Eileen and I managed to accomplish several onerous tasks yesterday. We had designated my Tuesday off as “bank day” (my coinage). We had an appointment at 11 with a investment banker. From him we learned that investing only $3,000 would end up costing us instead of making us money. Since the whole point of investing was to lower last year’s income, we decided to simply open an IRA savings account in Eileen’s name.

Which we did.

This inspired Eileen to come home and basically finish our taxes. On the way  home we stopped off at Mom’s bank to inquire whether the credit card they sent me in the mail incurred fees when it was used to debit her checking. It does not. Recently her Discover card didn’t work because she (I) was behind in paying the monthly minimum. I was pretty frustrated when this happened because the day it happened, I had received an email reminder of an upcoming minimum payment with no (!) mention of an outstanding over due amount. They just stopped the card. When I paid this, I emailed Discover that this inconvenience convinced me to consider not using my (Mom’s) Discover card. So having an alternate way to pay some of Mom’s out of pocket expenses with a card that draws on her checking is a very good thing.

While Eileen buried herself in our taxes, I had rising anxiety because we had an afternoon appointment with a tax consultant to begin work on my Mom’s taxes. Eileen finished in time to help me prepare for our meeting with Mom’s tax consultant.

By the time we had all this done, I only had energy to rehearse my latest version of my transcription of Holst’s “March” which I have been working on.  I have decided to wait and post copies of this transcription after I’m reasonably sure they are in the shape I want them.

I’ll probably do so tomorrow.

With Misattributed Constable Masterpiece, a Rare Look Into the Imprecise World of Art Identification

I love these stories. I also like Constable and decided to use his painting as my desktop background for a while.

Move Over Mao: Beloved ‘Papa Xi’ Awes China – NYTimes.com

After having read a bio of Mao and visited China a couple times I read a news story like this with interest.

I slept in late this morning (Thank God!) and then used up my usual blog time editing a final version of my organ transcription of Holst’s “March” from his “Second Suite for Military Band.” I am working on getting two final version of this piece finished, one larger score and one reduced with some repeats. I have simultaneously seriously rehearsed what I have at the organ. This is a bit tricky. My teacher, Ray Ferguson, taught me to work from reduced scores and clever page turn tricks, but made it clear that this needed to come at a certain point in the learning of the piece, namely late enough in the process that one knows the notes and early enough to get used to how one has laid it out so that one can play the whole piece without significant page turns.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of this kind of extended process since I’m playing the piece in public Sunday.

I plan to both the larger eleven page score and the smaller four page score online here when I get it done.

I’m sitting with Eileen right now in Panera. We had very good news this morning. My brother and his wife signed a deal on a house near Ann Arbor yesterday.

It’s in Gregory, Michigan. For all appearances, it is their dream home: acreage with access to woods and a stream, an old lovely house recently restored and high speed internet available. I couldn’t be happier for them. Very very very cool.

I think they will be ensconced there by May. Yay!

Another Monday with a lot on my plate. Besides the usual ballet classes, I have to prep for a presentation I am giving this evening for the St. Mary’s Guild at Grace. I haven’t thought much about this presentation. They made no specific requests. So I’m planning to mostly sing hymns from Lift Every Voice and Sing and the Hymnal 1982. In between I will talk about Gregorian Chant and teach Anglican chant.

We have been singing the psalm in worship at Grace to Anglican chant for over a year. One of the members of this guild mentioned to me that she doesn’t sing the psalm because the tune changes every week. Maybe I can help with this some tonight. We’ll see.

Tomorrow I am meeting again with the tax accountant, this time for my Mom’s taxes. I have already spent several hours prepping for this and am still woefully unprepared. I am planning to spend time on this tomorrow.

In between classes today, I plan to finish a draft of next Sunday’s postlude, my transcription of Holst’s “March” from his Second Suite for Military Band. I managed to get  all the notes into a Finale doc yesterday, print it up, and play through it at the organ. There is one note in the condensed score I doubt. When I work on it today, I want to double check that particular note (it’s in the bass) with the full score which I’m pretty sure is online.

I want to leave the house in about 45 minutes or so. I have already done dishes, made coffee, read Greek and MacCulloch this morning.

Yesterday in his homily, Christian used the Greek words: kenosis (emptying) and theosis (divinization). I misheard the first one as gnosis (knowledge).  Coincidentally I had been reading about theosis that morning in my MacCulloch. After church, I told him that gnosis meant knowledge not emptying (kenosis). I was happy that he was able to point out to me that he had been using a different word. A choir member standing nearby pointed out that as a choir director I insist on crisp “k” sounds like the one in kenosis. Ha ha.

