Very proud that my daughter’s partner, Jeremy Daum, co-authored an article in the South China Morning Post this week. Here’s a link to it on the web site he maintains for the US Asia Law Institute at NYU. It is called “Secret Agenda” on the subscription only South China Morning Post web site and “Behind Closed Doors” on the US Asia Law Institute web site.

Yesterday  I spent most of the day with my friend, Jordan.

Very exhilarating actually. We chatted for about an hour, then got down to some playing. We played through several pieces for saxophone and piano including works by Glazounov and Paul Creston. Great fun, actually.

We decided to continuing working on a Bach sonata and a couple movements from the Deckruk sonata. The latter is a lovely piece. I think Jordan is planning to perform it at school next year.  I will schedule these at church once we get them ready.

After this session, we had lunch at Margaritas.

After this I went over to check on my Mom. I was discouraged to find her still in bed at 3 PM in the afternoon. This is the worst she has been. I did not scold her, but strongly encouraged to get up and get dressed go to the evening meal. I will check on her again today.  I guess if she’s still in bed, I will call her shrink and take steps to hospitalize her. This was definitely the low point of yesterday for me.

Then I went over to church and practiced organ.  Spent some time with Sunday’s prelude and postlude and then the first movement of the first Hindemith sonata.

When I returned home I began working on a project I have had in mind for while. I have decided to examine closely the folk song melodies that I have found meaningful over the years and begin to transcribe them for possible use in some compositions.

I started with John Jacob Niles collection. I have had this book since my teens.  I have a pencil copy of an arrangement I did of “The Lonely Glens of Yarrow” also probably in my teens or early twenties. I selected four stanzas of the original Niles folk song and made up my own melody. Interesting that I was so drawn to this stuff even then.

After Eileen got home we walked down to the pub for a lovely evening meal together. I admit it was a 3 martini evening for steve.  Sort of a roller coaster of a day actually.

Exhilarating talking and playing with another musician. Discouraging to see my Mom continue to decline. Satisfying work on the organ and composition prep. Then a lovely evening meal outdoors with my wife.

Yesterday I chose hymns for this upcoming Sunday yesterday, then a prelude and postlude.

I have a huge hymn tune index to my collection of organ music which I have been assembling for years. This is very helpful in locating settings based on hymns.

Since it is so big it would be a task to convert it to a digital database. It works just find on the 4 x 6 cards I use.

I have felt for years that preludes and postludes based on the hymns the congregation sings that day are some of the most appropriate material for those slots.

I had a public disagreement with a local Reformed musician who said this was not the case.

I realized immediately that we were disagreeing about different styles of worship.

My understanding of liturgical worship is that it is coherent and chosen texts such as anthems and hymns are best when they contribute or illustrate the readings assigned.

So logically instrumental music is also ideally coherent with the feast and when it can be based on a tune sung that day that is almost ideal in my mind.

There is a huge corpus of material based on hymn tunes. Much of Bach’s organ music is based on tunes his congregations sang. We are not sure how they were used in worship. But it is probable they were either used in worship or considered connected to the tunes somehow in their use.

Last Sunday I played a couple of the Bach settings appropriate for Pentecost.

This Sunday the prelude is based on the opening hymn and the postlude on the closing. The proximity to the tune is satisfying to me.

Since it’s Trinity Sunday we are kicking off with “Holy holy holy!” (NICEA).

This is one I have sung all my life and enjoys a wide use  in US Xtian churches of many denominations.

Interestingly it’s author, John B. Dykes, was part of the so-called Oxford movement.

This 19th century movement was a combination of ritual interest and a Romantic awakening of appreciation of medieval and primitive Christianity.

When the Hymnal 1940 was assembled Dykes hymn compositions made up the largest contribution of tunes (22). The editors of the 1982 Hymnal only used about half that.

Nevertheless  his tune to “Holy holy holy!” is one that is familiar to many US Christians.

I am playing a gentle setting done by Robert Buckley Farley for the prelude this Sunday.

The closing tune, ALLEIN GOTT IN DER HOH EHR,  is like many German chorales actually based on a Gregorian Chant.

The chant dates from the 10th C. the chorale from the 16th. I have scheduled four variations by the 16th c. Dutch composer, Johan Pieterszoon Sweelinck for Sunday.

I think Sweelinck music is quite charming. I often wonder why the local Dutch musicians don’t use his music more often. During Tulip Time they give marathon organ recitals at Hope(less) College, but in all the years I have been keeping track of it I don’t recall any of the players ever playing the music of this worthy composer.

The third variation I am playing Sunday has the melody in the Tenor voice. I transcribed this variation with this voice written in the pedal because that is how I plan to play it Sunday and it is a bit easier if it’s written out this way.

Here’s a Link to a pdf of it.Also a here’s Link to complete free scores of Sweelinck Harps & Organ…. couldn’t get it to load but I’m pretty sure it’s there.

I ran across a nice succinct video summing up Howard Rheingold’s ideas on skills needed to be internet literate these days.

Last week I was talking with an academic and received the impression that he viewed the internet more with alarm than excitement. I passed this video (and a link to Rheingold’s “Crap Detection 101”) to this person.

This must have been perceived has confusing to him but I felt that I needed to at least pass along this basic information about how to use the internet.

Rheingold’s theory of literacies

Attention literacy
Participation literacy
Cooperation literacy
Critical Consumption literacy
Network literacy

All of these interconnect to create the set of skills we need in order to function, learn and think today.

I like how Rheingold says skills plus community = literacy. I take this to mean that we need to hone our skills and then put them in the larger context of the human community. Only then are we in the position of understanding and conversation of ideas I think of as literacy.

In music this is clear. I keep honing my musical skills as a player, as an analyst, as an interpreter of history and a composer. But this ideas do not exist in a vacuum. I have to reach out to other musicians living and dead for their input and points of view in order to continue to be up to speed.

This process is sort of an institutionalized curiosity.

So many academics I have known over the years seem to have had their curiosity removed. In its place is a guarded self-preservative reservation about how much to share and how not to look foolish.

I find this sort of boring.

One of the things I like about Frank Zappa is that he seems to have spent his life throwing himself into direct contact with the stuff that interested him.  He called Varese on the phone as a teenager. Having only a high school education he died a sophisticated and highly informed composer and performer.

I keep learning from him.

He is an important part of my community.

Anyway here’s the video I linked in to my academic acquaintance if you’re curious. If it doesn’t work here’s a link to a page that has it.

I woke up from a dream this morning  in which I seemed to be improvising at the piano in a meeting. My contribution to the conversation was the music. Others were making comments as one does at a meeting. I woke and remembered vaguely what I had done in my improvisation and got up and jotted it down.

I am mistrustful of  ideas from dreams because they often seem so much better in the dream than in waking life. Heh.

Mom’s shrink decided not to hospitalize her yesterday. I was prepared to spend my day dealing with Mom and health care bureaucracy. I even wore my dress up clothes.  I have found that looking a bit more formal seems to be a positive influence on people in this area. Often if I dress the way I would prefer (informal and a bit eccentric), people treat me with less respect or even a lack of cordiality.

I also had my computer and reading material with me.

So all of this was totally unnecessary. Mom’s shrink upped her meds a tad and scheduled another meeting with her in a week. She sees her psychologist this afternoon. Her depression is not lifting but her willingness to force her self to “go through the motions” of activities seems to be a good sign. At least this is what I got from the shrink.

