My high school friend, David Lyle Strong, has asked me to email him some of the details of my life since we knew each other back in the sixties. So that’s what I’ve been doing this morning. Whew. I’m up to 1987. I figure that’s enough for one email.

I had an interesting chat with my boss yesterday. She surprised me by doing a bit of research around music director jobs and salaries both locally and via the AGO.  She noted that even when one considers my current position as half time, I am still well below AGO recommendations. (I’m around 25K annual and the AGO recommends more like 28K). We didn’t talk too much about it, but I think I’m doing much more than a half time position.

In fact that is my question that I want to sort of ask this community. If my position is not full time, what’s the difference between what I am doing now and what full-time entails?

The other thing I suggested to my boss was that since she does seem happy with my work that we list off all that I do in the course of my job and then we could prioritize my tasks.

One of the reasons I want to do it this way is that I feel that my experience and understanding of my gig surfaces in consultative collegial conversations I have had with Pastor Jen. I have actually made quite a difference in the way this church worships on Sundays. This has been through appropriate wide ranging discussions about our community. Followed by judicious applications, development, refinement and/or discarding of these ideas by Pastor Jen.

Both of us seem to value this kind of conversation and would like it to continue. I would like it to be somehow acknowledged as part of my job. But we’ll see how it fleshes out.

In the meantime,  I do enjoy chatting with her.

I spent several hours on the organ bench yesterday. I have been rehearsing a long Bach chorale prelude that would be appropriate for Pentecost.  It’s based on the tune, “Komm Heiliger Geist” (Come, Holy Ghost), BWV 652.I was gratified to find that James Kibbie takes it pretty slowly on his recording. [link to free MP3… Kibbie has made his recordings of Bach’s complete organ music available free online. Cool!]His recording is 8 minutes long. I think this kind of a long prelude. I will probably go even a bit slower so it’s going to be more like 10 minutes.  Apparently it is one of his longer choral preludes.

And the dang thing is requiring some practice by gosh. I also read through Vierne’s Carrilion Westminster. [link to info on this piece]My buddy, Peter Kurdziel, performed the hell out of this on Wednesday. God bless the ISMLP online library of free music scores [link].

I am learning Mendelssohn’s Prelude and Fugue in G major. Lovely stuff and works nice on my little (very little) Moller organ. [link to PDF of this piece]

So all of this is taking time at the bench. Plus my piano practice. Yesterday I was working on Beethoven and Mendelssohn. Life is good.

I didn’t blog yesterday because I got caught up in trying to find some Mendelssohn letters to read online.

I do know that Mendelssohn left behind a ton of correspondence. I was interesting in reading his own words about his compositions and music in general.

I ended up finding a lovely edition of his Letters from Italy and Switzerland online. [link to archive which has several file versions available….. I like the pdf one I downloaded because it preservers the old feel of the original in the scans of the old copy]

I had staff meeting in the morning yesterday at 10.  I have asked my boss to review my job description and pay scale. I realize that when they hired me they had little concept of the standards for remunerating professional church musicians. In the meantime I have had to battle ignorance about the idea that what I do is actually a profession. My boss is sympathetic. I told her that even a simple creative discussion about this would probably raise my morale.

Another thing I noticed at staff yesterday is the underlying assumptions that we make as we talk to each other. This would be fine except several times yesterday it was obvious to me that people didn’t quite get other people’s frame of reference and no clarifying ensued. I will mention this to the boss today for her dining and dancing pleasure.

Then I rushed over to hear my friend, Peter Kurdziel, play a mini organ recital. Hope College has the practice of running 20 minute organ recitals daily throughout much of the local Tulip Time Festival.

An admirable practice. It is limited to alumni of Hope college. Over the years I have attended sporadically.

In the last few years it has been one of my opportunities to connect with Peter. Yesterday he did a lovely job on some Vierne, Langlais and Dupre. I especially liked the two Vierne pieces.

Then he graciously bought me lunch at Butch’s. What a guy. We had a lovely chat. I miss talking with him. I have about come to the conclusion that most of the local professional musicians find bullshitting with me uninteresting or at the worst uncomfortable.  So it’s nice to connect with a colleague.

My boss was recently surprised by the whole concept that church musicians would have collegiality type discussions. Interesting. I think she considers me a sort of colleague.

Erik Prince was a featured guest at Tulip Time this year. He spoke yesterday. I find this alarmingly disgusting. I heard someone defending him yesterday and could only respond that he was a criminal and should be tried and put in jail.

Links to some local coverage on this:

“Erik Prince Gets Standing Ovation from Tulip Time Crowd” by Peter Daining Holland Sentinel [link]

“Erik Prince Talks Values, Defends Blackwater at Tulip Time Lunch” by Peter Daining Holland Sentinel [link]

“Investigative Reporter Who Wrote Blackwater Book on Erik Prince’s Tulip Time Talk: I Wish He Would Speak More” by Gregg Chandler Grand Rapids Press [link]

I think it’s sort of like having a young Darth Vader come to talk.

Or Ollie North.

Good Grief.

Daughter Sarah’s clever interview project.  I quite like it.

I did some more composing yesterday. I have been thinking of the many ways I have approached music writing in my life. I began writing music most in the style of the popular music I liked at the time: Paul Simon, the Beatles, and others.

Not that my songs captured any of the style of individual pop musicians successfully. I just sort of fell into an attitude to making up music that I haven’t ever successfully shaken.

At this point, I used mostly guitar but sometimes piano as an accompaniment to my own voice.

At the same time I was learning about arranging via a high school group patterned on the then popular Tijuana Brass.

This was valuable experience. Everyone in this group read music fluently. I (and the first trumpet player) were able to write out arrangements of tunes we wanted the group to play. I am embarrassed to report I remember doing an arrangement of the pop tune, “Georgy Girl.”

There were other but I don’t recall them offhand. My friend the trumpet player did an arrangement of the Rolling Stones tune then being played on the radio: “Paint it Black.”

This was a bit like a little music lab. One could hear immediately how effective an arranging idea might or might not be. How like it was what one expected and experiment with ways to make it more effective.

I remember a pianist friend of mine asking for my arrangements (which I was no longer using) to take with him for his move to New Orleans to pursue his dreams of being a musician there. I always wondered what happened to him and briefly those arrangements.

Anyway, somewhere in there I fell in love with the harpsichord. The group of friends I had helped me build a cheap Zuckermann from a kit (which I still have and play). I remember quitting school (the first time) and telling my concerned counselor that I was going to practice music and then study harpsichord somewhere.

Oddly this particular little prediction came true. But it took years.

During my late teens and early twenties my musical world expanded. I began to consciously enjoy the music of people like Bartok and read the writings of John Cage in addition to enjoying and learning music by  the Doors, the Beatles and Frank Zappa.

My performance skills were pretty meager at this time. I date my musicianship from two years of piano study with Richard Strasburg at Ohio Weslyan. One year to qualify for the entrance exam and one year of study before I left my first wife and ran away to play in bars and eventually run a second hand book shop with my brother and his partner and my second wife, Eileen.

I have compositions from this period that were attempts to emulate Bartok and Hindemith. Thankfully this attempts tell me more about myself than these composers.

And that’s the insight I have been wrestling with.

All the composing I have done is connected. From my first attempts at writing pop songs to arranging for a pop instrumental group to writing works in a college setting to composing for church use.

This insight has been prompted by a re-examination of a sonatina I wrote just after I quit studying music at Ohio Wesleyan. My friends and colleagues were good enough to continue to include my work in their recitals after I left town. The oboe sonatina was written at that time.

