Thursday found me in a post triduum despondency. I consoled myself at my old piano at home with Bach and Couperin, mostly the latter. Glenn Gould has pretty much convinced me that the piano is a superior instrument to render baroque keyboard music. Despite that, I miss the harpsichord.

I played many pieces by Couperin yesterday. I love this music.

It requires a different kind of effort on the piano. On the harpsichord, the realizing of French baroque techniques and ornaments come very easily. When I spent time on a good French double harpsichord (one with two manuals) I discovered the old adage that the instruments teach you.

It helps me play the music on the piano with some stylistic discernment. It probably would sound weird to purists but at least I get to play music I love.

It’s also fun when I’m not quite sure when to apply which technique (“Equal notes or unwritten unequal notes?” “Which style of unequal notes?” and so on) I can pull up multiple recordings of performers and see what they decided to do. Yesterday I spent some time with Kenneth Gilbert’s recordings (link to long video of his recording of Book four of Couperin’s Orders). I didn’t always decide to do what Gilbert did. My teacher Ray Ferguson was a student of Gilbert and I remember attending a master class Gilbert gave. Gilbert is a premiere performer and editor of French Baroque keyboard masters. He has also done a beautiful  edition of Scarlatti’s keyboard essercizi.

I couldn’t face the National Pastoral Musicians dinner to which I had been invited due to the fact that I was the director of this organization locally for a while. Easter week is not a good time for me and church anyway. I rarely see or hear from my Roman Catholic colleagues. Last year I attended this dinner with Eileen. None of my dear friends were there. In addition to this, the Roman Catholic church has moved further to the right both in its morality and worship since I worked there. it’s hard enough for me to reconcile working for the Episcopal church, much less a church that doesn’t recognize women as full humans and insists on a celibate priesthood (just to name a couple of the aspects that trouble me).

Mostly I keep asking myself as why do I care so much about church? Eileen says its in my blood. I tell her that doesn’t cheer me up much. Yesterday I observed to her that I would never have predicted that at the age of 63 I would still be so connected to church work.

Eileen has been terminally cheerful since she has found a new loom to purchase. They will be delivering it this morning. On Wednesday night she was so excited she slept badly. I’m hoping she slept better last night (she’s not away as I write).

We make an odd pair: her elated,

me despondent.

Francois Couperin IV Book of Harpsichord,Kenneth Gilbert – YouTube

In case you missed the link above I put this here. I made an exercise playlist on Spotify yesterday that consisted of alternating pieces of Couperin (one Bach) and rock and roll that I like (Tv on the Radio, Living Color, the James Gang). It helped.

Bach: A Passionate Life – YouTube

I read Gardiner’s wonderful book on Bach this summer. I have watched about ten minutes of this video. Although it too is done by Gardiner, It doesn’t seem as good as the book. But I’ll probably finish it at some time.

This leads me to the further observation that where oral transmission of TV news and Radio news I have become a very grumpy old man. Even though I sometimes watch PBS news hour and listen to NPR news reports, I still find myself noticing how BAD they are, omitting basic “who, what, when, where” facts routinely and choosing the inane to report on instead of the many important things that are happening in and to our country and in and around the world. I find online reporting by New York Times and other organizations 100% better.

I read comments from my extended family that convince me that the TV and Radio media I do not watch or listen to [mostly right wing crazies] have brainwashed people into not thinking critically and stoking their anger at people they disagree with. Sheesh.

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber

My new hero, Russell Brand, recommended this book on Facebooger yesterday. It’s sitting in my shopping cart. One of the points I think the author makes is that paperwork and phone trees are a form of social violence institutions wreak on us. I look forward to reading this book as soon as I finish a few others.

As I was reading the essay, “Listening to the heard worlds of antebellum America” by Mark M. Smith, in The Auditory Culture Reader, it occurred to me how sound is a recurring interest of mine. I have sitting on my stack of books I am reading a book entitled Silence : A Christian History. I thought of this book because one of the main points of The Auditory Culture Reader collection of essays is to elicit the idea of how historically human society has sounded and how it has thought about sound. MacCulloch in Silence: A Christian History has sough the same kind of overall detective work about “silence” in the history of the Christian church.

