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Woke up to find no internet or phone. Read Charles Ives bio and did some more organizing of photo files. Broke down and called Comcast on the cellphone. They were able to rectify loss of service with a refresh from their end and a reboot. Now I don’t have a lot of time to blog before I have to go to work.
Yesterday Eileen and I did some consuming. We bought a few grocery items I missed on Thursday, Eileen helped me buy some clothes and I picked up a second external hard drive to use as a back up.
Came home and Eileen did the taxes. For years we had to raise money to pay taxes in April largely due to the fact that I report all my extra income. Silly me. But this year, we are getting money back from the Federal and have a nominal amount due to State. Cool.
I don’t really have time to write more. All is well in Michigan.
“Overwhelming imbalances in wealth and income inevitably result in enormous imbalances of political power. So the corporations and the very wealthy continue to do well. The employment crisis never gets addressed. The wars never end. And nation-building never gets a foothold here at home.”
“If ever public service unions needed to have their voices heard, it is now, when they find themselves demonized for much that ails America. Not that they are without fault. But to hear some people talk, you would think that it was workers, not bankers, who brought the country to the brink of economic catastrophe a couple of years ago.”
“Four decades of ruthless penalties for political dissent — and vast rewards for Qaddafi loyalty — long ago transformed Libyan public life into a kind of elaborate theater, dropping a heavy curtain between public expression and private opinion.”
Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, a business lobbying group, has asked its members and supporters to fight corrupting union political spending by making “unlimited” and “undisclosed” donations. Hurray for transparency and fairness!
The funeral yesterday lasted for two hours. I began my prelude about a half hour beforehand. The place was packed with mourning family, professors from the local college arrayed in academic gowns, students and others. There were two or three extra speakers at the homily time all of which were pretty eloquent. The singing was so strong I had difficulty keeping up with it with my small organ. Afterwards I was pretty drained.
I came home and sought refuge in the mind numbing task of putting my picture files in some sort of order on my exterior hard drive. I have my MP3s pretty organized. I have most of my Finale (music notation) files organized at this point. But I haven’t touched the pictures yet. Both the collection of pictures and of sheet music I have made are huge. I figure any organizing I do is beneficial because when I look for something I can begin with my organization and then proceed to look through random files.
For treadmilling I read through a couple of articles by my Dad and a couple of of his old sermons. I had sent them to my son earlier by email. He requested more of my Dad’s prose. I sent him all of the articles which I suspect he saw excerpted in a previous post. And he asked for Dad’s sermons, so I sent him a random sample. Then I thought I should read through what I sent.
While I treadmilled, I also baked another quiche for our supper. Comcast’s internet and phone service seemed to be intermittent yesterday. I managed to get my Mom’s bills done online and balance both her checking account and Eileen’s and mine before it went down.
My week off from ballet class is coming to a close. I think I managed to get some relaxing in this week, especially mentally. The funeral yesterday took quite a bit out of me. But the weekend looks doable. Then back to my more full schedule I guess.
I’m feeling kind of numb this morning, so I think I’ll close with an article I found interesting and revealing about my grandfather, Ben Jenkins.
I went a little nuts with my scanner in yesterday’s post. Afterwards I continued and and put up more pics on Facebook for family and friends.
I like this photo of my Mom as a young woman.
Today I have a large, difficult funeral to play. My boss and I met for an hour yesterday strategizing about the service. I like working this closely with the celebrant about a service. I pointed out to her that usually I have to make decisions on my own because we don’t have time for this kind of fine tuning.
Decisions like what style to do certain hymns in.
The sequence hymn today is “We’ll understand it better by and by” by the gospel music composer, Charles Tindley.
Charles Tindley (1851 - 1933)
I found this lovely video on YouTube which gave me some ideas how to lead it today.
I will playing music by other African American composers in the prelude as well as some pretty soothing Anglican organ music by Vaughan Williams and Parry. The extended family of Dr. Young, the deceased, has been Anglican for generations. She herself received her doctorate from the prestigious Howard University and taught African American literature as well as a course on hip-hop.
It will be an interesting funeral.
My trio also rehearsed yesterday. We manage to recover our equilibrium after having our performance pretty much ruined by thoughtless people Sunday.
We played through the Haydn piano trio movement we played Sunday with the repeats. We didn’t do the repeats Sunday due to length considerations. But we tend to prefer to do them if possible. Repeats enhance the meaning of this music and affect the interpretation. I always think about how I’m going to do sections when I play them twice. When a melody or a significant cadence occurs twice, I feel like I have to reconsider what I am going to say with it. Of course this kind of subtlety is pretty moot when people interrupt your performance like they did Sunday. We have decided to learn the rest of this lovely trio. It’s not all that easy but it’s a good choice to work on.
After this rehearsal, I went and sat in my Mom’s tax people’s office. Wrapped up her 2010 taxes and then went grocery shopping. I’m a busy little bee.
I ran across this pic yesterday and put it up on Facebook. It embarrasses me that I am so clearly in the center of this picture. The person to my immediate left holding something in his hands is David Lyle Strong. Dave is still doing music and we are connected on Facebook. As I am with his brother Doug Strong (whose face is immediately above my head).
I had a mini-vacation yesterday and basically just putzed around the house. I went through boxes and found stuff like the pic above.
I also ran across my father’s copy of Clair de Lune by Debussy.
He has stamped it with his name and address.
So my dad’s ownership of this music dates from our time in Tennessee (from 1956-1963). Dad must have purchased the baby grand piano I grew up with there.
Before Dad died, he wrote three volumes of family history. One for himself and one for each brother. They are very helpful for providing dates like the one above. I refer to them often when I’m trying to put something in perspective.
The title of Dad’s memoir is a quote from the third stanza of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” I never noticed how small his name seems.
Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
‘Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.
Mom and DadThis is in the house we lived in at Greeneville. My Mom has talked about me playing a toy piano while she played the real one. I think that's what's happening in this photo. But I don't think that's me. It looks more like my brother.
“Clair de Lune” is not that easy a piano piece. I do remember hearing Dad play snippets of Debussy, Chopin and other great piano composers. I always thought of him as a pretty good piano player but he was largely self deprecating about his skills in that area.
Dated from 1963, this article of my dad’s caught my eye because the gospel story this Sunday happens to be about the scene he writes about (in Dad’s words, “Christ and the Woman of Samaria’). My Dad always free-lanced in religious publications, usually but not always ones in his denomination.
This one dates from 1994. It was in the December Issue of Vital Christianity, the magazine of the Church of God (formerly the Gospel Trumpet).
I think this little piece he published in 1993 is interesting enough to put the whole thing here.
I have more stuff I found yesterday. But that seems like enough for today.
I discovered reading the wiki article yesterday that the history of the “Church of God,” the denomination my father and grandfather served in, begins with an initial emphasis on pacificism in the 19th century. This link is to a history on a website of a Church of God organization, Peace Fellowship, founded in the 30s to “eliminate racism and violence.” No wonder I have pacificistic leanings.
From Wisconsin’s Business Voice online. Found this link on Boingboing where Cory Doctorow says this about it:
“Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, a business lobbying group, has asked its members and supporters to fight corrupting union political spending by making “unlimited” and “undisclosed” donations. Hurray for transparency and fairness!”
This is my copy of a hymnal I spent most of my childhood singing from. At this point in my life I have learned enough about the history of American music to try put this hymnal and its music into the context of my own personal life and musicianship.