At the time I thought I was writing in a sort of Hindemithian style. I also based one them very remotely on a folk song Bartok had set.  When I look at this piece now I realize that it’s worth is connected to whatever compositional voice I have developed. It still interests me as a composer and listener. I like the rhythmic theme as well as the second lyric them. Now I can hear them a bit more clearly as the sort of new consonant music they are.

Once I have this insight, it does affect my composition.  Hard to explain exactly but I feel a bit more connected as I make up music. A big part of my compositional thought stems from a life time of improvisation. While my compositional ideas do dry up from time to time, my improv not so much. I can usually come up with something in a spontaneous manner.

Of course the usual stuff happens. Often after writing a sketch I am repulsed by it on the second day. I have learned not to pay too much attention to this and to continue developing an idea until it flourishes or asks to be put in the drawer (so to speak).

Yesterday I spent quite a bit of time with Mendelssohn on the piano. M’s piano works seem to put off many musicians (pace Nick). I have been perversely finding them fun to play through lately (as well actually learning the piano trio in D minor piano part).

Interestingly, it is the “Song without Words” that cause a lot of the trouble.  I first began playing them from an old Schirmer edition which had the titles which M himself did not add (He only titled a small number of them, prefering to leave them titleless as well as wordless).

The titles tend to be cloying. In my brain I associate them with the worst of
“salon music.” Music that was written to immediately appeal to a sentimentality of amateur performers who gobbled it up.

As I learn more about Mendelssohn, I begin to see the distortion of the worth of his musical ideas. 19th C. composers seem so preoccupied with where they stood as giants or dwarfs on the historical progression of music. Their romantic sensibilities naturally led them to see themselves in a sort of super human quest to create music for the ages and the spheres.

Brahms pops to mind here.  I have always thought that he suffered from the mantle laid on him by Robert and Clara Schumann. And himself. Especially regarding the “shadow” of Beethoven.

It was the nature of Brahm’s fine musical mind to be intimidated by this (as was Schubert apparently). But he strove mightily to live up to the idea that he was carrying on the fight for music for the gods. And what music he wrote!

But I think this notion is not a true one.

Brahms himself was crushed at the end of his life. The final blow being Clara’s death. He felt he had no more music in him. Then he wrote his late piano opuses (opi?). I think these contain some beautiful work. It is tempting to see them as freed from expectation and created for their own sake. But maybe that’s a bit romantic in itself.

Anyway back to Mendelssohn. Yesterday I played through several of the preludes and fugues of his opus 35. He wrote these around the same time he wrote his organ prelude and fugues. I was amused to read that he wrote these pieces framed in formal context (he said something about putting on his “wig” to write them which I take to mean that he self deprecatingly was looking a bit to the past with them instead of trying to push back the vistas of the future).

It seems as though he was turning from the more free idea of writing a wordless song for the piano to more discipline.

In reality there is discipline in the songs without words and several of the preludes of this opus are commonly thought of as little songs without words themselves.

So Mendelssohn himself seems to have wrestled with the idea that some of his work suffered from triviality or something.

Of course I maintain that he gave fodder to his critics by maintaining such high standards for himself and articulating his own dis-satisfaction with some of his work. Where Brahms was silent, we have words from Mendelssohn about his frustration at his own abilities.

I suspect most composers wrestle with some of this.

Now I have to go check to see if when I blew the fuse with the microwave yesterday I also erased part of my compositional sketches sitting on the computer which was plugged into the same circuit. Oy.

The hissing of the cooking Portobella mushrooms merges with the hissing of the light rain. Through the window I can also hear the brave sound of morning birds singing.

Eileen arrived safely home last night from her conference.  I had some food in the fridge for her to heat up. This morning I am cooking mushrooms because the portobella mushroom looked like it was quickly getting a bit old.

Composing didn’t go as well yesterday, but I did get the bills all paid, kitchen cleaned and a good deal of piano practice in.

I also waded into a conversation on Facebook.

Two  people were talking about the relative merits of Mendelssohn and Bach. Mendelssohn of course got the short stick. I can’t figure out why academics find him so wanting. I have to suspect that it’s sort of the party line that begins with his own self-criticisms and runs like a thread right up until recently.

Here’s my comment:

I sometimes suspect M is under-rated. I see him as the rare literate musician, a classical humanist of the first water. Besides composing a huge oeuvre including many works of genius IMO, he was fluent in multiple languages (including English and Latin), published at least one translation,
painted, and tirelessly championed music that came up to
his high standards (not only Bach but also was an early
proponent of Beethoven). He came by his classicism
honestly from Granpa Moses M. an important philosopher
in his own right.

M’s treatment by academics is ironically colored by his own extremely self-critical approach to his work, his pioneering of what I think of as the “historical museum approach” to music, not to mention his Jewish heritage. I love Charles Rosen (both as a performer and musicologist). But I think he gets a
lot of M wrong. I don’t hear very much of M as kitsch
(Rosen). But that’s just me.

I was surprised to learn recently that the “Songs
Without Words” not only reflected M’s childhood games of
composing with his brilliant sister, Fanny, but a deeper classical reflection that a “purely” musical thought was more capable of communication than words.

For my part, I love his “Midsummer Night’s Dream”
(mostly written at age 18), the piano trio in D minor (I
admit my trio is learning the first movement and we do
love it) and the Italian symphony (just to name a few I
return to over and over).

Please forgive me if this sounds pompous & insufferable. Just my 2 cents in defense of a composer I like.

I refrain from reposting the other comments here. One of the two people going back and forth replied in a conciliatory but terse manner.

I have found intellectuals increasingly difficult to engage as I age. I think some of this is not having life long friends that I am able to converse intellectually with and have a history of common education and orientation with.

I remember trying to engage a local English college prof about Elizabethan Poetry in 1987. He smiled condescendingly and said something supposedly witty but that I remember as being patronizing.

Sigh.

Some people disparage the superficiality of the internet exchange and god knows this is true. But I am still reminded of the careful conversational dance I have witnessed (and even, forgive me, participated in) that college types (professors and students) have with each other.

It is the rare college person (in my experience) who is interested in substantive conversation.

The irony around Mendelssohn is that he himself seems to have participated if not help found the idea that there a corpus of music that somehow reaches deeply and permanently into the human soul and becomes an indispensable part of the canon.

This idea seems to be disputed by some contemporaries. How do we make room for all the music that humans have made and will make if we adapt such a narrow criteria of appreciation and understanding as the strictures of Western academic music?

For me it has been intuitive that there is value to all styles of music I have run into.  I have increasingly changed my understanding that music is something static to be installed into a figurative music museum. Music is to be done as dance is to be danced. Each dance changes the idea of the dance. Each performance of music adds (and changes) to the idea of a piece of music.

An enlarged understanding of the value of musics then reaches into the corpus of work that Mendelssohn left behind and asks as Ellington said and I believe “If it sounds good, it is good” how can we dismiss such interesting and charming music?

What’s not to like? as some listeners ask about the music they are drawn to.

I rediscovered Mendelssohn through playing his discredited piano music. Then I realized that there were many pieces by him that I have admired all along. I have just let myself be influenced by my betters.

At this stage in my understanding, I stubbornly want to listen closely to my own response to music (and poetry and art and literature) and then use that as my guide.

This causes me to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate what attracts me about the arts. Also to evaluate and re-evaluate the source of my assumptions.

So anyway, I conclude that enjoyment of music is highly subjective. It relies on a mix of sound and experience and memory not limited at all to the notes themselves. Humans tend to mix in their own history to what they love. Music is no exception.

Learning about composers has this effect as well. I am convinced that when I sit down to play a composer’s work or listen to a recording of it, I am influenced by my own understanding of who that composer is.