I have a lot of confidence in him and other people who are helping with Mom’s care in Holland.

After getting Mom situated back at her place, I went to the Hope(less) college music department library and photocopied a page of the first Hindemith organ sonata. My copy of this piece is torn and I was actually missing a measure. This restores mine. Then I went to the bank and inquired about my mortgage which is nearing it’s completion (several years early due to the fact that we have overpaid our payment every month from the get go).

I had it in my head to get a copy of one of the Stieg Larsson Millenium trilogy. Eileen warned me that these books are immensely popular. Larsson came to my attention via an article in this week’s NYT Sunday Mag “The Afterlife of Stieg Larsson” by Charles McGrath [link]

The third volume in his posthumous series is coming out in the USA. McGrath compared it to when Dickens’ novel, “The Old Curiosity Shop,” was appearing in serialization in a US magazine. He describes the scene of people waiting on the dock for the ship to arrive with the next installment.

Eileen was right. There were no copies in the library. When I checked the catalogue, there were long reserve queues for them. Even the ebooks. I could have managed to obtain an online audiobook version of one of them but I wasn’t interested.

I came home and bought the Kindle edition of the first volume for around $7.00. My daughter later pointed out to me how she has seen the first buy valium in bangkok volumes available for very little in used book shops in NY. I checked again  and saw that they are pretty cheap used on Amazon, but when I factor in S & H, I probably only paid a couple more bucks for my Kindle edition.

I don’t own a Kindle. I just use the Kindle software on my Netbook to read Kindle books.

This enables me to easily read while I treadmill. Which is what I did yesterday.

I avoided going to church to practice organ even though the Hindemith organ sonatas are on my mind. I needed some space.

Larsson’s little crime novel is good for this kind of relaxing. He wrote it in Swedish and it exists in translations. The writing is a tad clunky but I don’t expect too much from it.

I realized when I was reading it that one of the main characters (Slander) is described as “a pale, anorexic young woman  who had hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows. She had a wasp tattoo about an inch long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle.”

She is the “Girl” in the titles of these books I guess. I was immediately drawn to the character because she is continually underestimated by people who meet her because of her appearance and manner. And of course she’s brilliant.

Okay. Okay. It’s obvious this is one of those guilty pleasures for someone like me. Living in Holland. Who is eccentric. And constantly under estimated by people.

Hey. It’s escape reading.

I also realized recently that in two of the novels I am reading, one of the important character, if not the main one, is a composer.

In my beloved Burgess’s first novel, “A Vision of Battlements,” Ennis is an English soldier serving in WWII in Gibraltar who is a misfit of a dude (ahem) who parties and misbehaves but also finds time for some serious composition.

In Kathryn Davis’s “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,” the dead composer, “Helle Ten Brix,” literally haunts the narrator and has left her the tormenting tasking of completing her opera which shares the name of the novel.

In this latter case, I also realized how much Davis owes to Thomas Mann’s book, “Doctor Faustus.” I have read “Doctor Faustus” at least twice.  For some periods of my life Mann was my obsessive author. “Doctor Faustus” is a thinly veiled use of the life of Schoenberg (who was incensed by it…. his character, Adrian Leverkuhn, makes a deal with devil for his weird composing style in a syphilitic delirium).

So there you have it. Composers are on my mind.

I had a nice chat with my NY daughter last night. She arouses my envy by her NY adventures. She also has been making lovely lovely drawings lately of Dr. Sketchy models. Very cool.

Yesterday was the Christian Feast of Pentecost.

My prelude was a ten minute Bach setting of a Pentecost melody (Komm, Heiliger Geist BWV 652). I have been working pretty hard on this piece. It is long and I found it a bit tricky. In ten minutes I figure I had 3 small concentration lags. This is not bad by my lights.

The introduction and final verse organ harmonization of the opening hymn, “Come Down O Light Divine” were written by my hero John Ferguson.

I often improvise this sort of thing, but I thought it would be fun to use one of Ferguson’s many creative settings. The introduction is a lyrical soft treatment of the melody. It is unusual in that it doesn’t pump up the congregation to come  roaring in on the first words of the hymn.

I warned the choir and showed them how it went a couple of times during rehearsal. One chorister asked me if I could play a chord in between the introduction and the first words of the hymn. I told him no. I pointed out that even though it was a bit different Ferguson had done it hundreds of times and had led hundreds of hymn festivals in the US and that it would be fine if the choir began singing as I asked it to.

This worked. The Bach prelude did seem to create a a quiet space with the congregation. Into this quiet, I introduced the opening lines of Ferguson’s introduction which are a soft flute stop playing Vaughan Williams’ lovely melody.

The rest of the service went fine. The Chamber Choir did a pretty credible job of the Thomas Tallis anthem. The closing hymn was a  bit of a gospel rendition of “There’s  a Sweet Sweet Spirit.” This is a favorite of many parishioners.

There were some odd moments but they involve personalities at the church and probably aren’t all that appropriate for this blog. Suffice it to say that in the midst of trying to do all the stuff I did, I was a bit off balance due some of the oddness. I try not to think about it but will talk to the boss about it on Thursday and get her take.

One of the friendly college profs at Hope(less) College inquired about my interview this week. I tried to tell him about it without being unnecessarily negative. He tried very hard to be “coffee hour” supportive and encouraging. This was a bit of a painful moment.

After church Eileen enjoyed the walk home, grabbed something to eat, then drove over to check on Mom. We found her sitting in the dark in her apartment resting on her chair.

She was definitely regressed deeper into her clinical depression but agreed (almost automatically) to come out with us to enjoy the beautiful weather in our back yard for a bit.

This was a tough two hours. If you have ever been around someone with this disease you know that they lack emotion and find it difficult to respond to the simplest conversation.

Mom has a follow up psychiatrist appointment this morning in Zeeland and I fully expect him to hospitalize her if she is still in this space.  Today is usually a day I try to take off and do some relaxing and composing, so I have the free time to walk her through this process.

I revised the ending to Dead Man’s Pants (formerly Small Rain) yesterday. I thought it might be fun to post the changes. This piece is still not in finished form, but I think the re-write on this section is closer.

Dead Man Pant’s

MP3 of last 23 measures
Pdf of last 23 measures

MP3 of revision of these measures
Pdf of same

This morning I listened to a dramatization of William Trevor’s short story “Sacred Statues” on BBC Radio 4.

The plot is that a talented but impoverished carver of beautiful wooden statues has come to the end of his tether with the fact that he cannot make a living at his art.

His strong willed pregnant wife convinces him to visit his English patron who has retired as a widow to Ireland where they all live. She has encouraged him by allowing him to live for free on her property in the next county. He bicycles 20 miles to ask her for more help. Unfortunately, she herself is falling on hard times and cannot.

His wife dreams up the notion that she will give her child to a local childless couple for enough money to live for a year while the wooden sculptor apprentices himself as a stone carver. There would then be a living in this after that for him and her and their two other children.

She approaches the wife of the childless couple. They are childhood friends. She outlines how to make two disappointments (childlessness and a failed artist) into two happy endings. The childless woman confesses to not having enough courage to pursue the idea.

The story ends with the sculptor preparing to go out to “work on the roads” as a manual laborer ending hopes for continuing his art.

Link to the BBC IPlayer where one can stream this story temporarily.

Happy stuff for a musician like me first thing in the morning, heh.