Inside the front cover of my Church of God Hymnal
For the first sixteen or so years of my life I was part of the Church of God, the church my father and his father served as ministers. Both men were also musicians. My father cultivated his musicianship a bit more than his father. So after he matriculated from the little church college in Anderson and began looking for a job, his CV was a double one: preacher and choir director.
Inside the back cover. Looks like my copy dates from my Dad's ministry in Flint (1963-1969).
As I remember now music was a very significant part of my experience of church. Last night I thumbed all the way through my copy of the Church of God Hymnal 1953. I could hear the singing of the people in my past as I listened to the melodies with my inner ear. This singing is quite sweet to me in my memory. Three times a week I would sit as a youth and sing with other people. My family had a practice of switching from the melody to the alto, tenor or bass line each for different verses. Singing in harmony was part of this experience.
I can hear this and other hymns being sung in the voice of the Greeneville, Tennessee congregation of my childhood. The sound is slightly sour and out of tune in the way of early American churches. However, it is a very sweet musical memory for me.
The Church of God is very small in numbers. Wikipedia gives its present worldwide numbers at around 1.2 million. This is hard to determine because since being founded in the 1880s this church has resisted thinking of itself as a denomination. I was raised thinking that it was non-denominational. No official membership. Makes it hard to count.
But if you consider that Catholics come in at around 1,116 million, Protestants at 590 million and Eastern Orthodox Christians at 225 million, the Church of God is not that many people (link to Wikipedia source for these numbers) And it was smaller when I was young, I am sure.
The history of the Church of God turns out to be the history of my family. And the music of the Church of God is a well spring of American music for me as a composer and musician. For much of my youth I was lukewarm to the music but played and sang it because it WAS music and I was falling in love with all music. But I grew away from the music, finding it saccharine and eccentric.
This hymn is often cited as a sort of shorthand for the vapidity of the sentimentality of much Christian church music.
But now I have a love for all American music. American composers such as Ives, Virgil Thompson, Aaron Copland have reawakened my appreciation of my heritage of growing up singing in an American congregation.
This is a hymn I used to play. For some reason I would turn it into a jerky weird boogie woogie (also an American musical genre).
So last night I thumbed through the Church of God Hymnal in the manner I do with any hymnal new to me, noting the tunes that I remembered singing and classifying them loosely into familiar, sectarian (used only by the Church of God therefore of limited influence), significant for one reason or another.
Here's another I remember playing in my early teens. I would wickedly turn it into a minor key. Of course I did all this when I was alone in the church playing piano.
I was slightly relieved to discover that most of the hymns rattling around in my memory are not sectarian or limited to the Church of God. Of the 507 hymns in this book, I identified 120 as old gospel hymns I learned as a child (I omitted the classical hymnody of my professional life). Only 15 of these are limited to Church of God use. However of the 507 hymns in the book, I count at least 127 that are unique to this little “non” denomination.
Counting was not only fun but necessary as there is no index in this book for composers or hymn writers.
So.
That happened.
I continue to attempt some rest and relaxation this week. Although yesterday my tasks seemed to mount up as I had to contact TMobile to stop paying for a service we are no longer using (Hotspot) saving us around $20 a month. Also called Netflix to cancel my Mom’s Netflix service at her request. Walked into the Tax place to jump start them a bit on my Mom’s taxes (My tax lady had the day off. So I will have to do this again today.) Picked out prelude and postlude for Sunday. Got my Mom back and forth to a doctor appointment. Treadmilled. Spent a good hour or so responding to my brother the priest’s request for some organ playing resources for his musician in New Hampshire. That was actually kind of fun.
Since I am a “scanning fool” this morning, here’s the first page of an out-of- print AGO resource I find kind of charming:
Here’s a link to the PDF of this pamphlet. I figure that’s okay since it’s not available now and I think it’s a good synopsis of ideas about improvising for classically trained musicians.
“In a world where most people consume their news safely, perhaps in a comfortable chair on some electronic device, it is worth remembering how dangerous news-gathering has become.”
“Bigotry is bad for business.” Ay yi yi. It’s also immoral. But I guess that’s moot these days.
“At least this editorial ends with this sentence: “[I]t’s important to note that none of the objections by Arizona’s businesses had anything to do with the strong moral arguments against xenophobic anti-immigration bills.”
Interesting observations of Bob Herbert about the renewed need for the out-of-date notion of what we used to call “integration.”
Fun quotes:
“Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.”
“I favor integration for integration’s sake. This society should be far more integrated in almost every way.”
“We pretend that no one’s a racist anymore, but it’s easier to talk about pornography in polite company than racial integration.”
Some salient comments from conservative commentator, David Brooks, about the drawbacks of unilateral multinational moves like the recent no-fly zone in Libya.
I see war as a failure of civilization. Thank goodness I don’t have to make this kind of difficult calls. But more people are dieing and Americans are killing them. There’s a reason we have mechanisms to slow down going to war and spread the decision throughout our government. Too bad they get ignored routinely.
Some notes from a ranking Republican in our state congress on the Anti-Mich Governor Snyder protest in Lansing. Not a pretty sight. While I agree with some of the protesters objections to recent legislation, I definitely do not support uncivil behavior.
Managed to basically take yesterday day off. I played through Beethoven piano sonatas and most of my favorite Prokofiev piano sonata (No. 2).
The beautiful G# minor slow movement (played above by Russian pianist/conductor, Mikhail Pletnev) felt like an elegy both for the Japanese tragedy of the earthquake/tsunami and the local tragedy of the death of a young professor.
I also finished off a couple of books I have been reading.
Schiffrin has been in the book business for a long time. In The Business of Books he argues that the conglomeration of publishers into new larger corporations has changed the book business. He has witnessed the new emphasis on only publishing books that make money without considering the responsibility of investing in new and important books and the ideas in them.
He quotes Klaus Wagenbach whom he describes as a “noted German publisher and Kafka scholar”:
“If books with small print runs disappear, the future will die. Kafka’s first book was published with a printing of 800 copies, Brecht’s first work merited 600. What would have happened if someone had decided that was not worth it?”
Schiffrin himself puts it this way:
“[I]f the domain of ideas is surrendered to those who want to make the most money, then the debate that is so essential for a functioning democracy will not take place. To a large degree it is this silence that has overtaken much of American intellectual life.”
“Books today have become adjuncts to the world of the mass media, offering light entertainment and reassurances that all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. The resulting control on the spread of ideas is stricter than anyone would have thought possible in a free society. The need for public debate and open discussion, inherent in the democratic ideal, conflicts with the ever-stricter demand for total profit.”
The phrase, “best of all possible worlds,” is a sly nod to Voltaire’s Candide. He also quotes from another book I have read and was happy to see him refer to:
“Freedom of speech is the very foundation of democracy. To allow private interest to monopolize the most powerful means of reaching the human mind is to destroy democracy. Without freedom of speech, without the honest presentation of facts by people whose primary interest is not profits, there can be no intelligent basis for the determination of public policy.”
Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy
Incidentally, McChesney is not talking about the current crisis when he makes this comment. Rather, he is talking as a historian about 1903s debate about funding for radio. But Schiffrin (and I agree with him) thinks it applies to now. Schiffrin continues this riff later:
“The idea that our society has been fundamentally affected by the importance of money is widely recognized. Other values that have been looked to as countervailing forces are fast disappearing. Not only our belongings but our jobs and, indeed, our selves have become commodities to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. There have been other times in history when such changes have taken place. But now, linked to globalization and to the industrialization of the media, the effects are all the more staggering.”