If you slipped a page of Mendelssohn into Schuman’s piano music or vice versa, I am not convinced I would be able to tell.

At the same time when I look closely at Bach’s music (a good deal of which I know pretty well and have performed and listened to and analyzed), I see not a single pure stream of style and ideas but a world of different styles, techniques and ideas. Composers tend to anthologize their understanding of the musical world. It’s sort of a creator stance. You take the materials you landed next to in this life and it ends up being your artistic voice whatever that is.

Enough.

Eileen left for a two day conference on plant stuff yesterday. She called last night excited that she was able to do plant “tissue” cultures. This seems to be a sort of petri-dish-based growing of plants from tissue. This is something she has wanted to do and said it was worth the price of admission just to do this. So that’s good.

After she left, I found myself sitting at the piano randomly working on a sketch. After some time, this evolved into a full fledge beginning draft of a piece I temporarily dubbed “Small Rain.”

[link] to Bartleby’s Oxford Book of English Verse

I have been reading this poem since I was a kid. I still like it.

It rained here in Western Michigan this morning while I was laying in bed gathering energy to get up. I had the windows open all night and it was a very pleasant way to begin the day.

I noticed that Arts & Letters Daily linked into Sven Birkhert’s American Scholar article called “Reading in a Digital Age.” [link] I read this and commented on it back in March.

Glancing over it yesterday, I was again struck by the naive histrionic view that bemoans the huge impact of the internet and consumerism upon our ability to think.  Reading and thinking seems to have always been a minority activity. Whippy skippy.

Birkerts and others usually bring up stuff about technology and reading online that I myself contradict with my own behavior. And I’m an old guy. Public intellectuals love to say how the technology is the natural water for the young. I say it doesn’t make them think any more or less than any environment experienced by most young humans.

How we respond to being alive seems to be a complex combination of who we are and who is around us and what we are capable of learning and processing and then what we actually do.

So fuck these guys who say the internet or something is basically ruining and changing everything. The possibilities remain. And we as humans will both imaginatively embrace it and obstinately and ignorantly ignore it.

Marcella Spann says in her introduction to the anthology she co-edited with Ezra Pound (“Confucius to Commings”) that “what matters in poetry…” and one could add music, art, you name your particular intellectual endeavor, “… is the intensity of the emotion, and the depth of comprehension registered by the writer” or musician or artist or thinker.

This intensity is something that draws me to people living and dead.

For me “intensity” implies a certain helpless honesty.

We all deal with our blindness, our illusions. Surmounting them in any small part is a very satisfying activity. And temporary. And always a bit inaccurate.

So after exercising and having lunch, I jumped in the car and did errands, picked up some new CDs at the library, came home and began working on the Jamaican Pastries.

These two days of solitude are enhanced by the fact that the charismatics have taken over my church building for the weekend (Cursillos).

So I have the odd freedom of not being able to practice organ there. My prelude and postlude this week are appropriately easy (due to this occupation of the religious types of the building). I am playing a nice little chorale prelude on MIDDLEBURY (Come away to the skies) and Healey Willan’s classic setting of GELOBT SEI GOTT for the postlude. Neither of them require too much prep.

I have been working on some Bach however which I do miss rehearsing. But it’s worth it to have this heady sense of having time to compose. I am planning to give myself another opportunity today to continue. After all this is one of the reasons I give myself for being such a bum: creators need this kind of time.

I ordered a couple of cookbooks online yesterday:

I have the Devin Alexander checked out from the library and have been cooking out of it. I like her combination of carefully designed low fat low cal recipes with stuff that actually tastes good.

As Eileen did her last minute prep to leave I made us “Mini Frittatas with Herbed Goat Cheese” from the Alexander cookbook.

What a brilliant idea! It’s just egg beaters with herbed cheese baked in a muffin tin. This could lend itself to many tasty easy variations.

Other recipes I have made recently include:

“Chocolate Raspbery Breakfast Sunday” (258 calories) I used fresh strawberries instead of raspberries, since they are more in season and much cheaper at Meijers.

“Blue Cheese Portobello Mushroom Burger” (224 calories)

A  variation on Alexander’s “Drippin’ Kickin’ Burger” This is a meat recipe for the lovely Eileen. I omitted the hot sauce and substituted regular Swiss cheese from the fridge for the suggested “light Swiss.”

And the ridiculously easy “Strawberry Shortcake to Go” which consists of layers of angel food cake, fresh strawberries and fat free thawed frozen whipped topping (Cool Whip).

I have also been on a cooking spree in Mollie Katzen’s little volume. Yesterday was the day to order them in the mail.
Mollie Katzen is the author of the wonderful Moosewood series. She has a bunch of recipes online one can access [link]

I have set aside the next two days to think seriously about composition. I have been thinking about the styles of music I compose in. This basically means almost any style I can think of.

I am interested in most musical styles. I have listened eclectically all my life. This with little encouragement or even discerning guidance from trained musicians and teachers.

I was thinking of my oboe sonatina and the style it is composed in. (By the way, the oboist and pianist opted not to perform it at this time) When I wrote the piece I thought of myself as writing in a sort of Hindemithian dissonant neo-Baroque style.

I think of my teacher who said it took him several decades to write a C major chord. By this, I took him to mean that the prevailing musical thought was to discount music that actually used chords and write in a more cerebral and esoteric manner. Echoes of the Schoenberg view of music history: progressive and more increasingly difficult to understand and enjoy. One practically had to take a music course (if not several) to be an intelligent listener of non-chordal music.

I remember another teacher insisting to the point of causing me to wonder if he was being honest that one could develop an advanced skill of listening that enabled one to hear and appreciate music that was composed in the strict serial technique of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and their disciples.

It sounded like he was describing a clarity of hearing that I have never really had.

But now I realize that as I listened to these and other academics, at the same exact time I personally had a passion not only for the music of the academy but also for all the other musics I had been exposed to so far: Charlie Parker’s jazz,

certain popular music including the Beatles,

traditional folk musics of certain countries (America, England, Hungary… via Bartok, India… via Ravi Shankar),

historical American popular music and blends like blues and ragtime.

This doesn’t include the strong influence on me of American church music with its multiplicity of styles.

This morning I realized that my study in poetry and literature probably exerted a strong influence on me regarding accepting many styles. I was looking at my worn copy of Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann’s collection of poems published by New Directions Paperback called “From Confucius to Cummings.”

Literature and especially poetry seemed to move more easily from the popular to the esoteric. Cummings’ language was one that I recognized as not divorced from my daily experience.

Over the years I have continued to compose. Besides the practical (but fun) practices of writing for immediate use in church, I never stopped writing the songs I began writing in my youth. I have called them “Bad Paul Simon Songs.”” This is mostly in jest and also to remind myself of my a necessary modesty in order to evaluate my own work as objectively and clearly as one who creates a work can. (In other words, not all that balanced and clearly…. if one has the ego to put pen to paper and/or make up music, one clearly thinks that what one is doing is worthy).

But I do know that like I believe Zappa seemed to feel, that writing strictly instrumental music is the most fun for me.

The songs have been as much therapy as any thing, since I have continued to produce them even when there was no real outlet for performing them.

Now I have the luxury to simply write. I have found myself writing once again in a pop style. I admire the work of Randy Newman and others. No matter what I do, I guess I am drawn to craft and disciplined skill in the execution of creating beauty.

At the same time I have a distinct distaste for music that does not show its humanness. No rough edges and I am almost always a bit uneasy if not downright bored.

All of this is to say that in the writing I am now doing, I am thinking hard about what particular musical language to use and whether or not to actually write lyrics (not necessarily my strongest skill, but I don’t think that I am unskilled in this area).

