It’s the last day of June and I’m sitting on my brother’s porch in Chelsea. It’s not exactly cool even though it’s morning. I will have to go in soon due to the heat.

I played some Beethoven and Joplin on Leigh’s wonderful piano. Did I mention she had it tuned? It sounds great! Then I pulled up what Leigh calls their guilty pleasure stack and played through a bunch of pop music and other stuff. I find that the notation in popular music has vastly improved since I used it as a kid to learn about chords and songs.

It’s not so much hot as muggy this morning.

We are planning to go to the Detroit Institute of Arts this afternoon for the  Star Wars and Power of Costume show. Mark and Leigh are giving the visit as a birthday gift to their son-in-law Jeremy Bastian. Afterwards they are treating him to a meal at the restaurant of his choice. Eileen and I are tagging along. I think the rest of the local branch of the fam will probably be there as well.

NYTimes: This Is the World Mitch McConnell Gave Us

Interesting article by a biographer of Mcconnell. We are fucked.

What the New Supreme Court Will Decide | The New Republic

Good over view on the fall term. We are fucked.

Yesterday, Eileen and I moved from our hotel to Casa Jenkins in Chelsea. My BP is beginning to drop a bit.

We had a very nice chat with Mark and Leigh after we arrived. They are consummate hosts (and both have been known to read this blog! Hi Mark and Leigh!)

Seriously I am grateful that they let Eileen and me crash over here. it is good to get out of town and just have a lot of time to laze around. Their home is large enough to accommodate two couples with plenty of space for not constantly can i buy valium getting in each other’s hair.

We ended up following them to Chelsea for a nice meal together, then Mark and Leigh went off to the movies and Eileen and I returned home.

Tomorrow we have a Detroit trip planned. This morning I got up and have been sitting on their porch sipping coffee and reading and studying. It’s still cool out right now though it promises to start heating up as the day proceeds.

I played Leigh’s piano a bit yesterday. She had it tuned. It’s even more wonderful than I remembered. Cool.

Vacation is going fine, although my BP has been up for a few days. The good thing about this is that I experience no discomfort, the bad, that I will have to report it to my doctor if it persists for long (a week). Ah well. I AM sixty-six years old and the body is not particularly regenerating. I checked and our motel doesn’t have a treadmill so I don’t have to feel guilty about not exercising.

These are dark days in the USA. The current majority on the Supreme Court is handing the racist right wing victory after victory. The Texan ruling promoting gerrymandering as okay and yesterday the upholding of the racist Muslim ban on entry into the country. These are morally wrong steps. The only slight consolation is that SCOTUS has made terrible rulings before (Dred Scott and many others) that have been undone.

In his book, What Truth Sounds Like, Eric Dyson describes and meeting between Robert Kennedy and several Black non-politician type leaders like James Baldwin, Harry Belefonte, specifically

• David Baldwin, James Baldwin’s brother
• Harry Belafonte, singer and activist
• Edwin C. Berry, director of the Chicago Urban League
• Kenneth Clark, psychologist, activist, and founder of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited
• Lorraine Hansberry, playwright best known for A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
• Lena Horne, musician, actor and activist
• Clarence Benjamin Jones, advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and civil rights lawyer
• June Shagaloff, a white NAACP official (attending in an “unofficial capacity”)
• Jerome Smith, Freedom Rider associated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
• Rip Torn, a young white actot

The meeting began on a false note with Belafonte chatting up Kennedy with whom he was personally acquainted already. Belafonte was concerned that the group’s comments would give Kennedy and his brother’s administration ammunition with which to dispute Martin Luther King, Jr. However, Jerome Smith quickly identified the need to talk truth to power and said “I don’t know what I’m doing here, listening to all t his cocktail-party patter.” Previously he had said to Kennedy, “You don’t have no idea what trouble is…” Kennedy ignored him, but the rest of the group acknowledged Smith’s authority and correctness since he was the most experienced protester present.

Kennedy quieted down and listened, though inwardly seething, as the entire group began to chime in with anger and insist that things must change quickly in the USA.

Dyson uses Kennedy’s listening as a model for what whites need to do right now. Kennedy eventually processed this meeting into more clarity for himself about race and acted on it. I am hoping that by reading books like Stamped from the Beginning and Dyson’s book I am not only listening but learning.

Also in The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, Masha Gessen unsurprisingly quotes Orwell’s 1984:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink” (emphasis added by me)

I think this describes some of what is happening right now in America and it has been rattling around in my head as I watch our feeble moral fiber completely disintegrate.

Dyson is even clearer:

“Trump’s total lack of knowledge, and the enshrinement of ignorance as the basis of power and authority is the personification of white supremacy and white arrogance…. the real unifying force in our national cultural and political life, beyond skirmishes over ideology and party, is white identity masked as universal, neutral, and therefore quintessentially American.”

