I began this day perusing Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Since Nick has said that he likes the poetry I have been posting (I figure that many readers’ eyes gloss over when they see a poem, a quote or a long-winded passage.), here’s one that caught my eye this morning.

Wonder–is not precisely Knowing
And not precisely Knowing not–
A beautiful but bleak condition
He has not lived who has not felt–

Suspense–is his maturer Sister–
Whether Adult Delight is Pain
Or of itself a new misgiving–
This is the Gnat that mangles men–

I felt “wonder” yesterday as I read through possible choices for upcoming organ preludes and postludes. I am seriously considering doing some Bartok piano pieces as preludes in the near future. But didn’t land on one yesterday.

Instead I am planning to play Bach’s In dir ist Fruede from the Orgelbuchlein as the prelude this Sunday. We are singing an Easter communion hymn based on its tune and I do love the Orgelbuchlein.

The postlude comes from a series of volumes published by Augsburg based on hymns which are a bit more involved than your basic two page 20th c. organ hymn choral prelude. It’s based on the closing hymn, “Christ is Alive,” sung to the tune TRURO and was written by a man named J. Wayne Kerr.

In this same series I found a charming partita on the tune, CRIMOND, written by Barbara Harbach. She obviously has Distler in mind because she begins and ends with a flourish on the tune similarly to the way Distler does in his NUN KOMM DER HEIDEN HEILAND partita. I scheduled this for the prelude a week from Sunday. It’s a bit lengthy but I can begin early.

CRIMOND always makes me think of an elderly woman I knew in Oscoda named Helen Swetka. It was one of her favorite hymns. She had purchased multiple copies for the choir when she was home in Wales.  The text is based on Psalm 23: “The Lord my God my shepherd is.”  Mrs. Swetka always nagged me about taking organ lessons, until finally I succumbed and began studying organ with a man named Kent McDonald.

CRIMOND does not appear in the older 1940 Episcopal hymnal but was included in the 1982 edition. Mrs. Swetka would be pleased.

I decided on several other pieces for preludes and postludes in the near future including works by Schulz-Widmar and Healy Willan. Then for some reason I pulled out some improvisations of Saint-Saens and chose one to learn.

I even went so far as to make a page turn copy of this rather lengthy piece.

This is a bit out of character for me. I do enjoy plunking away at the romantics at the piano (Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven and others). But most romantic organ music leaves me a bit cold. I think it’s a poor cousin to both the orchestral symphonic literature and the romantic piano literature.

Nevertheless yesterday I found myself working on this little Saint-Saens Allegro (No. 7 of the 7 Improvisations, Opus 150 [link] to pdf of the score, it begins on page 33).

I had glanced at some recently purchased Arvo Part and some other modern stuff but for some reason this stuff didn’t attract me. Weird.

Eileen suggested that I take my list of blood pressure readings in to show the receptionist when I dropped off my Mom at the doctor at the yesterday. The receptionist surprisingly offered to photocopy them and pass them back to my doctor’s office.

Later in the day I received a phone call that the doctor had looked over my readings and said she wanted to keep me on my present med. This is a small victory for me.

Unfortunately the readings do seem to be inching up in the last few days. Bah. It’s hard to tell what causes the shifts in blood pressure. I have had a lot of stress at work lately. Or maybe I should say I have allowed work to stress me lately.

I’m not sure how much about work stress is appropriate to post.

Suffice it to say that after meeting with my boss and a co-worker my job seems pretty secure but it remains to be seen if there will be any real change in the problems.

I am meeting one-on-one with my boss this afternoon. We meet weekly but had to reschedule earlier in the week since she is going out of town.

That should be a good part of the day. I like meeting with her.

I’m closing so I can get on the dang treadmill.

Here’s another Emily Dickinson poem from the same page as the one at the beginning of the post. It makes me think of crocuses in spring.

Pink–small–and punctual–
Aromatic–low–
Covert–in April–
Candid–in May–
Dear to the Moss–
Known to the Knoll–
Next to the Robin
In every human Soul–
Bold little Beauty
Bedecked with thee
Nature forswears
Antiquity–

I idiotically did not bring my netbook and indeed any book when I stopped by at Liberty Tax to sign the papers for my Mom’s tax filing.

I had filled the car with the equipment I need to play keyboard on the street. Then I had put on a suit and tie, tied my hair back tightly. My plan was to go immediately to the street after stopping at the tax place.

But not surprisingly there were people ahead of me there. The person who was preparing my Mom’s taxes said it would be about ten minutes. It was actually quite a bit longer than that.

So while waiting I perused National Geographics. I discovered that they seem to encourage people to download their lovely photographs to use for wallpaper for a desktop.

They have a photo of the day. This lovely desert pic is today’s.

Interestingly National Geographic does not indicate when this photo was taken. A quick google makes me think it’s around 1946. I decided it made a good desktop and put it on my desktop computer’s desktop as the wallpaper.

I also noticed a writer with same name as my brother, Mark Jenkins.

So apparently my brother shares a name with a published writer. Cool.

So I did go play on the street. I played a lot softer. Several people stopped and chatted with me. Most of them were local musicians I know, none of them associated with the college.

I spent some time talking to one guitar teacher about how Bartok’s music works. He wasn’t very enthusiastic until I showed him the six pieces at the end of the Mikrokosmos based on Bulgarian Rhythms. Those he liked.

I also chatted up my old buddy Jonathon Fegel. He and I don’t see much of each other now that he is working four jobs and has two children. I told him I had already had my babies. He seems pretty happy.

I am dreading a meeting today with my boss and another person who works at my church.

I am beginning to suspect that my position is in jeopardy. This makes me crazy because I have had little concrete indication, but I see my boss’s weird activity as possibly meaning that despite my accomplishments at Grace I might be looking at losing a power struggle when I wasn’t even all that aware one was going on.

My goal is keep my mouth shut as much as possible today and try to be constructive but not shoot myself in the foot.

I need the gig.

