Spent the morning working on the harpsichord yesterday, prepping the keyboard for the new jacks. This involved removing one lead weight from the white keys (the old white keys had two) and putting an extra bushing under each key to decrease how far the key depresses.  I believe that now Eileen and I ready to start putting the new strings on today. She has the day off so we should find some time for that.

In the afternoon, I went over to the church for my weekly trio rehearsal.

We ran the violin and cello part to “Dead Man’s Pants.” When we got to Tiny Lies I switched from piano to banjo and sang the vocal line. The string parts are “sweetners” for this section. It was such a rush to hear actual instruments play the parts I have been working on for a while.

I need to turn my attention to the rest of the play list and start getting people together to rehearse.

I meant to contact the drummer this week. I have his cell so I can do that soon.  I wrote a riff for an arrangement of Bob Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues” yesterday. This song keeps on haunting me. This is the second arrangement I have done of it.  Kind of a blues piano funk thing.

I have been adding people to my Facebook “friends” list.

This has necessitated substituting the word “screw” for “fuck.” Several of the people are young people from my church and that seems appropriate. More troubling is the fact that some of the people on the list really rag on political figures in a negative way.  I don’t mind them expressing their opinions. In fact, I’m for that. But it does look they have bit hook line and sinker the partisan line that people who disagree with you are immoral and stupid.

Interestingly,  in his book, “Making Patriots,” Walter Bern points out that the founders of the USA realized this kind of acrimony can be destructive to the life of the republic.

“The Constitution, they said, was intended to provide a “remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government,” and Federalist 10 leaves no doubt as to what they understood to be a disease: “tyrannical majorities,” “angry and malignant passions,” a “factious spirit,” and, of most relevance here, zealous opinions “concerning religion.” With these diseases in mind, they wrote a constitution that withholds, checks, and separates powers, and (see Federalist 63) excludes the people “in the collective capacity” from any share in the exercise of these powers, and consigns religion to the private sphere by separating church and state and prohibiting religious tests for officeholders. Their purpose was to exclude, or at least inhibit, the zealous, the angry, and the morally indignant, and this, in turn, depended on confining the business of government to issues less likely to give rise to zeal, anger, or moral indignation.”

from Making Patriots by Walter Bern

Bern is writing about the separation of religion and state which is quite apropos.

So I try not to knee jerk react on Facebook about highly charged issues and discussion.

It’s not religion so much as the recent federal suit to challenge the immigration law in Arizona and of course there is always a stream of hatred directed at the president no matter what party she/he hails from.

Spent a good deal of yesterday working on the harpsichord. I took my time and sanded as smooth as possible the parts I needed to reglue. Then I made a little brace for the  nailing and regluing of the lower  support guide.

Then I inserted tongues into the jacks. One of a few steps necessary to assemble them.  That’s done.

I put up photos on Facebook. Here’s a link to the whole album.

I took a hiatus from working on composition and think too much about what music I will play on Aug 5th. I did come up with the idea of doing an arrangement of “Tombstone Blues” by Bob Dylan. I do like that tune.

I called my Mom a couple of times and offered to get her out of the apartment. She declined. She seems in good spirits and no sign of a return of her clinical depression.

I grabbed a bunch of fruit and veggies from the farmers market.

Eileen and I have been regularly walking up and having our Wednesday supper at the local faux Irish pub. It’s kind of expensive for our pocketbooks, but it’s a nice weekly time together and I get to have a martini or two.

I decided yesterday to greet Eileen with a BLT, fresh green beans, fresh small new potatoes, and peaches and ice cream last night. That was just as festive.

I have heard back from only one of the five people I asked to look at my Samba like Holy I am writing for my congregation.

My colleagues tend to be a tad conservative so I’m afraid my feeble attempts at integrating a fresh pop style in this piece will put them so far off they won’t know quite how to respond. Hence the silence.

My one friend, Michelle Rego, living and working actively in an RC church in Florida, did her best to keep me encouraged as she observed the piece is “jumpy” and too hard for her to teach to her choir due to the non-lyrical skips in the melody. She did, however, like the rhythm and the chord progression. I’m not sure about rewriting at this stage. I would dearly like some other feed back, but people are busy, I know.

In the midst of this I have been playing lots of Haydn and Mozart on the piano. I am thinking about what the authors of Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the late 18th c. say about how this music is put together and was heard by its creators and contemporary listeners. They go so far as to say that their study has “defamliarized” this music for them.

I like that quite a bit. I have always thought that the way Sontata Allegro form was taught was artificial. I do like the way Hepokoski and Darcy talk and think about it. And I do see how their ideas lead to hearing the music differently and better.

I found time to pick out organ music for a week from Sunday yesterday. I chose two pieces by the composer, Andrew Clarke. He’s a trained church musician working in Florida. I quite admire his compositions. They show creativity and intelligence in a field where there is so much hum drum writing. Also they aren’t that easy to play.

I chose his “Fantasy on an Irish Ballad” for the prelude since we are singing the tune it is based on (SLANE) as the opening hymn that Sunday. And just to be perverse I scheduled his “Pastoral dance on MORNING HAS BROKEN” for the postlude. It’s nice stuff but I brought it home to practice the manual parts even though I have two weeks to learn it.

Today all I have scheduled is a rehearsal with my piano trio. Hopefully we can work in a run through of “Dead Man’s Pants..” I will take a banjo. The section entitled, “Tiny Lies,” is mostly banjo and strings. That will be fun to run through.

I am trying to downplay this performance in my mind. The big hurtle for me was getting “Dead Man’s Pants” completed. Now that that’s done, I want to make the rest of the prep for this gig pretty painless. We’ll see. I haven’t quite given up on doing a cover of  “Fade to Black” by Secret Dakota Ring. This will require some thoughtful arranging and diligent  rehearsal. I’m afraid once again I might be asking too much of volunteer musicians. Sigh.

Spent several hours finishing up “Dead Man’s Pants” yesterday.  I trimmed a measure from one section and beefed up some orchestration in another. Added more consistent articulation in one section. Finally, I extracted parts, edited them and emailed them to players.