I mention it because the music that the BBC used for the background of the dramatization seemed cribbed from the intro to the Beatles song, “And I Love Her,” and the main them of “Sunrise, Sunset.”

I found this mildly amusing especially considering the topic of the story.

My Mom seemed to be doing a bit better yesterday. She accepted my invitation to get out of the apartment. We dropped by the Farmer’s Market to see Eileen at the Master Gardener’s info table where she was volunteering. Then we picked up some Campbell’s potato soup and came to my house and had lunch together.

Yesterday after carefully preparing my Bach Pentecost organ pieces for today, for some reason I turned to Paul Hindemith’s organ sonatas.

I have performed all of the first one and some of the second. I have been thinking about Hindemith’s musical language. It is one that I have always liked. At this point in my life I really don’t personally know anyone else who likes Hindemith. He has fallen out of favor with most academics. Or at least the ones I talk to and read.

For me, he is someone I have listened to, played and read most of my adult life. His music is not all that easy to play but I think it sounds cool.

I came home and started reading an old article I had tucked away on his organ works. (“Hindemith and the Organ” by Boyd St. Jones II, AGO mag, March 1986).

Hindemith was one of the many talented people who fled from Europe to the USA during WWII. He continued to teach, write and composer. In addition to his compositions, he wrote much prose. I own quite a few of his works. He wrote a beginning theory text as well as an interesting set of exercises for musicians to hone their musical skills called “Elementary Training for Musicians.”

The title is ironic because the rhythm and sight-singing exercises in this book go from the simple to extremely complex. I have used these exercises as a student and as a teacher over the years.

He also wrote a couple volumes on his ideas about composing.

He believed that Western Musical scales are derived from natural acoustic properties. I don’t think he’s right about this, but I do find him charming, especially as a composer.

I played through a couple movements of his first piano sonata after I got home from practice yesterday.

I have been messing around with making MP3s from notation files of my compositions.

I have added 3 midi files today:

Hymnody

The Eyes of God pdf
Midi MP3

Oboe

Oboe Sonatina (1976)
Piano score pdf
Oboe Part pdf
Midi file MP3

Organ

“Little Recessional Dance” pdf
Midi MP3

[Link] to my Free Original Sheet Music Page which is where I keep this stuff.

Yesterday I decided to look more thoroughly at Finale’s capability to make mp3 files from its notation files.

Lo and behold there was a way. Of course I had to goof around with configuring it, but I did manage to do it.

I end up making a special copy of the file and altering it so that the playback is more acceptable.

I basically hate midi files,

but they can make a nice reference listen. And also most people interested in my music don’t read music, so it’s nice if they can get an idea of what I’m writing sounds like.

For example, This is the first page of the piece I have been working on.

“Small Rain” is just a phrase I like. I have even called some of my bands by this name. I am thinking of titling this piece: “Dead Man’s Pants” and dedicating it to my deceased dad, Paul Jenkins,

& Alec Wyton.

The second guy is obviously also dead. He was a sweetheart of a guy who was a pretty well known Episcopalian musician. I had a conversation with him way back in the 80s in which I bragged that I could write a “clever little trio,” but found composing simple hymn tunes and service music challenging. He told me that the church needed people who could write “clever little trios.”

I think this composition might be shaping up to be one of those.

Anyway.

Now I can not only share my rough draft in a PDF form [link to pdf of the entire rough draft of this piece], I can even share an MP3 of this working draft [link to mp3 of Small Rain/Dead Man’s Pants rough draft] so then if anyone reading this is interested they can get an idea of what I’m working on.

One of my passions is that the internet can be a way of having conversations with interesting people and learning from them and also sharing stuff like music, both in notation and recordings.

I know that many people reduce the web to its ability to make money. I find that pretty boring. I’m more interested in music, ideas, poetry, stories, and art of all kinds.  What better way to connect than right through the people involved?

I hope that my dream of distribution falling into the hands of the people who create stuff comes to fruition.

One of the reasons I am using this particular template f9r jupiterjenkins.com  is because back when I built my web site from scratch I had difficulty providing for comments. Conversation!

I know not a ton of people connect with me this way, but that doesn’t bother me. Never have been that interested in connecting with huge numbers of people. Quality, not quantity.

So if a few people connect with me, my ideas and my music, I am a happy camper.

And today I’m especially tickled that now I am able to put up midi files of whatever I have composed.

The bad news is that the silly interview with Dobreff was a false alarm. According to him, they have no needs for teachers right now. Not sure if he took one look at me and made that up or if it’s close to the truth.

The good news is that despite this discouraging news, I had a pretty good day. I got my Mom out for breakfast, did some composing and had  a good rehearsal at the organ on Sunday’s stuff.

I have now turned my little piano piece with the working title, “Small Rain,” into a trio. I mentioned this yesterday. Work on this is proceeding very well, although I can’t see any practical performance for this work since I don’t know a bassoonist, clarinetist or flutist right now.

Eileen and I splurged and ate out two nights in a row at the local pub. It was another beautiful day here in Holland Michigan. We couldn’t resist the opportunity to sit outside and eat and drink in downtown Holland. I only had one martini since it was my second night out in a row. But I did try a Riesling made here in Michigan and was impressed. Usually I find Michigan wines not that attractive. Maybe the trick is to have a martini first. Heh.

I had scallops. I seem to be slipping into being a vegetarian who also eats fish. I’m doing this because I have lowered the amount of cheese and eggs in my diet considerably.

Anyway, we have got to curtail this going out to eat a bit. Ahem.

While I was waiting for Eileen to get home from work, I began reading Roddy Doyle’s short story, “Ash.” It appears in the May 24th issue of the New Yorker which was in my mail box when I got home from GR.[ Here’s a link to the story].

You remember Roddy Doyle. He wrote the book the move, “The Commitments, was based on.

Plus some other charming stuff. I like his writing and I liked this little story.

I also liked one of the poems in the new New Yorker: “Exhaust” by C.K. Williams. [link]

Took my Mom to the doctor yesterday. He was a bit concerned because her clinical depression is deepening. He upped one of her drugs, ordered in home psychiatric nurse care, and asked to see her again on Monday.

Afterwards we went for ice cream.

I also asked her to go out for breakfast this morning. We meet in a couple of hours.

I managed to do some actual composing yesterday. I have been working on a little piano piece. I was looking at the melody (it’s basically a melody with some accompaniment) and decided it would sound cool  on the bassoon. Then I began to hear a chamber trio.

So I started a trio version for bassoon, clarinet and flute. This version is much more satisfying to me.

I found an online blood pressure tracker.

I entered all of  my readings since March 16 and my average is 127/81 which is not bad.

This afternoon I meet with Kevin Dobreff from Grand Rapids Community College. I’m actually sort of looking forward to talking to someone about music.

Yesterday I was looking through the stacks at the music library at Hope(less) College here in Helland Michigan. I was looking for a piano transcription of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

As often happens when browsing in a library, I discovered some stuff. There was an entire section of piano transcriptions of different composer. The first one I pulled out to examine was a collection of Mozart Symphonies. And the first symphony in it was the Jupiter Symphony.

I put it in my pile to check out.

Later I was trying to think how I first came in contact with the Jupiter Symphony of Mozart. The first memory I could pull up was of a little piano piece of the opening theme that I played in my ill-fated piano lessons in Flint Michigan.