We’ll see. I might be over-analyzing. Who am I kidding? I am over-analyzing.  I am trying to trust my boss but she doesn’t seem to be addressing the issues that she talks to me about privately. Instead it seems as though I am the problem. Oy.

I’ll try to report in this space if it’s appropriate.

In the meantime I’m wrapping this up and jumping on the treadmill. Today is the day I report to the doctor and she tells me if I go on statins or not for my cholesterol and beef up my blood pressure medicine.

For the most part my blood pressure has plummeted. But the readings are a bit higher the last few days. I am worrying over stuff at church. I wonder how this effects it. Also Eileen is convinced that my four martinis effect it. I sure hope that’s not the case. I will miss martinis.

I spent some time with Bartok on the piano last night and reading War and Peace on my netbook. Trying to relax.

Flattering to notice that my friend Nick has been reading my silly blog. Hi, Nick! Thanks for doubling my readership, dude.

My brother emailed me concerned about the “heart problems” I mentioned in the last post. He doesn’t read this blog but his wife does. (Hi Leigh) She mentioned it to him. Here’s what I told him:

I have an enlarged heart (as does Mom). Last year Fuentes ordered a echocardiogram of my heart which revealed some damage on my left side. This is possibly the result of years of mild hypertension or maybe just genetic roll of the dice. She said my heart sounded good when she listened to it at the last appointment. That was when she asked me to begin taking the proverbial 81 mg of aspirin a day.

So the heart problems are not huge or specific. Just in case any other reader was wondering.

Whippy skippy you live till you die.

I am seriously considering going out and playing on the streets again today. It has occurred to me that the more regularly I do this the more listeners will know when and where to expect me.

Interestingly at  least two people have mentioned they saw me playing on the street last Monday. It felt very lonely except for the attentive policeman who wasn’t listening only checking me for drugs or something.

I have thought of wearing a suit and tie today just to be sarcastic. And of course playing softly this time.

I do enjoy just sitting and playing music outdoors. It is a balm to my jaded soul.

I am troubled when music and things of beauty that I love like poetry, art and other stuff are treated primarily as commodities to be consumed.  So this is my little protest that I fling in the face of the huge cosmic nothingness of negativity.

Gratuitous: From Latin gratuitus (“free”) < Latin gratia (“favor”), gratus (“showing favor”)

Given freely; unearned

Not called for by the circumstances; uncalled for; without reason, cause, or proof; adopted or asserted without any good ground unjustified….

from wiktionary [link]

My mood seems to be shifting a bit away from depression and more toward a loosening of expectation around my situation at work.

Last night I was quite exhausted after driving up to Whitehall for the annual Hatch Easter Egg hunt. I lay in bed for a while reading the paper online and then I went downstairs and played Bartok’s Mikrokosmos vol IV for a while and felt much better.

Today I have to wrap up my Mom’s taxes with the tax woman. Other than that I have a pretty free day. Thinking I might do some cooking as well as play in the street, but we’ll see.

Tuesday begins a busy week for me. It looks like I will have a therapy session meeting with my boss and a co-worker on Tuesday afternoon. I will try to steal myself to be constructive in this situation even though I am increasingly unsure of my standing. This is probably just narcissistic insecurity. The trademark of the hack musician, n’est pas?

Anyway, my Mom has several appointments I am planning on taxiiing her to. And Saturday I am playing for a Dutch 50th wedding anniversary Mass at the Catholic church I used to work at locally. A lot of the singing will be in Dutch. It should be another of those odd little charming situations I find myself in from time to time.

I read the introduction and first short story from Charles Stross’s Sci Fi collection called Toast.

It’s free online and I like the way he thinks and writes. [link to his free online work at his site]

My postlude went well yesterday. I played a lengthy French Baroque piece based on the lovely tune to “O Sons and Daughters.”  Most French Baroque organ pieces of this kind are based on Christmas folk melodies from France and the entire genre is sometimes referred to as “Noels.” They are usually a series of Frenchified variations on the melody and the one I played yesterday was no exception.

People tend to ignore the postlude at my church which is pretty typical. I have long since accepted this and decided I will proceed as though I were performing the credit music in a movie. Yesterday by the time I got to the fourth page of this charming piece I was pretty much alone in the room. I considered stopping because the piece itself is so sectional. Then I realized that my poltroon soul wanted oxygen  (see poem below) and plunged happily back into playing the remaining several pages. It was a happy choice and my spirits lifted because of it.

There were a couple of volunteer musicians who somehow appeared during this time and made appreciative noises as did a soprano returning for the after church rehearsal. I don’t want readers of this blog to think I am unappreciated. Hardly a performance or service goes by without head turning compliments flying afterwards. So I am well served  in that regard.

I close with the poem I mentioned. Dickinson is much on my mind these days. I continue to return to her lovely lines for inspiration.

If your Nerve, deny you --
Go above your Nerve --
He can lean against the Grave,
If he fear to swerve --

That's a steady posture --
Never any bend
Held of those Brass arms --
Best Giant made --

If your Soul seesaw --
Lift the Flesh door --
The Poltroon wants Oxygen --
Nothing more --

Post Blog Script: check out the Letter from Galapagos I have just published from a friend who is doing cool stuff there. [link]

Listening to On The Media this morning. As usual they have some excellent reports.

The first deals with the recent Wikimedia leaks of videotape of soldiers killing journalists. The point of the report is how violent video games and killing technology emulate each other.  Clive Davis makes a good point about the fact that unless one is “unglued” one can distinguish between fantasy and reality. Given that salient comment, it is still chilling to see how video games and the tools our soldiers use to kill in our name are so like each other.

[link to Virtual War story on On the Media Site]

Then Bob Garfield interviews an ISP provider spokesperson and a Net Neutrality spokesperson about the court ruling this week that took away any regulation of the Internet.  Scary stuff.

[link to Command and Control story on On the Media Site]

My third recommended On the Media story is about the history of Copyrights. This celebrates the concepts 300th birthday this week.

[link to Copyright’s Wrong Turn story on On the Media Site]

Wow,as I was streaming On the Media, RealPlayer asked me if I wanted to download the clip. I wonder if this would allow me to turn some of the streaming I do into mp3s? Illegal not doubt but very cool.