If some of my readers (Ray, David) disagree with me and my weird ideas (see comments to the previous post), I hope this might help them see the logic in them (or that I’m not alone in them) even if they think I’m wrongheaded and off base.
I didn’t go looking for quotes to back up my responses from yesterday. These parts just leapt out me as I was reading last night.
Also finished William Jelani Cobb’s interesting and moving The Substance of Hope.
Cobb traces the phenomenon of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and first year of his election. He is a historian who specializes in post-Civil War African-American history, 20th Century American politics and the history of the Cold War. I saw him speak on C-Span and was very impressed with his historical understanding of the present. So I interlibrary-loaned this book. I was not disappointed.
Last night I finished off the chapter where he picks apart the comparisons made between Obama and FDR and Obama and Lincoln (“Mandates and Metaphors: Of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Obama). He does this in a very nuanced way and I recommend reading him. He delicately observes that FDR’s wheelchair disability and Obama’s race worked in similar ways in their candidacy and subsequent presidency . Neither man could point clearly to what was the elephant in the room, but both campaigns and presidencies represented important changes in American life. And there are other comparisons like the wars and the economies these men had to deal with.
Regarding Obama’s race, I like this story he tells:
“In 2002 reporters asked Denzel Washington what it meant for three African Americans to be in contention for Academy Awards in the same year. He replied, “It means that three African Americans are in contention for Academy Awards in the same year.” I am tempted to answer the question about the meaning of a black presidency with the same terms: It means that the president is black. And anything beyond that will be left for time to tell.”
I also like his nuances about Lincoln and Obama.
After pointing out similarities in their rise to power, Cobb says “Some of this is best left not too deeply explored. Lincoln has come down through history as a champion of racial equality, a cause he never actually endorsed. As a young legislator, he paid little attention to issues concerning blacks in Illinois and made no objection when blacks were disenfranchised in the state…. His earliest draft of the Emancipation Proclamation contained language stating that the freed blacks would be deported to the most reasonable and convenient locale.”
But he ends the chapter point to Obama’s awareness of and homage to Lincoln as evidenced in his use of the word, “lash,” in his inaugural address. Lincoln also used the image in his second inaugural.
Obama:
“For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.”
Lincoln:
Praying that the “scourge of war may speedily pass“… Lincoln allowed that God might will that it continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
Cobb is certain that Obama is too careful “a craftsman of words” for this to be coincidental and sees it as a “masterfully subtle nod, a recognition perhaps that Obama is not Lincoln—nor any other presidential predecessor–but that they are nonetheless bound to a common narrative, lashed, in effect, to the same themes of trial and perseverance, race and progress, turbulence and, inevitably, change.”
This book was an excellent read and I will watch for other titles by this brilliant contemporary observer.
from the UK Times Literary Supplement: “Yoga is a rich, multi-cultural, constantly changing interdisciplinary construction, far from the pure line that its adherents often claim for it”
Conservative Glenn Reynolds points justly to recent incidents of deplorable behavior towards conservatives. Use of the word, thug, seems to commit the error he is deploring, however.
“Elizabeth Warren..[is] the law professor and bankruptcy expert who is in charge of setting up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.”
“Nothing could be worse, from the point of view of bankers and the politicians who serve them, than to have consumers protected by someone who knows what she’s doing and has the personal credibility to stand up to pressure.”
“[F]ear of an imminent bond crisis reflects a profound misunderstanding of the differences between the short- and long-term challenges facing state and local governments, and what these governments can do to address them.”
I woke up Saturday morning to read a disturbing email from my boss about a young professor struggling with giving birth to her child. My boss was with her and her family at the hospital. She described the woman’s condition as “critical” and sounded very distressed herself.
Later during the day, I received an email from Hope college along with the rest of the college community that there had been a death in the community. It was this same person.
The baby survived and was doing well. The mother had preeclampsia (pregnancy induced hypertension) and eventually died of complications from a severe aneurysm. She attended my church although I didn’t see her often and didn’t know her well and have never met her husband.
She was however well known especially to people in my church from Hope College. I went over to the church to do a bit of hymn practicing before my Saturday Jazz gig and discovered several upset people from the college preparing to meet together to share their grief.
One of these people whom I know a bit approached me and I gave her the needed hug and commiseration. Interestingly she spoke to me about a totally unrelated subject saying “I don’t know why I’m telling you this now.”
It reminded me of this incident in Proust’s Swann’s Way:
“Several times a year I would hear my grandfather at the table telling anecdotes, always the same ones, about the behavior of old M. Swann upon the death of his wife, over whom he had watched day and night. My grandfather, who had not seen him for a long time, had rushed to his side at the estate the Swanns owned in the vicinity of Combray and, so that he would not be present at the coffining, managed to entice him for a while, all in tears, out of the death chamber. They walked a short way in the park, where there was a little sunshine. Suddenly M. Swann, taking my grandfather by the arm, cried out: “Oh, my old friend, what a joy it is to be walking here together in such fine weather! Don’t you think it’s pretty, all these trees, these hawthorns! And my pond—which you’ve never congratulated me on! You look sad as an old nightcap. Feel that little breeze? Oh, say what you like, life has something to offer despite everything, my dear Amedee!” Suddenly the memory of his dead wife came back to him and, no doubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a habitual gesture of his whenever a difficult question came into his mind, to passing his hands over his forehead, wiping his eyes and the lenses of his lorgnon.”
Proust is often profound about memory and how it works in our heads. I love this story very much because it describes something real about human behavior and coping. When my acquaintance said she didn’t know why she was talking about something unrelated to her grief, I felt like I was witnessing something a tiny bit similar.
I played well at church yesterday. But during the Haydn, someone disturbed our cellist by sitting too close to her and interrupting her bowing. She became very upset and we never quite recovered our equilibrium as a trio. Too bad. I had the dang thing under my fingers. I had already mentioned that I wanted to play through the movement we performed yesterday again in our weekly rehearsal, this time with the repeats (which we omitted for time’s sake yesterday). And then follow it with the other movement in the trio. All of this for our own satisfaction. It’s difficult for me to keep musicians motivated when others barely notice we are there, much less appreciate what we are doing.
My theory is that people sometimes think music is something that comes out of furniture like the TV and through the speakers of their phone or computer. They in effect reify this activity and don’t realize it is actually the result of effort by another human being. I feel like sometimes they see live performing musicians like speaker boxes. Or at least that what they are doing is sort of magic and not the result of effort.
Or maybe not.
Anyway, this inattention at church seemed to be related to the grief people are experiencing right now due to the death of the young professor.
It is ironic in another way because the trio and I were discussing the experiencing of performing music live. The violinist said she thought of live music like something knitted by hand and in effect not store bought. I mentioned the exciting energy of performing live music that involves not only the performers but the listeners and of course the music, itself. This energy is unpredictable and often quite significant to the quality of the entire experience. I try to stay open to this when I am working with a live audience and follow it where I may. Little did I anticipate the direction this would head later that morning. Oy.
Porochista Khakpour, the author of this article tells a story I found engaging. It is about dealing with her Persian heritage as a new American, rejecting it and then coming back to reconciling herself to who she is. Well written.