Definitely lyric writing is a totally different aspect of writing music. Historical academic composers tended to “set” poems to music. Bob Dylan seems to have sat at his typewriter and typed out rhythmic image filled verse that he immediately set to melody and harmony himself.

Zappa said that his contemporary audience demanded words in order to stay engaged with what they were listening to.  He said it with disdain but continued to produce this kind of work along with more stretches of strictly instrumental work.

I said I was thinking about my decades old oboe sonatina. It occurs to me that it is not exactly in the musical style I thought I was writing in as I did it way back then. It is actually a chordal piece that uses many techniques to make its point.

I am reminded of a piece I wrote when another composition student attempted suicide. It is a simple piece that is a snippet of melody over an unchanging chord. When a musician I had worked with in popular music heard it, he remarked that he was surprised that the music I was writing in college was something that he would be able to understand and appreciate. I remember replying to him that of course it was.

Hmmm.

Anyway, my lovely wife is going away for a couple of days and I am planning to allow myself some solitary space to do a bit of thinking and sketching. I have been keeping sketch books recently in which I jot ideas. I am not thinking too much beyond this other than I do have several musical thoughts I have been mulling over recently.

It’s hard to predict but maybe given some time something will pop out to be developed.

So I finished reading Mr. Peanut yesterday.  My wife is now reading it.

I put the spoiler alert so I don’t have to worry too much about ruining this wonderful book for anyone.

It is a book about marriage and Escher-like puzzles. There are three marriages in the book. David & Alice Peppin, Detective Ward Hastrell & Hannah Hastrell, Detective Sam Sheppard and Marilyn Sheppard.

About half way through the book a shadowy character named Mobius is introduced. At this point if it hasn’t already occurred to the reader, it becomes very apparent that some very odd puzzles are embedded in this story including the consistent reality of the story you are reading. Are you reading a story or a story  about writing a story? These questions are not resolved until the last few pages.

There are dozens of little plot rhymes throughout the book. These begin to resemble a story-telling version of Escher prints.  The wives never meet. Yet they share interesting backgrounds. Alice & Marilyn both are quasi-orphans whose mothers die and whose father reject them.  The two detectives transform from police procedural mystery characters to full blown characters whose lives and marriages push the story forward.

David constantly refers to Escher prints. One of the video games he helps develop and design is based on Escher prints. Escher images are used throughout to describe situations and people in the book. Mobius for Chrissake!

Alice herself is a wonderful portrait in a person struggling with life, sometimes triumphing and sometimes being beaten. Her name is an obvious reference to someone who fell down a hole and whose life is constantly and weirdly shifting around her. She remains a believable intriguing mystery to me as a character.

Also in an Escher-type manner, Alice and Marilyn both blame much of their own pathology on their husband. Both of them tell their husbands that they (the husbands) are “cursed”  exhibiting a weird point of view and using the same terminology. And both husbands (as well as all of the main characters it seems) behave badly at times.

And the novel itself sort of leaks into reality in an Escher manner when you realize that the Sam Sheppard character is based on a real life person. Albeit one who is so distorted by TV and Movie references that this reader didn’t even bother to wonder how much of the character is based on reality. It just doesn’t matter. Ross does deal gamely with the question of who actually kills Sheppards wife in this story. I won’t spoil that by telling you how this turns out. You’ll have to read it for yourself.

This book doesn’t come out until June. I read an advance copy I found on the shelf at the library. Ross himself has an interesting interview at the Amazon site. [link]

He confesses that Alice’s weird death (one of them anyway) via eating peanuts for which she has a deadly allergy was a family incident that sparked his initial idea for this book over thirteen years ago.

He says the book is about marriage:

“I like to say that Mr. Peanut is the story of three marriages that tell the story of one marriage–that is, the detectives’ marriages, Sam Sheppard’s and Ward Hastroll’s, telling the story of David and Alice’s and vice versa. Either way, like the Escher drawings that inspire the video games David designs for a living, they’re supposed to interlock to form another pattern, to be dynamic in their interaction. As the novel progresses, the reader should feel a more intense oscillation between the parts and the whole.”

There are intense descriptions of real life scenes in this book. A bloody miscarriage on an air flight. The fetus dubbed Mr Peanut.

Sheppard has an odd relationship with children. He seems to see his wife and child as an encumbrance to his career and sex life. He has difficulty remember at one point spending much time with his son as a child. But then later there is a moving description of how Sheppard himself is allowed to assist in the birth of his son.

Ross gets a lot of this kind of life stuff just right. He has a wicked and touching insight into how people and marriages actually are.

There is much more to be said about this well-written layered book. But I stop here in the hopes that you will somehow obtain a copy in June and read it for yourself. Good stuff.

Before I do my “nothing post,” let me brag about my daughter Elizabeth. She has recently put up her sketches online. I would love to show you but she has blocked stealing them. Ahem. So here’s a link to her wonderful work [link]. Good stuff. Makes an old man proud.

Woke up in an odd mood with one of those moments where the dream I was having was more real than waking up. I wonder if this relates to the section of Mr. Peanut I was reading last night. It describes (fictionally) the way Dr. Sam Sheppard (of the Fugitive TV show/movie fame) was dreaming about his wife as she was being murdered and then woke up actually hearing her calling his name.

I think I need to take some of today off.

Yesterday I called my Mom and left a message on her machine to be remind her to be ready to be picked up for her shrink appointment at 10:30.  Then Eileen and I walked downtown and back. I jumped in the care and drove to where Mom lives.

After checking her room and asking around, I eventually found her in the “Gathering Room” with 20 or so others listening to a Bible lesson. She was pretty embarrassed she had not made a note of her appointment and gamely jumped in the car without her usual hour of gussying up.

She felt pretty bad and I pointed out that it was not really a problem. I phoned the doctor’s office and we just arrived late.

Since she wasn’t dressed up as fancy as she likes she agreed to at least coming to my house for some soup and sandwich instead of going out to eat (which she does love to do).

After lunch we went back to her place and then I played a little April Birthday Party. It seemed to be pretty much the same group from the Bible lesson earlier in the day. It was held in the same room.

I didn’t play everything on the playlist I posted yesterday.  I dropped one of the Bach (the slow one… the Sarabande). I interspersed the pop tunes and the Haydn with group singing of hymns. I skipped the Brahms, Satie and my own setting. Seemed like the wise thing to do.

I do find it inspiring to listening to people singing.

Thank goodness as that’s how I also earn my dollars at this point at church…. getting people to sing. I have been thinking about my job quite a bit. I’m wondering if the idea of being music director for Grace came mostly from me. I just glanced at my Grace job description file. I don’t seem to have a copy handy of my job description, but it does refer to me as Director of Music on the evaluation form my boss did.

All this is to say that before me they had two separate positions: choir director and organist. These were combined to pay me a wage. In the mean time I have been trying to get my boss to reconsider my job under slightly more professional terms. Under American Guild of Organists guidelines I am sorely underpaid even as a part time musician (this is due to my degrees and years of experience).

Anyway.

It might help me to think of myself more as the organist/choir director instead of the Director of Music. I know it’s all nonsense, but my little sense of professionalism is sometimes set askew by what happens musically out of my control at my gig. Ah well. But still it is a gig and I do like a lot about it.

I’ve changed in my attitude and use of bookstores and libraries. Instead of being enamored of the physical aspect of being in a room with thousands of books and their possibilities, I have this thrill daily on the internet Sort of a bibliophile’s equivalent of the old Napster Celestial Jukebox, only not for music but for books.

So if I can imagine it, maybe I can pull it up on my screen or order a copy from my screen from the local library network or bookstore.