This is a list of the 9 parts I extracted, edited and emailed yesterday:

Eb Alto Sax

Bb Tenor Sax

Xylophone/Glockenspiel

Piano

Oboe

Violin

Viola

Cello

Bass

You’ll notice the drums is missing. I haven’t finished notating this part. Drums are tricky. One relies on the drummer to add appropriate parts and beats. Notating them carefully is not always helpful unless you have something specific in mind. In some sections of the piece I do have some specific things in mind and most of that is written. However I have emailed and FB messaged my drummer and asked him to meet with me this week to help me make a part that will be appropriate. I plan to follow up with him today if he hasn’t responded yet.

Later I made a vocal score for me to practice singing and playing the banjo part for the “Tiny Lies” section.

“Dead Man’s Pants” marks a moment in my life when I feel like I can turn back to my composing and music in a renewed and deeper way.  My family of origin has required a lot of attention in the last couple of years. I have no regrets of the time and energy this has taken. But it has coincided with a time in my life when I was less able to find myself, to find my usual core of self. I hope that “Dead Man’s Pants” represents a turn back to myself and my music.

I of course never abandoned them.  Living through my father’s illness and death and the reaction of my family did not totally dampen my ability to find my center. And my return has been gradual and largely a result of re-examining my ongoing relationship to music and even church music.

I find that there is a consistency in my writing and my music that dates back to my teens. Resurfacing my 1976 oboe sonatina helped me understand my compositional direction a bit better. Sections of “Dead Man’s Pants,” especially but not only the theme, represent a resurgence of a compositional voice of my own that I recognize.

At the same time I have been studying a bit more. Not only reading texts and books on scholarly subjects like Sonata Theory and the effects of recording on musical practice in the 20th century, but also a deeper look at my own musical influences. I have been reading in John Jacob Niles’s Ballad Book. I realize that I have a deep love for folk music and hymnody and am looking a bit harder at the former.

Discovering and rediscovering the explicit use of pre-existing folk materials by Stravinsky and others helps me understand my own relationship to my influences and interests. Specifically folk melodies.

Now that “Dead Man’s Pants” has been composed I can begin to move into other compositional considerations and start to think about other new works.

I am hoping for a performance that represents something of what I have written. Yesterday my oboe player was in a bit of a panic about the gig. I tried to assure her she could easily not do it. I am expecting shifts in personnel and am pretty confident I can easily adapt for this performance.

Imagining the performance seems to have helped me make the piece. Indeed I think it added to the enjoyment. I tend to compose for specific players I know. Whether it pans out is not as important as the contribution it makes to my process of creating.

So the first and biggest step toward the Aug 5th gig is done. Now I have looming over me attempting to get the harpsichord in working condition. Again I have a plan B to just do the gig without it if it’s not ready.  The rest of the play list should be relatively easy after composing the main piece I hope to do that evening.

Yesterday was a good day. After spending hours with “Dead Man’s Pants,” I went over to church and chose prelude and postlude for Sunday (Arvo Part’s Trivium I and a varied hymn accompaniment by Gerre Hancock). When I returned I was delighted to find a voice mail on my land line from my long lost buddy, Ray Hinkle.

I returned the call and we had great talk. I took Eileen her supper and then Ray called again and we had wonderful chat. I have great hopes that he and I can reconnect some forty years later in our lives. We are thinking of meeting in person on Friday. Cool beans. Ray has offered to help me record the Aug 5th gig. This is great (he also reads this blog, Hi Ray!). But as I age it occurs to me how important people are to being alive. My circle of intimates is small. It is rare for me to meet someone (besides my wife and daughters) with whom I can talk freely and be myself.  If there is a chance to connect with someone in this way, it cheers me immensely.

Distracted myself most of yesterday with cooking. This relaxes me. I got up and cleaned the kitchen. Then I made blueberry pies and pesto. I waited until I could escape to the AC in the other room before preheating the oven for the pies.

My neighbors got up around noon and began filling their kiddy pool. I walked one of the pies over to them as  a belated welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift. I hope it wasn’t quite as runny as the one we kept and cut into later.

I grilled fish and veggies (mixed veggies plus small portabella mushroom and sliced eggplant). Then started some more coals (I use the chimney starter pictured below)

Then I took the pizza dough out. Unfortunately I had made the mistake of putting the rolled out doughs in wax paper. It stuck. It made a mess. I had to salvage something and did manage to make grilled pesto pizza. But not before burning the bottoms of my weird shaped multiple little pizzas.  I cut the burned part off after grilling and what was left was actually quite tasty. But I have to try this again soon without the wax paper.

My Mom had already decided it was too hot to leave her room and come over. Poor kid. She missed the burned pizza and runny blueberry pie.

I did manage to get some work done on “Dead Man’s Pants” even though I was sort of giving myself the day off.

I think I should be able to finish it today and extract and email off parts. I have about four measures of reorchestrating to do.

I got my first response on my Holy from my colleague Michelle in Florida. She said it was a “bit jumpy” for her but she liked the chord progression. I messaged her back on Facebook and asked her for a bit more clarification. My buddy Peter emailed me that he would be glad to look it over Tuesday (today) after he gets back from his vacation on the lake. Brian the chair of the music department apparently has a robot answering his email right now. I saw him Sunday. Maybe I should take a copy to give him. Maybe that’s too forward. Hard to say.

We called Zuckermann to ask harpsichord questions yesterday. But not surprisingly they were not picking up the phone. We have some small questions about what we plan to do with a part (flip it over and use the smooth side). Eileen has apparently salvaged the pieces I thought I might have to replace so that’s good.

I dreamed about some friends of mine last night. They are a lesbian couple sort of in the closet. In my dream they casually touched each other and I told one of them how nice it was to see them touch. I remember she seem to be upset by the comment and I said I didn’t mean it as an admonishment. She wept. I do think it’s sad that people are forced to hide who they are. I probably totally identify. And as they say, one can understand one’s dreams by realizing that everyone in the dream is the dreamer.

Eileen spent a lot of her July fourth managing to undo all the damage from Saturday’s harpsichord screw-up. She took the hair-dryer to the badly glued pieces and pried them apart successfully. Then she pulled off the old part that we have to re-use.

I find church such an odd experience.  I think it’s largely being proximate to people who don’t seem to be self-aware or that interested in socializing with me. And of course I share common interests or even life orientation with so few people these days. Probably part of growing older in America.

My playing went well. For the prelude,  I played a Jan Bender arrangement of the hymn tune we sang at the offertory (DUKE STREET – the usual words: “Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun” link to words.)