These broad connective ways of thinking interest me. And “sound” itself seems to be a bit of theme in my life being a not only a musician but someone who literally loves the “sound” of words and poetry.

As I practice my Greek daily, I read aloud. When I have read books of poetry recently, these also I read aloud. Harold Bloom has written that when he is grieving the death of a loved one he retires to his garden to read Emily Dickinson out loud.

In the introduction to The Auditory Culture Reader, Michael Bull and Les Back draw on the story of Odysseus and the sirens. They point out how when Odysseus instructs his sailors to tie him to the mast and plug their ears, he is creating a sort of private sound world for himself. This private world is a precursor for how most of us listen to music these days. We listen privately. We play recorded music in our homes and in our cars. We plug in our ear buds and move in public in an oddly private way.

Homer tells a story that can be read in this same way: one person hearing privately what a group cannot.

I of course think a lot about how people experience sound and music in my culture.

I myself am an example of someone who chooses over and over to experience sound and music privately either listening to recordings or making the music in my solitary way on the piano or the organ.

I do value making music with others. In fact, it’s something I seek out not always with success. Being a conductor of church choirs at a time when the very idea of belonging, discipline and small group identity seems to be eroding has been a life long challenge for me. My choirs have tended to be small ones (usually ten or so people). And many of these people have difficulty maintaining the weekly discipline of attending rehearsals and services.

One of the rewarding parts of being a church musician for me at this time in my life is leading a congregation in singing hymns, songs and service music. The fact that a group of people come together and do this kind of singing is a very rare and precious occurrence in the present US culture. A large group of people actually making music just doesn’t happen much these days. We no longer even sing our national anthem together at public events. It’s sung for us.

So when I hear a group of people singing with gusto it is satisfying and arouses my musical instincts to help them do it as well as they can. I even find it kind of fun. And it is also a bit of a skill to listen carefully to the singers, to think about the ends of phrases and give them a chance to breath and to pick a vocally friendly tempo for singing, neither too fast nor too slow. These little challenges intrigue me.

I realize that it  has something to do with enjoying making music with others.

If you read yesterday’s blog, you might remember that I was planning to pick up my meds yesterday. I put it on my list of things to do. Eileen went off to have her hair done, something that is a relaxing thing for her. I went to the pharmacy to pick up my diuretic meds before practicing. The pharmacist informed me that my insurance had lapsed due to non payment. I would be able to purchase my blood pressure meds at cost if I wished, about $650.

I declined to do so and phoned Eileen who immediately began calling and complaining to our insurance company.

I then went to practice. When I turned on the lights in the choir area that I use to see my organ music as I play, nothing happened. I turned the organ on and that worked so we had electricity for that. I went to the light board in the other room. On the way there I flipped on a light I use to see the light board. Nothing again. I went down to the office and asked if we were having electricity problems. They looked at me with blank looks. I guess not.

I called the janitor who happened to be on the premises. He met me at the light board. Someone had turned off switches that were taped over and marked do not touch. O. Okay. That fixed that. The janitor asked me if I would help him move the piano up from the basement where we had the Maundy Thursday service. I agreed.

Unfortunately when we moved it into the church area, one of the wheels came off taking with it a chunk of the piano. Yikes. I have never thought much of this piano which was picked out by a college teacher. The exposed wood on the piano revealed pressed board.

After talking with my boss and the local piano technician we contracted with him to put some other wheels on the piano that do not rely on being screwed into the wood, rather the piano sits on a little metal piece that has the wheels on it. He would get to that next week.

By this time, an hour had passed. Good grief. I sat down and practiced. it didn’t go particularly well despite my valiant efforts at playing slowly through the Vierne movement I had been working on pre-Easter.

Eileen texted me that the insurance people said they would have cleared up the confusion around my prescriptions by three pm.

But of course when we went to pick them up we got the same story from the pharmacist. Eileen called the insurance people on the spot and managed to clear up the situation.

I took my blood pressure at the pharmacy area in Meijer where we were. It was high (168/104). Great.

We came home and I took a pill. This meant I had only missed two days of pills. I wanted to exercise but wondered about the wisdom of doing so with elevated blood pressure. I took my blood pressure again at home and it had fallen 18 points on the upper number (the one that seems important). i exercised.

