I am trying to not compose or do much church work today. I did go over to the church to pick out music for Sunday and landed on some charming Purcell to match the hymn tune, Westminster Abbey. We will use a couple of stanzas of the hymn, “Christ is made the sure foundation” as our shortened sequence hymn.
And when one is composing, musical ideas are never that far away from consciousness.
But I did Greek today for the first time in a while. I also read three translations of Canto X from Dante’s Paradiso. I have been working daily on getting through Mortimer J. Adler’s Aristotle For Everybody: Difficult Thought Made Simple. This stuff clears the brain. I’m reading the wonderful edition I have of T. S. Eliot’s poems and spending a lot of time with the foot notes.
Jeremy purchased and refurbished a rectangular table for the kitchen. This is a good idea with five people. Previously we had a round table which took up more room.
I have kept up my poetry reading. Working on A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing by Da Maris B. Hill and Kith by Divya Victor. Both are excellent and challenging. I own the latter.
I read Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang. It caught the eye of Alex so now Eileen is reading it to her.
Enough. Time to go sit in the back yard and read some more.
This is weird. Last Wednesday and Thursday, my Google Analytics tells me I had over a hundred hits here each day. Very odd.
I haven’t been blogging because I am using all my extra time to work on my composition.
On the up side, I sent a pdf and wav file of my first movement to Rhonda and Jordan. I was inspired to do so because Jordan emailed me to ask how it was going with the composition. He also told me he enjoys reading my blog (Hi Jordan!). He and Rhonda quickly responded to my first movement. I was very encouraged that Jordan seems to take my work so seriously and is so encouraging. At this time of my life, there are few people in that camp and it is flattering that Jordan is so supportive. This is especially true since I think he is an excellent musician.
On the down side, I hit a bit of snag with my second movement. I decided to dedicate it to Miles Davis, whom I admire greatly. I thought it would be cool to have a section in it where the trumpet player uses a harmon mute. This is something Davis was known to do.
I had the second movement mostly done and needed one more section for it. Sometime last week, I came up with some ideas utilizing trumpet with a harmon mute that I was very happy with. After sending off the first movement to my colleagues, I returned to the second movement, thinking I could tidy it up quickly.
Unfortunately, it seemed that the sections I had previously developed didn’t fit together very well. One of these sections is one that I think works very well. The bad news was that I liked the new section better. So I winnowed the piece down to just the new section, discarding the original parts that I liked but didn’t fit with the newer ideas.
This decision rattled me. It reminded me of writing prose. Sometimes I end up discarding the first paragraph or first page after i get going. I’m pretty sure the new section is the one i want to develop. This sets me back a bit. I’m now pondering coming up with a new B section to the second movement.
There seem to be stages of composition for me. The initial conceiving of ideas is one stage. This is a hard one to prime. The spinning out of ideas into more elaborate development and treatment is a completely different stage. The final stage is one of polishing, adding details like articulations and adjusting the notation to be more clear. The last two stages are much easier than the first and respond to discipline and energy.
My set back throws the second movement all the way back to the initial conceiving stage of coming up with ideas for that B section. it’s not quite starting from go, but it definitely requires different energy.
I have some ideas for that section but I’m trying to let them gestate for a while. I’m not planning on working on the piece at all this afternoon. The third movement is close to being done, but I’m feeling less secure about the whole thing.
It helps greatly that my colleagues are willing to put in there two cents. Thank you, Jordan and Rhonda!
Elizabeth and Alex do quite a bit of cooking together. Recently, they wanted to make animal crackers from scratch. They had a recipe for the cookie but no animal shaped cookie cutters.
So they innovated. The result was very charming. Elizabeth came up with some simple designs based on circles and portions of circles.
Then they got to work. I found the results charming.
Yesterday’s church streaming service went much better. I plugged headphones into the fancy mic I have been using. Since Rev Jen is on vacation, she had arranged to have someone co-ordinate the streaming. It was the first time he had done it, so it was very helpful that the headphones allowed me to hear him and the stream on my computer. This enabled us to touch base beforehand.
This has not been the case for weeks. Rev Jen and I have been working together with me being unable to hear her at all through my computer. Eileen would stream what we were doing live on her phone in the next room. I would run into that room to hear what was happening and then come back quickly when it was my turn to play. Unfortunately there was about a ten second delay between Eileen’s phone and the actual stream which was happening (silently) on my computer.
Anyway, yesterday was much better.
