverness will seem easy to the average singer at my church. This cleverness consists of dividing up some of the text in ways that might be a bit counter-intuitive to a trained musician as he/she reads it, but that might feel natural to someone who listens and likes music these days.

I test drove it on poor Eileen last night. She kind of liked it but that’s no test because she is probably my biggest fan. But when I specifically asked her about the ease of the melody she didn’t think it sounded hard or contrived.

I will probably give it another test drive on my boss tomorrow.

My boss and my wife are good barometers of this kind of thing. Musicians often bring a sort of literate ignorance to their judgments on music. First of all it takes a wide facile understanding of interpretation of music notation to understand a composition outside of your experience and taste as a trained musician. Secondly all listeners tend to evaluate in terms of music they are already familiar with or fond of. In both cases the evaluation is colored by the fact that the more we hear something the more likely we are to enjoy or appreciate it.

Of course there does a come a point when constant repetition works against almost any piece of music. This is the dilemma of writing music to sing the same text each week in public payer.

My goal in this piece is not only to write an acceptable composition, but to provide a flexible vehicle for my own pastoral parish situation. I envision utilizing a variety of accompaniments depending upon who shows up to help on a Sunday morning.

I wrote a little introduction that I hope will set the tone for a more playful and relaxed setting. It is my hope that most weeks I will be able to convince rhythm instrument players to assist. Some weeks I would like to do it with a battery of musicians who are also parishioners. Interestingly enough I haven’t thought too much about the usual boomer instruments: guitar and bass. They will fit fine I am sure. Instead I envision some interesting parts for strings and winds and mallet instrument. My marimba is sitting at church right now.

I have been using a Jazz font in “Dead Man’s Pants” and thought it might have a good effect if I notated my “Holy” the same way.

So instead of the usual printed look:

It looks more like this:

Anyway.

I woke up thinking about how composers like Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven thought about the evolving formal structure of some of their music. Specifically what is sometimes called Sonata Allegro Form although this term is probably not one they would use.

A little poking around in my files and on the web and I came up with an article to read and a book to check out.

Now to find out when exactly Hope(less) college music library is open today. They reduce their already minimal hours dramatically during the summer.

Dear Diary,

I was discouragingly exhausted physically and emotionally yesterday. I wanted to plunge into working on my composition and harpsichord. Instead I allowed myself time to attempt to relax and distract myself.

I still managed to do some work in “Dead Man’s Pants.” Actually quite a bit of work. I sketched a transition, wrote string parts, piano parts, xylophone parts. But I didn’t touch the harpsichord.

Finished reading Stieg Larrson’s last volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. After having read all three of these, I  conclude that Larrson could have used some strong editing especially in the second volume. But still they were perfect summer reads for me.

I spent some distracting time with Schumann on the piano.

Today I need to come up with a plan for next Sunday. I have chosen the hymns to be recommended already. I was hoping to use my sax player friend on the prelude and postlude but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet. I will choose organ music in case I don’t hear from him this week.

It is crossing my mind to start a compositional project after I get the Aug 5th gig up and running.  I am feeling much freer about my composing and think it might be interesting to write a more extended work, possibly for piano, violin and cello. I don’t really have any specific musical ideas for it yet. But my personal resolve seems to be strengthening.

Part of getting older seems to be accepting and even embracing one’s own eccentric stuff. In my case that means a very  human idea of musical performance and the joy of story and words and honest creating in general.

I feel calmer about my role at work. Part of this is realizing how disinterested I actually am in much of what preoccupies the staff there. The people in the community who bother to connect with me personally keep encouraging me with their enthusiasm and support. This is extremely satisfying. But it would help if they paid me more justly but that’s probably a pipe dream. I’m lucky to get the emotional support.

And I am lucky.

Today’s entry probably has too much shop talk for most non-church musicians. But it’s what’s on my mind this morning. I came home from church so enthused that I sat down and emailed a bunch of people who had played that day at service. Then I formed a Facebook group for musicians at my church. You can see I’m out of control but it’s typical of my enthusiasms.

I was surprised that almost every person I invited to come early and play rhythm instruments for the opening South African hymn  at church yesterday showed up. I took advantage of the moment and grabbed several emails of young people. Asked them if they would mind being put on a musicians on call list. Asked them for other names.

After some rehearsal they came together.  I decided to begin the hymn with the rhythm instruments. This allowed them to settle in (which they had no problem doing since we had just been rehearsing it) but also it gave the congregation a chance to notice the novelty of the rhythm instruments before beginning to sing.

So the rhythmic energy poured out of the music area. The singing was not that strong. I had planned to drop out the organ at one point but decided not to since I mostly heard rhythm instruments and organ (playing the vocal parts). It’s possible we could have seduced them into better singing with softer rhythm instruments but I’m not sure about that.

Interestingly the participation in the rest of the service was strong. It was especially noticeable in the Gloria which followed not too far from the opening hymn. But it seemed to me to persist into the rest of the service.

In addition to the South African hymn at the beginning of the service, there was quite a variety of other musics.

Prelude – Bach organ piece
Opening hymn – South African drum piece
Sequence hymn – Strong rhythmic German chorale upon which the Bach organ piece was based (If thou but suffer God to guide thee) with organ accompaniment
Offertory –  A Capella rendition of “I have decided to follow Jesus” (This often mistaken for an American spiritual when in fact it comes from the continent of India)
Communion hymns – Charismatic/Praise hymn “Seek ye first”
followed by the gentle but strong German chorale ” Come with us, O blessèd Jesus.” This is the tune used in the famous Bach cantata movement, “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring.”
Closed out the service with great text “Love Astounding” sung to the simple American tune called HOLY MANNA.