This was supposed to have been a day off for recuperating. Unfortunately it didn’t quite go like that. Today I have one ballet class. I have permission to skip the other two to do a funeral at church. Of course they won’t pay me for skipped classes. I work by the hour. My boss looked so forlorn (she buried a favorite dog recently) I didn’t have the heart to complain about this. Fuck it. I’ll still get paid for the funeral. And there’s no choir rehearsal tonight. Thank god for that.

Evelyn Starks Hardy, Founder of the Gospel Harmonettes, Dies at 92 – NYT

I admire the gospel singers. This woman sounds like she was important to the movement.

I ran out of blood pressure meds during Holy Week. The prescription had expired of course. I called my doctor but the phone robot said the whole process is now automatic between pharmacy and doctor.

The pharmacy contacts the doctor and the doctor okays the refill. I called for a refill last Friday but hadn’t heard anything by this morning.

I registered for the NYGoodHealth online pharmacy info and discovered I was using an old prescription number. Apparently, my prescription has been sitting waiting for me since last Thursday but I wasn’t inquiring about the correct prescription number. It looks like they automatically refilled it and did not contact me.

I only missed two days of meds. My blood pressure has been low until this morning when it was only mildly high (138/96). So I guess I’ll pick up meds today. Sheesh.

I was truly exhausted yesterday but managed to get through my ballet accompaniment okay. I even managed to treadmill for the first time in three days.

My head is still spinning from the last six days.

Hopefully I will begin to recover from this nonsense soon.

I have seen some interesting child behavior the last week or so.

Children out of control. Parents oblivious. For what it’s worth it reminded me of this section of Friedman.

Children who work through the natural problems of maturing with the least amount of emotional or physical residue are those whose parents have made them LEAST important to their own salvation. (Throughout this work MATURITY will be defined as THE WILLINGNESS TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ONE’S OWN EMOTIONAL BEING AND DESTINY)

Children rarely succeed in rising above the maturity level of their parents, and this principle applies to all mentoring, healing, or administrative relationships.

Parents cannot produce change in a troubling child, no matter how caring, savvy, or intelligent they may be, until they become completely and totally fed up with their child’s behavior.

Friedman came to these conclusions after thirty years of observation as a working shrink and rabbi. In these two roles, Friedman observed his Washington D.C. community over several generations made up of “thousands of lawyers, administrators, physicians, and other scientists… [there was] a good chance that many of them were in therapy.” He was a wise man and I think he was on to something.

When Eileen read these, she had an “aha” moment about stuff she has seen in her jobs. So these insights are not just about parenting, hence the reference to mentoring, healing, and administrative relationships.

Finally, in an effort to cleanse my weary brain I found myself listening to YouTube music. I ran across a group I quite like.

I listened to their entire live performance on KCRW while I treadmilled. It helped me tremendously.

I have been listening quite a bit to Takemitsu’s “From me flows what you call time.” I got in the mood for it a while ago and pulled up my playlist on Spotify. The playlist was still there, but the title of the piece was dimmed and would not play.

I have found this over and over on Spotify. Music that they used to licence suddenly is no longer available. Mildly annoying I guess. I own a recording of this that I love (by the BBC orchestra). When I tried to import it to a Spotify playlist it informed me that feature was only available on the premium version. I pay for Spotify but apparently don’t have the “premium” version.

My itch to hear it increased until I copied it to both of my computers from my exterior hard drive where I keep a copy  and was able to listen to it that way.

Last night after an exhausting day, Eileen and I sat down to relax. I thought I would go through Netflix and see if I could come up with something to “rot our minds’ (as we say to each other).

I kept throwing movies that might fit the ticket on our queue. I was moving by genre. When I pulled up the “comedy” section the first one was “Big Lebowski.” I was shocked. This movie is one of my all time favorites. I had just that day on the drive home fantasized about buying a used DVD of it so that i could watch it once in a while. It was definitely not previously on Netflix.

So we watched it.

It looks like part of the strategy of these subscription services is to licence stuff for a limited time. I remember last December. Toward the end of the month, all of Woody Allen’s movies began to have a little description added on Netflix: soon to be unavailable. Sure enough after January 1 there were no Woody Allen movies on Netflix. But strangely they are gradually returning.