I was surprised when Christian said that he had not studied Greek. Apparently they alternate Greek and Hebrew at the Seminary he attended and he had a year of Hebrew but no Greek.

The choir member (who is a Methodist Minister) piped  up that Greek was no longer a requirement these days.

This figures. Off to the races.

The time change has shortened the time I have available for blogging this morning.

This might be a good time to share a little story my Mom recently told me about the time she first met my Dad’s parents. It’s a well known story to me that my Dad’s mom wasn’t very happy that he had chosen my Mom for his wife. Dorothy (my Dad’s mom) expressed this disappointment directly to  Mary (my mom) when she met her. I can picture my grandmother’s mouth pursed and her saying in a slightly whiny voice, “Oooh, and we had somebody else picked out for Paul.”

So that’s one I have heard Mom tell more than once. But recently when she told it she added the face that at the breakfast table the next morning she found Ben, my Dad’s dad, sitting in front of a place with a piece of toast on it. He apparently jauntily held it out to and observed that was he “toasting” her.

Get it?

There’s the added fun that Ben (like almost all people in the “Churchagod”) was a teetotaler.

Anyway here’s a couple of links.

Ancient Mars Had an Ocean, Scientists Say – NYTimes.com

I know I mentioned this yesterday but I didn’t link it. I love this sort of thing. This morning while I cleaned the kitchen, I listened to Holst’s “The Planets” which begins with “Mars.”

‘The Events’ Uses Local Choirs for Vocals, Minus a Script – NYTimes.com

I think people in volunteer choirs are some of the most tolerant people I have known. This story reminds me of when a country singer named Laurie Morgan came to Muskegon. Somehow my little Roman Catholic choir got roped into being her back up choir for a religious number. It was a surreal experience. Also my daughters and some other kids from the church appeared with Morgan on stage as sort of human props. Weird shit.

Finished reading Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas this morning. While reading these poems, for most of them I have also read William Tindall’s elucidating comments on each poem. Lots of fun.

I don’t think I’m quite ready to leave Thomas. I want to read all of his prose as well as his letters and probably an updated bio at some point. I read the introduction to my copy of his collected letters this morning.

The scholarship is dated I’m sure, as she mentions that she has omitted letters that might embarrass living people. The book was published in 1967 and a quick google reveals more recent selections of Thomas’s letters.

But I like my old edition at this point since I have it in my hands.

My edition seems to be a United Kingdom edition. I may have even bought it there on one of my trips.

I thought I would read all the Thomas I own before buying more of what he wrote, new bios of him and other collections of his letters (of which there are many).

I reorganized my Mom’s bills yesterday and began preparing to meet with her tax accountant next Tuesday. I decided to reorganize when I could easily lay my hands on last year’s tax returns. Now I can.

I finished up another sections of my transcription of “March” from Second Suite from Military Band by Holst yesterday. I printed up what I have done and rehearsed it yesterday. I won’t be able to play it nearly as fast as any recording I have heard recently. I have chosen to put the bass parts in the pedal (naturally) and they do move along in places.

Yesterday I decided which feet will play which note and marked this on the music. We organists call this “pedaling.”

Eileen and I have a lovely evening out last night. My friend Rhonda and her husband met us at a restaurant for dinner. Then we went to Dance 41, the annual Hope College Dance recital. They’ve been giving a winter recital for 41 years and change the title each year to reflect this.

Today  I need to keep working on prepping for Mom’s taxes and prepare for tomorrow’s church stuff.

A Little Tech Talk

I have been struggling with the online presence of the New York Times for many years. I used to subscribe to the actual paper paper when there was no way to subscribe online because it was free.

Then when a subscription that was solely online became available I switched to that.

But how they are constantly upgrading and expanding how one can access the paper. Their latest innovation is sort of an online app. The URL doesn’t change from article to article. This defeats my bookmarking certain articles so I have been opening up another access they call “Today’s Paper” in order to book mark articles  I find in the app.

Yesterday I noticed that at the bottom of each article in the app, there was a url.

I don’t know how long that has been an option, but I saved an article I wanted to save two ways: one by right clicking on the app url which gave me the option to open that specific article in a tab (thus saving a step) and the other from the “Today’s Paper” access.