I was creative with the organ accompaniments as usual. I introduced the closing hymn on a simple flute stop and also used this sound in an interlude since the hymn was only two stanzas and the procession didn’t really have time to exit.

The postlude was a loud dissonant four pages from Hindemith’s organ sonata.

This seemed like a good solid musical service to me and I came home excited and satisfied.

I got up early and worked more on “Dead Man’s Pants” yesterday. Unfortunately after leaving my work I came back later and discovered that Finale seemed to have misplaced about twenty important measures of evolving string accompaniment. No doubt, I somehow told it to do this. I find that computers and software first of all do exactly what you tell. One just has to be careful what commands one gives them.

I use a lot of keyboard controls. They are powerful. Working with a large score, it’s impossible to see the entire score. It’s very likely I hit the control-Z hotkey and erased part of the music that I didn’t intend to.

Sigh. I wasn’t able to get this going again.

Eileen and I did, however, get going on tearing down the harpsichord in preparation for re-installing new jacks and strings.

We had a morning session in which we disassembled a great deal of the old harpsichord. I played a farewell piece before we began. The Prelude and Fugue in Bb from Bach’s first Well Tempered Clavichord. This is a piece I’m thinking or performing in August at LemonjEllos.

Here’s a link to all the pics from the morning on Facebook. I put it up here for you, Elizabeth, since you have migrated away from the Facebook madness, heh. Also anyone else who would be silly enough to be reading my blog and would like to link in to pics.

Eileen went to spend time with my Mom in the afternoon. I dragged myself over to church and prepared for this morning’s service. I called several people on Friday night and invited them to come early and learn some rhythm instrument parts to today’s opening hymn. So I re-tuned the skins on my conga. I find this a weird use of the word “tune,” but it is how drummers talk. What I did was simply loosen the heads and then re-tighten them carefully and evenly. I think they sound better then.

Also laid out all the decent rhythm instruments laying around the church. I am expecting about four young people  but it could be more or less.

Also rehearsed my Bach prelude based on today’s sequence hymn, “If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee,” and the postlude which is a four page loud excerpt from Hindemith’s first organ sonata.

I can hear you yawning but this is my life.

When I came home Eileen was still Farmvilling with Mom at her apartment. I continued working on the harpsichord. The pic above is how it looks after stripping out the keyboard and jack rails and vacuuming.

Then I started coals for supper.

You can see I was in a photographing mood yesterday.

Here’s a link to all the afternoon pics.

Then I watched an old South Park episode which I pulled up on Comcast. I am now a tv person, I guess. I think it might help me rot my brain occasionally and distract me from being so dam serious and self absorbed.  Worth a try.

The perfect music of the birds singing in the dawn is floating over the rustling sound of the wind in the tops of trees this morning. I find the bird sound exquisite at this time of morning in the summer in little old Helland where I live. Combined with the wind sound it is quite as appealing and wonderful as Bach to my ears.  Now the train whistles in the distance.

”]I have spent this week composing the “Dead Man’s Pants” theme and patching together the rest of the piece from compositions from this year.  Yesterday as I worked through scoring and composing for a theoretical (and fantastical to me) pallet of some 12 or 13 instruments it occurred to me where this piece lands in my own mental and artistic landscape.

It seems to be a piece about death in my mind. It is a futile waving of a jerky branch of protest in the face of the inevitable demise of us all.  A defiant angry joy of being alive. It’s also a regaining of sorts, I hope, of my voice as a writer.

Watching and helping my parents through this last phase of their life has had a dampening effect on my personal mental resources. At the same time this period has held insights for me, about them and also about myself.

In my life I have turned to little guitar songs to work out my own mental struggles. I realize they have mostly served as therapy for me. I am quite content with this and there is actually one of these embedded in “Dead Man’s Pants” called “Tiny Lies.”

But the first forty measures or so seem to be a bit of a musical statement that sums up something for me. Not easy to put into words. But it is a resurgence something for me that was ebbing.

It also helped that my struggle at work seemed to come to a peak for me.  I realize that the energy and direction and creativity seems to be mostly my own in my job as a church musician. Thus has it ever been for me.  For whatever reason I have visions and dreams about what could happen in the work of a church musician. I’m sure this is partially a sort of latent adolescent romanticism around musicians who worked in the church like Bach and Healey Willan.

This week I failed to muster this energy and watched what happened.  I experienced a strong sense of discouragement but oddly mixed with a determination that I could actually get my perspective and proverbial groove back.

This seems to have happened. Self-reliance, indeed, mister Emerson.

At our evening meal on Thursday my wife found my uncharacteristically quiet. She feared that I was gloomy but in fact something else seemed to be happening.  It looks like gestation or something. I told myself I was trying not to rehearse my frustrations at work. And while accomplishing that I do think that somehow I was finding an independent strength in my own sense of who I am and where I am in my life.

So the composing has been interesting for me this week. I do hope I can pull off the performance but it is in the end the composing that is more fun for me. I have invited all of my participants to set aside the night before the performance for a sort of full rehearsal. In the meantime I am planning to rehearse and consult with them in smaller groups. I mean to consult with my drummer. My drum parts are sketches of the improvised nature of drumming. I also am curious to expand the singers from me to me and a couple of other singers. This will need some delicacy and energy but I think it will be well spent.