Odd.

I have been slowly and meticulously rehearsing the Widor toccata for about four weeks. The meticulous part comes in trying to play every note either staccato as marked or for the exact length and precisely releasing the note.

This seems to have paid off. At the vigil, I was dead tired by the time the postlude arrived. I had not played Widor all the way through at tempo at any time during the previous four weeks. This did not seem foolish to me as I know the notes pretty well and have performed it many times.

I did start it a couple of times at a performance tempo (under the marking on my score but still fast enough). When I did this, it went so well that I stopped and saved it for the performance.

Sure enough. When I performed it Saturday night, despite exhaustion there was a precision and clarity I was proud of. I stumbled a little on Saturday night at one point introducing an accidental I had never played before. This was surely my lack of concentration not poor prep.

Yesterday however I played it very well. Wow. That works.

Poking around on Facebooger I was surprised how many of my colleagues had performed Widor for Easter. I had always thought that it was the rock and roller in me that succumbed to playing this popular piece at a high feast. But it looks like it was played in several local churches in West Michigan and other places.

So all I have to do is get through today’s ballet classes and I will have survived the Holy Week marathon at the age of 63. Whew.

Andrew Porter, New Yorker Classical Music Critic, Dies at 86 – NYTimes.com

This famous critic was an organist. I did not know that.His collection of articles from the New Yorker (Music of Three Seasons: 1974-1977)) is neatly tucked between Persichetti’s Mass for Mixed Chorus (A Cappela) and Poulenc’s Gloria on my bookshelf.

Yesterday I took advantage of having little to do during the day and planned the rest of the choral season at church. I’ve never done that before during Holy Week, but it seemed like the thing to do. I also chose music for next Sunday and emailed it off to the office. Next week I am planning to play an Offertory by Dandrieu on “O Sons and Daughters.”

It never fails to amaze me that stuff like this is sitting online for free use. I could only find 5 of the 9 pages in my library at first, so I printed up new copies of this piece.

I also rewrote a descant for last night. My printer is low on ink at home, so I wrote it out by hand at church. My sopranos didn’t quite pull it off, even though i spent quite a bit of time teaching it to them. As we worked on it before the vigil I found several errors in it. Damn.  We corrected them but ran out of rehearsal time.

I found myself with a bit more energy at the end of the evening for the postlude. It mostly went very well, much clearer and cleaner than I usually play the famous Widor Toccata. Of course it sounds like shit on my little instrument, but what the heck.

One more service today, then off to the Hatch Easter Egg hunt. I made excellent marinara sauce yesterday, bought some good bread and am planning to use it as a dipping sauce with the bread. That should be good.

Almost done with the marathon. Tomorrow I have classes as usual, then I will rest.

Review: ‘Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit’ – NYTimes.com

Eileen has been talking about going and seeing this exhibition in Detroit. i think that would be an excellent idea.

Retired Japanese Fighter Pilot Sees an Old Danger on the Horizon – NYTimes.com

So many soldiers talk about the horror of war. This man is doing what he can for peace.

The Last Man to Beat Floyd Mayweather Jr. Still Regrets It – NYTimes.com

One man’s on top of the world right now, the other scraping together money to live.

Transgender Inmate’s Hormone Treatment Lawsuit Gets Justice Dept. Backing – 

I guess that’s why they call it the JUSTICE department.

China Law Translate | 立法法 (2015年修改版）

This website is the work of one man, my son-in-law, Jeremy Daum. This is a link to a translation of important legislation that passed recently.

Today I need to rest up a bit and do some tasks. Eileen is gone for the day. She went to Whitehall to do her Mom’s hair and help prep for the annual Hatch Easter Egg Hunt tomorrow.

I was very tired for last night’s service. I am thinking of skipping the treadmill today in order to have energy for this evening. The service begins at 9 PM since that’s around the time of sunset. It will make a long night for Jupe. At the end of both of the remaining services (tonight and tomorrow)  I am performing the Widor Toccata as the postlude. This is a piece I know well and have been meticulously preparing. But I can’t anticipate how much energy I will have when it comes time to do it. Usually it’s fine even if I’m tired.

Attendance was very low at the Good Friday service. Ten people in the choir, about twenty in the congregation. Despite this, everything went well. I didn’t drop the organ accompaniment out as I like to because of the sparse numbers.