I am vigorously trying to gain perspective over my obsessive struggle with things that have been happening at my job.

Only having partial success. I spent a half hour on the phone with my boss responding to an email she sent out to some staff people myself included.

Earlier in the day I transcribed an oboe part for use with an upcoming anthem using Finale software. I do enjoy doing that sort of thing. Then I went over to church and made legal photocopies of several anthems and stuffed an end-of-the-year schedule and some other non-photocopied anthems into the slots of the Chamber Choir singers.

It was after I came home that I read the disturbing emails. I tried to compose an email to my boss describing my reaction but didn’t think it was saying clearly what I wanted to say to her. So that’s when I called her.

After the phone call  I treadmilled, went grocery shopping and then went to 8th Street Grill with lovely wife and had two martinis over supper.

That makes four martinis this week which is not exactly restraining. I have been trying to cut back on alcohol, calories and dietary cholesterol four about four weeks. I have to report to my doctor next Tuesday. I’m hoping I can stave off switching to a stronger blood pressure medicine. My blood pressure has been very good in this period. I have also dropped a few pounds. But I need to continue to avoid alcohol and calories and fat.

My uncle Richard died in his sleep from a heart ailment when he was 57. I’m 58 and have been diagnosed with heart problems. I sometimes feel like I am living on borrowed time.

It reminds me of the video game Clive James mentioned in the On the Media story, Virtual War. It’s called Passage. It takes five minutes to play. The player always ages and dies in that time.  She or he can explore a maze during this short time. One can marry but this limits how much exploration is available to the player. And the graphics look (from the online pics) very pixilated giving it a sort of whiff of nostalgia I would imagine. I haven’t played it. I haven’t played many video games, but I definitely like the idea behind this one.

Today is the Hatch Easter Egg Hunt. It was deferred from the actual day last Sunday to today. Although I usually don’t like moving around days of celebration to more convenient times, this was an excellent deal for me. Last Sunday I was in an even worse emotional not to  say physical state than I will be today I am sure.

I have to stop because I want to treadmill before Church.

Still fighting my down mood. I know a grumpy jupe does not an interesting blog make (What does an interesting blog make? he wondered, usually he just writes and links in what interests him….)

I have been hosting my family and that is good stuff. But the church work and my mood is keeping me in a distant sort of emotional place.

It reminds me of my first link this morning: Voices in Time: Life Devoid of Words – Nizhny Novgorod by Maxim Gorky  [link]

Found on the very interesting web site, Laphams Quarterly (more on that in a bit), it describes what it was like to watch some of the first moving pictures.

There are no sounds, no colors. There, everything—the earth, the trees, the people, the water, the air—is tinted in a gray monotone: in a gray sky there are gray rays of sunlight; in gray faces, gray eyes, and the leaves of the trees are gray like ashes. This is not life but the shadow of life, and this is not movement but the soundless shadow of movement.

For years I subscribed to Harpers Magazine. Lapham was the editor and I do admire him. He now is publishing a quarterly and several links in today’s post are for the fascinating stuff he puts up there.

Stuff like this lecture by Kurt Vonnegut on the the basic plots found in stories: Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard [link]. I love his plotting out of the plots of Cinderella, Hamlet and Metamorphosis by Kafka. I sure do miss Vonnegut

.

Harpers always was looking for creative ways to present information. Lapham continues with stuff like this chart of various Musal inspiring type situations. Click on the chart to go to this excellent website.

I like the idea of “Voices in Time” that Lapham uses.  For me this is an important part of learning about life. For example whose voice do you think spoke these strident observations on music?

Music is not art and is not called art; and if you say an artist, an Englishman understands that as meaning a painter, architect, or sculptor. Music is a profession, not an art, and no one speaks or writes of any musician as an artist, for in their language and customs it is something else than art—it is a <profession>.

This quote is a bit out of context. It’s Chopin talking about English prejudices.  I seem to remember that Chopin did not have a good experience visiting England. Here’s a [link ]to the quote on Lapham’s site.

Chopin mourns the English as “Eccentric folk, God help him” and observes that everyone there “seems to have a screw loose.” Heh. I see what he means but I find that sort of human behavior is pretty universal and not limited to the English.

I can remember one of my more outrageous undergrad music profs saying to the class: “You do know the most civilized country in the world? Don’t you?” Stunned undergraduate silence followed and then he proclaim with hands clasped, “Why England, of course!” I love that man. [His name was in fact Tilden Wells. I mention this because I have lurkers who also took classes from him. Hi Lurkers!]

Anyway, this about all the emotional energy I have for a post today. The sun is bleakly shining in Western Michigan and my coffee is weak this morning. The day can only improve. I still know I am lucky. Lucky to be alive and lucky to be loved and be able to make music. Now if I can just shake this damn mood.

Jeremy Bastian is the fiancée of my niece Emily so I guess he is soon to be my nephew-in-law. Is that correct? Hmmmm Anyway, he’s visiting and I got to read a publicity mag and made a note of web sites he is associated with. Click on the pic above to get to Olympian Publishers site where he sells some of his cool stuff.

Finished reading my second Sam Lipsyte novel yesterday. “Home Land” is a romp framed in reports of an alumni who “did not pan out” to graduates from his high school. Submissions to the “Eastern Valley High School Alumni Newsletter” never see the light of day except in the novel.

Like the other Lipsyste novel I have read, the book seems to build characters and plot through a distinctly attractive warped voice of a narrator. The ending passage is typical of what Lipsyte achieves throughout. Dirtfuck otherwise known as Gary has just obscenely and casually insulted the memory of Teabag’s mother [Teabag is the main character,the first person reporter & Gary is his stalwart companion] :

“I’ve never punched someone smack in the jaw before, Catamounts. It was a strange combination of sickening satisfaction and searing pain that shot through my wrist like something electrical. Dirtfuck teetered on his wrought-iron chair, pitched over to the patio stones. He looked up from where he lay, rubbed his teeth, shook off the daze.