I say ill-fated because unfortunately I learned very little from this teacher. In fact she started me off on some bad habits I later had to break. But I don’t blame her or anyone else for that matter.

“Jupiter Jenkins” first appeared as the title to a song I wrote in my teens. I can still remember part of it. I may have even notated it in a fit of perversity at some point.

jupiterjenkins.com was born when I was trying to register my first web site. A friend was helping me. My first notion was to use the initials: sbj. He told me that even though we were pretty early in the domain rush, most simple letter combinations were already spoken for. Sure enough, when he tried to register sbj.com, it was not available.

So I went with jupiterjenkins.com.

That’s the jupiter story.

I also ran across the “Cambridge History of Western Music Theory” while looking up Stravinsky.

I know this probably sounds boring, but Music Theory is decidedly an interest of mine. And the evolution of its understanding is definitely something I think about.

I was amused to see an article by Calvin Bower in it. He was the chair of the music department at Notre Dame, S. Bend when I was there.  “The Transmission of Ancient Music Theory into the Middle Ages” sounds dry and it probably is.

Calvin did his doctoral work on Boethius. I was amused while attending Notre Dame that when I went looking for his thesis it was filed simply under “Calvin.” Calvin was a huge eccentric presence so it seemed fitting I guess. Heh.

I read the Introduction to the Cambridge Music Theory book yesterday. Ate it up, really. I just checked on Amazon and while the book costs a couple hundred dollar, it does exist in a thirty dollar paper back. Cool. If I decide I want a copy I can probably afford that.

I was also very interested to do some background reading on Stravinsky. I discovered that as I sort of suspected and vaguely knew, many of the themes in the Rite of Spring are actually drawn from Folk Music.

Specifically the famous opening passage.

This is a bit of a revelation for me.

I am realizing that many of my more successful compositions (successful to me) use pre-existing material. I am very happy with the “Drunken Waltz” movement of my “Suite For Five Instruments.” The melody is actually “Popeye the sailor man,” disguised by significant changes in rhythm.

I did this because I have always admired Popeye and I had an oboe player friend at the time that I promised I would write a piece for some time using the melody.

I also remember some goofy pretentious young person thoughts about the “objectivity of musical materials.”

Ahem.

Anyway, I find discovering Stravinsky of all people using pre-existing material very encouraging and sort of liberating because I have been wondering how the folk music I love and play has influenced my compositional thinking and how to integrate this in the future.

If I think about it for a minute, I realize that my passion for folk music is another thread in my life that goes back very early. I remember plunking out tune like “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” and “Every night when the sun goes down” on the piano when I couldn’t even read bass clef yet.

And even before that, when I lived in Tennessee I recall singing the folk song, “Cindy,” in a goofy camp musical competition.

Good memories that connect with who I still am.

Had difficulty not thinking about church stuff yesterday. I realized that I witnessed three communication problems there within 24 hours. Two education series that were not on the supposedly master google calander, broken links on the web site, and a version of the closing hymn Sunday in the bulletin that was so garbled as to be totally unusable. I seem to be turning into one of those nitpicking old asshole guys. Fuck the duck.

I turned to Scott Joplin’s graceful rags, Bach’s preludes and fugues and Haydn sonatas on the piano for distraction. They definitely helped. I also spent time rehearsing the substantial Bach organ pieces I want to perform Sunday (the trio, Komm, Heiliger Geist BWV 652 and the larger version of Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist BWV 667).

It usually seems ironic to me that I put such effort into my organ music because it is such a subtle and ephemeral aspect of how people perceive my work. But I guess performing can never be primarily focused on the perceptions and/or attention of the listener. It has to begin and focus on the work itself. So that’s what I’m trying to do for Sunday.

I had a nice walk and breakfast with my wife before she left for work. We admired the art work of a young friend of ours, Emily Hunt, at the coffeeshop LemonJellos. One piece  was called “rebirth” and was sort of a hanging mobile of little bits of burlap with clumps of earth in them. One of them was beginning to sprout. I guess the eventual piece includes the sprouting of some or all of the others. Very cool.

Eileen spent a great deal of time and a lot of effort preparing soil and planting a little vegetable garden behind our garage this weekend.

My assignment was to turn to the sprinklers on and off yesterday. Which I did.

I ran across a very cool video of Jamaican Kincaid talking about and reading her work. Put it on Facebook but here’ s a [link]. I only listened to about an hour of it. Ironically (since it is an MIT link) I could find no way to pause the fucking thing. So I couldn’t return to it after a break. Oh well.

I had to interrupt it to take food to Eileen at work. Her boss gave herself an Ipad as a graduation gift (her second masters). I just find the Ipads so useless. All glitter, no gold for steve. I object to the proprietary nature of the access to stuff on it and find the touch screen and the balance trick (shifting from horizontal to vertical when you flip the thing) unimpressive. It also looks a bit like an Iphone for the visually impaired.

When I came home I sat with my new score and listened to the entirety of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. This is a labyrinth of a work and it continues to strike me how influential (and reflective of non academic music and ideas) it was. Unfortunately I discovered my score fluctuates in size on the page and therefore in legibility. This morning I started jotting out little transcriptions of themes in my notebook. Realized I wasn’t sure if the score was one that reflected the transposition of the instrument or was a C score. Usually I can tell by simply looking at the harmony. Not so much with Stravinsky.

I will utilize the materials I have, but there do exist more legible versions of this work including a four hand piano version. Nothing online so far.

One of the thing that interests me about Stravinsky is determining how derivative he was in developing his materials. I have looked at Bartok and Messiaen pretty analytically and know of times when they derive their material unabashedly from other sources, not only folk music but other composers. I like this because I like their work and am interested how they arrived at their compositional decisions. If indeed that is possible to determine.

I have been thinking about the derivative nature of my own work. I remember basing a section of my pretty successful oboe sonatina on a little Hungarian folk song that Bartok has set in a simple piano version. Hmmm.

Finished off two books last night.

They aren’t really two books that can be juxtaposed in their meaning. However, I was struck by the skills of the two writers. I am biased toward Anthony Burgess, I admit.

His novel was a clever fashioning of the novel form into what he describes as “an Aldwych farce,” referring to the English farce of manners presented in many plays staged at the Aldwych Theater on London’s West Side.

Like one of these farce, the book is a comedy united by time and place and theme. It is a skillfully written piece of fluff that hints at the depths present in the idea of love and marriage.

The characters speak and act like actors on the stage of the mind. They entertained me and gave me pause for thought.

Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, “The Help,” on the other hand flirts with some large issues like class, race, noblesse oblige, & the civil rights movement in the USA. Stockett, unlike the formidable Flannery O’Connor, does not break out of her New York publishing house writer mold and create something that directly addresses these important serious topics.

Nor does she quite pull off a Burgess and write a light entertainment piece.

Instead she creates sort of John Grisham level of prose and plot with a girly flair. The book left me a bit queasy wishing I could have read the book within the book that the main white character, Skeeter, is writing in conjunction (and necessary secrecy) with the more interesting Abilene and Minnie about the life of being a black maid to white house wives.

As a reader my interest waned over Skeeter’s dilemmas of first dates in her twenties and continuing her adolescent relationship to her parents while living off them on their cotton farm.

When the maids Abilene or Minnie take over the narrative, the story becomes much more interesting. But here, Stockett’s style falters. She insists on writing dialect. This is dangerous territory for a best seller type writer. Stockett doesn’t seem to have the ear of a Faulkner or O’Connor (or for that matter for the English a Burgess).