This morning I looked at the urls and discovered that the one from the app is a bit cleaner.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/science/mars-had-an-ocean-scientists-say-pointing-to-new-data.html

vs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/science/mars-had-an-ocean-scientists-say-pointing-to-new-data.html?ref=todayspaper

How bout that?

When I was in high school, I played cornet in the wind ensemble. One of the pieces we learned has stuck with me over the years: Second Suite in F Major by Gustav Holst.

I still like this piece. I like the theme of the March, the ascending five notes and have used the beginning figuration many times over the years in improvs at church.

I was making hummus yesterday and put on my Holst playlist on Spotify. It starts with “Mars” from “The Planets” which i quite like and then moves on to this suite.

We are singing the hoary old choral anthem, “God so loved the world,” by John Stainer a week from Sunday. The gospel reading is John 3:16. There are several anthems based on this text, but this year I chose this one. Choir directors like myself are not in love with this piece, but choirs enjoy learning and singing it.

When we do it, I think of choirs in the Church of God I have heard sing it. It reminds me of my Dad.

I was trying to think of a good postlude that might match this eccentric anthem.

Then I remembered the Holst Suite March. Sure enough, I had printed out a condensed score version of it I found online (link to pdf).

I took it with me when I went to church to practice organ yesterday. I played through it a couple of times and quickly decided it would be my postlude for next Sunday.

I got started on putting it in Finale yesterday.

As far as I can tell, the copyright on this is old enough (1922) that I can share this here when I get it done.

Ebooks are convenient for reading fiction. But when reading, non-fiction with many footnotes and cross-refers via page numbers, my experience is that the ebook as presently designed fails.

I recently ordered a hard copy of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I have read this book in an ebook version. I was able to access footnotes in that version. But MacCulloch does a lot of cross-referring by page number in the text. My Kindle book did not have corresponding page numbers so I was unable to check these references.

I am now reading MacCulloch’s Silence: A Christian History.  I purchased a hard copy of this book to read. In reading it, I have become aware of the elegant web of MacCulloch’s scholarly thought at he cross-refers in this book not only to itself but to his larger history, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

When I discovered a used paperback version of his history, I jumped at the chance to purchase it. Yesterday I spent my allotted time for reading MacCulloch going back and forth between the two books, expanding my understanding of his observations and history.

I am seriously considering re-reading the history after finishing MacCulloch’s book on silence. I think MacCulloch has an amazing mind. It is a privilege to come in contact with it via these books and others by him I have read.

I wrestle with the concept of Christianity. MacCulloch has coined a phrase in regards to his own relationship with Christianity saying that he, a man called to the priesthood of the Anglican church as his own father was but rejected because of his candor about his sexuality, is a “friend of Christianity.”

This week, particularly discouraged by the incoherence of theology at my church, I told Eileen that I was more of an “acquaintance of Christianity.”

However, I confessed to my boss yesterday my interest in all this shit, shaking my head and feeling dopey as usual.

My day yesterday was exhausting physically and emotionally. Improvising for three and a half hours of ballet class can be draining, especially when I try to put as much art in my work as possible. In addition to the improvising I worked with the young dancers developing their own choreography for the two tunes I wrote. I showed the B section of the piece I have dubbed “Sweet Talk but with a dark side” to one of the two dancers who are developing a dance for it. I could tell she was moved by my piece, an extraordinary compliment.

Later I sat with my boss (and friend) as she described her anger and bewilderment of the treatment of her life partner by Hope College. Her partner who has recently come out of the closet at work had been told that she would receive tenure when she returned from her present sabbatical. This offer has been summarily withdrawn (this is probably not even legal, much less moral or fair). Plus the people who told her this also apparently made bullying and threatening comments about my boss and Grace church.

Unfortunately both my boss and I can draw a clear line from the theology of the majority of the Dutch Reformed church to these outrages.  More reasons to be an “acquaintance” of Christianity even as I spend the quiet of my morning reading MacCulloch and continue to respect and admire my boss the priest.

I’m feeling pressed this morning as usual. I have set Wednesdays as the day I try to get my church stuff up to speed. Today this means choosing a new psalm tone for Sunday because my boss decided it’s too hard as well as preparing the psalm and bulletin info for the following Sunday. I’m working on learning the new church software (RiteStuff 2.0) which may end up making some of my tasks simpler. But I’m not there yet.

Yesterday was a fruitful day for putting Eileen’s mind at rest. We spent 40 minutes with a tax accountant recommended by my Mom’s estate lawyer. She was very complimentary of Eileen’s work. I think this helped Eileen almost as much as resolving our crisis.