Bender was the only composition student of one of my heroes, Hugo Distler. (link to Bender bio)

Both men were suspect as far as the Nazis were concerned. Bender was arrested for “sabotaging” the organ at the church where he worked after one of the resident pastors (who apparently was sympathetic to the Nazis and for whom Bender refused to play…. the story is at the link above).

Distler committed suicide rather than serve in the Nazi army.

But both men were also involved with very interesting reform movements  in Germany. One sought to restore organ building to the standards of  the Baroque and pre-Baroque. Another was an early liturgical/worship reform that sought to raise ordinary church music back to the musical standards of the same era. Both of these movements were, of course, highly romantic and full of idealism. But they are both near and dear to my heart.

Bender’s musical style resembles Distler’s a bit. Both are dissonantly counterpuntal and cleverly composed.  Neither is all that easy to play.

All this is to say that once again I put my heart and soul into my organ music yesterday.

The postlude was a clever adaptation of the closing hymn we sang: another South African tune: “We are marching” sometimes referred to as Siyahamba which is Zulu for the title (link to wiki article).

I admire attempts to allow the organ to speak a more rhythmic and accessible pop language.  Robert Buckley Farlee does a respectable job of this in the piece I played.  Again not all that easy to play technically and musically. My brother the priest who is also a closet musician insisted that one of his music directors ruined Siyahamba by playing it as written. My brother maintained that the piece needed to be changed in order to be right. I kind of think that if one plays it accurately and musically the result is correct. My suspicion is that if his music person played accurately they didn’t play musically and the effect of the hymn was destroyed.

Here’s a couple of Youtube versions in case you’re curious. The first one represents very closely the arrangement in the Episcopal resources and sounds a bit better to my ears:

The second is a more slick pop music production of the same piece. It probably sounds better to more people’s ears than the big choral sound. It uses solo voices on the parts blending nicely but screwing up the piece by adding some weird notes later in the recording. But that’s just my opinion.

I’d love to hear the following Zulu group sing this song. As it is I like this song they are singing better than Siyahamba.

Planning to do some cooking outside today. Probably grill fish and veggies and also seriously considering doing pesto pizza on the grill as well. That will take two shifts on our crappy old grill but I think it will work. Have invited my Mom over but she hasn’t decided whether she is coming.

Hope to get a bit more done on the harpsichord and compositions today. Yesterday afternoon I left all the work to Eileen as I did my usual recuperation from the stress of work (church). I did finish a piano part for my Holy and emailed it out to some people whom I’m pretty sure could give me some constructive criticism if they so desired. I also posted it to the Grace Church Musicians Facebook group.

Here’s a link to the pdf that I emailed and posted.  My idea was to compose a piano accompaniment that would exemplify to some extent the kind of loosely improvised accompaniment I actually hear for this piece. That way my learned musician friends can make an astute evaluation and criticism. Also I have a piano part ready for pianists who choose to play something as written instead of improvved.

Yikes! Woke up this morning and looked hard at what I did to the harpsichord yesterday and figured out I screwed up most of it. I mistook the board that was used to pack the lower register guide for a support I was supposed to salvage from the old instrument. I glued the lower register guide to this board and mounted it on the inside of the instrument drilling new holes for the screws. This is wrong.

Eileen figured this out last night while we were watching TV.

She couldn’t convince herself we did this wrong, but this morning in the clearer light of day I know that we did. We will either have to find a way to undo this or order new parts. I will talk to Eileen about this.

Also, I mis-glued the two small wooden reinforcing blocks in the wrong way on either end of the upper register. This morning it looks like the way I glued them would block two jacks, one on either end.

The instructions said to glue them “flush,” which I did. However they should have been perpendicular to the register and I glued them parallel blocking a hole on either end.

Bah.  It was silly to give myself a time deadline (my Aug 5th gig) for having the harpsichord refurbished.

I’m not hopeful about undoing what I have done. I am hoping they can sell me a new upper and lower milled register guide (probably pretty expensive) alone with new reinforcement blocks to do correctly. Of course this will have to wait until tomorrow if not Tuesday. Maybe Eileen and I can find a way to work ahead on the jacks themselves.

I also worked on “Dead Man’s Pants.”

I discovered a measure has been missing from the final section, “You must be the animal.” Somehow it never made it into any Finale file. I only found the original in an initial pencil draft. Happily it is now inserted in the proper place.

Yesterday I took a bit of a holiday from composing.  I did a little work on the Holy I am writing, but for the most part I spent the day goofing off. Didn’t touch the harpsichord.
By the time Eileen got home from work, I wasn’t sure where the day had gone exactly.

I corresponded with a parishioner who pointed to a hymn text he thought deserved to be better know. The text, “Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings,” is one I know well and when I checked back it seems we did sing it a few years ago.

While poking around on the web, I found an interesting setting of the text to the melody, THAXTED. This melody is taken from Holst’s “Planets,” which I proceed to listen to later.

Did my Mom’s bills and our bills. I downloaded U of Chicago’s monthly free ebook, Making Patriots by Walter Berns (link) and proceeded to read it while I treadmilled.

Although the author is a bit on the conservative side for me (he thanks Judge Bork among others in his introduction), a quick google persuaded me that his background and expertise are credible.

And I enjoyed what I read quite a bit. Obviously U of C made this book available to sort of coincide with the fourth of July.

I was gratified to see Berns distinguish between “patriotism” and “nationalism.” The latter he defines in a bit of a pejorative way as “glorification” of a nation. The former he equates with “citizenship.” I often think of the responsibilities of citizenship. Bern goes on and defines citizenship in this way.

” [C]itizenship is … more than legal status and the enjoyment of the “privileges or immunities” attached thereto; in its larger sense, it is a sentiment or state of mind, an awareness of sharing an identity with others to whom one is related by nationality, if not by blood, a sense of belonging to a community for which one bears some responsibility. In a word, citizenship implies public-spiritedness, and it is in this sense that it cannot be taken for granted; like patriotism, it has to be cultivated.” (emphasis added)

For me, my awareness of my identity is wrapped up with all the things I love about America: Jazz, the Blues, the writers, the poets, and godhelpme the poetry of living in a country which values its stubborn individualism and keeps striving to improve civil rights of all.