Last night as I went to church to do a quick practice of Sunday’s organ music, it occurred to me that the opening hymn would be served by a gaggle of percussionists. This seemed to be residual creative energy from my work this week. The hymn, “Halleylujah, we sing your praises,” hails from South Africa. Like many African tunes it is best served by voices and percussion. We have been singing this for a couple of years.  So far four young people have indicated their willingness (actually their parents returned the call, ahem) to come early and prepare a percussive accompaniment to this hymn.

My strategy is two fold. To add to the moment of this sung hymn Sunday. But also to begin to connect personally with talented young people at church. I haven’t had much chance for this. It seems that not only I but others there think this would be a good thing. My energetic intense passion is difficult for cerebral cool Episcopalians to deal with however much they admire it. I think I am not the only one that observes that the positive side of this part of me has a bit of an echo of the impetuosity and immaturity of youth.

I actually dreamed about Peter Pan this week. Heh.

This residual siphoning of a bit of my inner compositional and musical non-church self has been something that has happened to me all my working adult life.  It is in fact what has kept me going in this field. Also the fact that it is one thing I do that I can sometimes manage to get paid for.  This seems like a trivial thing no doubt for someone as privileged and educated as myself, but more than once in my life I have noticed fellow musicians casting a slightly jealous eye that I have managed to make some money with music.

Indeed I feel very lucky this morning.

I don’t have too much time to blog today. I started the morning by making a score template for “Dead Man’s Pants” and beginning a final score. I am scoring it for vocals, alto sax, tenor sax, oboe, glockenspiel, drum set, xylophone, piano, violin, viola, cello, bass and banjo. I am feeling a bit rushed on this because I want to get parts in people’s hands and then see if I can convince them to rehearse.

I’m also seriously considering taking the first step on working on the harpsichord. This would consist of reading the instructions all the way through and then stripping down the instrument.

Eileen has said she would help this weekend. She is worried about my state of mind. Yesterday I tried not to talk about church stuff over supper. I stupidly ordered the wrong thing at Margaritas trying to be clever and do it in spanish. I carefully read out the wrong title. Typical of my state of mind. I am feeling very disenchanted and distanced from church right now. I like the  work, but the people stress seems to be unusually hard for me.

It turns out that when I am immersed in composing I’m not very adept at much else.

Yesterday I showed up inadvertently for my meeting a half hour late.

I had the time wrong. I plopped down and attempted to pull up my google calendar which refused to load wanting only verification of my log on but refusing to allow me on. I remained off balance for the rest of the meeting.

I just wrote an entire post describing the meeting but when asked my wife agreed it was probably inappropriate so I deleted it.

The negative energy from the church meeting stayed with me for hours yesterday only ebbing mysteriously while I sat in my Mom’s shrink’s  waiting room.

I did figure out out how to outfox my browser into letting me onto google calendar.

And I did get quite a bit of composing done.  At this point “Dead Man’s Pants” is around 300 measures long and consists of 4 sections: “Dead Man’s Pants theme,” “Tiny Lies,” “Small Rain Trio,” and “You must be the animal.”

This piece is in extremely rough draft form. Much of yesterday was spent writing string parts to go with “Tiny Lies” which is actually a banjo song. I plan to sing that. The vocal line on “You must be the animal” is extremely disjunct and has a very wide range. I can’t really sing it. Not sure either of my other two singers will be able to do it. Maybe I’ll just omit the singing on it.

Today I am playing piano for the June Birthday Party for my Mom’s rest home.

I played one of these earlier this year and was surprised that there was so much interested in “secular” music in such a religious context.  I alternated hymns and pop tunes (mostly from the 40s and 50s). Most of my requests seemed to be for the pop tunes.

Today I will do the same thing but will take more pop tunes to play so I can play things people will enjoy.

I know that money is on my mind these days.

I am underpaid at church with no real prospect of improvement there. I find it discouraging to think about working out creative solutions to the music program because every idea relies on me doing more work and no real mention of remuneration commiserate with this increased load.

So my solution is to volunteer my time playing music for my Mom’s rest home.

Brilliant, eh?

Spent several hours yesterday working on “Dead Man’s Pants.” This composition is starting to come together. I sort of had in mind how the theme would go for a while so yesterday was pretty easy. I’m about half-way done and have incorporated several sections of the piece which were previous compositions from this year. I call the sections “Dead Man’s Pants” (theme), “Small Rain,” “You must be the animal,” and “Tiny Lies.” So far only “You must be the animal” and “Tiny Lies” have vocals.

I’m hoping that in my enthusiasm I haven’t written stuff that will be too hard to pull together without too much rehearsal. I’m excited about  having a drummer who can read rhythms and have written stuff specifically for his skills. Also I keep hearing xylophone, glockenspiel, saxes, strings and banjo.

So finishing “Dead Man’s Pants” and then preparing scores for my ensemble is the next big project.

I missed having supper with my wife since my Mom scheduled her doctor’s appointment around the time usually take food to my wife at work.

Today I want to spend more time on my piece. I have to meet with my boss and my children’s choir director at work. We are going to do some brainstorming about creative approaches to the music program at Grace.

While I have made my list of thoughts, I have been pondering that every one of them involves added duties.

My wage is well under professional standards for a music director and the children’s choir director is, I believe, even more poorly remunerated than me. Both of us have master’s degrees (she has two!).