For what it’s worth, it turns out if you are paying for your own insurance there is a huge tax credit available, that we were not taking advantage of. This brought our taxes way down. We are electing to put some money in an IRA anyway to lower our income in an attempt to keep our subsidy for our insurance this and last year.

Of course our problem number two is that the “Marketplace” (the national organization of the Affordable Care Act) is doubling billing us for two policies. They have promised to resolve this in thirty days about thirty days ago. This will make a big difference in our finances. We are waiting to see what they come up with.

So it looks like my marimba piece is going to be performed after all. The previous player backed out so my friend Rhonda found another player. This dude rightly wants to be paid to play. It comes at a hard time for us, but we are splitting his fee with Rhonda.

I hate to see her paying out of pocket at all. If I were sitting just a tad better I would want to pay it all. I have been fighting my whole life for fair pay for musicians. I wasn’t all that happy that my piece was going to be performed gratis anyway. But I figured it was the business of Rhonda and her church.

I think Holland is a pretty hostile economic place for musicians. When I came in 87 not many church musicians were getting paid that well if at all by their church. The local funeral homes were paying $30 a funeral, an amount that had not changed for decades. When the local coffee shop began running music, he didn’t pay musicians. It’s ironic that at a time when popular music is such a money maker, musicians on the ground where I am struggle to make a living. But that’s life I guess.

Rev. Malcolm Boyd, an Author, Activist and Counterculture Rebel, Dies at 91 – NYT

Malcolm Body was a big influence on me. I know he’s kind of corny, but I read his prayers as a kid and listened to him read them on record over Charlie Byrd’s guitar improvs. I may even still have the vinyl somewhere. I definitely have his book of prayers.

Leaving and Cleaving – NYTimes.com

Leaving people alone who no longer want contact with me is something I try to do. I have a list of people that I care about that no longer return calls. It’s sad, but I’m cool with it.

8 ways Obamacare has proved its critics wrong – Vox
This is why Obamacare political malpractice must stop now

These probably strike my conservative Republican readers as biased. However I think that there is a lot of deliberate misinformation surrounding Obamacare.

Ghanaian Spinach Stew With Sweet Plantains Recipe – NYT Cooking

This recipe looks good to me.

‘Moth Orchids’ – NYTimes.com

The NYT poem of the week from its mag. I like it.

Every once in a while, I go over to the Writer’s Almanac, read the poem for the day and glance over what happened is history on this date. Yesterday I was very discouraged to discover that the little phrase that Keillor uses at the end of the show, “Be Well, Do Good Work and Keep in Touch” is actually trademarked.

I suppose I’m violating trademark by using it here, although it feels like fair use.

Speaking of fair use, at last night’s AGO meeting one member was buttering up another. The butterer was complimenting the butteree on a service he attended at the church Sunday. He saved some bulletins which he shared and suggested that we (the local AGO) keep a directory of local program and services bulletins on our website. The member being buttered up told him he would send him a PDF. I spoke up and asked if he would send one to me to share on Facebooger.

He refused saying he didn’t want quite that much exposure. He felt that there were copyright issues (which there are of course since he probably reproduced music under copyright). The butterer chimed in and said that putting these up on the chapter’s website is more like fair use or educational use.

He’s a teacher and he probably knows better because once its online it’s in violation of copyright no matter where it is.

But I quickly acquiesced. No problemo.

After the meeting the presenter said to me that he hoped I wouldn’t put pictures up of him on Facebook. I told him I had already shared a picture. When I showed it to him, he was horrified. I told him I would take it down. Again, no problemo.

I realized that I was probably the only person in the room who uses Facebooger at all. I sort of maintain the chapter Facebook page. We have more people in that group on Facebook than we have in our chapter, since I invite all sorts of interested people to be part of it.

I see sharing of information and ideas as fundamental. I also love the way the Interwebs does this. I get a tad discouraged when I see this not being taken advantage of, but in the final analysis, I’m mostly happy to do so myself.

Take this morning for instance. Having read where Vierne dedicated his Suite Bourguignonne, a piano piece to a student of his, my curiosity was piqued. In a matter of seconds I was inspecting the entire score online.

Earlier I had been intrigued quotes from two books used by Kent Greenfield at the beginning of a chapter in his book, The Myth of Choice.

We don’t live in a world that suffers from doubt, but one that suffers from certainty, false certainties that compensate for the well of worldly anxieties and worries.