Bern points out that America is the only country actually founded on principles. These principles (republicanism, democracy, the rights of individuals to freedom and fairness) have played a part in other countries of course. But America grows out these, other countries have adapted into them (French Revolution). This is an interesting thought.

I believe pretty strongly in these principles.  Nationalism repulses me, but not so actual patriotism.

This weekend as I do each fourth of July I will pull out the music of Charles Ives and listen to it.

Ives music sounds very American to me. It jolts me back into my love and admiration for my country at its best.

Without America, not only would there be no Blues, no Jazz, no Rock and Roll, there would be no Charles Ives, no Mark Twain, no Frank Lloyd Wright, no David Foster Wallace, and so on. All great art and thought seems to me to grow out of a context. Take away the context and its hard for me to imagine the art and ideas.

Of course my life is a vacation. It sort of always has been. But this summer I seem to have particularly done some goofing around with my beloved composing.

Yesterday I made up and printed a study score for “Dead Man’s Pants” (hopefully pictured above). I didn’t put the drum part into the reduced score because I was mostly thinking of making something I could play over on the piano.

The reduced score consists of 315 measures spread over eleven pages. I think I may have omitted one measure but can easily fix that today.

I did an analysis and rewrite yesterday morning.  The proportions look something like this:

Dead Man’s Pants Theme – 28 measures
aprox 13%

Small Rain Trio – 30 measures
aprox 13%

Tiny Lies (Banjo Song) 179 shorter measures of 2/4
40%  of the length not the measures

Small Rain Trio – variation and continuation – 35 measures aprox 10 %

Dead Man’s Pants variation – 11 measures
aprox 4 %

You must be the animal – 66 measures (with D.S. & repeats) aprox 20 %

So the whole thing comes to about 350 measures with repeats.  I did quite a bit of recomposing and what I call “nipping and tucking.” This means experimenting around with some unifying motivic features and what not. I enjoy doing this stuff.

I also showed the following draft to my boss yesterday.

I don’t think I’m quite done composing the above congregational line. The melody will float over a sort of samba like rhythm accompaniment. Once I have the melody nailed down I will write multiple instrument parts.

I am definitely interested in  developing an Grace Electric Light Orchestra of parishioners for use at Sunday Service beginning this fall. One of our first numbers would be a rendition of the above Holy.

I also showed this version to my violinist, Amy, yesterday and both she and my boss, Jen,  seemed to like it. Amy said she likes it when people come up with “fresh” stuff. I hope it is “fresh.” I will encourage people to think of it as experimental music for our worship to avoid ensconcing it.

Yesterday the piano tuner came and fixed my piano. I had a broken string as I suspected. Instead of replacing it, he spliced it. I guess that’s the usual first step. He said the strings can be expensive. I suppose if that doesn’t work he will replace it for me. Anyway, it’s holding so far and he promises to return to retune it in a while after it has stretched.

He also tuned the piano which is nice.

I asked him about renting a bit nicer piano for the August gig. When he discovered that Hope faculty types are playing with me, he said it might be possible to cheaply rent one from the college.  It would depend upon if they were available or not. Cool.

I hadn’t thought of the Hope connection until he said that he would have to check with the chair of the music department. I pointed out that the chair’s wife and daughter were both playing on this gig. Also another adjunct professor as well as Grand Rapids Symphony player. That’s when he said there was probably discount available. Something about Hope college professors getting a good instrument I guess. It’s certainly cool with me.

The piano tuner’s name is Kelly Bakker and I have had him tune pianos for each of the three local churches I have worked for. Plus bought my present piano from him. I am happy with his work.

Kelly took a look at my harpsichord project. He thought it looked like a lot of work. Yikes. Well, we’re committed now. He also took some old jacks I was going to throw away for parts for the crappy harpsichord at Hope (they have a good one which I have not played…. but they have at least two crappy ones which I played years ago).

I rescinded the deadline I gave myself to try and have my piece “Dead Man’s Pants” completed by this afternoon’s trio rehearsal. I continue to do rewrite on it. I think I am improving it. It’s best to let compositional decisions set for a few days before distributing parts and I’m still in the throes of making these decisions. This is fun for me. Why terminate the process early when the players are so adept anyway?

I would also distribute parts to the rest of the musicians who have agreed to play. I am expecting some shifts but as long as I have a drummer I think I can make last minute adjustments if people drop out or have conflicts.

I got up this morning and started looking hard at my score. I discovered that the first two themes are primarily comprised of phrases of four measures. I didn’t do this consciously but it does provide the kind of unified coherence I am looking to make sure this particular version will have.

I plan to spend the morning looking hard at the relationships between the sections. I know that I have already changed stuff to make it more coherent and improve it in general. Now I am planning to be more calculated. This seems to be a way that my composing evolves from inspiration to perspiration.

And having a copy of the software, Finale, is extremely helpful.

I went over to the Hope College Music library and checked out a couple of books yesterday.

I specifically wanted to look at Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the late 18th century Sonata by James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy.

This is a very intelligent scholarly up-to-date (2005) look at its subject which is one I have thought about for a while. I reread Bathia Churgin’s 1968 article, “Galeazzi’s Description of Sonata Allegro” while I treadmilled yesterday.

Hepokoski and Darcy organize the ideas around Sonata Theory and musicology in general in a helpful way specifically mentioning authors and books I have read and helping me see them in their various schools of thought. Very cool.

In my post-education reading and studying I am much more likely to agree with the musicologists and music theorists than when I was in school. I think this is because in my college education, most of my teachers though they were excellent tended to represent schools of thought that were ebbing and actually were not as logical and coherent as what I run across now in my reading.  That’s how it seems to me, anyway.

This makes keeping up in the field interesting.

Readers may have noticed that yesterday’s blog had no pics. I find that I have a bit less time for blogging these days and curtail my morning’s efforts by omitting the time it takes for lengthy searches for just the right pic. When time returns, I will probably go back to that.

Yesterday I came closer to a finished score of “Dead Man’s Pants.” I am trying to resist obsessive composing day and night. I fear I will burn myself out quickly if I give in to the impulse to work constantly on this project.

Nevertheless I seem to be finding time to do the work. I think it is coming along. The piece timed out at around 9 minutes yesterday. Which for the number of instruments (12 plus vocals), is a whole lot of writing. At this point there are 314 measures in the piece which consists of several sections.