We accept the vilification of immigrants because, Dyson writes, they are “them’, However, [writing of Trump] when it comes to insulting folk, spoiling his office in narcissistic displays, acting vengefully—this is the heart of whiteness, and the force of whiteness against blackness and other colors.” I found that the next few sentences strike home. “It [the heart of whiteness] has always been a rather juvenile affair: drinking at a white water fountain was not simply a marker of rigid, though unscientific, anthropology, it was the symbolic height of adolescent bravura and competition—mine is better than yours.”

This describes Trump and his appeal.

“The point of politics was [is] to defend white interests. Politicians did [do] not have to name white interests because they were [are] considered American interest.”

I debated about bringing my organ shoes and a few scores along on vacation. In the end, I decided not to. My therapist. Dr. Birky, has been encouraging me to think about the benefits of some extended time without daily practice. He cited the examples of turning a horse out to pasture after intense training or a professional athlete deliberately seeking out a period of rest. So what the heck.

I only brought my guitar along for vacation. Eileen and I are holed up in a motel in Whitmore Lake. Eileen chose this place because it’s close to the weaving shop she likes, Forma, and it’s much cheaper than the Ann Arbor motel we have stayed in before.

We ate at the restaurant across the way from our motel last night. The martinis weren’t all that great. The food was okay. The important thing is that we are getting some time to relax.

I noticed that in my collection of real books (as opposed to ebooks) that I brought along, I have no novels.

This is a bit odd. I am still reading Alan Moore’s Jerusalem but I opted for the ebook on vacation. I do like having a book in my hands better than on screen but you can’t beat the convenience of ebooks.

I finished Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders recently. That was one of the novels I am currently reading. I brought along the ebook because I keep thinking about the book. Saunders has a bitter little piece in the latest New Yorker: Little St. Don | The New Yorker

I am very tired reading Trump pieces where the main content is a rehashing of Trumpian propaganda. But Saunders is worth reading if only for smiles at his clunky fake scripture about St. Don.

I finished this fine book of poetry in time to turn in the library’s copy before leaving town yesterday. Parker rocks in my opinion. Here’s some examples:

The President Has Never Said the Word Black

Another Another Autumn in New York

In her collection of essays, Feel Free, Zadie Smith has a hilarious essay in which she confesses that she hated Joni Mitchell until all of a sudden she didn’t and began to love her.  It was listening to the album, Blue, that she realized that it was a great album and that Joni Mitchell was someone she wanted to listen to.

I don’t remember this album very well. I followed Mitchell in my youth but quit buying her albums at some point. I remember buying Hejira at a thrift shop. I still have the disk and it’s in pretty good shape although now I listen to it on Spotify or YouTube.

Anyway, I decided to put on Blue and keep reading. After I finished Smith’s essay, I turned to Ned Rorem and began reading in his gossipy and entertaining little book, Setting The Tone: Essays and a Diary. 

Then I realized that both Mitchell and Rorem are alive and in their dotage. I suspect Mitchell is suffering from a debilitating end of life disease for some reason. I was surprised when I looked up Rorem’s dates recently that he is also still alive and quite elderly as well. Mitchell is 74, Rorem, 94.

It was an odd juxtaposition for me, reading Rorem and listening to Mitchell, both of them old and much closer to death than birth. Also, I have admired both of their work for a long time.

I like going back to composers like Mitchell and Rorem and filling in the blanks in their work that for some recent I’m not acquainted with. Dylan and Taj Mahal are another couple of elderly creators I’ve been doing that with.

Dylan is 77, Mahal, 77.

All these old people are making me feel a bit younger at the age of 66. Fun game.

Eileen came downstairs this morning and announced that the people who are going to clean our ducts will be here on July 12. This means we can get away today. I was waiting to see if we would need to hang around to expedite stuff, but now we are set.

Duct cleaning inevitable reminds me of the movie Brazil.

It has been quite a while since I’ve had some time off from my church work. I think in the last year I missed one Sunday due to illness but neglected to take time off except for flying out to California for our annual visit. I could be wrong about that, but it does feel like it’s been too long since I’ve had time for actual regeneration via some leisure.

This is not as bad as it sounds. It was about a year ago that our Pasi organ was completed. It has been a pleasure to use this instrument in rehearsal and performance.

Taking time off requires much prep and attention to detail. It’s hard for me to conceive of six Sundays off in a row. I will still be responsible for the program for the July recital and the poster for the August one during this time. This is easy stuff. Rev Jen will host the July recital. The August recital is on the 26th after I’m back at work.

I notice that the readership is falling for my blog, at least according to Google Analytics which I don’t pay too much attention too. There is a widget on my dashboard that gives me the daily number of hits.

At this point I’m hoping to leave town tomorrow and hole up in a motel with Eileen for a couple of nights before proceeding to visit my brother in Chelsea.