The situation is that the church is growing and more and more pressure is put on the staff to produce programs that fit it. While the budget is solid there is no provision for bringing staff salaries into line with fair wages.

I’ll have to mention this today.

Bah.

Also Mom has a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. One church meeting (the Worship Commission) was canceled. That frees me up a bit. Also need to get over and do some organ rehearsal.

As I worked over my notebook of compositional jottings from the past two years yesterday, I was interested to note several entries that reflected music I heard in my dreams. Not planning to use any of this material at this point, but it is interesting.

This is one dopey video. But I put it up so that you can hear the song I have been spending loads of time on recently.  I am putting as much of the recorded arrangement as I can into a Finale Doc. My idea is to use this tune as an opener on Aug 5th. I really like the writing and the arrangement and the fact that it uses  so many musicians.  It sounds kind of lame on Youtube, though.

The video completely misses the point of the song which is from the point of view of someone being re-accepted into a relationship not seeking re-acceptance. I guess that figures.

Finished reading this early Burgess novel last night. He is such a fine writer. And though his early work is not as good as I remember his later working being, it still is worth going back to.

I started reading Shalimar the Clown by Rushdie last night. I love the way this man puts sentences together.

She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love. She watched him recede into the past as he stood below her on the sidewalk, each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever, surviving only in outer space in the form of escaping light-rays. This is what loss was, what death buy valium australia online was; an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the in ineffable speed of the light years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos.

Salmon Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

I became interested in this book because it takes the reader inside the terrorist. Written in 2005, Rushdie uses his cred as an object of a death fatwa  himself to an intriguing effect by proposing a love story in which the disenchanted lover, Shalimar, becomes a terrorist. At least that’s what I think the book is about. I’m on page 26.

And I’m on my third Stieg Larsson. Perfect summer reading for me.

I meant to lay out my harpsichord tools yesterday in preparation for tearing it down. Instead, I spent my harpsichord time playing harpsichord. I think I must be getting accustomed to this instrument’s mediocrity because it doesn’t seem that bad to me. Indeed, I am finding it a pleasure to play my beloved Bach, L. Couperin and Francois Couperin.

I have been pondering just what I am going to write for performance in August.  I am considering making a bit of a collage (a la Zappa) of several shorter pieces that have popped out in the last year. I would tie them together with some musical ideas that would recur throughout and title the whole thing “Dead Man’s Pants.” This has real possibilities..

I read two letters from my deceased Dad yesterday on Father’s day.  I had asked my brother to pass them along because he mentioned that he had found copies of them in Dad’s papers.

The first one is dated Oct 17, 1969, the second Feb 17,1970.  Mark commented that he could see why my relationship with Dad was not a good one in these letters and that if he, Mark, had received them he would have found them upsetting.

Eileen read them yesterday and said they simply sounded like a worried father with a teen-age son.

I have no recollection of the letters or of the concerns Dad expresses in them.  I also didn’t think of my relationship with Dad as particularly troubled. He was a good conversationalist and I often looked forward to talks with him. But he did seem sometimes  to have difficultly expressing his intimate thoughts to me.

I do feel like a bit of a riddle as a personality when I think of my mother and father. Both were musicians of sorts. But I remember my childhood and young adulthood as one filled with music, books and poetry that was of interest solely to me and not my parents.  I guess that makes sense.

In the letters Dad does seem to be struggling with his lack of faith in me.  He seems to see me basically as wrong-headed and over influenced by a bad set of friends.  I think he felt guilty about leaving me in Flint and moving the rest of the family to Columbus in 1969. I one the other hand was exhilarated at the time.

Dad could have been right about the wrong-headedness. I was about to plunge into a bad marriage. But at the same time there were things at this time of my life that remain an important part of who I am (harpsichord, a critical eye on society, a willingness to be myself despite the difficulties it produces). Some of these Dad eventually accepted but others he seem to have difficulty accepting right up until his decline due to Lewy Body Dementia.

Most of this struggle went on inside of Dad or at least it never caught my attention as an adult.

It does explain a comment one of my uncles made to Dad when I began to assume responsibility for his and Mom’s care in their old age. Dad reported (bless his heart) that his brother had commented that since Steve was doing such a fine job of taking care of them that the family was probably wrong about me or that I had changed or something like that.

Another vote of confidence from the Jenkins clan for Steve.

But in truth I haven’t looked to my family for approval for a long time.

And I don’t have any significant conscious anger at my parents around any of the issues that seemed to trouble them so much.

Somehow I learned to look to myself (and for a time my younger brother) for thoughts and direction in my life.

I certainly made mistakes but I also take responsibility for them.

I do wonder why I am so different from the rest of the people in my family. In some ways I don’t think I am that different but in many ways I seem to be. I think it’s probably a logical combination of my DNA and the chances of the influence of life’s situations and experiences.

One thing I continue to notice in my life is how confusing I myself can be to many people I meet. Not always the case, but often enough for me to notice it.

I do remember with a smile when before he died, my Dad was surprised to find out that I did the bills  at my house. Dad continued to see me as the prodigal son, the undependable son, the reckless one until he gradually lost his mind. Judging from his report about my uncle this was a family perception as well. May still be.

I’m okay with it of course. In fact I often feel pretty lucky about my life.  I do think that having a passion in life (music, poetry, books and art) is a lucky thing.