I also composed a light musical setting of a piece of service music for the Eucharist yesterday, the “Holy, holy.” This text used to be known as the Sanctus of the Mass and is now part of the ritual of any liturgical Christian church I can think of.

Service music has dogged me all my life. I watched several hymnals make choices about what service music to provide for people who use their hymnals. This includes the Episcopalian 1982 Hymnal.

Writing ritual music in a lighter more understandable and usable musical style has given rise to a ton of trivial sounding stuff. I wonder how possible it is to write this kind of thing successfully. I have attempted compositions in most styles however and gave this kind of thing a good try yesterday.

My idea is to write a piece to be sung in the weekly prayer that captures and facilitates this community’s current theology which I would say is a sort of moderately intelligent socially committed not too serious one. I have chosen to write music that is rhythmic and has some cleverness in the congregational melody itself. I am hoping the cleverness will seem easy to the average singer at my church. This cleverness consists of dividing up some of the text in ways that might be a bit counter-intuitive to a trained musician as he/she reads it, but that might feel natural to someone who listens and likes music these days.

I test drove it on poor Eileen last night. She kind of liked it but that’s no test because she is probably my biggest fan. But when I specifically asked her about the ease of the melody she didn’t think it sounded hard or contrived.

I will probably give it another test drive on my boss tomorrow.

My boss and my wife are good barometers of this kind of thing. Musicians often bring a sort of literate ignorance to their judgments on music. First of all it takes a wide facile understanding of interpretation of music notation to understand a composition outside of your experience and taste as a trained musician. Secondly all listeners tend to evaluate in terms of music they are already familiar with or fond of. In both cases the evaluation is colored by the fact that the more we hear something the more likely we are to enjoy or appreciate it.

Of course there does a come a point when constant repetition works against almost any piece of music. This is the dilemma of writing music to sing the same text each week in public payer.

My goal in this piece is not only to write an acceptable composition, but to provide a flexible vehicle for my own pastoral parish situation. I envision utilizing a variety of accompaniments depending upon who shows up to help on a Sunday morning.

I wrote a little introduction that I hope will set the tone for a more playful and relaxed setting. It is my hope that most weeks I will be able to convince rhythm instrument players to assist. Some weeks I would like to do it with a battery of musicians who are also parishioners. Interestingly enough I haven’t thought too much about the usual boomer instruments: guitar and bass. They will fit fine I am sure. Instead I envision some interesting parts for strings and winds and mallet instrument. My marimba is sitting at church right now.

I have been using a Jazz font in “Dead Man’s Pants” and thought it might have a good effect if I notated my “Holy” the same way.

So instead of the usual printed look:

It looks more like this:

Anyway.

I woke up thinking about how composers like Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven thought about the evolving formal structure of some of their music. Specifically what is sometimes called Sonata Allegro Form although this term is probably not one they would use.

A little poking around in my files and on the web and I came up with an article to read and a book to check out.

Now to find out when exactly Hope(less) college music library is open today. They reduce their already minimal hours dramatically during the summer.

Dear Diary,

I was discouragingly exhausted physically and emotionally yesterday. I wanted to plunge into working on my composition and harpsichord. Instead I allowed myself time to attempt to relax and distract myself.

I still managed to do some work in “Dead Man’s Pants.” Actually quite a bit of work. I sketched a transition, wrote string parts, piano parts, xylophone parts. But I didn’t touch the harpsichord.

Finished reading Stieg Larrson’s last volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. After having read all three of these, I  conclude that Larrson could have used some strong editing especially in the second volume. But still they were perfect summer reads for me.

I spent some distracting time with Schumann on the piano.

Today I need to come up with a plan for next Sunday. I have chosen the hymns to be recommended already. I was hoping to use my sax player friend on the prelude and postlude but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet. I will choose organ music in case I don’t hear from him this week.

It is crossing my mind to start a compositional project after I get the Aug 5th gig up and running.  I am feeling much freer about my composing and think it might be interesting to write a more extended work, possibly for piano, violin and cello. I don’t really have any specific musical ideas for it yet. But my personal resolve seems to be strengthening.

Part of getting older seems to be accepting and even embracing one’s own eccentric stuff. In my case that means a very  human idea of musical performance and the joy of story and words and honest creating in general.

I feel calmer about my role at work. Part of this is realizing how disinterested I actually am in much of what preoccupies the staff there. The people in the community who bother to connect with me personally keep encouraging me with their enthusiasm and support. This is extremely satisfying. But it would help if they paid me more justly but that’s probably a pipe dream. I’m lucky to get the emotional support.

And I am lucky.

Today’s entry probably has too much shop talk for most non-church musicians. But it’s what’s on my mind this morning. I came home from church so enthused that I sat down and emailed a bunch of people who had played that day at service. Then I formed a Facebook group for musicians at my church. You can see I’m out of control but it’s typical of my enthusiasms.

I was surprised that almost every person I invited to come early and play rhythm instruments for the opening South African hymn  at church yesterday showed up. I took advantage of the moment and grabbed several emails of young people. Asked them if they would mind being put on a musicians on call list. Asked them for other names.

After some rehearsal they came together.  I decided to begin the hymn with the rhythm instruments. This allowed them to settle in (which they had no problem doing since we had just been rehearsing it) but also it gave the congregation a chance to notice the novelty of the rhythm instruments before beginning to sing.

So the rhythmic energy poured out of the music area. The singing was not that strong. I had planned to drop out the organ at one point but decided not to since I mostly heard rhythm instruments and organ (playing the vocal parts). It’s possible we could have seduced them into better singing with softer rhythm instruments but I’m not sure about that.

Interestingly the participation in the rest of the service was strong. It was especially noticeable in the Gloria which followed not too far from the opening hymn. But it seemed to me to persist into the rest of the service.

In addition to the South African hymn at the beginning of the service, there was quite a variety of other musics.

Prelude – Bach organ piece
Opening hymn – South African drum piece
Sequence hymn – Strong rhythmic German chorale upon which the Bach organ piece was based (If thou but suffer God to guide thee) with organ accompaniment
Offertory –  A Capella rendition of “I have decided to follow Jesus” (This often mistaken for an American spiritual when in fact it comes from the continent of India)
Communion hymns – Charismatic/Praise hymn “Seek ye first”
followed by the gentle but strong German chorale ” Come with us, O blessèd Jesus.” This is the tune used in the famous Bach cantata movement, “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring.”
Closed out the service with great text “Love Astounding” sung to the simple American tune called HOLY MANNA.