Yesterday morning I noticed that studying Haydn via Haimo’s analysis gratified me in the way a good poem does. I mean to see if I can find an email for him (Haimo) and tell him how much I am enjoying his book. I bet he would be surprised that someone like me (an organ dude in his eyes, no doubt) would be reading his book thirty years after taking his course.

I need to go over today’s psalm before walking over for the Eucharist. It’s one the congregation knows (I think), but it will require clear, strong leadership. The postlude is a Buxtehude piece I have been working on. It will be a good way to end my last Sunday before vacation.

I’m planning to take my synthesizer and guitar with me on vacation. Once I get to Mark’s house I will have access to a very fine piano. But at the motel I am thinking of playing harpsichord music on the synth.

I wore myself out yesterday. After lunch Eileen went with me to work and filed choral music. She completely straightened up the choir room. I put the hymns up on the hymn board. I’m not exactly sure how that will work in my absence. I can post next Sunday’s hymns after service today. I also need to put the paper work in to pay next Sunday’s sub.

I finished straightening the choir area around the organ. I will need to contact my trio, my piano student, and my shrink to let them all know I will be gone next week.

I can hardly believe I’m going to get some time away.

While Eileen was at her “Alto Breakfast,” I finished choosing hymns for August. This means I have July and August hymns ready. Even though I am playing the last two Sundays of the month, it helps to have this planned ahead.

Then I contacted Holden Alee who is a former “organ scholar” who served at St. Mark’s GR. He was recommended to me by Gregory Crowell as  a possible substitute organist. The only way I could contact him was through his business Facebook page. But he responded immediately and said he could do it. Woo hoo! This means I have six Sundays off in a row.  Surely I can turn back into a human being after that.

I walked over to church and madly started sorting out music. I need to file a bunch of music from this past season. Eileen has volunteered to help with this after lunch. So it looks like most of the loose ends at work should be tied up very soon.

Eileen has decided to hire a company to clean our ducts before we get a forced air furnace/AC. Otherwise the people installing the furnace/AC told us to be prepared for an awful lot of dust at first from our gravity heating system ducts.

Well, time for lunch. Things are definitely looking up!

“art is nice but the question is how are you
making money are you for sale”

from Welcome to the Jungle – Morgan Parker 

I’m working my way through Morgan Parker’s There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé. This morning I read this poem and was struck by the couplet above. I have spent my life as someone who doesn’t sell well. I am deluded enough to think that I make good music and even occasionally (rarely in a life time of attempts) good poems or prose. But it’s always been just enough off kilter to not fit nicely into the markets where I have submitted them. My problem is that my heart I was never into selling myself. So first I compromised with playing top 40 in bars when I needed a gig in between wives. Then I sneaked back into church and did music there for money.

I think I knew I wasn’t great at church music at first when I took my little Episcopalian job in Oscoda, MI in the 70s.

There was an elderly Welch lady there who kept bugging me to get lessons. Mrs. Swetka (sp?) would probably be gratified with my pursuit of actually learning my craft.

In the last year I have experienced a bit of a flowering of ability under the tutelage of the new Pasi organ at work. But I still see that I  am out of step in the same way that I was never successful commercially with my compositions, my poetry, and even my occasional prose piece (I recently submitted what I thought was a pretty well written article about our new organ to the local paper. They didn’t even respond with a rejection.)

Speaking of being out of step, my morning Anne Stevenson poem is one that reviewers tend to quote from her Stone Milk. I can’t find it online to link but here are some lines from it. It begins:

“‘I-pod’ is a hideous word,
while mobile phone, although euphonious
Chirps from its ambulant next like a digital bird…”

It is a bit of a rant from one old person to another, dedicated as “‘a fully interactive poetry experience’ for John Lucas at 70.”  (Stevenson is 85.)

‘To be honest’ and speak my mind,
Dear John, my guess is that ‘at this point in time’
English is leaving you and me behind.
Do you know how t teach a sound to bite?
Do I go surfing through a net all night?
Lacking ‘promotional strategies,’ I’m afraid
We’ll hardly make the canon’s hit parade.

Still, appearing ‘live’ at seventy has
a tingling, clear, unsponsored compensation.
Like fugue motifs in Bach, like flowering jazz,
Those plummet lines of language, free of fashion,
Reach to your deepest layer and won’t let go.
There, ever minute tells you lightly, gently,
The still sad music of humanity
Is all we know, and all we need to know.

from “Listen to the Words” in Stone Milk by Anne Stevenson

By now, you can probably see why I like Stevenson. I couldn’t stop typing out her poem once I had started. Stevenson is the daughter of a U of M prof who began life as a musician who  went deaf and ended up living most of her life in England.

My problem may be that I can still hear well enough to keep my church gig and don’t need to quit music in public yet. And I do still enjoy what I do.