I recently was talking with a couple of young people who also have passions and pointed out how lucky we were. I said that when I get up in the  morning I know what I am going to do each day.  I figured they did too. And all of us look forward to it.

When I first attended college to study music (around 1973?) , I was a composition major. The school was Ohio Weslyan. My keyboard skills were very meager. I had played keyboard in rock and roll type bands.

I owned my harpsichord then so I attempted to learn baroque pieces on it.

I remember saying that all the keyboard technique I really needed was to be able to play Bach’s Well Tempered Clavichord volumes.

This makes me smile now.  Ever since that time I have attempted to continue to improve my keyboard skills. I think of pounding away on scales and Hanon in the back room of the Jenkins Bookshop (started out as “Just Another Store”). This was after quitting Ohio Weslyan and leaving my first wife (and child).

Another growth spurt in my technique was my times at Wayne State and Notre Dame.

More recently when I quit my full time Roman Catholic church music job here in Holland Michigan (around 2000), I utilized my increased free time to improve my playing.

At this point, when I want to learn a harder piece I determine how deeply I want to get into it. The deeper I want to learn it and the more difficult it is, the more I slow my practicing of it. The goal is to rehearse it with as few mis-steps as possible. This usually works. And it opens up the idea that I can learn a lot of music that used to be inaccessible to me.

The Italian Concerto of Bach is a piece I have flailed away at for a long time.  I can see by my notes on it that I performed it at church in August of 2000. This must have been on the lovely Bluthner piano I helped purchase at the Roman Catholic church here in Holland. I’m pretty sure I didn’t perform it on my harpsichord.

But I did rehearse it for many years and not too successfully. Since then it’s one that I feel pretty comfortable playing. There are couple of sections I still find a bit challenging.

I am musing about my technique today because I put up in my status on Facebook yesterday that I was happy to be playing my harpsichord in my dining room. I even mentioned that I played through the Italian Concerto and some Platti.

Platti is a baroque Italian composer. I found a volume of his works in a used shop in Ann Arbor and quite enjoy playing through them. They remind me a bit of the great Domenico Scarlatti but that might just be the debt both owe to the Italianate style.

Anyway, two people from my past commented on my status. One from way back in my high school days about listening to me play piano at church camp (!). Church camp? I have no recollection of playing piano at church camps but I’m sure I probably did given half a chance and a piano.

The other from a wry woman I knew and admired in grad school commenting on the fact that she would very much like to be able to “play through” the Italian concerto.

I suspect both people of trying to encourage an old musician.

It worked. Heh.

I have been hosting my brother and his wife who have been visiting. Hence the lack of blog yesterday.

My brother helped me move the harpsichord from the church to my dining room.

As we were moving it, he mentioned recently finding a letter from my Dad to me chiding me for purchasing the harpsichord kit.

He promised to scan it and others in so I could read them.

My daughter Sarah has posted a couple of Youtube videos. I know I’m the Dad and everything but I think they are neat:

Today Mark and Leigh leave for home. I plan to grocery shop, practice organ and maybe do some composing and/or arranging for the Aug 5th gig. Picked up another player, Laurie Van Ark. She will do viola and vocals. She has a great voice and sings in my church choir.

Now that I have my harpsichord in the dining room, I need to get going on refurbishing the jacks. I called yesterday and asked about the strings I am using and the person at Zuckermann said that I have the right strings (I ordered them back in Feb) to restring. So I’m probably going to give the instrument as much of a refurbish as possible.

Hopefully it will be ready by Aug 5.

Got the wireles working late last night. Yesterday seemed to be a day of low energy for me. I was kind of grumpy and melancoly all day.

After Eileen left for work, I went over to church to pick out music for the weekend. I had hoped my bud, Jordan, would perform his Bach sonata at church this week but it was not to be. I chose a very abstract piece by William Albright called “Nocturne” for the prelude. I found it in a later edition of the Gleason organ textbook.

I notice that this U of M composer did not notate this piece very well. The hands tremolo through out creating a “marimba” like effect (the composer’s words). Though they are written with half notes their value is arbitray and follows placement over a strictly written pedal part. Very confusing. But once you figure it out it can be done. It just could have been a bit more player friendly.

For the postlude, I’m using a piece by a friend of mine, Bobby Hobby. It’s based on the melody of the closing hymn, “Joyful, joyful.” I actually looked Emma Lou Diemer’s setting but decided to do Bob’s instead. Diemer was all grumpy about an entry in a previous blog and I admit I might have had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth when I looked at her piece. Anyway, I know the Hobby and it’s a very pleasant end to a church service in my opinion.

The next week I am planning to play one of the Schubler chorales, “Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten” BWV 647 of Bach. I always hear this melody as “If thou but suffer God to guide thee,” since I have conducted several choral settings of it with that translation and it is translation of the hymn we will be singing that Sunday.

For the postlude I am seriously considering (and have been rehearsing) a loud section from Hindemith’s first organ sonata.

I received two packages in the mail yesterday. One from Comcast to set up the wireless. The setup was needlessly confusing. I didn’t have time to mess with it before the choir party. So Eileen and I came home and tried to get it working. I was exhausted from my day and had had a few glasses of wine at the party so I wasn’t at my sharpest (ahem).

Eileen began installing the new router and I helped. Eventually she got stumped and went to bed. The difficulty was the encryption stuff.

After she went to bed I turned off the encryption and the wireless worked fine. This is not the best set up but it will do until I decide to up the security.