I was creative with the organ accompaniments as usual. I introduced the closing hymn on a simple flute stop and also used this sound in an interlude since the hymn was only two stanzas and the procession didn’t really have time to exit.

The postlude was a loud dissonant four pages from Hindemith’s organ sonata.

This seemed like a good solid musical service to me and I came home excited and satisfied.

I got up early and worked more on “Dead Man’s Pants” yesterday. Unfortunately after leaving my work I came back later and discovered that Finale seemed to have misplaced about twenty important measures of evolving string accompaniment. No doubt, I somehow told it to do this. I find that computers and software first of all do exactly what you tell. One just has to be careful what commands one gives them.

I use a lot of keyboard controls. They are powerful. Working with a large score, it’s impossible to see the entire score. It’s very likely I hit the control-Z hotkey and erased part of the music that I didn’t intend to.

Sigh. I wasn’t able to get this going again.

Eileen and I did, however, get going on tearing down the harpsichord in preparation for re-installing new jacks and strings.

We had a morning session in which we disassembled a great deal of the old harpsichord. I played a farewell piece before we began. The Prelude and Fugue in Bb from Bach’s first Well Tempered Clavichord. This is a piece I’m thinking or performing in August at LemonjEllos.

Here’s a link to all the pics from the morning on Facebook. I put it up here for you, Elizabeth, since you have migrated away from the Facebook madness, heh. Also anyone else who would be silly enough to be reading my blog and would like to link in to pics.

Eileen went to spend time with my Mom in the afternoon. I dragged myself over to church and prepared for this morning’s service. I called several people on Friday night and invited them to come early and learn some rhythm instrument parts to today’s opening hymn. So I re-tuned the skins on my conga. I find this a weird use of the word “tune,” but it is how drummers talk. What I did was simply loosen the heads and then re-tighten them carefully and evenly. I think they sound better then.

Also laid out all the decent rhythm instruments laying around the church. I am expecting about four young people  but it could be more or less.

Also rehearsed my Bach prelude based on today’s sequence hymn, “If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee,” and the postlude which is a four page loud excerpt from Hindemith’s first organ sonata.

I can hear you yawning but this is my life.

When I came home Eileen was still Farmvilling with Mom at her apartment. I continued working on the harpsichord. The pic above is how it looks after stripping out the keyboard and jack rails and vacuuming.

Then I started coals for supper.

You can see I was in a photographing mood yesterday.

Here’s a link to all the afternoon pics.

Then I watched an old South Park episode which I pulled up on Comcast. I am now a tv person, I guess. I think it might help me rot my brain occasionally and distract me from being so dam serious and self absorbed.  Worth a try.

The perfect music of the birds singing in the dawn is floating over the rustling sound of the wind in the tops of trees this morning. I find the bird sound exquisite at this time of morning in the summer in little old Helland where I live. Combined with the wind sound it is quite as appealing and wonderful as Bach to my ears.  Now the train whistles in the distance.

”]I have spent this week composing the “Dead Man’s Pants” theme and patching together the rest of the piece from compositions from this year.  Yesterday as I worked through scoring and composing for a theoretical (and fantastical to me) pallet of some 12 or 13 instruments it occurred to me where this piece lands in my own mental and artistic landscape.

It seems to be a piece about death in my mind. It is a futile waving of a jerky branch of protest in the face of the inevitable demise of us all.  A defiant angry joy of being alive. It’s also a regaining of sorts, I hope, of my voice as a writer.

Watching and helping my parents through this last phase of their life has had a dampening effect on my personal mental resources. At the same time this period has held insights for me, about them and also about myself.

In my life I have turned to little guitar songs to work out my own mental struggles. I realize they have mostly served as therapy for me. I am quite content with this and there is actually one of these embedded in “Dead Man’s Pants” called “Tiny Lies.”

But the first forty measures or so seem to be a bit of a musical statement that sums up something for me. Not easy to put into words. But it is a resurgence something for me that was ebbing.

It also helped that my struggle at work seemed to come to a peak for me.  I realize that the energy and direction and creativity seems to be mostly my own in my job as a church musician. Thus has it ever been for me.  For whatever reason I have visions and dreams about what could happen in the work of a church musician. I’m sure this is partially a sort of latent adolescent romanticism around musicians who worked in the church like Bach and Healey Willan.

This week I failed to muster this energy and watched what happened.  I experienced a strong sense of discouragement but oddly mixed with a determination that I could actually get my perspective and proverbial groove back.

This seems to have happened. Self-reliance, indeed, mister Emerson.

At our evening meal on Thursday my wife found my uncharacteristically quiet. She feared that I was gloomy but in fact something else seemed to be happening.  It looks like gestation or something. I told myself I was trying not to rehearse my frustrations at work. And while accomplishing that I do think that somehow I was finding an independent strength in my own sense of who I am and where I am in my life.

So the composing has been interesting for me this week. I do hope I can pull off the performance but it is in the end the composing that is more fun for me. I have invited all of my participants to set aside the night before the performance for a sort of full rehearsal. In the meantime I am planning to rehearse and consult with them in smaller groups. I mean to consult with my drummer. My drum parts are sketches of the improvised nature of drumming. I also am curious to expand the singers from me to me and a couple of other singers. This will need some delicacy and energy but I think it will be well spent.

Last night as I went to church to do a quick practice of Sunday’s organ music, it occurred to me that the opening hymn would be served by a gaggle of percussionists. This seemed to be residual creative energy from my work this week. The hymn, “Halleylujah, we sing your praises,” hails from South Africa. Like many African tunes it is best served by voices and percussion. We have been singing this for a couple of years.  So far four young people have indicated their willingness (actually their parents returned the call, ahem) to come early and prepare a percussive accompaniment to this hymn.

My strategy is two fold. To add to the moment of this sung hymn Sunday. But also to begin to connect personally with talented young people at church. I haven’t had much chance for this. It seems that not only I but others there think this would be a good thing. My energetic intense passion is difficult for cerebral cool Episcopalians to deal with however much they admire it. I think I am not the only one that observes that the positive side of this part of me has a bit of an echo of the impetuosity and immaturity of youth.