Today I began my day with Haydn and my new book about his compositional logic by my former prof Ethan Haimo. I am deep into chapter two about Symphony 1 and Haimo’s insights and reference to the scholarly literature on his subject are as salient and fascinating as I remember them!

I have begun my last two mornings listening to Taj Mahal. His music has been part of my life’s soundtrack. I love it that he keeps making records. The above song was recorded last year. It was written in 2006 by John Mayer but I like the Taj Mahal cover better.

This lyric jumped out at me this morning: “When they own the information, they can bend it the way they want.” Here’s another great rendition of a tune I like by Taj Mahal. It was recorded last year.

I am feeling drained today. Yesterday was a very full day. I enjoyed chatting with my boss. Also, my friend Rhonda met with me and we played organ and piano duets. Thank you, Rhonda! I hope I especially enjoyed doing Mozart and Haydn on the piano!

My Haydn book came in the mail today. Written by the professor I studied this subject with in grad school, Ethan Haimo, it looks just like what the doctor ordered for my current Haydn jones.

The trio met this morning and we took another whack at Clara Schumann’s piano trio. It really is a magnificent piece. We learned a lot about it today. I’m going to have to practice it!

A guy came today and supposed fixed our leak in our kitchen. If this is so, it will dramatically improve Eileen’s life who was frustrated to tears about this morn than once in the past few months.

Well that’s all for today. Here’s another great recording.

Melancholy hit me pretty hard yesterday. When that happens I sometimes go into a stall of not being motivated. Fortunately my actions don’t depend on motivation. As I keep saying, I need some time off. Eileen is busily trying to get work done on the house. A man was suppose to come last night to do some preliminary work for us before the furnace can be installed, but he did not show. The furnace is scheduled to be replaced next week. I have to clear out my very cluttered workroom in the basement. This installation means if I want Eileen to come with me I have to wait until after that is installed to get away. I do want Eileen to come with me though she has told me I could go without her.

I have started reserving time for people to practice on the Pasi. This means that today there is a window of 45 minutes that I can sneak in and do some practice myself before lunch. After lunch, I meet with Rev Jen, then give a piano lesson, then meet Rhonda for some duet playing.

In a pathetic attempt to throw off some of my melancholy, I pulled out Ned Rorem’s journals. Specifically, Setting The Tone: Essays and a Diary (1983). He writes “composers approach music from the inside out.” This admirably expresses what I sometimes feel. I think of myself more as someone who likes to make music up. I do think that the “insides” of music is something that has been a life long interest of mine.

quotes

from Madness, Rack, and Honey: collected lectures by Mary Ruefle

“The highest levels of consciousness are wordless.” Charles Simic, quoted by Mary Ruefle

“Like the aircraft used for lunar launches, good books only look heavy and slow: their speed depends on their internal engines and where they are pointed. ” Mary Ruefle

from We Too Had Known Golden Hours by WH Auden 

“All words like Peace and Love,
All sane affirmative speech,
Had been soiled, profaned, debased
To a horrid mechanical screech.”

In his commentary on this poem, John Fuller says that Auden is writing about the debasement of poetry, but It reminds me of our president.

from Unpack Poetic by Trevino L. Brings Plenty | Poetry Magazine

“Speak of Soul? Sounds like a grifter’s hustle. Don’t do it.”

links

Ulysses “Seen” | I: Telemachus | 0001

This is an online comic book of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Paris Review Recommends Anti-Beach Reads

Some interesting titles in this list.

Salman Rushdie: ‘I like black comedy in dark times’

Rushdie does it for me.

Up and playing through late Haydn piano sonatas. They satisfy the way his best symphonies do. In their 20001 Groves entry, James Feder and James Webster write: ” In the 20th century he was understood primarily as an ‘absolute’ musician (exhibiting wit, originality of form, motivic saturation and a ‘modernist’ tendency to problematize music rather than merely to compose it), but earnestness, depth of feeling and referential tendencies are equally important to his art.”

“Wit, originality of form, motivic saturation” and tendency to “problematize music” aptly describes much of what continues to attract me to Haydn. I think I hear his music through the understandings I pointed to by Ethan Haimo (whose book is satisfyingly in the bibliography to the Groves article).

I decided to learn and perform two cool pieces for this Sunday, feeling a bit goofy about improvising last week. My chagrin comes from being able to perform on such a wonderful instrument. It not only teaches me daily more about playing the organ, it inspires me to play some of the great literature on it.

So next Sunday, Buxtehude! Yay! I was playing through my Dover edition of Buxtehude and wondering why I kept adding trills that were not notated. Yesterday I pulled out my old Kalmus edition and discovered that Ray Ferguson had taught me several Buxtehude Praeludium and had written in the trills. This is BuxWV 137, the C Major Prelude, Fugue, and Chaconne. It displays the beauty of the Pasi quite nicely beginning with a pedal solo. Fun stuff.