I managed to sleep in this morning until 8 AM. That is much later than I can usually get myself to lay in bed. I should be able to ease myself through this day without too much stress.

Rev. Robert Schuller, 88, Dies; Built an Empire Preaching Self-Belief – NYT

I knew Schuller attended Hope College, but learned that he also matriculated from the adjoining Western Theological Seminary. His obit makes him sound so much saner than he seemed on TV.

A Transgender Bangladeshi Changes Perceptions After Catching Murder Suspects

I wasn’t aware of the “third sex” in this culture. Interesting story.

Photos: Jumping Japanese businessmen show their daughters how to defy stereotypes

“The neologism “solarymen” combines Japanese word sora (sky) with “salarymen.”

Self-Portrait Of The Artist As Ungrateful Black Writer

Saeed Jones knocks it out of the park with  this excellently written essay.

I remain interested in Les Back and his sociologically related ideas. Reading his The Art of Listening, I realized that I have had a life long lay interest in many of the social sciences including psychology, sociology, anthropology and others, the more holistic the better.

This morning I was reading Back’s introduction (written along with Michael Bull) to  The Auditory Culture Reader. This book is a collection of articles and is edited by Back and Bull. (click on the title and you can scroll down to read the table of contents to get an idea of the wide range of articles in this collection if you’re interested).

Bull and Back quote Geertz

It is always very difficult to determine just when it was that “now” began. Virginia Woolf thought it was “on or about December 1, 1910,” for W.H. Auden it was “September 1, 1939,” for many of us who worried our way through the balance of terror, it was 1989 and the Fall of the Wall. And now, having survived all that, there is September 11, 2001.

I recognize Geertz as one of those behavioral science type writers I have read (and thought had died long before Sept 11). I ran down a copy of the quoted article via Jstor which I have from being employed at Hope College.

I was delighted to find that this article is also online for anyone to read.

HyperGeertz-Text:AN INCONSTANT PROFESSION:
The Anthropological Life in Interesting Times by Clifford Geertz (2002)

One thing I like about many fields of study in the 21st century is that they are interconnecting like crazy. There seems to be an emphasis on losing the gobbledygook-jargon-Ivory-Tower approach.

Many thinkers are trying to write with wide ranging clarity and insight.

I find the Geertz article to be like that. As he outlines his experience of his field he cites  I  recognize many thinkers I have read and who have influence my thinking: Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Erik Erikson and of course many I do not.

I’m hoping that the articles in the Bull/Back reader will also be clear and informative.

I have been slowly playing through piano works by John Adams. When I approach his music more as a percussionist than a pianist, it makes more sense to me. I have been playing his stuff, because I was basically in the mood to work on Ligeti’s piano etudes and couldn’t find my copy of them.

Yesterday I went through organ music at church and then came home and went through all of my piano music file. No dice. I kept searching and finally found Ligeti tucked in a cranny.

So now I have both Adams and Ligetti to study. I even treadmilled to recordings of the works I have been slowly playing through.

They have a cleansing effect on me. Something that is helpful this time of year in church work.

I ran across this cool image of Jupiter yesterday and put it up on Facebooger.

The Scrambled States of Immigration – NYTimes.com

Overview of the confusion created by not having a coherent national policy about immigration.

Thursdays for me are the day of the week I find myself the most exhausted. Yesterday was long but pretty productive. I eased myself through the day and even had time and energy to exercise on the treadmill something I rarely can pull off on Wednesdays with so much else on my plate.

I am finding a sense of calm and perspective coming over me a bit. I’m not sure where it’s coming from but I am grateful for it. Church doesn’t seem near as important to me as it has in my more burnt out moments this year. I have scheduled sensible music for me to play and conduct for the next four days. No big projects. Some small ones like continuing to rehearse the Erik Thiman anthem I am playing and conducting from the organ which has a pretty involved accompaniment.

I skipped practicing organ on Monday and Tuesday and that seems to have been a good thing. I didn’t have to go to church.

My practice yesterday and the rehearsal last night left me confident that I will acquit myself just fine in the upcoming services.