I actually dreamed about Peter Pan this week. Heh.

This residual siphoning of a bit of my inner compositional and musical non-church self has been something that has happened to me all my working adult life.  It is in fact what has kept me going in this field. Also the fact that it is one thing I do that I can sometimes manage to get paid for.  This seems like a trivial thing no doubt for someone as privileged and educated as myself, but more than once in my life I have noticed fellow musicians casting a slightly jealous eye that I have managed to make some money with music.

Indeed I feel very lucky this morning.

I don’t have too much time to blog today. I started the morning by making a score template for “Dead Man’s Pants” and beginning a final score. I am scoring it for vocals, alto sax, tenor sax, oboe, glockenspiel, drum set, xylophone, piano, violin, viola, cello, bass and banjo. I am feeling a bit rushed on this because I want to get parts in people’s hands and then see if I can convince them to rehearse.

I’m also seriously considering taking the first step on working on the harpsichord. This would consist of reading the instructions all the way through and then stripping down the instrument.

Eileen has said she would help this weekend. She is worried about my state of mind. Yesterday I tried not to talk about church stuff over supper. I stupidly ordered the wrong thing at Margaritas trying to be clever and do it in spanish. I carefully read out the wrong title. Typical of my state of mind. I am feeling very disenchanted and distanced from church right now. I like the  work, but the people stress seems to be unusually hard for me.

It turns out that when I am immersed in composing I’m not very adept at much else.

Yesterday I showed up inadvertently for my meeting a half hour late.

I had the time wrong. I plopped down and attempted to pull up my google calendar which refused to load wanting only verification of my log on but refusing to allow me on. I remained off balance for the rest of the meeting.

I just wrote an entire post describing the meeting but when asked my wife agreed it was probably inappropriate so I deleted it.

The negative energy from the church meeting stayed with me for hours yesterday only ebbing mysteriously while I sat in my Mom’s shrink’s  waiting room.

I did figure out out how to outfox my browser into letting me onto google calendar.

And I did get quite a bit of composing done.  At this point “Dead Man’s Pants” is around 300 measures long and consists of 4 sections: “Dead Man’s Pants theme,” “Tiny Lies,” “Small Rain Trio,” and “You must be the animal.”

This piece is in extremely rough draft form. Much of yesterday was spent writing string parts to go with “Tiny Lies” which is actually a banjo song. I plan to sing that. The vocal line on “You must be the animal” is extremely disjunct and has a very wide range. I can’t really sing it. Not sure either of my other two singers will be able to do it. Maybe I’ll just omit the singing on it.

Today I am playing piano for the June Birthday Party for my Mom’s rest home.

I played one of these earlier this year and was surprised that there was so much interested in “secular” music in such a religious context.  I alternated hymns and pop tunes (mostly from the 40s and 50s). Most of my requests seemed to be for the pop tunes.

Today I will do the same thing but will take more pop tunes to play so I can play things people will enjoy.

I know that money is on my mind these days.

I am underpaid at church with no real prospect of improvement there. I find it discouraging to think about working out creative solutions to the music program because every idea relies on me doing more work and no real mention of remuneration commiserate with this increased load.

So my solution is to volunteer my time playing music for my Mom’s rest home.

Brilliant, eh?

Spent several hours yesterday working on “Dead Man’s Pants.” This composition is starting to come together. I sort of had in mind how the theme would go for a while so yesterday was pretty easy. I’m about half-way done and have incorporated several sections of the piece which were previous compositions from this year. I call the sections “Dead Man’s Pants” (theme), “Small Rain,” “You must be the animal,” and “Tiny Lies.” So far only “You must be the animal” and “Tiny Lies” have vocals.

I’m hoping that in my enthusiasm I haven’t written stuff that will be too hard to pull together without too much rehearsal. I’m excited about  having a drummer who can read rhythms and have written stuff specifically for his skills. Also I keep hearing xylophone, glockenspiel, saxes, strings and banjo.

So finishing “Dead Man’s Pants” and then preparing scores for my ensemble is the next big project.

I missed having supper with my wife since my Mom scheduled her doctor’s appointment around the time usually take food to my wife at work.

Today I want to spend more time on my piece. I have to meet with my boss and my children’s choir director at work. We are going to do some brainstorming about creative approaches to the music program at Grace.

While I have made my list of thoughts, I have been pondering that every one of them involves added duties.

My wage is well under professional standards for a music director and the children’s choir director is, I believe, even more poorly remunerated than me. Both of us have master’s degrees (she has two!).

The situation is that the church is growing and more and more pressure is put on the staff to produce programs that fit it. While the budget is solid there is no provision for bringing staff salaries into line with fair wages.

I’ll have to mention this today.

Bah.

Also Mom has a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. One church meeting (the Worship Commission) was canceled. That frees me up a bit. Also need to get over and do some organ rehearsal.

As I worked over my notebook of compositional jottings from the past two years yesterday, I was interested to note several entries that reflected music I heard in my dreams. Not planning to use any of this material at this point, but it is interesting.

This is one dopey video. But I put it up so that you can hear the song I have been spending loads of time on recently.  I am putting as much of the recorded arrangement as I can into a Finale Doc. My idea is to use this tune as an opener on Aug 5th. I really like the writing and the arrangement and the fact that it uses  so many musicians.  It sounds kind of lame on Youtube, though.

The video completely misses the point of the song which is from the point of view of someone being re-accepted into a relationship not seeking re-acceptance. I guess that figures.

Finished reading this early Burgess novel last night. He is such a fine writer. And though his early work is not as good as I remember his later working being, it still is worth going back to.

I started reading Shalimar the Clown by Rushdie last night. I love the way this man puts sentences together.

She saw him fracture into rainbow colors through the prism of her love. She watched him recede into the past as he stood below her on the sidewalk, each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever, surviving only in outer space in the form of escaping light-rays. This is what loss was, what death buy valium australia online was; an escape into the luminous wave-forms, into the in ineffable speed of the light years and the parsecs, the eternally receding distances of the cosmos.