“What the fuck was that?” said Dirtfuck.

“That would be love,” I said.

Catamounts is what Teabag calls his readers from the get go. [His nickname comes from the practice of pinning a person on the ground and covering their face with your loose testicles] Lipsyte has an ear for euphonious obscene comic word usage. I rilly liked it. I am now reading his novel “The Subject Steve.”

My meeting with my boss yesterday left me drained and depressed. After discussing at length the problems we have been up against recently we talked instead about the basic insight that the task before us is probably to draw an Episcopalian community that is enthusiastic about its good works to connect their belief and actions to their public prayer.

This is weird because a more stereotypical notion is that Christians are a pious lot who love to go to church and pray but fail to connect their faith to their daily lives.

In this case, it seems more like our parishioners are drawn to issues like gay rights and feeding the hungry, but find themselves vaguely disconnected from traditional liturgical prayer. It is little more than churchy tradition which they tolerate in order to be part of the community.

This means drawing on the energy and enthusiasm people feel naturally about doing stuff like peopling (as opposed to manning) the distribution of free food to the community-at-large and channeling it into representative aspects of the public prayer.

Simple ideas like connecting the Holy Thursday ritual which centers on the meal Christ institutes in the Eucharist and the model of service he himself is as he bends to wash the feet of his motley disciples,

connecting this to the people in the church community who are actually involved in the food program. I suggested why not have the good hearted man who has been so active in this program (and was present at Holy Thursday) assist at distribution of Communion that evening. Doing this replete with written explanation to the community of why he was asked to do so.

Silly fucking me, I know.

So my boss and I did discuss this stuff and I think it might have been a new insight for her into this situation.

The problematic stuff (which I am deliberately being vague about) on the other hand is very depressing to me. It seems connected to the way I confuse people (especially but not limited to the local professional community) by my one-of-a-kind musical personalty that is intense, passionate and in their opinion a just plain weird and wrong approach. It would probably help if I could suppress myself a bit more…  turn it down some, even though I am already keeping it pretty quiet.

I keep seeing the face of the cop last Monday: “Could you just turn it down a smidgeon?” With a smile of course.

But I refuse to do this entirely. I do not apologize for who I am just the mistakes I make.

I have company coming this evening. My niece and her fiancee, my brother and my brother’s wife. So yesterday I cleaned house and cooked.

As I worked my mind continued to buzz with ideas about music and church music.

on "What's my line?"”]I have thought long and hard about the function of music. For me all sound is music. I think I learned this from John Cage’s writings and thinkings.

Yes, as Ray says in his comment yesterday, music is a form of communication. But it is much more than that to me. Encompassing communication,  music is also a basic factor in making meaning for humans. Neurologists are increasingly discovering how important this aspect of being is to the physiology of the brain and therefore the physiology of thinking and being.

At the same time after wondering “what music is for?” I have concluded it is to make meaning.

The insights of neurologists coincide nicely with my own predilection to be human is to be one who seeks and construes meaning from the confusing and chaos of life.

So if music is a conversation of meaning it is one not only between breathing living people (in person and alive!), it also means to be in conversation with humans who have already lived (like but not limited to great composers) and humans who will live in the future.

This is a bit cosmic I know. But it is the way I see this stuff.

I also find it interesting to wonder “where” the music is. I have been reading “The Changing Sound of Music” by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson [link to entire work online]. He confirms my own intuitions and conclusions that music is much more than what is written on a page or even what makes up one recording.

Among the many concepts I have learned from Leech-Wilkinson is the importance of every occurrence of a piece of music whether that be in the form of performances over the life of the piece or existing editions and performance practices regarding the creation of those editions.

Of the first, the people who make the music happen, the performers, are restored to their position as essential. Music notation is an imperfect process. Ultimately, it is suggestions for a fluid improvisation of sound by one musician (the composer) to another (the performer or even recordist).

Leech-Wilkinson uses historical recordings to make this point. Chopin writes three quarter notes. How did he play them? Surely not always evenly. We can tell from recorded performances that excellent pianists will play them markedly different from each other. Each performance is part of the piece. Where is the music?

Leech-Wilkinson suggests convincingly to me that the a piece of music as a concept extends to all performances of it. And more than that, individual performances add to the what ultimately makes up the piece of music.

He does not discuss editions of music. Probably because he is in the process of demystifying the printed music which has dominated academic thinking for about a hundred years or so. When I was in school most teachers (and probably students) thought that the music of Bach and other great composers was solely what was on the page. They and we used the page to think about form and compositional technique.

There is truth to this but like the blind men and the elephant it is only a part of the truth.

It omitted the transformations a piece goes through via its performances and recordings.

I like including them. It makes more sense to me.

It also answers a question I have about whether performing historical music  is some sort of museum ritual activity of preservation.

If one thinks of music this way, every time a piece of music is performed it is changed and added on to. It is recreated in the context of now which is always different.

In the comic novel I am reading, “Home Land” by Sam Lipsyte, there is a noxious father figure who despite his own repulsiveness Lipsyte has yell at his son the phrase: “Gravy boat! Stay in the now!”

The main character remembers his dad yelling this at him at supper. Apparently they didn’t have a gravy boat only something “more on the order of a mason jar filled with pan-spooned turkey juice.” But the dad was trying to get the kid’s attention.

If all we really have is “the now,” then remaking music in the now is very important. Especially to me.

After taking my Mom to the doctor and “Miracle Ear” (I love the names people give to business), I am meeting with my boss for the first time since Hell Week. I think the main thing I might suggest we think about is the impact of the growing size of our church community on the rituals of Holy Week.

There is a whole theory of church size and our community is rapidly moving into what is called “program size.” At this size, you lose the folksy “every body knows your name” style and have to have paid staff and programs to help the situation thrive.