But a few days ago I was in the library picking up a copy of a book I had made sure was there via the online catalogue, when it occurred to me to do a little looking around.

At the back of the building are several bookstore style kiosks stuffed with advanced copy issues of forthcoming books that somehow the library provides for its patrons.

Glancing over them I saw a book entitled, “Mr. Peanut.” For no clear reason, I picked it up and read the first few sentences:

“When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed of convenient acts of God.

Okay. Good opening sentence. I’ll check it out and we’ll see.

Then last night after reading several chapters in the Mao biography I am reading, I went to bed with the John le Carré I have been re-reading (“The Honorable Schoolboy”) and Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross.

John le Carré is a favorite escape read of mine lately but it is so melancholy. I thought I would try the forthcoming Mr. Peanut.

It turns out to be a witty, nasty little take on the detective novel via some intimate glimpses of three marriages.  Just what the doctor ordered. No melancholy, but irony and wit. And humor.

Adam Ross’s main character David Pepin makes video games. And what games Ross describes in the book! One wonders why he is writing a novel when he could probably clean up as an idea development guy for a video game company.

“It’s called Playworld,’ she said, ‘It’s loosely based on this Piers Anthony book I read as a kid called Split Infinitive. In this world, all anybody does all day long is play games. They’ve taken care of all their material needs, I guess, so the only currency is gaming prowess. It’s like the coolest communist state in the universe. People are ranked by record and enjoy status accordingly. Strangers or friends can issue challenges in a whole range of games and skill sets from the physical to the mental, obstacle course to board games and hand-to-hand combat. It’s how you interact socially, how you meet lovers, how you live life…..

“But it’s also like Facebook, where you have a profile–though in this case that also includes your skill level. Your world rank.And it’s not your own picture mind, not your identity, but a highly detailed avatar—think Second Life—that’s your own Warhol of yourself or your bent or ideal version, your cartoon equivalent but as buff or thin or hot or warped as you want to make yourself…

And so on. The book comes out in June. I’m enjoying it immensely.

I didn’t busk yesterday because I have a gig at my Mom’s assisted living facility today. Another freebie. But no matter. I’m a last minute substitute for their monthly birthday party (All April birthdays). I have developed a playlist. Here it is:

1.Chattanooga Choo-choo
2. Hymn – I come to the garden alone
3. Bach Sarabande in G
4. Hymn – What a friend we have in Jesus
5. Bach Gavotte in G
6. Hymn – Heavenly Sunlight
7. Alley Cat
8. Precious Lord or Just a closer walk with thee
9. Haydn D major sonata, first movement
10. Hymn Come thou fount of every blessing
11. Brahms intermezzo
12. Hymn O for a thousand tongues to sing
13. Satie F minor Gnoissiene
14. Hymn
15. Jenkins one page essay
16. Hymn
17. Happy birthday

At first I was thinking of mixing up styles in a bit different way. Then I decided alternating singing hymns would give the audience of elderly people a chance to catch their breath figuratively and literally. The hymns are just suggestions I will ask people to call out their favorite. They keep multiple copies of a hymnal in the room.

I attempted to watch Blade Runner while treadmilling yesterday. This time Netflix only failed once. I do like this hokey movie. Roy’s death scene alway moves me.

Something about the transience of life.

Earlier just before he is shot, Leon the replicant lightly slaps Decard’s face and says, “Wake up! Time to die!”

Besides being enamored of the theme of the fleeting nature of being alive, I love the pictures this movie makes. Great flick.

Eileen soon joined me in watching it, sitting a chair next to the treadmill.

There was an odd moment at church yesterday during the prelude. It seemed as though (contrary to my expectation) there were actually some people listening closely to the little partita I performed on CRIMOND. Later my cellist remarked that she had listened carefully and enjoyed it confirming my impression that someone was actually listening.

I came home and obsessed about the difference between my bank balance and my ledger balance. Good nuttiness for Sunday afternoon. The bank seems to think I have about 1K more dollars than I do. Yikes.

Tomorrow I play the April birthday party at my Mom’s assisted living facility.

I will plan out a 45 minute program today. Am thinking of playing a Brahms piece, then a Satie piece, then my little “One Page Essay” which moves from a Brahms treatment of a melody to a Satie treatment of the same melody. The point being that these very differently lyrical composers were actually alive and composing at the same time in the late 1890s.

Plus both have exerted an influence on me.

We’ll see about playing this tomorrow. It’s kind of esoteric for an audience that is listening for “I come to the garden alone.”

Still pondering Chinese, Japanese and Ezra Pound poetry. It fits nicely into a Blade Runner meditation on the ephemeral nature of life.

I used the word, “ephemeral,” yesterday describing the tenuous connection I sometimes make between hymn tunes in service and pieces (like the partita) I play on them. My boss said she was sorry she had switched the hymn. I told her I actually thought her choice was a better one than mine since I assumed my little Episcopalian community would know CRIMOND somewhat. My boss substituted another setting of psalm 23, RESIGNATION, a lovely American tune.

I do find that more than one mind often makes a wiser decision.

Yesterday was Good Shepherd Sunday. Hence all the sheep stuff.

I am trying to purge my mind of church pathology with the Mao bio I am reading and Chinese/Japanese/Ezra Pound poetry. I have a stack of worn paperbacks sitting right next to me.

I read several chapters in the ABC of Reading by Pound yesterday. I can see what a blustering phony he is and also how much his ideas have influenced my thinking.  I’m not sorry about that. Some beautiful ideas.

I’ll end with a quote:

“Partisans of particular ideas may value writers who agree with them more than writers who do not, they may, and often do, value bad writers of their own party or religion more than good writers of another party or church.

“But there is one basis susceptible of estimation and independent of all questions of viewpoint.

“Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. “

Ezra Pound, The ABC of  Reading [link to Google books]

After filling and starting the dang dishwasher this morning, I took my first cup of coffee outside to stand on the steps for a moment and savor the cool damp morning.

It put me in mind of Rexroth’s two slim books of poetry from the Chinese and the Japanese.

I admit to reading more Japanese poetry than Chinese.

I came inside and pulled both of them out of the bookshelf and read a few of the Chinese ones.

Here’s a [link] to a page of them. I suppose the person who lovingly transcribed these is in violation of copyrights. Good grief. They are still beautiful poems and I have a real copy sitting next to my chair at the moment. I recommend these lovely poems.  This web site also has some of the Japanese poems [link] as well as a useful portal to texts of Rexroth (who died in 1982) online [link to list of links]

Besides my melancholy morning mood, I am thinking of the Chinese because I continue to read in the Mao bio. I always vaguely knew that Mao seemed to have ruined China, but I had no idea how many misperceptions about him seem to prevail. At least the authors of this book seem to be correcting some common myths about him and creating a picture of a ruthless Chinese Stalin who began purges of his own people (Communists) well before Stalin began his waves of murder in Russia.

I can see why this book is banned in China (if it is indeed banned). It is meticulously researched and there are extensive footnotes to sources consulted.

Rexroth makes me think of Ezra Pound’s renditions of poets like Rihaku. I have been reading this poetry since my teens. Here’s one of my favorites:

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.  I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
   As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

        By Rihaku

I added my Oboe Sonatina (1976) to my list of free sheet music here yesterday (Piano score pdf Oboe Part pdf ). It took me most of the morning to put it into the music notation software. I found a pencil draft of it before asking a couple of parishioners to learn it for May 9. The oboist is scheduled to play a piece with the choir and the pianist seems a bit disgusted with me so I thought it might be a nice gesture.