Haven’t finished this review from the UK paper, The Guardian. I did like this quote however:
Her most famous slogan – “Freedom is also the freedom of those who think differently” – was adopted by student protestors in East Germany in 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall came down.
Haven’t finished this one either. I picked up the link from Arts and Letters Daily. Their description interested me: “Adam Smith, far from being an apostle of free-market capitalism, advocated full employment, high wages, high taxes, and big government..”
I was too busy to post here yesterday. Since creating my own website (years before it was called blogging), I have an ideal of putting up fresh material daily. As a web user, when I look at a web site I am often interested in how recently it has been updated. Too stale, and I quickly move away if it’s a personal site like a blog.
It’s not that I think I have stuff that is interesting on a daily basis (although I do find life mostly very interesting), it’s just that one of my original ideas about the internet is that it could create an area of conversation. In this, I see that my feeble attempts have not really succeeded. Relatively few people visit this site (around 30-40 hits a day according to my counter) and their comments are few. More often I figure people come and lurk and keep their ideas to themselves. Fair enough.
I recently heard a journalist disparage the comments section of his online paper. He felt that it served little purpose to hear the comments that were predictable and reactive. Apparently he couldn’t conceive of his work as part of a conversation.
The metaphor of conversation is one that I think I got from Mortimer J. Adler. A quick google reveals this quote:
“What binds the authors together in an intellectual community is the great conversation in which they are engaged. In the works that come later in the sequence of years, we find authors listening to what their predecessors have had to say about this idea or that, this topic or that. They not only harken to the thought of their predecessors, they also respond to it by commenting on it in a variety of ways” Adler quoted in Wikipedia’s entryThe Great Conversation and footnoted to “The Great Conversation Revisited,” in The Great Conversation: A Reader’s Guide to Great Books of the Western World, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., Chicago, 1990, p. 28.
I may have learned about this dipping into this article or Adler may have referred to it in his How to Read a Book another book I have read, learned from and admire.
I have extended this idea to the arts. When I play music I think of myself as in conversation with the composer, the composer’s interpreters I have heard, and my teachers, hopefully doing a great deal of listening.
This morning I am looking forward to performing a movement from a Haydn piano trio at church. I see this as a conversation with Haydn. Also with the other performers and whoever bothers to listen.
Last night I was in a very interesting musical conversation with two young adept musicians: Nate Walker on bass and Roman Tarchinski on percussion. We were performing for a charity gig and Nate (who is still in high school) called the tunes from the Jazz Real Books. We then wove our spontaneous interpretation of and variations on standard Jazz “heads” or melodies. Lots of fun!
These two are a pleasure to play with, both intelligent improvisers and listeners. I don’t get to improvise with other musicians that often these days.
This was the gig where they decided not to pay us. The people at the charity event were very complimentary of our playing. Ironic.
The USA promises the UN to act more justly. But defends capital punishment. I still believe that states have no business taking lives. Incarceration, yes. But not killing. Just my opinion.
An Adamastor is "a Greek-type mythological character" often symbolic "of the forces of nature Portuguese navigators had to overcome during their discoveries."
“Had Colonel Qaddafi responded with openness to the calls for reform and not overreacted to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the urban elite might have been placated, and the violent rebellion avoided. He blew it. Once his army and police shot at protesters, the pent-up disaffection of Libyan society was unleashed, and it is too late for the regime to bottle it up. In recent weeks the revolt has even gained support from the historically pro-Qaddafi rural populace. No matter how much blood is shed today, the uprising will not be stopped.”
I have been looking at this book. Ira Sankey was a 19th century hymn guy. He wrote the “Ninety and nine”
This copy of the book was originally my grandfather’s.
And apparently also my father’s.
PAJ = Paul Alex Jenkins.
This book is published by Warner Press which is the press of the Church of God, my parent’s denomination. It is written in a very readable prose and tells the story of Sankey and his work with Dwight L. Moody, the preacher.
More on it later.
I called my representative in Congress yesterday, Bill Huizenga,
and left a message urging him to vote against bill HR 1076 titled: “To prohibit Federal funding of National Public Radio and the use of Federal funds to acquire radio content.” I had to call before I left for my early ballet class. There was no one inh is office so I left a message. Later I noticed that he voted for this bill (link to the final tally).
I didn’t find this surprising. It seems pretty dire to me in a democracy that public officials have the idea that there is no need to fund public media. The ideas behind this are not coherent to me. It’s probably not as simple as punishing NPR, although I’m sure politicians are alert to how this appears to its constituency. But could it be that their view is more that free enterprise and the market concept will eventually solve all problems if government just gets “out of the way.”
My first response to this is that this is a different way of thinking of our country’s government. We have never had a true democracy in this country, but we have had it as our goal on occasion. I guess I believe in the idealism of American democracy and the best voice of the people is the government even when it’s corrupt (which it usually is) not the free market.
It seems so obvious to me that there are limits to private enterprise and the open market due to it’s inevitable considering the “bottom line” of profit. And that a democracy needs a press unfettered by the need to cater to consumers to the point that it doesn’t do its job of journalism (This describes all network TV “news”).
But as Governor Rick Snyder commented yesterday after being booed at a public appearance, people who disagree with him and the ideas of Republicans are just going to have to get used to these kinds of changes.
I’m running out of time to write. I’m meeting my Mom for a breakfast date in 25 minutes. I am feeling pleasantly exhausted today and due to spring break do not have a class.
My boss at church pointed out to me that doing as many ballet classes as I am (4) is equivalent to a full-time teaching load. I pointed out to her that I’m not really teaching, just playing for the classes. But still it makes me realize that even though the dance department is paying me as much as they can ($35 dollars an hour?), it’s probably still less than it’s worth. Story of my life. Heh.
I was pretty happy with the “crumb” (the texture). I used whole wheat flour. Amazingly this bread has no oil in it making it a “low-fat” recipe. I turned my little gas oven all the way up since it recommended a temp of 450 to 500 degrees. The bottom of the bread got a little dark so next time I think I will use 450 degrees.
I followed the recipe which does not recommend oiling the pot you bake the bread in. I wondered if the bread would stick but it didn’t. The loose cornmeal seemed to help it stay free from the cooking surfaces. It tastes great!
I also made blueberry muffins yesterday. These are actual pics of them and the bread. I have them sitting like this to allow the moisture to evaporate a bit from the bottoms.
My copy of Swafford’s Charles Ives: A Life with Music arrived in the mail yesterday. I read the first chapter last night. I think I will enjoy learning more about this composer I admire.
I did manage a bit of relaxing yesterday. I worked hard on rehearsing the upcoming Haydn piano trio. I also did some piano technique rehearsal of scales and Hanon. I would dearly like to play well Sunday.
After 2.5 hours of ballet class, Eileen and I grabbed a quick supper at the wonderful Margaritas restaurant. Then I went to a rehearsal for the freebie Jazz gig on Saturday. When I arrived at the house, no one appeared to be home. Eventually someone let me in. The rehearsal ended up being me and the bass player running through the tunes the group usually plays.
I don’t think of myself as a jazzer but due to playing with people like the Barefoot Jazz Quartet and my colleague, Jordan VanHemert, I am beginning to recognize more tunes in the Jazz repertoire.
I thought about the college approach to Jazz and other music when I read this quote from Ives in the bio above last night;
“The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set an art off in the corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance… It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life.”