We have staff now, but the head priest is the only full timer. The rest of us do full time on a part time salary (pretty usual in church work, sometimes hardly avoidable). This is another aspect of a shifting church size. I have been talking to my boss for a while about the difference between what they pay me and my skills, experience, education and knowledge,  what the business community calls, in its ugly phrase, credentials and expertise. I’m not expecting them to pay me what professionally they should. It would just help my morale if it was acknowledge that I am worth what the American Guild of Organists says someone with my experience and degrees is.

My boss does recognize my expertise and regularly consults me on many aspects of church life. I like that she is not dependent on my observations and advice but just likes to hear it and think about them. I don’t want the responsibility of leadership of any institution, but I do think I sometimes have insights that people inside institutions miss.

And I try to balance quietly doing my job and not keeping insights to myself when they occur.

My boss will probably be happy to hear whatever I have to say and then will ponder or discard it.

I think that’s  good.

But of course it’s just my usual hubris-filled opinion. Heh.

My friend Ray asks why I go and play on the street.

Since I have been doing this for several years, I’m not exactly sure of all the reasons I do it. There is something attractive and pure about doing music just to do music. Part of music is not just spending hours practicing but going and finding listeners. This is a time when very few people listen to live music. Live music is a rarity in people’s lives. I find that doing music on the street puts it in a context I find very satisfying. If people would like to listen, they may. If they choose to ignore me (which is the usual choice here in Holland….), that’s fine, too.

My best listeners are usually children. I have taken my harpsichord out and played on the street as well as my marimba.

Kids are drawn to live music and I find that very satisfying.

The best answer is that I like music that is done gratuitously just for its own sake. This is for me the essential reason to make any art.

Since I make my money with church music and understand that music in church must frame another activity,namely prayer and is never totally purely done just for its own sake, it is refreshing and satisfying to play in the open air.

This past Monday I was prepared to play not only Mozart but also Bach, Bartok, Couperin, some Jazz and my own compositions. I had prepared little signs saying “Now Playing” so and so (Eileen’s idea). I probably would have done more if I hadn’t been discouraged by the local peace officer. I accept the responsibility for my own over sensitive nature the day after Easter.

I have also spoken to the violinist and cellist in my trio about performing Mendelssohn and Mozart on the street.

I have seen buskers all over the world and think it’s a great idea.

When I was in Barcelona I heard some fabulous classical guitarists as well as a wide variety of styles and abilities on the street. We stayed in a major quay which had a huge island in the middle of the street where all kinds of music played late in the evening outside our window.

I have heard buskers in New York subways and the London tube .

I always think of them as the front line of live music no matter how electrified they are.
There’s more no doubt, but that’s all I can think of this morning.

Last night I re-read the first twenty or so chapters of War and Peace on my Netbook. I have started this tome before and now I’m starting it again. It seemed relaxing to stare at the screen and listen to the wind and rain last night.

I spent several hours working on choosing hymns and anthems for the period between now and this summer.  I even went to church and chose Sunday’s postlude. I decided to do Dandrieu’s wonderful 18th century setting of the tune: O Filii et Fillia. This hymn tells the story of the readings on Easter II which is always the story of Thomas the doubter. I think of it as a Sunday I can relate to.

Dandrieu is one of the many French organ composers who not only wrote a ton of ritual organ music for the Mass but also  set folk melodies (mostly Xmas ones) and performed them at church.

They are very cool pieces and are usually called  Noels.   They were so popular with people at the time that they were eventually forbidden to be played before or after Mass by the church.

I am still trying to shake the dismal mood I have fallen into after Holy Week.

My fam (niece Emily and her fiancee Jeremy, brother Mark and his wife Leigh) is planning to visit this week so I will need to do some cleaning and straightening today. I also am planning to contact the tax people and see how my Mom’s taxes are coming.

I will probably also finish up planning hymns and anthems.  I keep thinking about music and beauty. Rilke reminds me that

“Beauty is only
the first touch of terror
we can still bear
and it awes us so much
because it so coolly
disdains to destroy us.”

from First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke

This is David Young’s translation. Here’s a [link] to a different translation of the entire work .

Woke up wondering if maybe I did play too loud on the street yesterday. I looked at the volume knob yesterday and it did seem higher than I thought it was.

I situated the amplifier behind me so that I could monitor the volume. But of course it was sitting on grass at my feet so it would absorb some of the initial impact.

I had a vision this morning of me putting on my work clothes (i.e. suit and tie) and putting my hair back in a bun and setting a flower in a vase on my piano next time.

Because it seems that the sounds I make are not near as important as people’s visual and gestalt impression that I am a dangerous homeless person.

I told Eileen last night that I would prefer to be identified with the marginal people in our society anyway. If there are lines forming please put me in the one with the losers, the outcasts, those who are shunned.

The trick here for me will be to force myself to go out and play on the streets again. It’s a moot question because I accidentally left my piano power cord hanging out the door and it is wrecked. So I will need a new one before I can play my electric piano again. Also it’s raining

and I have to do work today and take my Mom to the shrink.

On the upside, I received a phone call yesterday from a choir member telling me how much the music of Holy Week meant to her and thanking and complimenting me for my work.

It’s nice that she let me know. It’s nice to know that someone noticed although intellectually I am sure people do notice.

I am feeling a bit like a child who misbehaved this morning for some reason.

I usually take myself to task for feeling sorry for myself and lacking perspective and generally contributing to the nonsense that bothers me (like when a police officer asks me to turn down my music).

This is the downside of trying to take responsibility for my own actions and realizing that in any given situation one can only truly affect one’s self and one’s behavior not that of others.

I spent some time with Bartok yesterday.

Played entirely through the fourth volume of his Mikrokosmos. Like Bach’s 2 and 3 part invention, it boggles the mind that he wrote these six volumes for learners.

I even dreamed about the cool peasant music rhythms he uses.

I also worked on the jazz rhythms of Yellowjacket’s tune, “One Family.” I’ve always liked this tune and found its slow funky melody challenging to play and count consistently. It would make a great church prelude. I have a killer sax player who attends my church whose sweet tone would ring out on this piece. Now if I could just master it.