Even though I wrote it as a young man, I still think it’s a pretty good piece. But I tend to like my work.  I wrote this piece for my brother to play on piano and his future wife to play on the oboe after I quit school the 2nd time. Neither do much playing of those instruments these days. Ah the future.

I repeatedly called my Mom yesterday to remind her we could go out for lunch if she was of a mind to. She didn’t pick up till about noon. Then she told me she wasn’t really up for it.

The church secretary emailed me that the boss had changed a hymn for this Sunday. Usually I don’t mind but she dropped the hymn my prelude was based on.  She’s away at diocesan convention so I thought it wasn’t worth bothering her about.

I copied some of my comments to her and she replied last night that she thought the hymn wasn’t very familiar but that we could still sing it and she would announce it. I almost immediately emailed her back that this wasn’t necessary. Then I thought it wasn’t even worth emailing her back about.

Eileen and I walked up to a local restaurant for supper last night. It’s called 84 east and has a pretty limited number of vegetarian entrees. I had a personal pizza loaded with cheese and two martinis. Eileen had a chicken pasta dish and a Mudsling (vodka, Kahlua and ice cream). We came home and tried to watch Blade Runner on Netflix. It kept telling us our internet connection was slower than it anticipated and then reloading the movie. After the third time we gave up. I drank two glasses of sherry bringing my alcohol intake to a bit more excess than I am shooting for lately.

No spike in Blood Pressure this morning, but I’m not sure it works that way.

I guess I have mixed feelings about doing a composition of mine that is so old. I’m glad to get the score in a good working shape. But lately I have been feeling like sort of a hack has-been kind of old guy and doing a 36 year old piece doesn’t really help that.

It is sort of nice that I found two musicians at least willing to try it.

Just emailed my boss that we don’t need to go back to my  hymn choice. Whippy skippy.

Thanks to Matt Scott of LemonJellos (pictured above)  I woke in a very creative mood this morning. I am thinking about the August 5th gig that Matt has thrown my way. I am considering approaching this evening a bit differently.

Instead of asking a small group of musicians (bass,drums, instruments, guitarists) to learn an evening’s worth of music, I think it might be interesting to design an evening in which I schedule many different styles and musicians to do bits in different styles.

I have begun by making sure my violinist, Amy Piersma, and cellist, Dawn Van Ark, are able to be there. At our weekly rehearsal yesterday, we discussed performing the first movement of the Mendelssohn piano trio in D minor we are working on. This is a great work and I think it would be interesting to use it on August 5th.

I am considering doing a little listener’s guide before we perform this 20 minute work. Amy and Dawn were very supportive and enthusiastic about all of this. Still thinking about exactly how to include it.

In addition I am considering doing some composing for this event. I have started a 3 movement work of new material. The first movement is has the working title of “You must be the animal.” The second movement I am thinking of composing is a work I have been thinking of ever since the death of my father called “Dead Man’s Pants.” The third movement is still up for grabs.

I would also like to do some of my other compositions as well as some interesting “covers” that might extend from Zappa to Bebop to Harpsichord music.

I need to let this mull around in my head for a bit.

As I was thinking of this I realized that I would like to hear my old Oboe sonatina I wrote back in the seventies. Recently I have invited Deb Coyle to perform as oboist with my choir on May 9. We will be doing John Rutter’s setting of Psalm 23 that he included in his Requiem.

Deb has told me she really likes performing with Jennifer Wolfe, the children’s choir director at my church. This morning I emailed both of them proposing that the two of them play the prelude that morning on oboe and piano. I have offered my oboe sonatina as a possible piece to do but have also told them they could come up with something else.

At any rate, before doing this I dug around in my files and found a copy of this sonatina. I am fond of this little work and am planning to put it in to Finale for some future use. Maybe even on Aug 9. I would especially consider this if Deb and Jennifer don’t perform it on May 9.

On another note, I read 60 or so pages in Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. This book is very critical of Mao but I have been meaning to read it since way back before my China visit. I didn’t take it with me not only because it is a huge old hardback but because I think it might be banned in China.

I also have been doing some escape reading in John Le Carre’s Smiley books. I have been listening to dramatizations of them on BBC and it makes me want to read them.  I thought I had read all of the Smiley novels but I’m beginning to wonder if that is so. At any rate I am almost done with The Honorable Schoolboy and managed to find Smiley’s People on the shelf at the library yesterday.

I queued up a couple of the articles from yesterdays links that I haven’t read yet. The New Yorker came in the mail so I can read the Ipad article in real life if I choose to.

Nice that my esteemed colleague Nick commented on a recent post. Hi Nick! You remind me that I do have a few colleagues left.

Living in Holland can be pretty brutal for me. I’m now working on a second generation of Hope College music profs who seem to find my very existence distasteful.  Ah well, I still sneak into the library and use it when I need to.

Spent some time at the piano with the first couple of sections of Schubert’s big Fantasia, Op. 15 yesterday. I heard it on the BBC composer of the week program. The moderator also described Schubert’s own frustration with the difficulty of the piece supposedly abandoning it in a public performance with the comment, “Let someone else play the damned thing!”

This has got to be an apocryphal story. But still with my meager technique I certainly sympathize.

Yesterday I cleaned the street in front of my house of the yard refuse Eileen stacked there for the city to pick up. We received a nasty letter from the city telling us we were in violation since we had put it out after the pick up date. Yikes.

Also took my Mom out so she could buy me lunch and stroll around in the cool sunlight with my coat wrapped around her.

Then off to some organ practice at church. I have mixed feelings about church these days. I like church work but hate people politics. It seems I am in the midst of losing a little power struggle. Ah well. I have a tendency to just withdraw and let my work speak for itself. Not a winning strategy when the work I do can be so unnoticeable. But winning is over rated in my opinion certainly not worth the typical manipulations and lobbying necessary to do so in petty people politics. Fuck the duck. Better solitary and with a vestige of personal integrity. No wonder I like Harlan Ellison.

Anyway, I spent a good amount of time with Bach at the organ. I rehearsed the first movement of his D minor trio sonata. What great music! Also rehearsed Sunday’s prelude and postlude.

The prelude is the Fantasy Toccata and Variations on “The Lord my God my shepherd is”  by Barbara Harbach.

This is a set of variations sandwiched between the same short Toccata played at the beginning and the end. Some very clever writing including a layering of Crimond with the similar melody of Amazing Grace (New Britain).

The postlude is Fanfare and Allegro on “Alleluia, alleluia! Give thanks to the risen Lord” by Jeffrey Honoré. This piece is a bit cognitive dissonant because it is a big organ treatment of an old Charismatic hymn.

The rest of the day was spent cheering me up. First an hour or so chatting on the web came with Sarah the daughter.

Always cheers me to hear her voice and see her on my little netbook screen. Then Eileen and I walked down to supper at the pub which included two martinis for Steve. Nice. And my blood pressure does seem to be leveling off at a more reasonable reading (averaging around 130/85).

Today I offered to take my Mom to Panera before her appointment with the hearing aid people (Miracle Ear). She didn’t take me up on it but she may call this morning and opt for it yet. After that I have a rehearsal with my piano trio.

Good old Matt Scott is negotiating with me to perform an evening of music in his shop this summer sometime. We have been discussing an eclectic evening of musical styles featuring the piano trio, harpsichord, and original material. Should be fun. Matt has emailed me a list of possible dates. I have yet to hear from my cellist what’s possible for her. She plays in the GR symphony and often has bookings.

I have been thinking a bit about doing this gig entirely different. Usually I engage a few other musicians and use them for the entire gig. This time I think it might be more fun to feature one or two of them a time throughout the evening. This of course builds in a few more listeners as well as performers.