Charles Ives
My experience of college is that while it can deepen one’s experience of music and definitely expanded my meager skills, it does have a tendency to gaze at its own navel and cease to actively “weave” art into real life. I think Ives’s idea that art comes from the “heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life” challenges us to expand our notions of our lives beyond the boundaries of our immediate experience. Something that is hard to do in college.
While I’m at it, here’s a quote from Swafford, the author of the Ives bio.
“One of the innate dilemmas of biography is that life is not much like a book. It rarely contains a clearly stated thesis, coherently developed. Life sprawls, stumbles, advances, retreats, gropes for the light switch, and once in a while makes intuitive leaps whose import is barely understood until later, if every, by the leaper. Life seems to me to be an improvisation.“
I have read Swafford’s bio of Brahms. He is a musician and composer as well as an author. I do like his writing and look forward to the bio of Ives.
This morning I have a full schedule of ballet class, meeting with boss, and then piano trio rehearsal. Since today is St. Patrick’s day, Eileen and I will skip our pub meal. I’m sure the place will be packed.
While acknowledging the serious of the fact that Gottfried lost his job pitching Aflac, I found this article amusing.
“Laura Kane, a vice president at Aflac, said on Tuesday the company had stopped running television commercials using the voice of Mr. Gottfried, including one that had been introduced only last week.
“We are re-voicing them temporarily,” she added, as the company makes plans for “a nationwide casting call to find a new voice for the duck.”
A couple of reviews describing music I plan to check out later. I am a fan of Savall ever since hearing his work on the soundtrack of Tous Les Matins du Monde.
Speaking of copyright, this a nasty little site where consumers report wanting to purchase material, being unable to do so and then resort to procuring it by other means.
Tried to do some relaxing yesterday afternoon. I am stressed and exhausted from the last few weeks and found relaxing a bit tough. Relaxing for me looks like alternating between practicing piano and reading. I developed tension in my neck and a weird headache that really didn’t leave me until the middle of last night. Sigh. Usually I am able to practice and read comfortably.
Oh well.
Finished The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.
This book is sneaky. It starts out feeling a bit vapid and goofy in its plot premise which is another Atwood relatively near-future vision. In this one, we follow some characters who are navigating their way in a consumer nightmare to odd solutions the chief of which is a religious cult which combines liturgical calendar and ecological beliefs and concerns called the Gardeners.
Early on, Atwood flips back and forth in time so that we do know the Gardeners stilted religious beliefs about an impending disastrous “Waterless Flood” (as in Noah) does actually take place and that at least two of the main characters miraculously survive a world-wise disease pandemic that kills most humans.
In between narrative chapters, Atwood places sermons that the cult leader, AdamOne, gives are liturgical meditations in such feast days as “Saint Euell of Wild Foods” (That would be, you guessed it, Euell Gibbons)….
“Creation Day” which makes clear that the Gardeners are not “creationists” but scientists.
These homilies are in AdamOne’s voice and serve not only to explicate Atwood’s dystopian idea of a weird cult but also move the plot along with the timely references AdamOne makes to the community’s ongoing struggle to survive. Each of homilies ends with a Gardener “hymn” from the fictional collection, The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook (St. Euell’s ends: “The Holy Weeds are plentiful/And beautiful to see—/For who can doubt God put them there,/So starved we’ll never be?.”) In the afterword Atwood says someone has set these hymns to music and that people are free to use them in their (ahem) devotions. But after looking at the website, it seems basically set up to merchandise (link:www.yearoftheflood.ca/ca/music/)
At first the Gardeners seem very eccentric and out of step with the urban environment in which they are living. They are holed up on a roof and practicing guerrilla gardening.
Atwood does manage to tell an interesting story. I interrupted my reading of it so that occasionally I had trouble remembering personalities of the characters. By the end of the book it occurred to me to re-read it to get a better grasp of this well-told story. If I do, I will want to purchase my own copy and mark it up.
Here are a few of places I noted in my library copy (I use stickies…. hoping they don’t damage the books the way that some librarians complain about…).
“On Predator Day we celebrate, not God the loving and gentle Father and mother, but God the Tiger. Or God the Lion. Or God the Bear. Or God the Wild Boar. Or God the Wolf. Or even God the Shark. Whatever the symbol, Predator Day is devoted to the qualities of terrifying appearance and overwhelming strength, which, since they are at times desired by us, must also belong to God, as all good things belong to Him.
“As Creator, God has put a little of Himself into each of His Creatures–how could it be otherwise?–and therefore the Tiger, the Lion, the Wolf, the Bear, the Boar, and the Shark–or, on the miniscale of things, the Water Shrew and the Praying Mantis–are in their way reflections of the Divine.” p. 346
I have always loved William Blake’s images of Christ the Tiger. Atwood cites him as an influence on her “hymnody.”
“Nature may be dumb as a sack of hammers, Zeb used to say, but it’s smarter than you.” p. 366
“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.” p. 326
I put the page number in for my own benefit so that I can get back to the context of these quotes if I get my own copy of this book.
Reading this helped me a bit with Juan Cole’s description of the historical differences and contexts in the North African countries experiencing change right now. The tribal part of the history of Libya is fascinating and important to what is happening there right now.
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This guy wrote “Have yourself a merry little Christmas.” Judy Garland made him change the original lyric from “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/it may be your last” to “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/Let your heart be light.”
The saddest part of this obit for me was the fact that Martin became a Seventh Day Adventist before he died and rewrote his hit to begin “Have yourself a blessed little Christmas.”
What can I say?
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It’s possible you might remember this guy if you were following the Iraq war. He was on the ground trying to protect Iraq’s invaluable archaeological stuff. I like the fact that he was a drummer for a rock band in his spare time.
This guy sounds very interesting. I might give this book he wrote a try at some point.
Obit describes it this way: “The book grew out of a question that had apparently occurred to no other modern scholar: Why is it that in so many Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child, the infant Jesus’ genitals are actively displayed to viewers both within and without the picture?”
The chair of the dance department yesterday mentioned that she is organizing the local “Global Water Dance” that will take place June 25th at 5 PM at Tunnel Park. She asked me if I would be interested in composing some of the music to be danced to. I said yes.
Got up this morning and wrote a bulletin article about the service music we are using at church and the piano trio prelude and postlude. I will stick it at the end of this post in case you are masochistic enough to want to read it. Heh.
Yesterday was my first day of being at the piano bench for dance classes for 3.5 hours in one day.
Afterwards, I wasn’t quite as fatigued as Sunday morning, but I was still feeling it at the end of the day.
I think I’m getting the hang of the Modern Dance class.
So far I was wrong to suspect this would be require some irregular meters like measures of 5,7,11. I have had to improvise in 3 0r 6 measure phrases for each class and that is a fun challenge.
Today I only have one class to play for and that is a good thing. I am performing with the Barefoot Jazz Quartet on Saturday.
These are the actual feet of the players of the Barefoot Jazz Quartet. Neato.
Originally it was a paying gig. But the charity we are playing for refused to pay the band. Nice. The guy who booked me offered to pay me out of his own pocket. This makes me crazy. I told him I would play without fee. I will still enjoy playing with the group which besides myself is made up of local high school and college musicians. Flattering to be asked. Discouraging that locals continue to not see musicians as skilled laborers worthy of their hire.
I dreamed last night I was taking a test and it had a question about this guy’s death. I asked the people giving the test how they got this information on the quiz so quickly.