My understanding of what music is and why we play it is changing. If music is not a discrete composition or performance but a collection of these, then when we choose to learn and perform historical music (like Bartok or Jazz) we are actually not only recreating the piece but adding to it by our own use of it. Our understanding which is shaped by our lives contributes a unique portion of what makes up the entire piece itself.

This changes performance of historical music from museum stuff to living breathing art. I like that a lot.

I have asked numerous Jazz performers and professors why should we study and recreate the Jazz of the  past? I ask the question because my understanding of Jazz history is that the style was always a moving target. It is a history of experimentation and music in the moment.

So when a young musician plays a great Jazz solo note for note that was spontaneously crafted by a practitioner he or she admires haven’t they changed the music from something that is free and alive to something that is trapped in amber?

But now I can answer my own question.

Every time a musician makes or remakes music she or he makes something unrepeatable and uniquely expressive of the music itself. So whether it is an original (whatever that is) improvisation or composition or an interp or even a note for note recreation of someone’s improvisation, there is a level at which the music is continuing to breathe, live, thrive and transform in the hands of the human making it.

I like this idea quite a bit.

I’m probably in a pretty normal space for me on Monday of Holy Week. While the services went fine and it was encouraging that so many people were doing their best to make things work, I found myself just barely getting by mentally.

One woman confided to me that the Easter frontal (the cloth banner that covers the altar) always reminds her of her son’s funeral some 27 years ago. He was buried in a local Reformed church which did not allow palls (the thing that covers the casket). Her husband is now a retired teacher at the local Reformed seminary and dearly wanted a pall to cover their son’s casket.

“Of course the casket had to stay closed,” she said making me picture a death by mutilated car accident or something.  A young Episcopalian priest mentioned they were making a new Easter frontal. This priest managed to borrow it and they used it as a pall on their son’s casket.

This same piece of fabric was draped on the altar yesterday as it is every Easter at this church. The woman said it had a great meaning for her to see it as we celebrate the mystery of resurrection.

Resurrection is a prominent Christian theology of funerals.

She mentioned the first time she realized it was the same thing was at an Easter service when the lights came up at the Vigil. I asked her if this was a good memory and she said yes.

“How old was your son when he died?” “25”

I played a postlude by Helmut Walcha. He was my teacher’s teacher when he (my teacher Ray Ferguson) was a young man on a Fulbright scholarship to Germany. Ray taught me several things he learned from Walcha. One was how to play and conduct. I used this skill yesterday. I was expecting the children’s choir director to conduct one of the pieces yesterday. This didn’t happen so I ended up quickly learning to play and conduct the piece myself from the organ. And there was another anthem that I did in this manner as well.

A parishioner chatted me up after the postlude commenting that Walcha was a famous performer. I replied that he was not that famous actually. And the parishioner (godblesshim) said he is to music lovers.

This piece is an amazing work. It’s based on the Easter Hymn tune CHRIST IS ERSTANDEN (as was one of the choral anthems). In the second half of the piece the soprano voice in the right hand and the pedal were the hymn melody in canon at the octave. Walcha composed another melody for the alto and tenor line which was also played in canon at the octave. It was an amazing technical feat especially consider that the result sounded very cool to my ears.

After the last service a woman handed me a score of a Mozart flute trio she is playing next Sunday so I could put the information in the bulletin. As my wife commented this is very refreshing. I am always looking for ways to include people in the performing of music in this talented parish. So nice when they actually volunteer.

There was a glitch in planning this Holy week and it was very difficult for me to receive communion. At the Thursday service (which is pretty informal at this parish), my boss came by and left me some Jesus on the piano as I was playing.

Yesterday at both services I was busy playing and conducting throughout communion.  At the second service I spotted my boss about half way down the church giving a wheelchair person communion. I was just finishing one of the hymns and thought I would slip down and get some Jesus. But she turned away just before I stopped playing.

I don’t know why I receive communion being a nonbeliever and all.

Actually I do. The first Episcopalian priest I ever worked for told me to receive even if I didn’t believe. Since then I have struggled with belief but have continued to receive communion.

Catholics don’t like it when people not in the club receive communion. It’s actually against their rules. For the decades I worked in the Catholic church I only recall receiving communion twice, once at Gethsemani Kentucky in a Trappist Monastery and once with the staff from a church I was working at. It was the only two times I think I was invited.

I obviously like open communion. My boss has evolved in the time I have known her. In the first year or so of our work together she said she had decided we should open communion to anyone. I told her she would first have to explain to people that it was closed because most didn’t realize it. I turned out to call that one right.

Anyway, now she gives communion to  anyone. If there was a Jesus this seems more like how I figure he was.

I walked in on my boss madly trying to write Easter sermons this week. She told me she was having difficulty shaking South Park images from her mind. I told her that was a sign of sanity for me.

Sorry to be so dang religious today but I have sort of a religion hangover.

No drinky poo for steve yesterday. I have been cutting down on alcohol and calories and exercising more due to a warning from my doctor about blood pressure and cholesterol.

I had one martini last week. Skipped wine at the Holy Thursday meal. When I pointed out that there was a bar open in downtown Holland yesterday and that I could go have a martini, my lovely wife told me I had martinis on the brain. I replied that you bet your bippy I do.

Then I took my sorry ass into the kitchen and made tea.

I tried to revive my spirits with music by Telemann and Touzet (the cuban composer). Also played through some of my own compositions.

I dug out my batteries that I use when I busk outdoors with the electric piano and set them up to recharge. It looks like one of them is not taking the charge this morning.

I keep fantasizing about playing on the street.

Got up the this morning and read this poem online:

The Windhover
To Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! 

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins [link to site where I found it]

I do find that poetry works on me like a good piece of music. According to the web, “sillion” is the “thick, voluminous, and shiny soil turned over by a plow.” I like the lines “No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,”

I also read a depressing poem by Georg Trakl this morning called “De Profundis” It seems to be a meditation on what it’s like to be dead on the top of a garbage heap. [link to beautiful depressing poem] “De Profundis” usually refers to Psalm 130, “Out of the deeps.” We did a setting of this text this Lent by John Rutter. It was kind of poppy and sort of missed the depth that this poem actually captures for me.