I paired this with a very clever setting by Richard Proulx of the melody to our opening hymn, LEONI. The piece is a neo baroque treatment of this melody and goes so far as to change it a bit just the way a baroque composer felt free to change a note here or there in a chorale he was setting.

These pieces will not require hours and hours of prep, but they will be fun to study and perform.

Now for some videos and pics from Sarah.

This was the last recital at church. I am obviously having fun. And here are Alex and Lucy having fun.

More stills from the recital.

And more pics from the visit.

A good time was had by all.

Eileen went a little nuts this morning and scheduled our furnace to be replaced next week.

They will also install AC and a humidity control unit.

I told her we were probably guaranteeing cool weather for the rest of the summer. We could use the AC and humidity control right night as it is hot and humid in Holland.

She is at the dentist right now. But when she gets back she is planning to shop for tickets to fly to California. She is my energizer bunny.

My daughter Sarah sent me some cool pics for Father’s day.

This is me worming my way into Lucy’s heart with the guitar.

Same thing here, but it looks like she’s more interested in the camera.

Here Lucy is exploring moving me up and down on my Mom’s old electric chair. She loves buttons and moving me around!

The interwebs can be a beautiful thing. I “follow” some Italian organists who post  concerts on Facebook. Yesterday I was looking at a program called “Organ Visions”

There was no performer, date, time, or place in the post. I suspect Marco Lo Muscio was the performer. The Ligeti caught my eye. I recently purchased “Musica Ricercata.” It is written for piano.  I pulled out my copy and took it along when I went back to church to spend some time with Buxtehude and Bach. After a couple hours, I began to get tired, but thought it would be interesting to look at the two pieces by Ligeti.

First of all, No. 7 is not titled, but I like the title the performer put in the program because it is descriptive and would probably be helpful to the listener.

I like this piece a lot and it does sit nicely on the organ manuals. I’m not sure how I would learn to do two speeds at once but I was able to fake it enough to think that it was cool and would make a good organ piece.

This is the other piece the organist played. It also works. I played the loud sections with my Great reed and it sounded very cool.

Not sure which portion of the Bernard Hermann movie Soundtrack the organist played but here’s a lovely taste.

While I’m at it, I searched for the piece on Scarborough Fair. I’m listening to the above video as I write. I love the way this dude programs although the last piece is kind of long. He and I are living in the same century anyway. So far I’m enjoying the above video. Warning it’s over 20 minutes long. (P.S. After listening to the whole video I think there are some outstanding variations in the last couple of minutes of this piece. They are probably what I would program. The piece is a bit of a monolith otherwise, in my opinion)

I was listening to Haydn this morning and thinking about the course I took on him. I checked in my library and my notes were not on the shelf. Dam. That means they are filed away somewhere. It was a great course taught by Ethan Haimo at Notre Dame.

In 1995 he published  Haydn’s Symphonic Forms: Essays in Compositional Logic (Oxford Monographs on Music). This is exactly what his course was about. I remember being tempted to purchase it but it was expensive. Fuck the duck. This morning I ordered a used copy for around 70 bucks. It will make some great vacation reading and his insights into Haydn were amazing.

Two fans are humming loudly in my morning living room. It’s a calming sound. While reading poetry this morning I had an insight that my reading takes me into a reality that is far from the place where people pray together and call it church. If I had integrity maybe I would quit doing what I am doing even though I enjoy it. Fortunately, I am a whore (as I told my colleagues who came to the interment service of the ashes of my parents).

I managed to get some quality time with Bach at the organ yesterday. This was after straightening the music area which was left in disarray from last Sunday’s excellent recital. I have been wondering how Bach used his preludes and fugues. I can’t find anything which documents how he used them. I don’t think scholars are sure.

They are inspiring works and I feel lucky every time I play one. I find in them a feeling of elegant larger space and architectural beauty. They are very satisfying pieces to me.  I like to think Bach not only used them at church but at his court job. I can remember wanting to learn his D Major prelude and fugue BWV 532 before grad school.

I tried to learn it on my own and even scheduled it for a recital at my little church in Trenton, Michigan when I was an undergrad.

However, the performance was a disaster. Instead of doing many of the pedal sections I chickened out on the spot and played many of them on the manuals.

I did learn it in grad school and performed it credibly at one of my Master’s recitals.

While listening to the above amazing recording of this piece, Eileen came downstairs and I put everything aside to have breakfast with her.

I am now back home from playing a church service. The fans are still going. I listened (and watched) the rest of the video above. I like it that Czsausz uses mostly toes. That’s how I do it as well. I also like that I saw an occasional heel. I like that kind of flexibility.

I do wonder about the pedal board. Most of the pedal boards I have seen on Bach organs don’t have quite as much white key as this one.