For you gluttons for punishment, here is my Sunday Bulletin article as submitted this morning:
Music note In choosing service music for Lent, Pastor Jen and I were looking for music that would reflect both the meditative nature of this season and the chosen emphasis for this year of the spirit of healing ourselves and others. Last week, we began our Lent with the singing of the Great Litany. Today we begin singing the Kyrie at the beginning of service. Like the Lamb of God, the Kyrie is also a Litany and is historically a remnant of longer Litanies that end with it (Notice that the Great Litany we sang last week found at page 148 of the Book of Common Prayer ended with the both the English “Lord have mercy” and Greek “Kyrie.”). Today’s gentle setting of the “Lord have mercy” is taken from Lift Every Voice and Sing II. It comes to this Episcopal Hymnal from Betty Carr Pulkingham’s Freedom Mass based on African-American Spiritual melodies. It combines the American musical idiom of “Call and Response” found historically in African-American Worksongs, Spirituals and eventually Jazz styles with the ancient idea of a Litany. Litany is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1978, as “A form of prayer consisting of a series of petitions or biddings which which are said or sung by a deacon, a priest, or cantors, and to which people make a fixed response, e.g. Kyrie, eleison, ‘Grant, Lord’, ‘We beseech thee, hear us, &c.” p. 826. Today’s prelude and postlude were performed by Amy Piersma on violin, Dawn Van Ark on cello and myself on piano. We think of ourselves as Grace’s resident piano trio and rehearse weekly. In The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, Charles Rosen has said that Haydn’s little known piano trios are “some of the greatest music ever written.” He singles out the movement we performed today as one of Haydn’s most dramatic contributions to this genre. Our postlude was the lovely ending Gigue from Jean-Baptiste Loeillet’s suite-like Sonata, Opus 5 (Book I) No. 1. Originally composed for Oboe or Flute, we think it also makes an elegant violin, piano, and cello piece. As music director, I seek to enhance our prayer with excellent music of as many styles as possible and it is satisfying to frame our Eucharist with these pieces. It is my hope that music of this caliber will raise our hearts and minds into more profound prayer. As Bach used to scribble on his manuscripts: SDG (Soli Deo Gloria – To God Alone be the Glory!). submitted by Steve Jenkins, Music Director.
I had a weird day at church yesterday. I began the day off-balance. I think I was 1/3rd sick with a cold, 1/3rd slightly hungover & 1/3rd physically exhausted. The upshot was that I felt pretty awful and didn’t really realize it.
I hate to report that I murdered the organ prelude.
I was looking forward to playing Parry’s lovely little piece based on the melody, Rockingham. Unfortunately, I began the l.h. melody as it was written after having previously decided to play it down an octave. This threw me off at the beginning of the piece. It was pretty much downhill from there as my mind raced with trying to figure out whether I should improv and a few measures and begin the piece correctly or continue.
In the meantime I began hitting wrong notes. Which of course threw me off further. I continued with the melody in the wrong octave for two phrases. At that point I decided it would be logical to begin to play it in the right octave. If not logical at least this would not do violence to a rendition of the piece.
I continued to play an occasional wrong note…. a few of them (unforgivably!) in the melody. Bah! I never fully recovered the sense of the piece. How disappointing, but sometimes these things happen especially when you perform in public as much as I do.
"Some times you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you."
The good news is that this was the worst part of the service musically.
I had five cantors sing the Great Litany at the beginning of the service as planned and that went splendidly. The choral anthem came off nicely. The congregation responded well throughout the service and sang lustily. I dropped out of the sequence hymn several verses before the end and the congregation carried it in four part harmony.
By the time the postlude was nearing, I had fully realized that I was operating at about 1/4th capacity. Unfortunately, the postlude was the most difficult thing I had scheduled for the morning.
Not only was the second half of Jan Bender’s setting of the melody of the closing hymn a bit tricky. I had decided to alter his piece to reflect a later version of the melody. This was the version the congregation would have just sung. I figure if the idea is to be musically coherent with my instrumental organ pieces, it would help if the listener could easily perceive the connection. So throughout Bender’s piece, I rehearsed changing the 3 note basic building block of the music to reflect the melody just sung by the congregation.
Diagram of the relationship of the 1543 melody to the later version and how Jupe made his life harder yesterday by changing the postlude to reflect this difference.
Here’s the first page of my copy. If you look closely you can just see where I have penciled in this change beginning in the “Lively” section.
So this part of the story has a happy ending. I nailed it (as I like to say). Despite feeling poorly, I played this piece very well.
Then went on a gave a good post-service rehearsal with my choir.
This is the full email interview given by Patrick La Forge, editor for news presentation at the NYT, to Arthur Brisbane, Public Editor of the NYT. La Forge talks about how he sees and uses Twitter. Much more interesting than Brisbane’s subsequent article.
This is a link to a bread recipe with no kneading but you have to put it together the night before. Planning to use this sometime when I have an upcoming morning free.
Got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed my kitchen floor yesterday for about two hours. Surprisingly I’m not as sore as I thought I would be this morning. I think this might have something to do with exercising more.
I love this from a morning link:
“MANCHESTER, N.H. — Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s visit to the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire got off to a rocky start on Saturday morning when she misstated a key fact about the American Revolution in a speech to a group of local conservative activists and students.
“What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty,” the potential GOP presidential candidate said. “You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history.”
In fact, the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord that marked the first military engagements of the American Revolution took place in Massachusetts.
I did manage to get some practicing in yesterday. I am performing a chorale prelude by Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, this morning at church. His music is in the English Romantic Pastoral style.
C. H. Parry (1848-1918)
It’s based on the melody, ROCKINGHAM. We are singing the hymn, “My God, thy table now is spread,” at communion today which uses this tune.
The postlude is by Jan Bender.
Jan Bender (1909-1994)
He was a student of my hero, Hugo Distler. Bender writes in an angular coherent dissonant style.
It’s based on ERHALT UNS, the melody of the closing hymn, “The glory of these forty days.”
Also spent a bit of time online with friends on Facebook discussing Michigan politics.
In the meantime here are a bunch of links to articles I have bookmarked and will hopefully check out more thoroughly at some point:
I found it very moving to watch dancers I have been accompanying for two semesters show off their skills in actual dance pieces last night. After a typically very busy day, Eileen and I met for a relaxing meal at our favorite pub then walked across the street to the theater for the performance.
There were seven pieces and something to like in each one. The first piece was most connected to the work I have been doing. Choreographed by the excellent teacher, Amanda Smith-Heynen, it involved six dancers all of whom were very familiar faces to me. Amanda used ballet steps to create an energy filled several minutes to quick, rhythmic gentle guitar music of Ewan Dobson. Very satisfying to watch. This was my wife’s favorite pieces.
The other six incorporated a lot of dance I am not that familiar with. I especially liked the second piece on the program called “Pieces of a Dream” which seemed to be Modern dance. I also learned how Tap Dance can feel contemporary in the next piece, Sincerely Jan.
The whole evening was fun for me. I am scheduled to play for the ballet warm-up for the last performance this evening. Apparently there are warm-ups happening for dancers in other areas as well and the dancers are either assigned to the warm-up by their teacher/choreographer or choose to attend one of them.
Besides rehearsing my organ music for tomorrow, cleaning house and doing this warm-up, today is sort of a day off. I have been thinking that I should try to treat Saturdays as down time since it is the only day I am not always scheduled to do something for one of my jobs.