I found a temporary link to an entire Sci Fi novella that has been “short-listed” for upcoming Hugo Awards [link to site].The novel is Palimpsest by Charles Stross. This would be more impressive if the Hugo Awards had not also announced they were short listing the screenplays for Avatar and District 9. Both of these movies really struck me as poorly written. But there goes my hubris filled opinion again of something when it doesn’t seem to be that well done to me.

I think that phrase from Hopkins poem describes how I felt and continue to feel after Holy Week: “my heart in hiding.” Sometimes it best for me to hide my heart because I am so dam thin skinned and eccentric. I find myself caught up in giving a shit about things that I can’t control. At the same time I did have some good experiences this week.

In the words of T.S. Eliot “Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still.”

There are things I sometimes do when certain times of year roll around. I try to listen to Schuman’s Spring Symphony in the spring. I also like Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony around this time of year.

I also try to pull out this poem by James Dickey.

SLEEPING OUT AT EASTER

All dark is now no more.
The forest is drawing a light.
All Presences change into trees.
One eye opens slowly without me.
My sight is the same as the sun’s,
For this is the grave of the king,
When the earth turns, waking a choir.
All dark is now no more.

Birds speak, their voices beyond them.
A light has told them their song.
My animal eyes become human
As the Word rises out of the darkness
Where my right hand, buried beneath me,
Hoveringly tingles, with grasping
The source of all song at the root.
Birds speak, their voices beyond them.

Put down those seeds in your hand.
These trees have not yet been planted.
A light should come round the world,
Yet my army blanket is dark,
That shall sparkle with dew in the sun.
My magical sheperd’s cloak
Is not yet alive on my flesh.
Put down those seeds in your hand.

In your palm is the secret of waking.
Unclasp your purple-nailed fingers
And the woods and the sunlight together
Shall spring, and make good the world.
The sounds in the air shall find bodies,
And a feather shall drift from the pine-top
You shall feel, with your long-buried hand.
In your palm is the secret of waking,

For the king’s grave turns him to light.
A woman shall look through the window
And see me here, huddled and blazing.
My child, mouth open, still sleeping,
Hears the song in the egg of a bird.
The sun shall have told him that song
Of a father returning from darkness,
For the king’s grave turns you to light.

All dark is now no more.
In your palm is the secret of waking.
Put down those seeds in your hand;
All Presences change into trees.
A feather shall drift from the pine-top.
The sun shall have told you this song,
For this is the grave of the king;
For the king’s grave turns you to light.

—James Dickey

So all that’s left of Holy Week is the celebration of the Vigil. My community does it as sort of a faux sunrise service on Sunday morning instead of the more traditional Saturday evening.

This has been an exceptionally troubling holy week for me. I think I have once again been caught into the struggling idealism of Christianity.  For me this is one of those truth is beauty and beauty is truth sort of things.

And there have been some very good parts to this week. My choir has been very good about showing up for rehearsals and services. Having the choir sing at all Holy Week services was something I think is a logical expression of these rituals and a goal I have been working towards.

If Christ lives at all (a big If for me) he lives in the bodies and actions of those around us. Salinger’s “Jesus Christ is the fat lady in the fifth row” and admittedly pious expressions of the community as the “Body of Christ” are a couple examples that spring to mind.

“I remember about the fifth time I ever went on ‘Wise Child.’ I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast — remember when he was in that cast? Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again — all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don’t think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and — I don’t know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.”

“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me?There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know — listen to me, now —don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? … Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

from Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

While the choir and the priests have been inspiring, there have been other moments which have challenged my optimism and my notion that there is any importance to beauty and  music.

I can’t shake the feeling that my life has been one that has been warped by church. I have embraced aspects of my Christian background. The beautiful stories and historical music and ritual.  I have also admittedly tried in my weak human way to pursue the radical teachings of the New Testament Christ of human love and acceptance.

But my life lived in the church has been a pretty typical human life full not only of fragile beauty and idealism but also weakness, betrayal, phoniness and hypocrisy.

For me the redeeming moments are the ones where I witness the strength of kindness that opposes cruelty and beauty that persists even when ignored and actively discouraged.

Last night, a parishioner played a movement from a Bach unaccompanied cello suite as the prelude.  This was an incredible moment for me. Lovely lovely profound music in a good context (Good Friday).

One of the choir’s two anthems was based on Faure’s  Pavanne. The arranger gave this famous melody of this piece to the right hand of the organist (that would be me in this case).

This is kind of a hokey movie music kind of thing, but I did sweat some bullets trying to pull off this accompaniment. It seemed to go okay.

The other choral anthem was an arrangement (transcription) I myself did of one of Brahm’s religious pieces he wrote for women’s voices.  The choir did a good job, but I don’t think my conducting was served by trying to keep some of them on pitch with the piano at the same time I was conducting. Oh well.

Yesterday afternoon I walked into the local city office and bought my street musician licence for this year.  Right now I feel like I would be much more comfortable playing on the street than anywhere else. Listening for Dickey’s “song in the egg of a bird.”

There’s a a bat in the basement. We get them from time to time. I discovered him last night before I went to bed. Couldn’t manage to coax him out the door. Couldn’t find him this morning to catch or coax.

I found a credit card transaction on my online statement that I’m pretty sure neither Eileen nor I initiated.

Contacted the bank yesterday to dispute it. Eileen thinks someone might have transposed a number when giving it over the phone or online (it was identified as that kind of transaction). My first thought was of card number theft. At any rate that number is no longer connected to an account.

So mr thief if you are reading my blog, I hope this further thwarts any transactions you make in my name.

I am in a numb mood this morning. I found myself reading articles online.

Snobs in the Groves of Academes by Naomi Schaeffer Riley explores the reason so many profs are under the illusion they are privileged experts when in fact they have abandoned a vocation to guide learners.