I play this piece a bit slower, but Czsausz really nails it with her interp. She inspires me to maybe do some memory work during my vacation this year. This would be a good piece to memorize. I can still play it pretty well although I like to slow down and do it accurately (which is what I did day before yesterday) rather than push the tempo and fuck up.

Church was pretty easy today. Improvising the prelude and postlude feels a bit like a cop out, but my improvisations do seem to be popular with the congregation. Many compliments this morning, including a nice one from Rev Jen about the prelude.

I do enjoy improvising. But next week I will schedule something composed.

I’ve been doing a lot of pondering, attempting to process the last few weeks and also thinking about my own life here in little old Holland.

Laying in bed this morning, it occurred to me that yesterday was a landmark day because I did not touch a musical instrument all day. (Eileen disputes this, but I think she’s wrong) I did give an organ lesson. One of the things I admire about my organ student is how obvious it is that she loves music.

This morning I have already read about and played through several movements of the B flat Partita (BWV 825) of Bach. I am reading Peter Williams’ J. S. Bach: A Life in Music. He makes an interesting point about the key structure of the partitas. They make up a volume of music Bach published in his life time, the first of the four volumes Bach called the Clavier-Übung (Keyboard practice).

The keys of the six partitas form a pattern (outlined above). The second volume of the Clavier-Übung consists of two pieces for harpsichord: the Italian Concerto and the Overture in the French Style. The key of the first completes the pattern of keys in Clavier-Übung I. The key of the second is B minor which in German is called H moll. This letter completes references to all of the German alphabet names: A B C D E F G H.

That’s kind of cool.

I have played all the way through Clavier-Übung III at the organ recently.  The only piece I don’t own to play through is the Overture in the French Style. I need to add that to my collection so that I can study and play it.

After talking with my therapist buy cheap valium online australia yesterday I was pondering how in my life many people I care about and am interested in have separated from me.

I can see a vague beginning of this when I was 17 and my Mom, Dad, and Brother moved away from Flint and I remained.

At the time this didn’t feel particularly uncomfortable. It was time for me to leave the nest at least in some ways.

But now I look back over my life and I can see many separations initiated by others.  After Grad school, I was working in a local Roman Catholic Parish here in  Holland.  I realized that my abilities and intensity were intimidating colleagues. I began what would be a life long pursuit of tempering my personality so as not to alienate people.

I have had only limited success with this.

An interesting aspect of this is the many men who have chosen to minimize our connection after a period of intimacy.

At this stage of my life, I attribute this largely to the fact that I am hard to pigeon hole and eccentric. Also I am probably seen seen as old (invisible) and thus easily dismissed or ignored.

It’s not something that’s bugging me. Just something I notice.  There is definitely a pattern there. It’s ironic because I feel good about myself. More than that, I feel lucky to have a life that I enjoy so much and find so rewarding. I like having friends and colleagues but they seem to go away. Regrettable, but what my brother described to me recently as my “voracious” appetite for ideas easily sustains me.

It helps to have some good listeners in my life like Eileen, Rev Jen, and Dr. Birky.

Yesterday was Eileen’s and my 43rd wedding anniversary. It was a laid back day. Both of us are still recovering from the past few weeks. We went out for lunch and then ordered in for supper. Eileen spent a lot of time “putzing” (her word) with her new loom. I met with my trio. We played entire through Clara Schuman’s piano trio, opus. 17. It is a pretty amazing piece. I have seen it referred to as her masterpiece.

Right now I’m listening to Swing to Bop Live by Charlie Christian and Dizzy Gillespie. It’s a very fine recording. Kevin Young talks about it in his poem, “Swing,” from his new book, Brown. I haven’t finished his To Repel Ghosts: The Remix, but decided I could add one more book of poetry on my currently reading stack.

 NYTimes: Shouting ‘Fire!’ in the Burning West

Sarah Vowel!

I looked over the hymnody for this Sunday and decided I would improvise the prelude and postlude. This is much easier for me than preparing a piece, so this is a bit of coasting.

Eileen asked me to write the email to the contractor and the city dude about our decision to withdrawn from their program. Within a few hours we had their innocuous replies. It seems to me that there is incompetence everywhere these days. So many people lack eduction and even simple abilities to follow a grocery list. The latter has been a metaphor for me even before we started using the grocery delivery service.

I look at people and decide if I would send them to the grocery store with a list and expect to get what was on it.

This service came in handy when the fam was visiting. My daughters enjoyed ordering up stuff from the grocery store. It certainly saved us some wear and tear during their visit, even if it feels mildly decadent and upper class to pay someone to get your groceries.

Unfortunately, the last delivery was pretty bad. Apparently when Eileen and Sarah pointed out to the delivery person they had requested paper bags, she looked at them incomprehendingly. Nice. There were also missing items which we got charged for anyway.