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I don’t normally go in for stuff like this because I think the trap in having so many avenues of news reporting available can too easily lead to the “echo chamber effect” of only hearing what you agree with, but this video lays out pretty clearly some misinformation being disseminated in an easy to understand quick way.
I was engaged in some discussion on Facebook yesterday about the emerging national coverage of recent legislation in Michigan regarding Emergency Financial Managers.
This link is pretty polemic and partisan. Not sure how much is fact based. I found it on this blog that my daughter who is pretty active politically linked into:
Also remembered some pretty evenhanded statements by our new governor regarding not acting like the governor of Wisconsin and found some online reports.
Finally this morning, I found this report which sounds more reasonable to me than the polemic partisan scrapping. It helps that I have been listening to Jack Lessenberry long enough to give him a bit of credibility.
I’m hoping I’m not being foolish in accepting more work from the Hope College Dance department. The chair called me this week and offered me another class to accompany, “Modern Dance.” It will be my first non-classical ballet class. The teacher is a woman I have worked with before and actually have seen her perform Modern Dance with her husband in a duet piece.
I’m scheduled to accompany an 11:00 AM class today, as well as an evening warm-up for this evening’s dance concert. The reason I’m hoping it’s not foolish is that I seem to be on a pretty hectic schedule and am pretty fatigued. Now I have accepted more work.
I told my wife last night that it would not be my first choice to “stretch” myself at all when I am this stressed and tired. Although it will probably be a bit of new task to accompany Modern Dance, I’m pretty sure I have the chops. I just would like some time off from stuff and I don’t really see it in the cards.
The Modern Dance class will meet three times a week which brings my load up to four classes that meet over all five weekdays.
Yesterday was another pretty strenuous day. Ballet class, meeting with rector and children’s choir director, meeting with rector, exercise, piano trio rehearsal then a bout of cooking (made yolk-less quiche again), then another ballet class.
My piano trio decided it would perform the first movement from Haydn’s lovely E minor piano trio H. XV no. 12. a week from Sunday as the prelude. Without repeats it clocks in at about six minutes. I had prepared a baroque violin sonata by Loeillet for us to perform that day. But after we read through the Haydn movement we all agreed it would be a fun prelude to perform in the near future. We will be doing the Gigue from the Loeillet as the postlude that day.
I read the NYT obit first and was struck by the negative jabs it took at this man while acknowledging his prominence and abilities. Weber writes that Broder’s writing style could be “pedestrian.” He mentions a recent profile in Time magazine which he describes as “flattering.” He quotes Paul Begalia’s assessment that Broder was a “gasbag” and “the Hindenberg of pundits.” Only later does Weber reveal that Begalia was the subject of Broder’s implicit disapproval in his book, ““Behind the Front Page” (1987).”
None of this was in the Washington Post obit where Broder worked. Broder did work for the New York Times briefly but left quickly and apparently very dissatisfied. Interesting to compare the obits of the two rival papers.
I haven’t read this article about the King hearings, but I did read one which suggested that if King was truly interested in home-grown terrorists in the US he should check with the Southern Poverty Law Center for one of their hundreds of violent groups they track. I’m a fan of this organization.
I deplore the direction King is taking our public discussion. What I have heard from the hearings from yesterday hold out the hope that this angry politician is inadvertently allowing some reasoned and emotional assessments of the travesty of hate against Muslims in America.
A couple of articles about possible US intervention in Libya. I have no idea how I feel about this, but it is fascinating to track and watch. Glad I don’t have to make this decision.
It’s hard to know exactly what it means when someone says, as a woman did last night after service, “Nice music!”
After an hour of readings, preaching, praying, singing, choral music and even a dab of organ music, it’s not clear what struck a person as effective unless they specify (which they sometimes do).
A musician I respect once told me that I play “ornamented chorales” well. Ornamented organ chorales are settings which take a hymn melody and sort of riff on it like a baroque jazz musician. Usually the melody is featured using its unique solo sound like a reed stop or beautiful flute stop. The movement of the melody and harmony is slowed down considerably.
Last night I came into the church area from the choir rehearsal room and noticed a relaxed meditative quiet among people waiting for the service. I was thankful that the boss and I had decided not to have me do a congregational rehearsal of the new Sanctus and Agnus Dei they would be asked to sing in this service. We had agonized about how to move from a little teaching session into the prayer itself. Options included rehearsal – organ prelude – silent procession…. or organ prelude – rehearsal – silent procession.
One problem was the organ prelude was Bach’s “O Mensch, bewein dein Sunde gross” (O Man, bewail your great sins), one of those slow beautiful ornamented chorale preludes. Indeed, in my mind, it is the prototype of the form.
This is the second Ash Wednesday in a row I have scheduled it for the prelude.
So we opted to see if the congregation would get the hang of the two simple melodies without the rehearsal and with the assistance of the choir.
I did play the prelude well last night. The choir was experiencing anxiety over the under-rehearsed William Byrd motet. I did my best to cheer lead them through the last minute preparation and tried to use my best non-anxious technique.
The piece is notated in such a way that it presents challenges for even a fluent musician. The time signature is 4/2. The beat is the half note (actually last night I beat the whole note). This means that half notes work like quarter notes usually do, whole notes like half notes and so on even using the ever popular breve (double whole note).
Breve or double whole note
So “seat-of’the-pants” good musicians sometimes stumble over the music. And of course notes and rhythms are just a small part of what makes music music. Difficult to do expression and other fine tuning without the correct notes and rhythms.
So my first task was to rehearse notes and rhythms as much as possible. I chose a quicker tempo than in previous rehearsals. I thought maybe this would help the music make more sense both interpretively and to the singers themselves. This worked until singers began to make rhythmic mistakes. Hence the anxiety in the rehearsal.
I managed to move them into thinking a bit about the tone quality and cool pure vowels needed for Byrd. Worked on the beginning of the piece. Suggested we sing a couple of especially lovely sections softly and also fixed the ending by slowing up the final measures and then ending with a lovely soft chord on the word, “clear,” as in “none shall be justified and stand before thee clear.” I love the Byrd texts.
This had the double effect of creating a possible musical performance of an under-rehearsed piece and also suggesting to the more alert members of the group that there was a way to save the performance and, hopefully, giving them the possibility of relaxing and doing well.
In the service, itself, I asked the singers to take a deep breath and remember the sound of the beginning few measures. Then I told them the tempo would be slightly slower to allow us the space to perform well.
The performance was much more musical than it had a right to be, and still wasn’t near realizing the potential of this group of singers. It was lovely however.
Speaking of “nice music” I spent time at the piano yesterday with Brahms, Ives and Beethoven. Ives often leads me to Beethoven. Beethoven permeates the Concord sonata of Ives as does its quintessential “American” nature. I was reading yesterday a commentator who said that Americans hear Ives with a “shock of recognition.” This is also the title of a novel I admire by William Gaddis. Great concept! That great art is appreciation with an emotion like recognition.
Anyway, I played through and rehearsed Brahms waltzes, Concord Sonata of Ives, and two early Beethoven piano sonatas yesterday. Nice music, indeed.
Finally, I ran across two new pieces that I couldn’t resist purchasing yesterday.
The first is a Concerto for Flute and Recorder in e minor (TW52) by Telemann. A writer in the New York Times reviewed a performance of this piece and called it lively and “Gypsy-inflected.” (link to the review). I was intrigued and listened to the snippets on Amazon and then bought MP3s of the whole concerto for four bucks.