The second package I received in the mail was the kit to refurbish the jacks on my old harpsichord. I haven’t opened the box yet but look forward to messing with it.

My second meeting with the priest and the children’s choir director was enlightening to me. I am beginning to understand this situation better. It is fraught with overtones from the local college but I did learn a lot more about the point of view of the children’s choir director and am hopeful we can work out some structure and collaboration this fall.

It was emotionally exhausting for me, however.

I now have several musicians committed to performing with me on August 5th at LeMonjellos.

People who have consented to be a musical “friend” of Steve Jenkins on August 5th at LeMonjellos.

This makes me very happy. I have a few more musicians in mind and have been talking with them about possibly joining us.

I’m hoping to plan a unique evening of very diverse music. From Mendelssohn to mayhem you might say.

I think I managed to program our new cable outfit to record a program for Eileen to watch in its entirety at her leisure. Seems to be very easy to do. Now to figure out how to set it up to do so weekly.

I have to do church stuff today. 2nd meeting with children’s choir director and priest. Hope it goes well. Probably going to begin to get to the nitty gritty today.

Need to pick a prelude and postlude. I was hoping my bud, Jordan, could play movements from the Bach sonata we have been rehearsing but he is going to be out of town.

Also way behind on picking hymns but don’t think I’ll get to that today.

Eileen and I went out to breakfast together yesterday at Panera and neither of us realized that it was our 35th wedding anniversary. Eileen later called and left a message on my cell wishing me a good one.

I remained at Panera studying the score of the first movement of the Mendelssohn D minor trio sonata my trio is learning. Score study is something I don’t see a lot of trained musicians doing. It’s one of those dots that rarely gets connected in many educational institutions.

A music student is asked to learn an instrument by way of lessons and is asked to learn music theory and analysis by way of multiple courses. But when I was in school it was the rare student who used his analysis to understand the pieces he was learning.

Conductors are encouraged to do score study. But again my experience of many college conductors is that not even they spend a great deal of time with the scores in preparation for rehearsal and performance. Instead they wing it with the score in front of them using their immediate skills and knowledge to interpret.

I hasten to add that many conductors do prepare scores. It’s the usual thing.

But winging it and giving the appearance of knowing what you are doing seems to be a skill encouraged and developed by being a college teacher.

Just my impression of course.

But instrumental and vocal performers are a different case.

I fear that learning notes and rhythms and dynamics and interp take up so much time that players learn to sort of ignore the nuts and bolts of the music of how the music is put together compositionally.

Having said that, I love to look at the nuts and bolts of music, the puzzle of how it is structured and thought up.

The Mendelssohn first movement mentioned above is a fascinating blend of structure and innovation that doesn’t draw too much attention to the fact that it is subtle and carefully worked out.

By the time I looked up at Panera yesterday at least an hour had passed. But I had cracked much of the code of the piece I was looking at.

This morning I got up and worked on understanding two parallel passages Mendelssohn uses to close off two important sections of the piece.  These two sections had already come to my attention as a performer since they involve some pretty treacherous exposed octave passages (very Mendelssohn) in the piano part.

I was interested to learn that Mendelssohn uses the material in the first instance to calm the piece into a restatement of the main them. In the second instance he extends and elaborates the same material but uses it to build to a climax. Very clever.

These are things one only learns sitting and carefully looking at the notes one is learning.

It is my suspicion that musicians are vaguely aware of form and motive and structure. One knows of course that one is playing a theme or repeating it whole or fragmented or other wise varied.

But I wasn’t sure in this piece (still trying to figure out actually) if Mendelssohn was using the structure that Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn used so much in many of the first movements to their symphonies and sonatas.

This is sometimes called Sonata Allegro form and involves a 3 section piece.

In the three composers mentioned above, these sections are pretty easy to see. Often they are marked off with major repeats.

Section 1 is usually repeated. In it you have the main themes that close off out of the main key.

Section 2 “develops” material. Depending upon the composer this material can be new, derivative, fragmented…. whatever. Haydn liked to use the main theme here again but in devious and clever variations.

Section 2 builds to a restatement of the main theme which then closes off in the home key usually using material from the latter part of section 1.

If it sounds a bit vague, it actually is. But one can lift the veil so to speak and pretty easily see what Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven are up to.

Mendelssohn was writing just after Beethoven’s death and was extremely well informed about how previous composers made their music.

Like Brahms he became both more structurally innovative but releasing more intense romantic emotion via these very disciplined and clearly worked out variations on the forms of the past.

All this said, I’m not 100 % sure that Mendelssohn used this form in this movement.  But it looks like he may have but of course made it not only his own but quite beautiful.  Wikipedia confidently asserts he did use this form. But just as confidently asserts that the development section is in the home key and uses both themes from the first section.

This makes it dubious that it is functioning in quite the same way as the classic development section (usually a push away from the home key).

Hey but what do I know?

Today I plan to take a day off.  First one in a while.  Yesterday’s service went pretty smoothly. I played the Parry postlude pretty well.  The violin teacher from Hope(less) college chatted me up at the coffee hour.  I have a sneaky suspicion I have aroused his pity somehow.

Eileen was ill. She volunteered Saturday at the Children’s Garden at the library and once again no patrons showed up to help. She came home and went to bed and has pretty much stayed there all weekend with a sore throat.

I checked on Mom and half-heartedly volunteered to take her for a ride or something. She also took pity on me and declined. She is looking a bit better every day. Depression does cycle. We agreed to do lunch today.