Ah well. You pay your money. You take your chances.

I am enjoying getting back to daily Greek, poetry and reading as well as playing music.

My student was late for his piano lesson yesterday so I sat down and started playing harpsichord.

Even though there are some minor problems with my refurbished harpsichord (some notes don’t return consistently) it’s still fun to play the music written for it.

Yesterday I played through several pieces from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book before my student arrived.

I think Eileen had a pretty good day yesterday. She’s still recuperating from the past week or so. This damn contracting problem threw her for a loop. We made a list together yesterday of the important things she wants done to the house. Stuff like replace a couple of doors (the mice get in that way) and replace the furnace. This list making seemed to help Eileen.

When she realized I was doing the laundry that she thought needed to be done, she said said she was going to go upstairs and mess with her new loom.

Desired effect achieved!

Sliding Off the Couch with George Saunders

Another fine podcast from the New York Public Library. Saunders is great in this and gives lots of insights in writing and thinking. Recommended.

Beyoncé is Sorry for What She Won’t Feel « LEVELER

 The Poem: ‘Afro’ by Morgan Parker | Financial Times

A couple of poems from my morning poetry reading session. I love being able to not only find them online but also to reach out to the poet on Facebook and Twitter.

Trump has turned words into weapons. And he’s winning the linguistic war

George Lakoff has insights for the media on how to work with Trump but they’re not listening to him or at least not following his good advice.

My family has come and gone. It was excellent to have everyone here. Sarah remarked yesterday that if she and Elizabeth and their families lived closer our (Eileen’s and my) lives would be chaotic. For my part, I would love it if Sarah and Elizabeth (and the rest of the crew including Matthew who didn’t show up for this family event) were close. I like having intelligent people to talk to and I admit that having grand kids is great fun.

Anyway, Sarah is now safely back in England. Elizabeth and her crew are still wandering the States but will soon return to the smog of Beijing.

Eileen has been under a good deal of stress due to the collapsing of her project to fix the house with the city’s help.  During the family visit, we discovered that the contractor the city had recommended had a history of screwing over at least one person we know. Then Eileen’s Weaving workshop hit.

Yesterday after Sarah got on the plane, Eileen described herself as a wreck. For a change, she had to ask me to not bring up impending tasks. Last night we relaxed. She is resting now. I am hoping to help alleviate the pressure she is under. She said that we should skip using the city’s offer of a loan and 10% discount. Instead we should find people we have confidence in and pay them from our savings to do the work. This sounds like a good idea to me.

I listened to Schumann’s Spring Symphony this morning, then Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony and Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. I am buoyed up by the hope and beauty in this music.

Audio/Visual | Garrison Keillor

I have been looking for Garrison Keillor’s new post-sexual harassment accusation incarnation of The Writer’s Almanac. I have been watching his web site, but it didn’t seem that he was updating it daily. A few days ago my brother sent me the RSS feed for it (thank you , Mark!). It turns out Keillor (or his web master)  has been hiding the daily update at the above link. Sheesh.

I used to use this daily podcast to listen to as I sat still for five minutes before taking my blood pressure. I see that Keillor now is not trying for a precise five  minutes but I can still use it and keep an eye on the time.

“The Gurney” | The New Yorker

I used to not like most poems in the New Yorker. However since Kevin Young has taken over as poetry editor I find that I like more of them. This is one I like from the current issue.

NYTimes: The Good, Racist People

Daughter Elizabeth recently put this 2013 article by Ta-Nahesi Coates in her Facebook feed. It bears rereading in light of our present awful times.

NYTimes: Lost John Coltrane Recording From 1963 Will Be Released at Last

Excellent. I think you can choose your access here.

NYTimes: How the Supreme Court Avoided the Cake Case’s Tough Issues

It’s difficult not to see the SCOTUS as a partisan strong hold of the right.

The Probable Artist – Out of my Face

Short story by son-in-law Jeremy Daum. I think he found the old manuscript while he was visiting and typed it into his blog. I like it.

Sarah and Lucy are now safely aboard the first leg of their journey home to England. It was great having everyone visit. I learned that I should break out the guitar sooner when the granddaughters visit.

On Monday I sat and sang songs with Lucy. Both she and Alex were just a tad stand offish this visit. So much going on and I admit to being a bit scary. But after I sang songs to Lucy she seemed much more comfortable with me. She even asked to be picked up earlier today when Sarah was outside and Lucy was feeling a bit abandoned.

I did play piano early on for both Alex and Lucy. But the guitar is a bit more personal. Next time I will break it out sooner in hopes that the grand daughters relax more around scary old Grandpa.

The China group had more people to see before returning home. Above Alex is with her Granny (Jeremy’s grandmother).

It was amazing to see all my family in the last week. It was especially fun to spend time with Lucy and Alex.