Salmon Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown

I became interested in this book because it takes the reader inside the terrorist. Written in 2005, Rushdie uses his cred as an object of a death fatwa  himself to an intriguing effect by proposing a love story in which the disenchanted lover, Shalimar, becomes a terrorist. At least that’s what I think the book is about. I’m on page 26.

And I’m on my third Stieg Larsson. Perfect summer reading for me.

I meant to lay out my harpsichord tools yesterday in preparation for tearing it down. Instead, I spent my harpsichord time playing harpsichord. I think I must be getting accustomed to this instrument’s mediocrity because it doesn’t seem that bad to me. Indeed, I am finding it a pleasure to play my beloved Bach, L. Couperin and Francois Couperin.

I have been pondering just what I am going to write for performance in August.  I am considering making a bit of a collage (a la Zappa) of several shorter pieces that have popped out in the last year. I would tie them together with some musical ideas that would recur throughout and title the whole thing “Dead Man’s Pants.” This has real possibilities..

I read two letters from my deceased Dad yesterday on Father’s day.  I had asked my brother to pass them along because he mentioned that he had found copies of them in Dad’s papers.

The first one is dated Oct 17, 1969, the second Feb 17,1970.  Mark commented that he could see why my relationship with Dad was not a good one in these letters and that if he, Mark, had received them he would have found them upsetting.

Eileen read them yesterday and said they simply sounded like a worried father with a teen-age son.

I have no recollection of the letters or of the concerns Dad expresses in them.  I also didn’t think of my relationship with Dad as particularly troubled. He was a good conversationalist and I often looked forward to talks with him. But he did seem sometimes  to have difficultly expressing his intimate thoughts to me.

I do feel like a bit of a riddle as a personality when I think of my mother and father. Both were musicians of sorts. But I remember my childhood and young adulthood as one filled with music, books and poetry that was of interest solely to me and not my parents.  I guess that makes sense.

In the letters Dad does seem to be struggling with his lack of faith in me.  He seems to see me basically as wrong-headed and over influenced by a bad set of friends.  I think he felt guilty about leaving me in Flint and moving the rest of the family to Columbus in 1969. I one the other hand was exhilarated at the time.

Dad could have been right about the wrong-headedness. I was about to plunge into a bad marriage. But at the same time there were things at this time of my life that remain an important part of who I am (harpsichord, a critical eye on society, a willingness to be myself despite the difficulties it produces). Some of these Dad eventually accepted but others he seem to have difficulty accepting right up until his decline due to Lewy Body Dementia.

Most of this struggle went on inside of Dad or at least it never caught my attention as an adult.

It does explain a comment one of my uncles made to Dad when I began to assume responsibility for his and Mom’s care in their old age. Dad reported (bless his heart) that his brother had commented that since Steve was doing such a fine job of taking care of them that the family was probably wrong about me or that I had changed or something like that.

Another vote of confidence from the Jenkins clan for Steve.

But in truth I haven’t looked to my family for approval for a long time.

And I don’t have any significant conscious anger at my parents around any of the issues that seemed to trouble them so much.

Somehow I learned to look to myself (and for a time my younger brother) for thoughts and direction in my life.

I certainly made mistakes but I also take responsibility for them.

I do wonder why I am so different from the rest of the people in my family. In some ways I don’t think I am that different but in many ways I seem to be. I think it’s probably a logical combination of my DNA and the chances of the influence of life’s situations and experiences.

One thing I continue to notice in my life is how confusing I myself can be to many people I meet. Not always the case, but often enough for me to notice it.

I do remember with a smile when before he died, my Dad was surprised to find out that I did the bills  at my house. Dad continued to see me as the prodigal son, the undependable son, the reckless one until he gradually lost his mind. Judging from his report about my uncle this was a family perception as well. May still be.

I’m okay with it of course. In fact I often feel pretty lucky about my life.  I do think that having a passion in life (music, poetry, books and art) is a lucky thing.

I recently was talking with a couple of young people who also have passions and pointed out how lucky we were. I said that when I get up in the  morning I know what I am going to do each day.  I figured they did too. And all of us look forward to it.

When I first attended college to study music (around 1973?) , I was a composition major. The school was Ohio Weslyan. My keyboard skills were very meager. I had played keyboard in rock and roll type bands.

I owned my harpsichord then so I attempted to learn baroque pieces on it.

I remember saying that all the keyboard technique I really needed was to be able to play Bach’s Well Tempered Clavichord volumes.

This makes me smile now.  Ever since that time I have attempted to continue to improve my keyboard skills. I think of pounding away on scales and Hanon in the back room of the Jenkins Bookshop (started out as “Just Another Store”). This was after quitting Ohio Weslyan and leaving my first wife (and child).

Another growth spurt in my technique was my times at Wayne State and Notre Dame.

More recently when I quit my full time Roman Catholic church music job here in Holland Michigan (around 2000), I utilized my increased free time to improve my playing.

At this point, when I want to learn a harder piece I determine how deeply I want to get into it. The deeper I want to learn it and the more difficult it is, the more I slow my practicing of it. The goal is to rehearse it with as few mis-steps as possible. This usually works. And it opens up the idea that I can learn a lot of music that used to be inaccessible to me.

The Italian Concerto of Bach is a piece I have flailed away at for a long time.  I can see by my notes on it that I performed it at church in August of 2000. This must have been on the lovely Bluthner piano I helped purchase at the Roman Catholic church here in Holland. I’m pretty sure I didn’t perform it on my harpsichord.

But I did rehearse it for many years and not too successfully. Since then it’s one that I feel pretty comfortable playing. There are couple of sections I still find a bit challenging.

I am musing about my technique today because I put up in my status on Facebook yesterday that I was happy to be playing my harpsichord in my dining room. I even mentioned that I played through the Italian Concerto and some Platti.

Platti is a baroque Italian composer. I found a volume of his works in a used shop in Ann Arbor and quite enjoy playing through them. They remind me a bit of the great Domenico Scarlatti but that might just be the debt both owe to the Italianate style.

Anyway, two people from my past commented on my status. One from way back in my high school days about listening to me play piano at church camp (!). Church camp? I have no recollection of playing piano at church camps but I’m sure I probably did given half a chance and a piano.

The other from a wry woman I knew and admired in grad school commenting on the fact that she would very much like to be able to “play through” the Italian concerto.

I suspect both people of trying to encourage an old musician.

It worked. Heh.