I came home and immediately video chatted with my lovely daughter Sarah in England.
I haven’t worked on my composition today. I had a video doctor visit this morning. It was my annual check up. The doctor had tech problems with the interface. I was able to go through the usual pre-appointment interview with the nurse, but when Fuentes came on, she was pixilated and silent. We did manage to get it to sort of work. She was understanding about me not wanted to come in person. She said that the Covid 19 thing was not working out great for her. I suspect Spectrum Health (where she works) didn’t give their doctors a choice about being open during the virus. So far she hasn’t gotten sick.
My health is about what it was. I have gained weight since my last check up. And although my BP went down for a few months, it has been higher in the last week. I’m wondering if this is connected to my composition project which is weighing on me heavily.
I am making progress on the piece, but I’m planning on taking today off. Time to rest up a bit from yesterday and, of course, get some more reading in.
My sister-in-law, Leigh, “liked” last Sunday’s church service on Facebooger. (Hi, Leigh!) This inspired me to actually listen to my part in the recording. It was the first time I had listened to any of these streams. My playing wasn’t as bad as I remembered it being.
Besides composing, I have been doing quite a bit of reading. I’m banging away at A. R. Moxon’s The Revisionairies. It’s a bit of a romp. I’m enjoying it. It’s about 600 pages long and I’m trying to read a library copy.
The story is hard to describe. It begins a little isolated nook of a city where there is a Mental Asylum, a Sardine Factory, and the Neon Church. All of these are important to the plot. However the surreal nature basically dominates after a while. Not only do the inmates (called the “loonies” in the book) flood the streets due to something called the Fritz Act which reforms mental facilities by allowing the loonies to come and go as they want, the stability of reality fluctuates in very odd ways. Like I say, hard to describe.
I ran across this video recently.
This is an amazing performance. After checking around a bit, I discovered that this version is a transcription. The original was for an instrument called the Arpeggione.
Apparently, this instrument is tuned like a guitar but bowed like a cello. The accompaniment was originally piano.
I’ve been on a Zadie Smith kick. I listened to the video above from Dec 2019. She reads a story and chats with a fellow writer.
She published a new book, Intimations. I purchased the audiobook to exercise to. It is excellent. I will purchase a used copy of the when I can one cheap. In the meantime, I pulled out my copy of her 2017 collection of her essays, Feel Free and started reading in it again.
I didn’t finish it on the last try. I guess I got distracted. I am promising myself to read some of her work that I own but haven’t read before purchasing more of her work.
I spent more time working on my composition today and yesterday. I have backtracked and rediscovered some of my initial ideas which look more attractive than when I discarded them.
I have been playing a lot of Bach organ music. Bach organizes my mind compositionally. Plus playing his music is like sitting at the feet of genius. This idea that it is an exciting privilege to spend time with authors and musicians in their work is one that Zadie Smith talks about.
“Race does not exist in the ether. It must be created and recreated, part of a hierarchical system of domination called racism, itself tied to the production and distribution of resources in our society. The violence and forced peonage of the post-Reconstruction era; the segregation of Jim Crow; the white flight, deindustrialization and the ghettoization of inner cities — all of these things created race.”
I find myself in a bit of a struggle with the first movement of the trumpet/organ piece I am writing based largely on African American Spirituals. Recently I changed the spiritual for the first movement from Bye and Bye to Better Be Ready. But I have had several false starts using this tune as well. I now think I may have developed some decent ideas. This experiences caused me to ponder how I find myself thinking about how one can jump start one’s basic creative impulse.
Portrait of Glen, Basquiat
One way i do this is simple improvisation. This can pay off to prime the pump a bit. Improvising has been a life long exploration for me of my own personal aesthetic. It also has been a well spring of ideas and satisfaction that has never run dry. Unlike composing.
Horn Players, Basquiat
Yesterday, I decided to use visual arts to see if it might help me beginning to think more imaginatively about my first movement. I sat down with books of art by two of my favorites: Dubuffet and Basquiat.
This did seem to help and I managed to sketch some interesting basic ideas that might work out in the long run one way or another.
Besides their work, both artists had quotes in the books that I liked.
Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985)
“For a very long time I was too humble … and lacking in confidence and composure; and I suffered cruelly because of this, appearing in my own eyes to be nothing more than the most abject dog turd. It was only at a late stage—when in the end I had resigned myself to living like a dog turd without shame or regret and making the best of the situation—that it dawned on me that everyone else was also a dog turd.”