I found myself reading the dialect aloud in an interior voice which is pretty normal for that sort of thing. But unlike well written dialect I didn’t marvel at the author’s ability to capture and convey something that is actually heard when people speak. Instead I noted (as I tend to do with the dated dialects of Twain and Kipling) the technique used to create a supposed symphony of speaking.

This book seems a bit more market driven than story or prose driven. That’s of course probably why it was a bestseller. Unlike Burgess, I don’t think I’ll ever find myself returning to read it a second or third time  for pleasure or insight.

I am excited to be thinking about interviewing this Thursday at Grand Rapids Community College. It’s not clear for what sort of position I am interviewing. Initially Kevin Dobreff’s emails in response to my inquiries  were cordial but lukewarm mentioning that they already had a pool of adjuncts.

But after I submitted my CV and filled out their forms (on which I checked every box of what position in the music department I was applying for), he emailed me and said we would talk in May.

If nothing else, this seems to have raised my morale and unencumbered my approach to my current gig at Grace. I have been feeling a bit more easy and creative and more free to comment as though I have some ownership in the gig.

This is probably also a result of the vote of confidence I felt I received last week both from my boss, Pastor Jen, and my friend and colleague, Peter Kurdziel. During conversations around how to deal with working with the children’s choir director at Grace both of these people reinforced my view of myself as a competent professional. And had constructive helpful insights.

I like that of course.

I’m wondering how my boss might feel because in the brief interim I have spoken up a bit more about some stuff at church like omissions from the church calendar and dead links on the web site. No response about any of this stuff (including my interview this Thursday) from Pastor Jen yet. But that doesn’t mean much at this stage. I try not to do to her what so many do to both of us which is engage us at multiple levels around the Sunday worship. So I didn’t talk to her about any of this at church yesterday. Instead I have been communicating via email.

Church went well. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the movements of the composition the young cellist played as the prelude and postlude yesterday. I have never heard of Henry Eccles, the composer. But I liked the quality of the writing. After a little poking around online it looks like this is his one extant piece. There’s probably more but I couldn’t find examples on line.

The cellist played well. The hoary old Anglican anthem went well. There was a train wreck in the closing hymn. One line of the music was repeated and so that there was a duplicate line and a correspondingly omitted line. I might have caught it as I played it, except that I was looking at a harmonization of the hymn in the source book and not at the bulletin. Fortunately one of the choir sopranos came over after returning from the procession and told me what was going on. I stopped at the end of that stanza. Sheesh.

Mistakes will happen and they don’t throw me for a tizzy. I do wish that I felt like others on the staff were as concerned about the accuracy and quality of their work as I am mine. It is the middle of the month and I am just now noticing that the online church newsletter is confusingly linked on the web site. It’s wrong in one place and correct in another.

I discovered this when Pastor Henry the assistant pointed out that he couldn’t attend the choir party due to the film series he is giving. I emailed him back quickly that his series was not on the calendar. He replied that it was in the newsletter so I went hunting for the info and discovered not only that his series (and another book club series at the church) was not on the calendar but that it was difficult to get from the web site to a current version of the newsletter.

Do I care?

I guess I do.

Anyway, this week’s upcoming interview has helped me not be so embarrassed that I give a shit about the functioning and stuff at my little church gig.

I emailed Kevin Dobreff, department head of the Performing Arts department at Grand Rapid Community College, yesterday.  Through the good graces of someone I knew in my youth, I had come to his attention as one of the adjunct teaching applicant back in March. He had said at that time he would meet with me in May.

I hadn’t heard from yet. My wife suggested I should send him an email to remind him in case it had just slipped his mind. Within three hours he had replied suggesting a day and time we could met. Hmmm.

I figured he hadn’t got back to me because he no longer was interested in me as an applicant. Back in March he indicated they had an ample pool of adjuncts, but after I sent my resume, he said he would meet with me and also arrange a meeting with the Dean.

Hard to know what all this means.

It is interesting that this comes at a time when I am experiencing doubts about my church work. I know that I am a good professional church musician. I asked my boss for a discussion around my job description and pay salary back in October. We are just finally getting to this since I am the wheel that doesn’t squeak so much.

But next week we aren’t meeting (as I mentioned in yesterday’s post). And I will be meeting with the college guy on the day I usually rehearse with the trio and meet with the boss.

It is likely that the connection with GRCC will not come to any  sort of fruition. Usually everything is based on the perceived needs of the institution not the possibilities of a prospective employee. There is a slim chance I could end up doing some teaching there. An even slimmer chance that it would be rewarding and remunerative enough that I would quit the church work.

I need the money. So a best case scenario for me would probably be a part time gig in both cases that would add up to a bit more bucks. The church is significantly underpaying me (hence the discussion I have been trying to initiate with my boss). And colleges don’t pay adjuncts much. So we’ll see. Watch this space for the further exciting adventures. Heh.

Speaking of gigs I had a web cam session with my daughter Sarah yesterday. I don’t think she would mind if I mentioned that she is dealing with life stress in the U.K.

Right now she is working two part time gigs. One at a bakery and one at a pub. She has a third one on the line as proctor for tests. All of this is not adding up to enough to get her on her feet financially. She is very frustrated and discouraged. Hard to watch helplessly.

Meanwhile my brother is preparing himself spiritually for moving from Michigan to New Hampshire in July. This involved a final trip to a Detroit Tigers game with his baseball fan wife. The Tigers lost.

I had an email from one of my two sopranos last night indicating she won’t be coming on Pentecost Sunday (a week from today). I have a rather difficult anthem scheduled for this our last Sunday. Chorister keep indicating they are a bit busy this month. Not unusual but definitely stressful.  Today we are singing a hoary old anglican type anthem which I can probably pull together with slightly diminished forces. Next week is a lovely piece by Tallis. Two sopranos is probably the minimum for doing this piece well. I will ask my remaining soprano if she want to do it by herself. She will probably say yes and will do a pretty good job by herself. I will also have a back-up easier anthem to substitute just in case.

Typical stuff really.

Racism continue to be on my mind.

Yesterday at lunch I quizzed my Mom about some of the stuff I remember and think about. She is bit more confused these day. I’m hoping its the med that need adjusting. But she remembered and confirmed some family stories.

Like the one I remember where she and Dad were discussing whether they should join in the civil rights protests in the South. My memory is most vivid about their realization that they would not be welcome in the homes of people (read other white people in the south they knew from church work) where they would normally be enthusiastically hosted and housed.

I asked if she meant Greeneville the town where I did a lot of growing up and my brother was born. She hesitated and said yes.

I mentioned to her that in retrospect it looks like we got out of the south just in time to avoid being there during the really ugly struggles which included beatings, confrontations murders and lynchings. She like me hadn’t really thought about this before.

I have been thinking of this because of two books I have been reading: Burgess’s “The Right to An Answer” and Kathryn Stockeett’s “The Help.”

Burgess’s book predates the American struggle in the 60s by a decade but I still find it illuminating about the division of life into “us and them.”  His character Mr. Raj takes bigoted England on its on terms ostensibly studying at university to research “racialism.” He himself is a believable creation and mixes passion and insight beneath a “civilized” Indian skin as he discovers first hand the racialism of UK at the time.

Ultimately he dies by his own hand after murdering the estranged husband of the woman he loves.