Anyway once my trio has committed to a date I will start shopping for some other musicians.

My wife actually said I was quiet during her supper last night. Working on some depression I guess. Sometimes better not to share.

So.

Here’s some links I have been/am looking at:

7500 shoppers unknowingly sold their souls [link] to Fox News report (not a video)….

Handy dandy guide to impact of different kinds of tunings (I know, I know, you’re dying to know this): [link] “The Wolf at our heels: the centuries long struggle to play in tune” by Jan Swafford Salon.com

Books still matter to presidents. [OOPS… this link was wrong but is now corrected    link ] “For Obama and past presidents: the books they read shape policies and perception” by Tevi Troy Washington Post

Roque Dalton is new  (to me) radical poet who died in 1975. [link] to a long poem (Tavern: Conversatio) of his in which he uses the language of young Czechs, W. Europeans and Latin Americans to write some cool poetry.

If you still care about the Ipad and the Kindle [link] to “Publish or Perish: Can the Ipad topple the Kindle and save the book industry?” by Ken Auletta New Yorker.

I am the only one I know who checks online MP3 blogs for new music. I found a couple of interesting ones yesterday: [link] to the official blog of the Analog Arts Ensemble [link] to Theoretical Music

The first not only had some interesting popular music type downloads, it also linked in Handel’s entire Laudate Pueri which I promptly downloaded and listened to.

Theoretical music sends viewers to Mediafire.com [link] which seems to be one of those barely legal file hosts which provide online space for files. If you mess with this you will need to be able to unzip .rar files. I downloaded a charming little free program called Rare Extract Frog [link to download.com page where you can get it]

other MP3s I downloaded yesterday:

Christina Says by The Sneaks
In Stride by Mantler
Heaven and Earth by Blitzen Trapper
Friendly Ghost by Harlem
Dixon’s Girl by Dessa
Waves by Holly Mirand
Safe and Sound b Electric President
Anxiety by Eddy Current Suprression Ring
Not Getting There by Blonde Redhead
I’m Not a Kid Anymore by Sloan
King of Spain by The Tallest Man On Earth
Fool’s Day by Blur
Sexual Healing by Hot Chip (cover of Marvin Gaye)
Fading Sun by Isungset,Terje
Saltarello (Munich, Marh 27) by Dead Can Dance
Walk On by Neil Young
From the Bughouse by Ceasars [jupe says sic] Palace
Livin’ In the Sunlight, Lovin’ In the Moonlight byTiny Tim
Dark Eyes by Dizzy Gillespie
One Step at a  Time by Bigbang
Ten Steps to Heaven by Holger Czukay

In an effort to maintain what little sanity I have left I went out on the street yesterday and played music to the birds.

Or should I say the birds serenaded my music.

Keeping an eye out for the grumpy cop, I played Haydn, Bach and Mozart softly. The spring birds sang lustily from nearby trees. Very charming.

One friend remarked to me that the birds seemed to like “my” Mozart. I said that I liked the birds’ music.

Earlier I ran into some videos of an excellent pianist named Hiromi. I picked up on her “Choux a la Creme” which played on the streaming jazz station.  And then there’s this:

You tell me what kind of music she is playing. I can close my eyes imagine it is written by Ligetti or some other “contemporary” composer. I quite like it.

This morning I started off listening to BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week show on Schubert. Click the pic below to stream it.

My brother recommended a Netflix streaming video of Harlan Ellison’s Dreams with Sharp Teeth. I have been a fan of Ellison’s for years.

This is a pretty clear picture of him, warts and all. He is full of shit, but I do love him and a lot of his writing.

At 72, he makes an excellent grumpy old man.

Ended the day cooking. Made marinated carrots, cubed rutabaga, sweet potato soup (withOUT the chipotle…. it was excellent), and served it to myself with some tabouleh and diet cherry Dr. Pepper. Ahhhhhh.

So this morning I’m streaming Jazz. Yesterday I discovered a charming band called Tiempo Libre on this station. I heard something that interested me so I began paying attention. It turned out to be a piece called “Fuga” by Tiempo Libre based on a Bach sonata I don’t know.  If you click on the album cover below it should take you to a Tiempo Libre page for their album called “Bach in Havana.” After you click on any title a tab should open and you can listen to the entire album. I just checked out a score [link to original Bach score this is based on…. the theme Tiempo Libre uses begins at the bottom of the second page].

After looking at the Bach score this morning I notice that the parts that attracted me were the first two thematic entrances which are not directly taken from the Bach score. Interesting.

Speaking of Bach, during the peace at Church yesterday a woman thanked me for the prelude and told me she would tell me why after church. It turns out that she and her husband used to listen to a recording of the Orgelbuchlein (!) in their New York apartment. Their two year old son found a path throughout the rooms of the apartment to ride his toy (a fire engine?). She said that when the piece I played yesterday came on (that particular track) he would invariably go find his toy and ride for the duration of the piece.

When this son was tragically killed as an adult, she and her husband were surprised to learn that the local college prof who was the organist at the church where the funeral was held refused to perform this piece at the wedding because he didn’t feel prepared. Instead she found a friend at another church (someone much much lower on the local pecking order of musicians…. not a college prof) who happily agreed to play it.

The piece is called “In Dir ist freude” which I read as “In thee is joy.”  Here is a [link] to James Kibbie playing it if you’re curious. He plays it better than I did and faster. It was interesting this woman spoke to me about the prelude. I get a lot of comments at church but rarely about the organ music. I also was not terribly happy with my performance of this work yesterday. It went okay. But I was unable to stop focusing on people in the congregation who I have recently discovered seem to consider me a third rate musician. Ah well.

So my concentration was interrupted but not fatally. It does bother me when I know that I am allowing my inner monologue to babble on during a good piece of music. I have consciously to guard and work and against this and I wasn’t prepared to do this yesterday. When I played weekly at Notre Dame however I was. I found Notre Dame to be a hostile environment which I managed to surmount with considerable effort. Now it seems that I am allowing one or two people to do the same thing at my little Episcopal church in Holland. I have to get hold of this better and probably will.

There was another person waiting for me after church as well. She wanted to tell me how well the choir sang the African American spiritual, “You Hear the Lambs a-Cryin'” And actually they did sing well yesterday.

Another person at the coffee hour insisted that we must have one of the best choirs in town. I didn’t demur because I thought it might be a bit rude and counterproductive to contradict such a nice compliment. But I haven’t been happy with the overall choir sound this year. I have attributed this largely to lack of practice.

But come to think of it I have recently sacrificed part of my pregame rehearsal time to some old fashioned choral vocalises and warm ups and it has seemed to make a difference in their blend and diction.

Before I close I want to point out another listening possibility on the web. This time it is largely spoken word programs. As far as I can tell prx.org [link] seems to be an online distribution and licensing web site for NPR stations with listener privilege granted to the general public just for registering.

You have to have the patience to poke around but you will be rewarded if you like programs like The Moth and old short stories by Philip K. Dick and other interesting radio stuff.

I’m afraid it might not be available in the UK (sorry Sarah I think we have had this conversation due to your love of The Moth).

Woke up in the mood for listening to medieval/renaissance music. So I tuned in to the above online stream. Excellent. Click on the pic to go to the web site.

I skipped blogging yesterday. I spent my blogging time chatting with my brother who has been attending a conference on religious (Christian) writing.

Interesting to hear second hand descriptions (from my brother) about the fears and misconceptions book people have about the book, literacy and the internet.

It reminds me of intellectual property discussions I have listened in on.

I did find some interesting stuff online yesterday. As usual.

“Five Ways to Marinate Vegetables” [link] links to five interesting recipes, some of which I plan to try.