Jean Dubuffet, Chien, 1960
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)
“People think I’m burning out, but I’m not. Some days I can’t get an idea, and i think, man, I’m just washed up, but it’s just a mood.” Jean-Michel Basquiat
Last time I was at the Detroit Institute of Arts, I asked if they had any Basquiat. Nope. That’s a serious omission, i think.
First of all, thank you to the 13 people who accessed this blog yesterday. Probably you’re not all actually human, but thanks to you all anyway.
I’m feeling the pressure of completing my trumpet/organ piece for Rhonda. I have a good start on movements two and three. But I hit a brick wall with movement one a few days ago. As a result I decided to switch my “B” spiritual, from “Bye and Bye” to “Better be ready.” I like it better anyway. And it’s foreboding in a way that fits my underlying Black Lives Matter theme.
Unlike the other spirituals I’m working with I could only find one setting of “Better be ready.” It’s in the third volume of R. Nathaniel Dett’s charming four volume collection, The Dett Collection of Negro Spirituals.
I own three of them. It interests me that the picture above only has three volumes in it. I haven’t done my research yet, but I wonder if the fourth group is available or if it was ever published.
I know the hymn because we sing it at church. It’s in the Lift Every Voice and Sing II hymnal of the Episcopal Church. There it is the exact same arrangement as in the Dett collection and is credited to him.
I began examining Dett’s collections more closely. Published in 1936 by Schmitt, Hall & McCreary Company out of Minneapolis, each volume has a different prose introduction. I read the one for group three which has “Better be ready” in it. It’s entitled, “The Authenticity of the Spiritual,” and written by Dett, himself. It interested me enough to turn to the introductory essay to the second group, “Understanding the Negro Spiritual,” also by Dett.
It was there that I began to get a feeling for Dett himself. I found this paragraph charming and read it out loud to poor Eileen:
“There are some who having been to a ‘show’, read a Negro novel (probably by a white author), or who have seen a movie in which there were colored people appearing, usually in serio-comic parts,—or who having a colored cook,— feel themselves to have an advantage. Truly, these favored few are really at a disadvantage; for had they approached the music with an altogether open mind, instinct would have guided them, more than likely, along the right path toward the solution of that which is itself elemental. But being blinded or misled by preconceived ideas, they go far astray, not realizing that though they may be enthusiastically in motion, they are not necessarily arriving anywhere” (emphasis added)
Okay, clearly the “favored few” people in this paragraph are white. This reflects the environment Dett lived in (as do we) that the normal person is implicitly white. So I love the last sentence. It drips in my mind with frosty sarcasm and wit. I began to wonder who Nathanial Dett was?
The Groves Dictionary informed me that he had quite a pedigree. He was born in Canada in 1884. He died in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1943. He was the first African American to graduate from Oberlin College with a Bachelors of Music degree. He majored in Composition and Piano. He embarks on a life long career of teaching in traditional Black colleges like “Lane College, Tennessee (1908–11), the Lincoln Institute, Missouri (1911–13), the Hampton Institute, Virginia (1913–32), and Bennett College, North Carolina (1937–42). He continued his studies at the American Conservatory of Music, at Columbia University, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, the University of Pennysylvania, Harvard and with Boulanger at the Fontainebleau school in Paris; his graduate work was rewarded with the MM degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music (1932).
, composing, and continuing to learn.” (Groves Dictionary of Music, 2001)
By now, I was intrigued. I started researching him. His biography was prohibitively expensive at this stage, $150 for a used copy Anne Key Simpson’s Follow Me: The Life and Music of R. Nathaniel Dett. Normally, I would interlibrary loan this, but while the Lakeland Cooperative is back, the more extensive MELCat is not accepting loan requests.
I did find some of Dett’s music on IMSLP. I began perusing them yesterday. By this time, I realized that Dett was a composer with chops. I also had read that he disdained my beloved Jazz and Blues. I get it. But examining his work, he allows the spirit of all three genres: Spirituals, Jazz, and Blues, in the door.
I’m pretty sure the reason Dett isn’t better known is that he was an African American. I’m guessing that he is a good subject for recent scholarship that could off set this. I’m very curious about why his family was in Canada. Canada claims him in wimpy documentary on YouTube.
I can see why.
P.S. I just ordered the fourth volume on AbeBooks. It was about 40 bucks plus 20 for shipping from the U.K. All four volumes are going as a set for $175. I paid .50 a piece for my three, no doubt at a thrift shop.
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