Before church, I treadmilled to some videos.

This one is very interesting. 6 ways we look at time and what it does to our lives….

I like what David Byrne says in this video about how rooms affect the basic notions of what kind of music we compose and make….

Finally, daughter Elizabeth turned me on to Johana Blakely’s synopsis of what the relatively copyright free fashion industry can teach other industries bogged down in intellectual prop protection.

I spent some time with Mendelssohn and Brahms at the piano yesterday. Then did some reading.

Besides reading in Mao: the unknown story by Change and Halliday and The Doctor is Sick by Burgess, I read in the New Yorker Summer Fiction issue.  I especially liked “Dayward” by Z. Z. Packard. The theme for this issue is “20 under 40”. A few of the stories are online.

Finally Eileen came downstairs to Farmville on the mainframe (no wireless…. makes me crazy) and then joined me watching “A Time to Kill” on our new stupid cable tv.

I read this book years ago but never saw the movie. It’s Grisham’s first. I remember being so shocked when the main lawyer character, Jake Bergance, has a moment of undiluted pleasure when he realizes the case will thrust him into the spotlight and most of all TV coverage.

I couldn’t understand how anyone would look forward to that. Still don’t, for that matter.

I neglected to go practice organ yesterday afternoon. I have in mind performing one of the Schubler for the prelude next week and a loud section from the Hindemith first organ sonata for the postlude.

I desperately need to get back to doing some writing and contacting musicians for the August fifth gig.  Time marches on.

TV doesn’t seemed to have changed much since I last looked.  It’s still a bit addictive and dopey.  It still sucks up life like a sponge. I know. I know. I allow it do that. I like to think that right now it’s just the novelty of having it back in the house that causes me to turn it on.

Yesterday I figure I watched several hours of TV including 40 minutes on the treadmill.

I watched Myrlie Williams, Medger Evers widow, talk about his life plugging the book she helped edit, The Autobiography Of Medgar Evers: A Hero’s Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches (link to video).

I watched Jay Wexler wittily talk about his book and the supreme court. Very cool. He clerked for Justice Bader and is a gentle atheist interested in the topic of separation of church and state. Definitely worth watching.  (link to this video)

Finally Eileen and I watched most of “Up” last night. I have been vaguely interested in seeing it. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood but I didn’t like it all that much. Surprising.

Also, I rilly rilly miss my netbook wireless connection.

It was so nice to turn over in bed and kick on the internet and look up a word or a reference in something I was reading or thinking about.  I hope I can get this up and running again. It was so convenient and actually contributed to my ongoing learning such as it is.

I was amused to see that the composer, Emma Lou Diemer, left a comment on one of my old blog posts.

I had linked in to her website. I suspect her webmaster either responded on his/her own or pointed it out to her and one of them responded. Her comment doesn’t seem to directly relate to my comments about her music. She responds to my observations about her reputation among musical snobs as though it were my own opinion. She suggests I check out more of her music. After I had described the piece I was playing by her in laudable terms. Plus I have taken the trouble to learn several of her pieces, a few of which are of the highest standards. Usually a composer knows their own work well enough to recognize a gambit of achievement. But maybe not. Maybe Diemer is just as thin skinned and narrow as the rest of us dang church musicians.

Interestingly, I find that some church music composers I have spoken with seem to almost be angry with people like me (little people that is) who learn their music and perform it to the best of our meager ability on less than stellar instruments in our parishes.

I heard a friend of mine bitterly complain that so many people perform his music at workshops without preparing them well enough. No sympathy there.

I emailed David Hurd recently requesting permission to register a piece of his a bit differently than his original composition. I did this mostly out of the novelty of being able to appropriately contact a composer via email (That way he/she can ignore or respond). Also I was trying to be respectful of his intentions and courteous.

He emailed me back suggesting I not use the piece and perform a different piece of his. Which I did. Which meant that one of his piece received on less public airing (no big deal to him I’m sure). His suggestion was a good one. But unfortunately it meant that I would be repeating one of his pieces I had performed before at my church something I try not to do much of.

I have been giving thought to some composing for my August gig. I keep fantasizing about having a group of musicians playing strings, saxes, oboe, mallet instruments, harpsichord, and piano.

I think it would be fun to write at least one piece for the entire group. This means getting some commitments from musicians. So far I have three commitments from three very fine players (violin, cello, sax). Trying to build up my courage to ask some other players that I know find me a bit intense or dopey or something.

So I’m sitting at my desktop in the living room instead of my netbook at the kitchen table. Last night Eileen was forced to Farmville on the desktop as she watched old episodes of NCIS on our “new” cable tv.

So our wireless is hopefully only temporarily gone.  And of course a harder look at the upcoming change in bills reminded me that I was forgetting that it would include not only the base price but extra things like taxes effectively increasing the amount we were paying before (from $90 for internet and phone to more like $110).

The technician attempted to run the internet through my wireless mobile bless his heart. He seemed to know what he was doing and was unable to get the modem I own to work with Comcast’s modem that brings the tv and internet into the house.  I ordered a “free” modem installation kit from Comcast (S & H $9.99. Hmmm.). I hope it works out so that I can have my wireless service back.

Come to think of it we just lost our TMobile Hotspot (running Eileen’s cell through the internet because otherwise we get bad reception in the house. My cell is not rigged for it.)