And sex does seems to be important in the story of racial hate.  Many of the terrible deaths involve rumored or actual cross racial sexual situations.

Stockett on the other hand seems to not quite get her story right.  I find it jarring that she moves from a quick mention of a young black man’s blinding because he used the wrong bathroom to the main white character’s dilemma of a restrictive rich background and a floundering first romance.

I think Stockett may have in mind sort of a Thomas Mann like narrator who narrates from ignorance and tells the story obviously in a manner that illuminates the reader but not the character. I fear that Stockett has had one too many creative writing courses and is trying to show the growth of the white character.

I suspend a bit of judgment because I’m not quite done with the book.

However, there is such a stark contrast between the lives of the black maids the main character is interviewing and the white people in the world of the interviewer that Stockett seems compelled to invent problems for the white people (young motherhood, social climbing, failed housewife skills).

There are other problems but she glosses over the fact that the white people are living as duplicitous lives as the black people in her story.

Yesterday I made a soundtrack for treadmilling.

It ended up being all Beatles and Zappa.

Interesting mix. The rest of the day I spent thinking about the music of Stravinsky, Chaikowsky, Villa-Lobo and of course Bach.

I have been listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and reading the introduction in the score I purchased. I was embarrassed yesterday when I discovered that I actually already owned an old used score of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Ahem.

I also played through a couple of pages of a transcription of the main theme of his Petrushka.

I keep reading in the Chaikowsky collection I purchased. I don’t know these pieces at all. Not sure what kind of a reaction I am having other than just learning about how he puts music together. They don’t strike me as pieces I will return to over and over as I do my favorite composers. But still it is interesting.

I am finding Villa-Lobos entirely charming. I recall playing the Faculty Club at Wayne State once and having a visiting South American couple request Villa-Lobo on the harpsichord. It was an unusual request and I told them that I sincerely wished I had some of his music to play for them. It turns out that some of it might sit quite nicely on the harpsichord. Go figure. Also it’s decades later.

I keep working on Bach for Pentecost. Also rehearsed the hoary old anglican anthem for this Sunday. There is a skill to playing and conducting from the console and it takes a fair amount of prep to do it competently. Also I have been rehearsing singing along on the tenor part due to absent singers. This is something that Ray Ferguson included in his teaching.

I also spent a few minute updating the stupid stupiid church google calendar after I discovered several omissions. I have been trying to get my church to develop a master calendar. Pretty much to no avail. There are obstacles. First the idea of one master calendar seem to be a foreign one to many of the people I am working with. Secondly there is still a lot of skittishness around doing stuff with computers like google calendar.

I discovered some errors in the church newsletter online. It made me once again think that if they put the newsletter online in an html format that errors could be as easily corrected as they are on the google calendar. But like so many websites they insist on putting information pages up in pdf form.

I emailed my boss to tell her what had happened. I fear I am turning into a squeaky wheel. She asked if we could skip our meeting next week. She has a lot to do. I also feel that I represent some ongoing conflicts that are probably not that high on her priority due to other pressing more real stuff. Fair enough. She didn’t say this but we both laughed with a bit of relief when she agreed to skip it for a week.

Someone invited me to come hear her accompany a singer at Hope college this Sunday. I respectfully declined thinking there are several reasons not to. One of them is that I find the so-called natural solo voice a color that I am not crazy about. I love some of the Schubert lieder and some solo operatic arias. But for me the sound of Billie Holiday and certain pop singers like Elvis Costello and the Beatles are more of the solo vocal sound I like.

For some reason the sound of a blended choir attracts me, but not the solo voice in the “natural” mode.

In addition Hope college seems so toxic to me right now. Last week their board rejected any further discussion of changing its policy around gay people on campus. Sigh. Fuck them.

And there’s always the academic problems of departmental politics, people nonsense and intellectual dishonesty. Better sometimes just to stay away.

Today I have few tasks. I’m hoping to have breakfast with my lovely wife (who is still sleeping as I write this) and do the bills (both ours and my Mom’s). Some practice and study and reading. Exercise. My life continue to be good.

I had two very productive conversations yesterdays. The first was with my friend and colleague, Peter Kurdziel. The second was with my boss, Jen Adams. Peter reminded me of the coherence and professionalism of my approach to my work. He said if I ended up leaving church music due to the usual pathologies one finds in this kind of work it would be a defeat and a loss to the profession. Nice to hear. He also had some specific strategy suggestions for my situation.

Later my boss and I sat down for our weekly talk. I was relieved that her perceptions of some of the stuff happening in my work is very similar to my own. We had the usual easy meeting of the minds.

Before this my piano trio rehearsed. We began rehearsal with Mozart instead of the usual Mendelssohn.  We did some detail work on this piece including discussions and experiments with tempo and articulation. Very satisfying experience.

Playing with string players can be so enlightening for me. There are musical things that string players do as a matter of course, like phrasing and tempos and general musicality that are things that keyboard players must make their sounds do as well. Even though we are a step removed from the actual producing of the sound. String players actually touch the string (when it’s not the open pitch) and activate the string with the bow. Keyboard players are forever “pushing a button” that activates a mechanism that makes the sound.  That’s a bit different.

But I have found it helpful to listen to other musicians who are string players and learn. So it’s one of the many things I am getting out of working in this piano trio.

It was also interesting to move from rehearsing Mozart to Mendelssohn for once. Usually we begin our rehearsal with the Mendelssohn. I found that we were working for a necessary precision in the execution of Mozart. Then the Mendelssohn seemed much more scattered to me. I think it was a bit looser than usual yesterday  with all of us in the trio having little “moments” when we didn’t play exactly how we intended.

The cellist remarked that proceeding from Mozart to Mendelssohn reminded her how “romantic” Mendelssohn’s music is.

Anyway after the rehearsal and my meeting with my boss I walked home to find that Dover publications had sent me the books I had ordered. It felt like a positive reward, heh.

This morning I noticed that none of the books I ordered were directly related to church music. Hmmm.

One of them is a translation of a music theory treatise first published when Bach was 37 years old (1722). “Treatise on Harmony” or “Traité de l’harmonie” was Jean-Philippe Rameau’s first work in which he laid the ground work for the 19th C. and early 20th C. understanding of how chords work in Western Music Practice.

I always find it so ironic that rock and roll musicians sometimes insist on the primitiveness of their music and its uniqueness and worth. We would not be able to play our rock and roll if it had not been for the invention of harmony in Western Civilization around the 13th century and then for its codification by people and especially Rameau.

What I mean is when I teach people chords I utilize the idea of I-IV-V (one, four, five). People usually quickly recognize a bit of “Louie, Louie” or some such rock piece that outlines these basic three chords.

When I do that I am using ideas that Rameau himself actually articulated in his theory of the “fundamental bass.”

I have read in his work over the years but did not own this particular text.

Wonder of wonders, as I was reading the translator’s introduction her referred to other books that do a good job of systemizing and clarifying Rameau’s theories. Of course with a few clicks I was able to look at one of these books online [link to Theory of Harmony by Shirlaw]

It sits on a website I have never been on before but had books that were not on my usual sites (including Google Books). It’s called Open Library and its slogan is “one page for ever book.” [link]

While I’m talking about book sites, I recently received a magazine in the mail about U of M’s online books site called MIRLYN [link]. I just tried it and it’s a bit clunky for looking for books to read online. U of M seems only to have links to other sources online. But that is only after a quick look. I might not be using it correctly.