And this cool diagram:

Book dealers who are convinced that readers need “filters” at a time when readers can access tons of interconnected recommendations about books strike me as a bit out of step.  I find myself less and less drawn to the browsing in a bookstore because of my ability to find almost anything I can imagine online.

Old timey distributors seem to fail to see the possibilities of the situation as they also seem to fail to see the blindness caused by their own panic and narrow self interest.

Anyway, I’m just getting it second hand from my brother.

Howard Gardner& Howard Rheingold have helped me understand a lot about how I approach reading and the web. A good quick overview can be found in this article: “The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading” by Howard Gardner, Washington Post Feb 17, 2008 [link].

I sometimes confuse thinkers Howard Gardner and Howard Rheingold.  Rheingold talks about attention literacy. Here’s a [link] to a quick article Rheingold has up on the Edge, “Attention is the fundamental literacy.” I couldn’t find the one where he talks about working with his daughter and the internet.

I had an interesting time yesterday returning to the site of the last Catholic church I worked for and playing a 50th wedding anniversary Mass. Very interesting to try to work with people with whom one does not share a common language (besides Music, heh). I accompanied a 14 or 15 voice choir. Played the mass.

I saw people from my past.  It’s an odd feeling. Also we’re all a bit older, from the people who were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary to the young man who used to be a toddler who snickered at my song, “Naked Boy” while his mom and I played and sang it.

Life is good.

And odd.

Beautiful day in michigan yesterday.

Eileen and I walked down to the local pub and ate outside.

I succumbed and had some alcohol. A pre-dinner martini and a Guinness with my meal. I also abandoned my vegetarian principles and indulged in fish tacos and fries. It was all excellent.

The wind was blowing through the beautiful white blossomed trees in downtown Holland.

I was happy that my blood pressure seems to have reversed it’s trend of creeping higher.  Monitoring blood pressure and body weight daily is tricky. My systolic reading (the higher of the two numbers) has been a bit on the high side for four days with a high of 144 on Monday. This morning it was 127. That’s a bit more like it. I hope it stays like that.

Another excellent moment yesterday was the piano trio rehearsal. What a delight to spend time working on beautiful music with two very fine musicians. On top of that we sound good.

We were kicking around some possible public venues this summer. So nice to work with excited competent relaxed people. I am learning a ton working closely with strings.

I was curious how closely our edition of the Mozart piano trio (KV 548) resembled the original so I toddled off the library and checked it out. I seem to make the young college music students occupying the Hope music library a bit nervous.  Who is this old fat guy puttering about and asking to use the computer and photocopying machine?

Mostly they ignored me and talked loudly to each other.  Typical college banter.

I was both pleased and displeased to examine the critical edition of the movement we are working on.

Pleased that our Peters edition seems to be in line with the better edition. Displeased to see slurs over the bar that I suspected were editorial.

But that’s why one checks these things. I photocopied the movement for further discussion with my colleagues.

Life is very good.

I am listening to the Mendelssohn D minor piano trio on my MP3 player as I write. This is the other piece we are working on. This is a superb piece of music and it is so much fun to play and rehearse.

Ahhh.

My brother who is visiting asked me to put his daughter’s tax stuff in an envelope and mail it so that he could leave for the conference he is attending in GR.  I happily did so. I observed that I mailed my Mom’s taxes, our tax envelopes, and my brother’s daughter’s tax envelopes. Hilarious.

Received two books by Sam Lipsyte in the mail yesterday. I decided I need to own this guy’s work. He captures a conversational sensibility that appeals to me.

I’ll end with some samples.

This one hit me last night as I was reading before bedtime.

I was a droplet in the steady rain of crap.

This is spoken by the main character referred to but not actually named Steve in The Subject Steve. He is an advertising copy writer who has been diagnosed with a mysterious deadly disease of which he is the unique sufferer…. no one else has ever contracted it much less died of it before. He manages to get trapped in a brutal self help center run by a criminal violent perverted zen master named Heinrich.

The above quoted observation follows this paragraph.

The copy I confected for a living was never more than a line or two, designed to capture the allure of the new, to shimmer with efficient leisure and sumptuous toil, the ongoing orgasm of the information lifestyle: “Software with a Soft Touch,” I wrote, or “Reality for Those Who Dream,” or, simple, “How Did You Like Tomorrow?”

I like this guy’s prose quite a bit.  Would like to own my own copy to mark up and laugh over and reread.

I can’t close without commenting on Obama’s announced rule change about allowing people access to each other in hospitals. His personal order (he didn’t have to do it this way) frees up gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered people to have access to their loved ones in hospitals.

One more bureaucratic idiocy bites the dust. Thank you, President Obama. It’s been a long time coming.

Gene Luen Yang’s new graphic novel kid book, Prime Baby answers the question: what do you do when your new little sister start spouting prime number and ruins your plot to become president of the earth.

You can buy it or read it online here: [link to New York Times list of pdf files of the book]

If you click on the link above two things to keep in mind. First, the last chapter is linked to the title “Prime Baby: conclusion” at the top of the page. It took me a while to figure it out after I read the 17th chapter at the bottom of the list and felt like it couldn’t be the ending.

Secondly, you might want to make a mental note that this page also links you in to other online graphic novels for future or even immediate viewing.

I didn’t figure out until later that Yang is also co-author of the excellent collection The Eternal Smile.

This guy is fun. I just discovered by poking around on his web site [link] that he is going to be speaking at the Festival of Faith and Writing [link] that both my brother the priest and my boss the priest are attending this week in Grand Rapids. Hmmm.

I spent some extra time with my Mom yesterday, partly because I had the time available and partly because her psychiatrists surprised me with the notion that she is wrestling with some depression right now. I had not picked up on this so much.

Part of Friedman’s notion of survival in family system is to develop a “resistance to other people’s threshold of pain.” This is something I think about and practice regularly. Unfortunately, it has probably sometimes been a bit inappropriate to response to my Mom’s very real depression.

What I mean by this is not taking her complaints too seriously but just seriously enough (Hi Mom!). Let’s face it, complaining can be fun and an important social lubricant much of the time.

Anyhoo, I managed to get her to do some shopping, buy my lunch and then go for a lovely drive here in blossoming tulip time Holyland michigan. A good time was had by all.

Another surprise I received was that somehow the assisted living facility which administers her meds discontinued giving her one of her important mood drugs (remeron) back in Jan of this year.

Hmmm. This cannot be helping her grief and depression. Her psychiatrist recommended resuming it in sensible very small doses to be increased gradually.

I did some asking and found out that the company that used to pay for Mom’s drugs sent a letter to her internist raising questions about possible drug interaction between drugs on the list of ones she is taking.

The internist (also my and Eileen’s doctor) apparently took the recommendation at face value and discontinued the drug.

I asked the head nurse at the assisted living facility to fax some info around regarding this beginning with faxing the letter to the psychiatrist. He is a gerontologist psych and playing with drugs is right up his alley. I thought he would have an opinion about the recommendation and should know about it.

The head nurse also promised to fax the psychiatrist’s recommendations to the internist.

The meeting with my boss went very well. She assured me that my behavior was not part of the problem at this stage. We talked through how I arrived at my insecurity (emails, phone calls, misread signals). We basically resumed our weekly collegial conversation without missing a beat.

The cool part was that by this time of day yesterday it was beautiful in Holland Michigan. I asked if we could meet outside. So we sat on a bench in the sun and had our talk.

My brother mentioned last night that he thought my boss was one of the sharper priests around. This is high praise from an experienced, cynical colleague.

I immediately agreed. It is true. Hell, she hired me, right?