The other piece was “Central Market” by Tyondai Braxton which was mentioned in another review which began with the sentence: “The Wordless Music Orchestra had a kazoo section for its concert on Monday at Alice Tully Hall, along with six electric guitars. There was whistling, too.”
I went on Warp.net’s Braxton page and listened to a bit of it. Liked it so much I also bought the MP3 album on Amazon. Braxton struck me at first as a bit of a 21st century Zappa type. This morning I re-listened carefully to the entire album and am not sure it will hold up to a lot of replaying. But it is delightful inspired music. Nice music, that is.
They discuss some very interesting evolving definitions and ideas.
Collective intelligence exists in the animal world. In the human world the connectivity of the “internets” represents an important amplifier of this idea as it helps to advance our collective reasoning and knowledge.
An emerging skill is one of curation in which a synergy is created between personal knowledge management and collective knowledge management.
The example Lévy offers is when one tweets a link with a comment. The comment categorizes the link and represents a form of personal knowledge management. But it also is offered to others in the collective. Lévy calls this signaling and he also calls it the result of new kind of idea:
“We say that everybody [online] becomes an author, an editor, a publisher but also everybody is becoming a specialist in library science because when you categorize information, you organize it for youself but at the same time you organize it for others when you share it contributing to the common memory. This is a new thing when done in a conscious way…. (Emphasis added…. I have roughly transcribed Lévy’s comments on the video).”
Rheinhold and Lévy both call this knowledge citizenship.
Rheinhold points out that choosing what to share comes under the old adage of thecategorical imperative.… that is “share with others the quality of ideas you would like them to share with you.”
Brooks says we often limit our understanding of ourselves to reason and/or emotion. He cites some new talents and strengths in humans that are the result of combined insights in the fields of “neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on.”
I am still pondering these:
Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.
Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.
Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.
Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.
A couple of automatic features combined on my desktop computer so that I lost a bunch of edits I made in an exhausted fog last night to a cello part I am preparing.
Overnight, Windows did an update and automatically attempted to restart. Whenever Finale asks me if it should autosave I always say yes. Apparently it hadn’t asked me about that and I neglected to manually save a bunch of work before giving up last night.
So this morning I got up to find my desktop stalled in an attempt to restart. It had, however, managed to shut-down Finale where my work had not been saved. So about an hour lost.
Lots of “user-friendly” features defeat me.
Finale itself had defeated me earlier. I was unable to create multiple measure number areas in a single doc. I know this probably sounds like gobbledy-gook, never the less the dang program purports to do something (and in all likelihood DOES do this). But the way I was doing it didn’t work.
Of course, with Finale there’s always a “workaround” solution. And I figured out one. Just not as elegant as it could have been.
I had a nice chat with my bud, Jordan VanHemert. He is a musician friend of mine who continues to kindly reach out to me when he’s in town. He is a senior at Central Mich University where he studies music. Yesterday when he said to me that he was finds it exhausting, I misunderstood him for a minute and thought he meant our conversations when he meant student teaching multiple grade levels. Amusing.
Anyway, he saw my Ive’s Concord Sonata score sitting on my piano and started talking about Ives and his first exposure to Ives. He was visiting a university, I believe, and heard a wind instrument ensemble transcription of the third movement (III. “The Alcotts”) of this piece which he instantly liked.
Charles Ives (1874-1954)
Jordan also mentioned Mozart’s Bassoon concerto as one that a roommate had performed which he also liked.
After he left, I purchased mp3s online of the lovely Mozart concerto.
Also, throughout the rest of the day, I carried around the Ives score and when I got a minute (of which I had very few for myself yesterday), I played through it several times.
I have always seen the Ives Concord sonata as an impossible mountain to climb as player. Ives wrote music that was complex and idiosyncratic. I like his music very much, but haven’t learned much of it. Interestingly I found “The Alcotts” easier than the other movements. Not sure I have ever played through it all the way before. Probably have but just don’t remember.
I found the 2.5 hours of ballet class yesterday a bit exhausting. I fear part of it was the impending Worship Commission meeting I had to attend afterwards. By the time of the meeting I was pretty punchy. I try to sort of “co-teach” these meetings with my boss as she and I try to help this community take “next steps” in its evolving choices about how it prays.
I know the liturgical theology pretty thoroughly and have had years of experience of helping lay people think about what their ritual prayer actually is saying and how it compares to what they intend and the design of the prayer.
I think I was helpful last night. But as I say, I was punchy.
Played a piece by Daniel Pinkham called “Postlude” as the postlude yesterday. Oddly enough there was scattered applause after I finished this sharply dissonant and pretty abstract short piece. I have been playing Pinkham’s organ music since the 70s when I first began playing organ.
IN the 70s, I worked in a little Episcopal church in Oscoda, Michigan which looked out on the beach. I would sometimes prop open the door near the organ and listen to the waves as I practiced. There are a set of voluntaries by Pinkham that I learned then that when I play I still hear the fog horn from the nearby Lake Huron.
I’m feeling fatigued and emotionally drained. Pretty typical for a Monday. Yesterday at church, someone was very nice to me who usually doesn’t speak to me or notice I’m around. Very weird. Also after service a visitor introduced himself to me as a truck driver from North Dakota. He said that he has attended hundreds of Episcopal churches around the country as he travels. He was a slight almost elderly looking unshaven man in a rumpled light brown suitcoat. I thought at first his tie was an American flag design but when he came closer I could see that it was just a wild mixture of muted colors.
He told me he keeps a journal in which he records his church visits and saves the “pew handouts” (He waved his bulletin at me when he said this). He said that each church has things that are “special” about it and that if he was a writer he had lots of material with which he could write stories. Little did he suspect that he, himself, was becoming fodder for my daily blog post. I tried to make him feel welcome but couldn’t help but wonder why he came all the way over to the music area and introduced himself to me. Just sharing his presence, I guess.
This week will be pretty strenuous for an old guy like me. I have ballet every day with some shifts to allow for the performances Thursday, Friday and Saturday. On these days I will be working a bit later (5:30-6:45) and playing for the warm-ups for the dancers who choose to warm-up in a classical ballet way for the evening’s performance. On Friday evening, Eileen and I have tickets to see the performance. We are planning to meet downtown and go for drinks and food. Then see “Dance 37″ as they call this dance extravaganza.
The”37” represents the number of years they have been presenting a dance performance from the Ballet department. My guess is that is probably about how old this young department is.
Wednesday of this week is Ash Wednesday so I have a service to play that evening. Am planning for the choir to sing a lovely three part setting by William Byrd, “Attend mine humble prayer” [link to pdf of the music]. The choir doesn’t know this as well as I would wish. This piece was a bit of turning point for me this year. I realized that I would be more prudent to pick music that could be done well with far less preparation than a piece like this.
I will double the vocal parts on the piano Wednesday and it will probably not be a train wreck. I will shoot for a musical performance (when musicians say “musical performance” they mean one that not only includes a rendering of the notes and rhythms accurately, but also draws the listener in and past the notes to the beauty and meaning of the music…. not always that easy but always the goal of a good musician or musical organization like a choir). But will actually be satisfied if the performance is not a poor one.
I like the fact that my Mother’s mental health care workers are so conservative about her mood drugs. They prescribe them, but in low doses and monitor pretty closely. She sees her “talk shrink” this week.