I have been working on the infamous Widor Toccata for postludes for the Vigil and Easter Sunday. I have been working at a fairly slow pace paying attention to playing all the staccato markings. Yesterday after doing this, I played the first few pages up to performance tempo. It sounded clean. I stopped. I have been thinking seriously about the research that shows that the important part of rehearsing is not making mistakes or if one makes them to immediately work on correcting them.

This leads me to think that it’s better not to fling myself at rehearsing for it’s own sake. Better to rehearse smarter and emphasize accuracy. I know this probably sounds simplistic. But to me, it feels like a new insight.

I think my rehearsing techniques have been improving over the last fifteen years and that they weren’t bad before.

Maybe some of my calm is coming from understanding myself better. I am realizing that my relationship to music makes sense. It’s hard to convey this exactly, but some of it is letting go of some stereotypical educated musical prejudices that I don’t share. At the same time embracing my own understandings and love of music.

My improvisations have been showing this to me. I routinely think about genre and style as I improvise. And I have been including even more popular music style in my improvs. But at the same time I will switch to clear motivic and almost classical sounds (at least to my ears).

This ranging over styles combined with coming up with melodies on the spot that I think are interesting in the moment may be part of my recent perspective.

It doesn’t hurt that I have reading and thinking about writers like Les Beck, Ed Friedman, and bell hook.

I have begun outlines of the two versions of Friedman’s  A Failure of Nerve. It has occurred to me to offer to the priests at work to read through this book with them this summer sometime. I’m not entirely sure I’m up to this. But I know it would help us, especially the curates. We’ll see. Right now I’m on survival until next Monday afternoon.

This is a little project I have been helping a student with. I think she is going to use this video for an audition with a ballet company. At any rate, I put it up on Facebooger and am posting it here as well.

The Supreme Court’s Death Trap – NYTimes.com

I’m so glad that Linda Greenhouse continues to write an article one in a while in retirement. I think she is excellent.

Campaign Finance Complaints Filed Against 4 Presidential Hopefuls – NYTimes.co

Probably moot, but still sort of interesting.

Arizona Orders Doctors to Say Abortions With Drugs May Be Reversible – NYTime

If we all vote on it we can change science.

I tried to take it easy yesterday since today begins the marathon. For the next six days this old guy has stuff to do each day: rehearsals, services, ballet classes. This kind of schedule is bit more daunting than it used to be for me. I feel old particularly when I see myself in pics like this:

Hell I am old, 63. This morning I tried to laying in bed past 6 AM. On Wednesdays I drive to the ballet classes because I meet with Jen and company right after my last class at the church. Driving is the only way to make it on time.  This means I can leave the house a bit later.

I took advantage of this as well and made tabbouleh this morning. I bought and prepared the bulgur yesterday. The instructions said to add boiling water and dry bulgur and wait an hour. After an hour, I was dissatisfied withe bulgur, too tough. So I covered it with water and let it sit overnight. This morning it was just right so I drained it and added the rest of the ingredients. It helps me to eat on the run on Wednesday as well so I will be having tabbouleh between ballet class and church meeting.

I’m wondering if the cat is contributing to my weird blood pressure lately. What has been happening is that I get up and take my blood pressure and it’s a bit high (over 140/90). Then I make coffee. Take it again and it invariably falls down into a  more acceptable range.

Yesterday I took it at Meijer. The stupid stupid blood pressure machine had new annoying talking software. It wanted to know if I was a boy or a girl, my birthdate, my height before it would take my blood pressure. I seem to amuse a person standing nearby as I yelled at the robot. Since the human was amused I pointed out that this was probably going to make my blood pressure higher.

But it didn’t. I had the lowest Meijer blood pressure in ages. Weird.

Back to this morning. The cat invariably accompanies me in the bathroom as I sit and take my blood pressure the first time. He likes to give me uncomfortable love nips on the most vulnerable part of my calf. So I usually sit and try to relax while the cat rubs me and sometimes nips me.

This morning I decided to take my blood pressure again right away with the cat out of the room. Sure enough, it fell enough points to come down to normal or normal high for me (under 140/90). Hmmm. That seems way too simple for me. But maybe there’s something to it. Tomorrow morning I will try to remember to kick the cat out before taking my blood pressure the first time and see how it is.

Meanwhile: Once more into the fray!