I had my bi-weekly visit with my shrink yesterday. I enjoy chatting with this guy. I do miss conversation with intelligent people (Eileen can only listen so long).

As I left the session, I told him that I found it helpful, but it felt an awful lot like bullshitting. He laughed.

I have been spending a lot of time with Beethoven at the piano. This morning it was Schubert. On Thursday I performed for my Mom’s nursing home. I took three books with me for the “classical portion of our program:” Bach suites, Mozart piano sonatas and Beethoven. I had intended to perform the first movement of Beethoven’s first piano sonata which I know fairly well. However, by the time I had played Bach and Mozart I thought it was time to move on to the pop music of the forties that I usually do in this context.

One never knows how much is being soaked up by listeners when one performs.

They have a newer baby grand at the nursing home which they purchased a few years back. It was out of tune, of course. It was the first time I had performed on the new piano since they fell out of the habit of inviting me when a new activities director was hired.

Today there is a wedding at church, but I’m not the organist. I’m not sure what’s going on, other than the fact that they wanted a different musician (probably a guitarist) for their wedding. Jen acquiesced but insisted that I still be paid my fee. This is done to ensure that people are bringing in their own people for cheaper music.

Anyway, I will have to get in and out discretely today for my usual organ rehearsal and prep for Sunday morning.

I checked Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Burrows and Wallace out of the library recently. It is a huge book. Last night I read through the six page table of contents.

This book came to my attention after reading reviews of Mike Wallace’s solo authorial follow up:  Greater Gotham. Both books look very interesting. I am looking at the first one and thinking about what I am learning about 19th century America from Edward Baptist’s history of slavery. It is a mistaken notion that only the South was involved with slavery. While the North often held itself aloof, it still invested heavily in slavery. It is weird to read about the history of banking in the 1830s and 1840s when primary collateral behind loans and financial activities were human beings.

Roasted Apple, Butternut Squash and Caramelized Onion Pizza Recipe – NYT Cooking

Interesting recipe. I’m not sure about the use of legumes in it, but could easily revamp to have calories come from some small amount of cheese instead of beans (I’m not a vegan).

I recently finished the first volume of Alan Moore’s trilogy,  Jerusalem. I think I have fallen in love with these books. Moore’s imagination is amazing to me. I have enjoyed his graphic novels immensely. But in the first book of Jerusalem, The Boroughs, he has charmed this reader without pictures. (Post script here: It looks like this novel is also a graphic novel. I ran across this googling for pics here. Very cool.)

Interestingly, he makes several allusions that interest the church musician in me. Basically each chapter of the book is from different people’s point of view. In the chapter, “Blind, but now I see,” Moore tells of a man named Henry who is American but has moved with his wife to England. Henry stumbles ont an area of Boroughs where John Newton, the author of “Amazing Grace,” lived.

“Henry felt stirred up by this in a manner what surprised him. He’d been sincere when he’d said it was his favorite song, and not just trying to sweeten the old lady. He recalled the women singing it out in the fields, his momma there amongst them, and it seemed like half his life had been caught up in its refrain.  He’d heard it sung since he’d been in his cradle, and he thought it must’ve been a black man’s tune from long ago, like it had always been there. Finding out about this Pastor Newton fair made Henry’s head spin, just to think how far he’d come since he first heard that song, only to wind up quite by accident on the doorstep of the man who wrote it.”

Henry goes looking for Newton’s grave. Instead he meets the warden of a cemetery who tells him Newton is buried in London. The warden tells him some of the story of Newton’s history including the fact that Newton chose to be a slave trader after he himself had suffered being “press-ganged into service on a man-o-war where he deserted and was flogged.”

“Henry was all in pieces. He didn’t know what to think…. John Newton had become a slave trader… Even when he’d just got rescued from a slaver, even when he knowed what it was like aboard they ships, he’d gone and got a vessel so he could ply that trade himself. He got rich off it, he got rich off of slaving and then later on he made his big repentance and become a minister and wrote ‘Amazing Grace. Dear Lord, dear sweet Lord on the cross it was a slaver who wrote ‘Amazing Grace.”

I put the excerpts here so you can get a taste of how Moore makes his sentences.

There are many  interesting references in the book. Mentions of people from the history of hymnody like Cowper, Doddridge, John Wesley. William Blake’s Jerusalem plays a part in the story and also multiple references to the hymn, Jerusalem. But these parts are subsidiary to the story that Moore is telling about a place  the reader learns in the second volume is called “Mansoul” and exists at odd dimensional angles to the Borough. This place is populated by people who have died.

One chapter in The Boroughs describes ghosts who haunt the Boroughs. The reader doesn’t understand initially that they are ghosts. But gradually it becomes obvious in ways I don’t want to write about in case any of you ever read or listen to this book.

I’ve already started the second volume. Moore combines qualities of Dickens with fantasy writing that strikes me as virtuosic.

NYTimes: Hear 9 New Psalm Settings for Challenging Times

Embedded settings. I seem to be on a church music kick this morning, eh?

 

My web site was down yesterday for some reason so I skipped blogging (and wrote a bulletin article for this Sunday).

Today I’m tired from yesterday for some reason. Long day, I guess. Eileen and I have already gone to Evergreen for exercise this morning. While I was treadmilling I received a phone call from Resthaven. They are expecting me today to come and play a November birthday party at 3 PM. I said I would be there. There was some mix up on exactly when I was going to do this. I emailed the activity director yesterday but she was out of town. I’m planning on playing Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven for them as well as pop tunes from the forties and end it with a hymn sing.

My trio meets before that. Not sure when I’m going to get my organ practice in today. My student is over at church right now. Maybe I’ll slip in some time before trio and the party.

Whew.