Oh well. Eileen has her TV and it does look like it won’t be too hard to “DVR” it (that is, record tv shows she wants to watch and watch later). And Comcast does test out on my desktop at about 12x faster than TDS. Of course my computers are still as slow as they were before.

Eileen was not keen on the TV upgrade. But I know that she enjoys watching and finds it relaxing after a long day at work (like hopefully she did last night). So I insisted we upgrade her access.

Of course I do hate tv.

I also hate the fact that now I will watch more. The 20th century is sucking me back in.  No wireless. Desktop computer. And teeveeeeee.

I also ordered a jack conversion kit for my harpsichord yesterday. My house is a total wreck (and has been since I dragged my parents here to live in 2007). I’m not sure where I will be able to work on this project. The house is full of stuff that could be discarded. Most of it needs to be sorted. If I could toss a bunch of stuff and clear out a room on the ground floor it would be a great place to work on the harpsichord. However I’m not sure this is going to happen.

I did manage to treadmill, take Mom for a drive, and practice organ yesterday.  I also prepared a draft of the tool my boss will use in her next meeting with me, the children’s choir director and herself. That took a couple of hours.

Sheesh.

I had a very pleasant day yesterday. I had nice chats with my niece Emily and her fiancée Jeremy Bastien.

Emily is multi-talented woman whose many interests and skills include a passion for all things equestrian (she is a teacher and owns several horses), weaving, animals, growing things and music.

Jeremy is a highly-skilled artist who is pursuing a career in comix and is the author of a series of excellent books called Cursed Pirate Girl.

Then in the evening, Eileen and I had another pub supper outside with a friend, Roger Jerry. Roger is someone I met at church and share interests with. He is soon to move away and I thought I would like at least one relaxed conversation with him before he left. It was delightful and fascinating.

Wow. All of this contradicts my self-image as introverted non-social geeky musician internet guy.

In between I managed to check on Mom, do some practicing and a wee bit of composing.  Plus a lovely rehearsal with my piano trio.

As I said, a relaxing day.

I am beginning to think about my annual coffee house gig. Shared a bit with the trio yesterday and they seem very amused and interested. I would like to involve several musicians. I have my eye on a gambit of people.

Also I plan to order the jack kit for my harpsichord today. I would dearly like to refurbish my jacks and  use the harpsichord at my coffee house gig  as well.

It would be fun to do an evening of all kinds of music that I love and make. So besides Mendelssohn and maybe a Loiellet trio sonata movement, I would like to some of my old and recent compositions. A lot depends upon who I can convince to play and how much rehearsal I can get from them.

On top of all this good stuff in my life, my blood pressure seems to have dropped in the last couple of readings. Naive to think that my new drug is already working with three doses, but still encouraging when I think I have had two martinis and two beers during this period.

The doctor added hydrochlorothiazide (a water pill) to my daily dose of valsartan. I was expecting a switch to a different class of drugs but maybe this will work. He said should show evidence of working within a week. Of course my BP readings were a bit lower today.

He also assured me (when asked) that I have not been diagnosed with cardio vascular disease. That’s nice. I have an enlarged heart (have known this for years) but  in addition I have some thickening of the heart muscle which indicates the heart is working too hard. Hence the  need to keep the BP down.

My conversation with Jordan yesterday was fun. We were both a bit distracted to play so we just did a lot of shop talk. He showed me a piece he is writing. Before that we discussed the question what makes a “good” melody. I showed him some church musician resources which talk about melody in terms of hymn tunes. It’s kind of goofy but I have found these ideas helpful. I showed him the “mysterious ways” hymn tune from this past Sunday as an example of a weirdly (and hence harder to sing) hymn tune.

Then I showed him the elegant tune HYFRYDOL which consists of five notes until the final phrase where it ascends once to a sixth higher note and then quickly comes to a conclusion. It is an amazing melody to me since it uses such slight materials and can create a magnificent effect when sung by a congregation.

After Jordan and I had lunch at the pub, he took off and I went over to see Mom. I was gratified to see her sitting at the Bride Show in the Gathering Room of the place she lives. She still is fighting the depression. But she is fighting and in what seems to me in a bit of a heroic way.

She told me later the Bride Show consisted in elderly women (probably mostly widows) showing off their wedding dresses and presumably sharing wedding stories. There is something poignant about this to me.  It’s probably therapeutic for the participants. At least I hope it is.

I did manage to get some organ practice in yesterday. I snuck it in early before the weekly Eucharist and then got back later for a bit more. As I was reading a new piece by David Hurd, a parishioner came over and starting listening and then asked questions about it when I stopped. Before we were through I was explaining the metrical index to him in the Hymnal. I like chatting like that.

I had my weekly meeting with my boss yesterday. I think we both look forward to this meeting. (At the end of yesterday she told me that she had had fun in our talk once again.) I think what is happening that is fun for both of us is to sort of talk shop (like I do in music with Jordan) about church and church music.

We decided to continue course in our discussions this summer about the music program with the children’s choir director. I am to prepare another series of quotes and questions to spark further conversation at our next meeting. This meeting will cover ferreting out each of our professional motivations in our work at Grace. I have some ideas about how to make this tool. I only hope that it will be constructive and helpful.

Right after the meeting, Eileen came home from work and we walked down and I had a second meal at the local faux Irish pub. It was a lovely windy summer evening. Very very relaxing.

My niece and her fiancee were arriving later that night so we left the door open for them and made sure there were clean sheets on their bed.

Pretty relaxing day. Probably makes a bit of a boring post, but there you are.