I didn’t have much time to blog this weekend. Eileen had a Weaver workshop and was gone most of the time. Saturday, Sarah, Lucy, and I went to the church to work on posters for the July Grace Notes recital and a program for yesterday’s recital. It was helpful to have Sarah along since she speaks Publisher software fluently. I had to return after lunch to practice organ and harpsichord before Jordan VanHemert’s crew arrived for their scheduled Saturday rehearsal.

Then I stuffed music in the choir slots for the choir who returned for the special 150th anniversary celebration which began yesterday. I also watered the tree Elizabeth bought in memory of Mom and Dad.

Sunday was a marathon. I walked over early to get ready for back to back Eucharist and Recital. The congregation sang lustily and that’s always fun. The choir quickly rose to the challenge of “This Little Light of Mine” which was scheduled for the offertory. The organ music went pretty well. It makes me crazy that I continue to challenge myself when I need to be coasting. Both the prelude and the postlude were a bit of a handful. The prelude was Paul Manz’s goofy “Hallelujah Chorus” arrangement of a choral prelude on our opening hymn, “God of Grace, and God of Glory.” The postlude was a tricky little trio by Calvin Hampton on the closing hymn, “People of Grace,” which we sang to Old 100th.

As usual I learned something from my prep. The middle section of the Hampton was quite tricky for me. The last section wasn’t one that was that hard to learn and the first section was almost easy. So I breezed through the tricky middle section and then managed to flub a bit in the last section.

After playing the postlude, I quickly went outside to witness the unveiling of our new Historical Michigan Plaque.

It’s pretty cool. The last line on it mentions that Grace installed a Pasi organ in 2017. Wow. We made the plaque. It is something to be proud of.

We had a record crowd at Jordan’s recital. I introduced  him and then played on the first set of pieces: all three movements of CPE Bach’s G minor sonata for flute or violin (and now sax).

We checked tempos before the recital. About a third of the way into the first movement, Jordan took off and started playing much quicker. Graehme and I followed him. When we paused for the second movement I whispered to him, “Hey Dude! Can I take this movement slow like we talked about it.” He said yes and we did. In the final movement it was satisfying that Jordan followed my suggestion to take a breath between sections. This really worked.

It was fun to sit and listen to the rest of the recital. Lucy and Sarah came and I got to sit next to them. Jordan pulled together an amazing group of musicians and they each one played very well. It was inspiring.

By the time I got home I realized that I hadn’t had a break since 9 AM. Whew.

I’m up early as usual. But this morning is the first morning I haven’t been joined by some of our guests. Both groups of visitors have been dealing with the time difference. This has meant rising at early local time while bodies deal with the change. But all is quiet this morning at 7 AM.

I used the time to carefully read Chapter one in Nicholas Temperley’s The Music of the English Parish Church Vol 1.

I interlibrary loaned this volume after it was mentioned in a Facebook conversation on one of the church music feeds I peruse, possibly the Anglican one. The commentor said he owned it but had never read it.

Published in 1979, I found the first chapter had some interesting aspects that motivated me to begin typing out some notes into a google doc.

Temperley rather elegantly outlines the three approaches to use of music in worship.

“There have always been those who recognize the great emotional power of music to move men’s spirits. Some have as a consequence come to mistrust this mysterious power and to exclude it altogether from worship, in spite of clear biblical injunctions to praise God with psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs, and with instruments of music (e.g. Psalm 150:3-5, Colossians 3:16). This was the attitude of the Quakers, and, for a time, of the General Baptists, but it has never found appreciable support in the Church of England, except perhaps from the unmusical. Others, acknowledging the emotional power of music, have been concerned to harness it for the good of men’s souls. This view has been held by Lutherans, Puritans, Evangelicals, and Tractarians; it has led to a concern that music should be sung earnestly and spontaneously by the entire congregation, and that both the text sung and the music itself should be appropriate to the purpose—but of course, opinions have varied widely as to what music is appropriate. A third body of opinion denies the role of music as an actual vehicle of religious expression, but values it as an ornament in the offering to God,as part of the ‘beauty of holiness.’ This was the prevailing view in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it has often gained the support of the moderate churchman of no particular zeal or party, of those more or less agnostic or apathetic church members who value church as a political or social institution, and of those who want to relieve the tedium of the service with pleasant music. it has encouraged professionalism and has often led to the virtual silencing of the congregation.”

Later Temperley says that “the most effective weapon against any tradition of folk psalmody was an organ” and quotes a Dr. Busby form 1820 who said ‘an instrument powerful enough to drown the voices of parish clerk, charity children [SBJ note: a source of choral singing], and congregation, is an inestimable blessing.”

This is a hilarious quote. But it reminds me of loud organ playing being done to this day by many professionals while people struggle to hear themselves sing.