I also ordered a the score to Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”

Although Dover uses this cover in its catalog, it’s not the one they mailed me which was a miniature score. It looks more like this:

This piece has haunted me all my adult life. I like having scores when I am analyzing and thinking about a piece. Thinking of adding “Rite of Spring” to the music I listen to in spring.

Also purchased three music scores.

Music by Tchaikovsky

Although Chaikowsky’s music is scattered throughout many of my scores, I don’t own one collection of his piano music besides a charming little transcription of “The Nutcracker.” I have been taken a weird interest in romantic music lately and thought it might be nice to read through some of his work I am unfamiliar with.

Fanny Mendelssohn:

I am aware that Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann were composers in their own right. But I haven’t been that interested in their music.  Fanny figures prominently in the life of her brother, Felix. So I thought it might be interesting to check out her work.

Villa Lobos

I am a fan of this composer. I do have several of his scores but not this one.

Last night I alternated cooking and cleaning with sitting down and reading through pieces in these collections.

Life is rough, eh?

It’s raining in Western Michigan again. Eileen informs me it’s supposed to rain all day but warm up as the day proceeds.

I slept badly last night so the relaxing rain is welcome.

Too much input I guess.

Thinking too much about my church work.

My brother on the other hand has good news in the church arena. It is now official that he has a new gig in Keene, New Hampshire as a priest of a larger church, St. James [link to church website]. This is very good for him. I am so pleased and happy about this.

His bishop is the wonderful Gene Robinson. Good stuff. He and his wife move in July so they are madly preparing themselves.

I received a couple of old paperbacks in the mail yesterday.

I love these old paperbacks.

Eileen and I went out to eat last night then came home and watched “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”

I was thinking about watching it again, but it looks like Eileen took it back with her to work.

I quite liked it, but would like to watch it again without martini, guiness and several glasses of wine.

I managed to sneak in some decent organ practice yesterday. Working diligently on prelude and postlude for Pentecost both by Bach and both based on relatively obscure German chorales (BWV 652 Komm, Heiliger Geist [link to recording]  & BWV 667 Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist[link to recording]).

Rainy days are great days for composing, maybe I can push a piece or two further today.

I seem to be outlining Burgess’s “The Right to An Answer.” I am quite taken with a non-U.S.A. take on racism in the fifties.

Plus I can’t help but wonder what the heck the election in the U.K. portends. Could it be a role reversal? Bush/Blair meant the Amuricans had the conservative/reactionary leader and the Brits the temperate intelligent leader…. Now Obama/Cameron could be the opposite. Although Cameron is as media savvy as any world leader right or seems to be.

I don’t know the U.K. codes for racism as well as I do the U.S.A ones. Cameron’s acceptance speech yesterday was vague and slightly disturbing to me. And I only heard snippets.

Let’s hope he’s far away from Maggie Thatcher (who did some real damage).

I started reading “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett last night. It was recommended to me by my wife. She and my Mom have both read it. It is immensely popular.

I am finding it startlingly uneven in writing skills and plotting. But I like reading recommendations when I can.

I find her description of the south in the sixties a bit odd. But it is supposedly a Jackson Mississippi portrait from the point of view of black maids and a slightly misfit white writer living on her parent’s cotton farm.

I must say it feels very New York in its outlook. The author lived in New York for more than nine years. More so than my idea of the south (Faulkner, Edgerton, Flannery O’Connor). But probably no less true.

I also continue to re-read early Burgess. Read a chapter of “The Eve of Saint Venus” last night. Very light. But very enjoyable. I “ordered” a couple more of his early novels through the Paperback Exchange I belong to.

Finally I have a graphic novel on the immediate to-read list. “Wonderland” by Tommy Kovac and Sonny Liew seems to be a re-telling of Alice in Wonderland.

Eileen brought it home and finished reading it last night.

So many books so little time.

I was thinking about Melanie Safka, the composer of “What have they done to my song, ma?” The lines:

If I could find a real good book
I wouldn’t have to come out and look

were ringing through my head. I remember being quite fond of Melanie in the sixties.

I notice that I have been doing a lot of reading of fiction, lately.

It definitely feels like escape reading.

I finished re-reading “The Right to An Answer” by Anthony Burgess last night.

My copy looks nothing like this. It is an old worn hardback.

This is a book about UK race relations in the 50s. The main character is a man named Mr Raj who is a Sri Lankan who  has come to the UK to study race relations.

His observations and actions are the heart of the book. The book is comic and tragic and ultimately sort of profound.

Even though this book is over fifty years old I find it interesting that the problems are still so fresh. Hard to believe that it was written a decade before the civil rights struggle in the U.S.

I also spent quite a bit of time on the piano yesterday. As I played through many pages of early Debussy piano music, I realized how my technique has improved even in the last ten years.

I now insist on much more accurate rendering of the page. And there is a slight increase in facility of this rendering.

I have been struggling with a bit of a mood of melancholy. In the face of this mood I thrust my reading and music. I am reminded of John Hartford response to his diagnosis of imminent death. If I understand correctly he began practicing harder than ever. I am charmed by this.

I also visited mature Beethoven and late Mozart on the keys yesterday.

Not sure what it all means but I do take solace in fiction and music.

Today is a cold rainy day in Western Michigan.

I will be taking my Mom to the shrink this afternoon. She is also suffering from depression which I take to be much deeper than mine.

My blood pressure readings were a bit better this morning (123/84). I consciously lay in bed relaxing my body before getting up to take it. I think my melancholy increases my stress and probably affects it. But who knows?

I bought some Hibiscus tea because I read recently it might be efficacious in helping blood pressure and cholesterol.  The label on the expensive little can of tea bags suggested three cups a day. I tried to use one tea bag for two cups yesterday, but the second cup barely tasted of the tea at all. Hmmm.

I also have been working on composition lately. This is especially difficult when one is dealing with a bad mood. The notes mock the creator. They seem suddenly cold and pathetic. Time to put it aside, I guess.

Tomorrow I have church meetings and I am dreading them a bit.

I keep pondering  Burgess’s little meditation on life. At one point he has a minor poet give this little speech.

“Now, said Everett, ‘I enter, I hope, on my last phase. A poetry more rarefied, perhaps, full of mature wisdom, an old man’s benediction for a sinful world, a poetry calm in resignation.’ He extended his arms in blessing. ‘A poetry which says that none us really has a right to an answer.’

‘An answer to what?’ I said.

‘An answer to all the questions that ultimately become one question, and that question it is not easy to define, although we all know what it is.'”

Yesterday at a gathering of my in-laws for Mother’s day, someone cheerfully asked me if I was doing any music lately? I replied that I was and that I had in fact done music that very morning at church.

At the post game rehearsal yesterday, the choir sounded really pretty good on the little Tallis piece we are planning to sing on Pentecost. (“O Lord, Give Thy Spirit …. [link] to online editions).

In addition, we gave a respectable rendition of John Rutter’s Psalm 23 from his Requiem at the offertory. I wanted to do this piece on Good Shepherd Sunday but my oboist who is also the Religious Ed director couldn’t play until yesterday.

The postlude was one of those barless rhythmic Charles Ore pieces that I enjoy playing. My little organ really fails to render a postlude audibly over the congregational buzz. This annoys many musicians but it does not annoy me so much. The one I played yesterday was based on the opening hymn, the hoary old Arthur Sullivan tune for “Welcome, Happy Morning.”