Les Back, The Art of Listening

I liked that and interlibrary loaned the book this morning.

There was a second quote.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

Tom Perrotta, Little Children

I kind of liked that one too.

It’s sitting on the shelf at the local library. I will probably pick it up soon to look at.

I should probably explain today’s title since it didn’t make that much sense to Eileen when I read it to her. I find myself about equally disinterested in local Dutch Reformed civic stuff and local Dutch Reformed college stuff.

Usually you can go with one or the other, town or gown, the city or the college. In this case, I have one colleague locally (Hello again Rhonda if you’re reading) and a few sympathetic dance teachers at the college.

What I really depend on is the internet to keep the old brain cells working and the morale reasonably good.

I do wonder if the internet should just happen to crash (Heartbleed), having all this access to information will motivate me to continue seeking out answers even without the internet.

Hey. It could happen.

By the way, I did get the presenter’s sort of permission to post a “discrete” pic of him on Facebook. Now all I have to do is work up the motivation to fuck with it at all.

Another by the way, Eileen is beginning to smile a bit more after talking to her CPA brother. It does look like there’s probably a way out of our most recent crisis.

Once again a Monday morning and I don’t have much time to blog. It looks like this is going to be a week where I do a lot of pretending to be a grown up. I have to untangle some billing and insurance for my Mom’s recent stay at a local full care place. I have been getting mail, calls and bills from them. They don’t seem to have had enough insurance information even though I gave it to them at the time. I’m hoping to clear this up this week.

Also, my younger smarter brother, Mark, called yesterday with a brilliant idea about our insurance crisis. He pointed out that one can reduce last year’s income by investing in an IRA account before April 15. The tricky part will be if this reduces our income at the correct stage on our tax form thereby restoring our eligibility for a substantial subsidy (Thank you, Mark!).

I also need to get moving on my Mom’s taxes which will be more complicated this time since she sold her house last year.

Oy. It’s ironic that all this falls on my plate since I basically am a bum and do not believe in money. As Herbie my hero says, “I know mostly about lollipops.”

Did Israel Put Money Over Justice? – NYTimes.com

Interesting convoluted story of one Israeli couple that is pissed at Netanyahu.

How We Learned to Kill – NYTimes.com

The author is a marine who thinks clearly and writes well about this subject.

In his book, The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits, Kent Greenfield describes how our choices and judgments are not nearly as controlled as we think. For example, I think the “echo chamber effect” which I try to minimize, can be seen in Greenfield’s concept, “motivated reasoning,” by which he means “scrutinizing ideas we disagree with more than those we agree with.”

That one’s pretty obvious.

We also exhibit “mental contamination”: the influence on judgment by unrelated but recent or nearby facts.

This last one is pretty funny. He quotes from a study where people are asked to guess the number of countries in Africa. But before they are asked, they spin a roulette wheel. The number that comes up influences whether they will guess a higher or lower number just because it was recently noticed.

At the end of chapter three, Greenfield writes

Parts of our brains are highly sophisticated, but other parts are still prehistoric. Our brains make mistakes, are easily fooled, and have tendencies to make us think, react, and feel a certain way. We routinely misremember the past and make horrible predictions about the future. In the phrasing of Dan Ariely, we are ‘predictably irrational,’ with our minds playing tricks on us all the time.

What’s worse, we usually do not recognize these tendencies in ourselves, which leaves us open to manipulation.

I feel like this vindicates some of my own tendency to doubt myself as I often do, turning over possibilities in my head. Chapters 7-9 in this book are in a section entitled “What to do.” Greenfield not only is teaching how choice works, but apparently will propose strategies for more personal responsibility in the light of this brain science.

Cool.

I finished drafts of B sections of my ballet music yesterday. I spent the morning working on it. In the afternoon I had auditions and a funeral all of which went okay. Unfortunately by the time I had a chance to practice for today, I was pretty exhausted. But I did get some in.

I’m hoping you can access my music with these links. I would appreciate it if someone would let me know if they don’t work. Google has once again changed how Google drive works. It’s not entirely clear to me if I can now make permanent URLs of music as I was doing.

Anyway, click on the music to go to what I hope is a PDF of it. You will notice an absence of tempo marking, dynamics and articulations. These are my working drafts to learn and begin performing tomorrow. I will add details as I evolve them, learning to play them.

When I’m satisfied with them I will further edit them and add them to my free mostly original sheet music page.