In face we had two Sullivan tunes in church yesterday. The second was the closing hymn, “Alleluia, alleluia! Hearts and voices heavenward raise,” (tune LUX EOI).

I prefer Sullivan’s dancing little operetta tunes.

I find his church music rather dreary.  But it appeals to a certain Anglican sensibility which is still present in the U.S. Episcopal church.

Speaking of Anglican sensibility, next week’s anthem is one of those. It comes from a Royal School of Church Music anthology my church owns.  It’s composer, Horace Spence, seems to be an obscure member of this organization; the “Clerical Commissioner,” according to the little introduction to the collection.

The anthem strikes me as one that is well-crafted and attractive in the strict Anglican romantic choral organ anthem style. It is sort of a miniature consisting of four pages.

Interestingly, Spence writes quite convincingly in 5/4 meter.

I notice that he copyrighted this piece in 1959 which makes it roughly contemporary with the Anthony Burgess trilogy I have just finished reading (see yesterday’s post).

There’s something charming to me in an obscure competent composer of the mid-20th century. I find it admirably modest and even a bit beautiful in its own way.

In the typical way, my choir members are dropping out like flies this spring. One member took  his daughter to Paris for a couple of weeks. Another absented himself due to a pressing family surgery. Others for one reason or another.

This is not too bad when you have a 20 or 30 voice choir. But in our small ensemble it puts us uncomfortably close to lacking the resources to accomplish the anthem.

But, toujours gai, archie, I persist.

Speaking of persisting, after church Eileen and I jumped in the car and arrived a bit late for the Hatch mother’s day festivities. I forced my pies into the hands of relatives.

After that, we drove back to Holland and removed my Mom from her digs to a little bar which was open late in honor of Mother’s day. I indulged in an unusual Sunday martini. My Mom is very glum these days. But she is trying to stay interested in life, I believe.

Eileen bought her some cash for Farmville for mother’s day and it looked like she was getting active last night online once again.

If I can muster any emotional energy today (always a question on Mondays), maybe I will drag her out again this afternoon.

My blood pressure is sneaking back up again. Bah. I have had a bit higher readings for the last four or five days. Not sure what to make of it. I persist in exercising and I am losing weight. But I have been having drinks and there’s always weird diet responses (too much caffeine? salt?).

I just think my old body is aging. I would like to stave off dependency on more intense drugs (for Blood Pressure and cholesterol) as long as feasible. But that time may be drawing nearer.

Yesterday at the Hatch gathering, someone remarked that I looked like I was losing weight. In the ensuing conversation, I remarked that I had been hard on my body and now I was paying for it. The rather prudish response was that was what happens when you abuse your body. I impishly smile (I hope it was impish and not just grotesque) and said it was worth it.

Mondays after church often have a bit of a glum feel to them.  I’m not really an extrovert, so pressing the flesh at church and family gatherings, while something I choose not to miss, does leave me feeling a bit drained.

Mothers Day.  How this day has been changed since Julia Howard Ward’s Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870. Described by the Wiki article as “a pacifist reaction to the carnage of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.[link to en tire proclamation]

Woodrow Wilson proclaimed it a national holiday in the U.S. in 1914. [link to article on U.S. Mother’s Day]

All of this is a preamble to linking Gail Collins’ column from yesterday pointing out that today is also coincidentally  the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill.

“What Every Girl Should Know” by Gail Collins [link]

Gail Collins’s article is well worth reading.

I have a busy day today. Besides the usual church stuff, I  have two Moms that I need to connect with today. Both my Mom and my Mother-in-law lost their husbands within the last year. Today is a good time to reach out to them. So after my post service rehearsal, Eileen and I will jump into the car and drive to Whitehall for a little Hatch Mother’s Day celebration.

This is an annual affair for this family. Eileen asked me to make a peach pie for the occasion which I dutifully did. I also made a blueberry pie with the idea of giving it to our sort of new neighbors. But Eileen found out that quite a crew is coming to the Hatch affair so we are taking both pies to that.

Then after we get back we are taking my Mom for supper probably at the 8th Street Grill.

I have been reading a bunch lately.

I’m on page 293 of this tome. I count 631 pages of prose in it (there’s lots of notes and other stuff after that). So I guess I’m almost half way.

I keep thinking of “War and Peace” by Tolstoy as I read this. Both books describe stuff that is unthinkable to me. The Mao book seems to have a reputation for being exaggerated. It well may be. But at the same time it corrects many of my own misconceptions about the history of Communist China and Mao.

I am almost done re-reading Burgess’s “The Long Day Wanes” Trilogy.

My little paperback doesn’t look like this. It’s black with huge yellow type. I have had it for a very long time. I was just thinking last night how satisfying it can be to read an old beat up paperback.

The first volume is “Time for a Tiger.” A “Tiger” is a beer.  Wiki says it was Burgess first published book.  I mostly remember Nabby Adams from my first read. He is addicted to warm beer.

This is the second volume which I have also finished reading for a second time recently. While reading it, I was interested to read about the Muslims in Malaya from a 50s Brit point of view.  Much different than the current Western Stereotypes. Speaking of which, apparently Burgess was appalled by the cover above. Wiki says “He wrote in his autobiography (Little Wilson and Big God, p. 416): “The design on [the] dust-jacket showed a Sikh pulling a white man and woman in a jinrickshaw. I, who had always looked up to publishers, was discovering that they could be as inept as authors. The reviewers would blame me, not the cover-designer, for that blatant display of ignorance.”

So I’m now reading this one. I just learned this from Wiki as well:

“The title is taken from a line spoken by Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, act 2, scene 6: “The beds i’ the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call’d me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain’d by ‘t.”

How bout that?

I have to quit blogging so that I can treadmill before this long arduous day.

I had kind of an odd day yesterday. My wife had the day off but even before she got out of bed a friend was ringing on the phone saying she had blown into town and would be by in a few minutes.

Minutes later I was feeding her some blueberry cobbler I had made the night before and Eileen was quickly getting ready for her day.

The two of them left shortly to go shopping and watch the dutch dancers

and I went on with my day doing bills, composing and exercising.

I phoned my Mom out of guilt to invite her to take me out for lunch.

No go. It was cold and rainy.

This morning I lay in bed and listened to the wind.

I  can still hear it a bit sitting in my kitchen.

Eileen returned in the afternoon and was gone before too long to keep my Mom company and have supper with her at the nursing home. I charged over to Meijers to purchase groceries.

After that I had just enough energy to go practice organ.

I missed spending time with Eileen on her day off. But I am actually a bit depressed and sometimes am not that great company when this is so.

For some reason I keep thinking of an old, old song I wrote called “The Song the Wind Sang.”

Must be the morning wind. Combined with chatting with old friends online. Anyway, here’s the lyrics.

hear me
outside your window
as I say
your secret name

and the grass it is so restless
as i silent sifting all the sand
tall grass is so restless
as i silent shifting all the sand
and the Moon makes misery her gown
i am the Wind

and the ocean
wears islands in her hair
where will you find me
and the sky she is delighted
to chase us all the way home
yes sky she is delighted
to chase us all the way home

with flowers for hands
the snow dance man
begs me to follow
o you snow dance man
i will follow
if i can

and the snow she is soft
as i sweep singing for your mind
and the snow she is so soft
as i sing searching for your mind

and the Moon puts down her gown
and she gives the gift of night
and she gives the gift of light

1970