“how did we get from Socrates’ famous dictum, “All I know is that I know nothing” to [professor] Skip Gates’s “Don’t you know who I am?”” [LINK TO ARTICLE]

Articles like this often lead me to the new interesting sources in which they appear. This one is in “In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues” which seems to be worth bookmarking or checking out from time to time. [LINK TO SITE]

Another interesting site I found this morning is Lapham’s Quarterly: a magazine of history and ideas [LINK TO SITE]

On it was a nice new poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “At Sea” [LINK TO POEM]

I found two interesting articles on the New Statesmen Site [LINK TO SITE]

I found “Soul of the Party” by Slavoj Žižek  an antidote to the whole day after the beginning of the Xtian Triduum numbness.

He says a God who only doesn’t exist but knows he doesn’t exist is what is called for these days.

“… rather like the God from the old Bolshevik joke about a communist propagandist who, after his death, finds himself in hell, where he quickly convinces the guards to let him leave and go to heaven. When the devil notices his absence, he pays a visit to God, demanding that He return to hell what belongs to Satan. However, as soon as he addresses God as “my Lord”, God interrupts him: “First, I am not ‘Lord’, but a comrade. Second, are you crazy, talking to fictions? I don’t exist! And third, be short — otherwise, I’ll miss my party cell meeting!”

He later says

“Christianity is anti-wisdom: wisdom tells us that our efforts are in vain, that everything ends in chaos, while Christianity madly insists on the impossible. Love, especially a Christian one, is definitely not wise. This is why Paul said: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise” (“Sapientiam sapientum perdam,” as his saying is usually known in Latin). We should take the term “wisdom” literally here: it is wisdom (in the sense of “realistic” acceptance of the way things are) that Paul is challenging, not knowledge as such.”

I think he is on to something. This morning I am feeling tired of anti-intellectual religion. A religion that seems to rely more on the doctrine of victimhood, ignorance and superficiality that permeate our society. I like this guy’s take a lot better. He even has me admiring my old archenemy St. Paul.

“It was St Paul who provided a surprisingly relevant definition of the emancipatory struggle: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers [kosmokratoras] of this darkness, against the spiritual wickedness in the heavens” (Ephesians 6:12). Or, translated into today’s language: “Our struggle is not against concrete, corrupted individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification that sustains it.”

[LINK TO ARTICLE]

“Of Men and Monsters” by Terry Eagleton is a bemused humanist non-religious look at evil using the child murderers and an instant response of identifying them as evil by the policeman who arrested them. [LINK TO ARTICLE] I haven’t finished reading this one yet.

So there you have it. Last night’s service and rehearsals went okay. It was all a bit demoralizing to me when I realized that in my heart I don’t relate to the situation in the way most of the people I am serving do. This is fine. God help them and me (that marxist fiction above, eh?) Heh.

Today I have do bills, grocery shopping, clean the kitchen, practice organ, have a quick phone conversation with the boss about tonights service. I wonder if I will thaw at all today. I did start thawing when I played through the C major prelude and fugue of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, vol II. My life’s conversation is certainly enriched by the music I play and stories and ideas I read and think about.

The weather was wonderful here in Western Michigan yesterday.  My walks to the church and to downtown were relaxing. The sunshine coaxed me out of my usual reading spot inside and I sat in the sun and read waiting for lovely wife Eileen.

After she got home we walked down to the faux Irish pub we like and ate sitting outside.  I succumbed and had a pre-dinner martini, my first alcohol in two weeks.  I have been rigorously watching my diet and exercising ever since my blood pressure hit an all time high recently in the doctor’s office.

I was feeling smug yesterday because in two weeks I had pulled it down not only from the high at the doctor’s office (150/100) but well into recommended zones with a shockingly low reading of 110/78. I am also slowly but surely on the way to losing weight and have lost about four pounds in two weeks.

And Eileen said ONE martini would be okay. She is after all my numero uno co-dependent. Heh.

My cyber buddy Ray Hinkle seems to think that I am getting signals from Grand Rapids Community College that they are planning to pull me in to do some teaching. I remain skeptical but interested.

Holy week can be such a cynical time for me. Since I have some in depth background on the Christian rituals and their intention, it is always better to not focus too much on how they actually play out in any given situation.  Not only that but church people are pretty predictable in their misbehavior around this time. I had some unpleasantness Sunday but also I was on the phone yesterday trying to reinforce mental health in a climate of anxiety and self-absorption.

My dead mentor Rabbi Friedman taught that pathological misbehavior was often the result of success in challenging the system to grow and mature. This disruption naturally causes the system to attempt to reassert it’s status quo. Never from the same quarter and hardly ever expected. This has the benefit of understanding individual bad behavior as expressions of a resistance that is present in the situation and shifting from one person to another who will act out reactivity and sabotage via bad behavior.

Friedman taught that one should learn not only to identify it but look forward to it as evidence of leadership.

Whew. My task is to not give in to my own weaknesses of cynicism, self-pity and depression. Not always an easy task.

Anyway.

Whippy skippy.

I had a very encouraging meeting with my boss yesterday. She asked me to submit the fact that my Dec organ recital from last year was published in the April issue of the AGO mag to the church bulletin newsletter.  She is calmly supportive of my exploring other avenues of employment like teaching even though she knows there is an extremely remote possible it might lead to my quitting.  And she is also very supportive and insightful about how we are working out way through an unpleasant situation at Grace that will loom over my work during Holy Week.

I hate being mysterious but this public venue (public but obscure, granted) is no place to be airing the church’s dirty laundry while it’s going on. Maybe later. Heh.

So I also managed to get in organ and piano practice yesterday. Plus some time alone in the coffee shop reading and thinking.

It actually doesn’t get any better than this. Life is good. Today is the first day of the Christian Triduum. Before I arrived at my present gig, I doubt that anyone had used that word. I have gradually discussed these rituals with the boss and together we have brainstormed our way into a more coherent approach to this time.

So tonight we celebrate most of the service in the basement of the church with a meal, footwashing and Eucharist. I pointed out yesterday that as we approach program size church it will become more difficult to pull off the informal. Program size church is church jargon for changing from a smaller church where everyone basically knows each other to the size of church that needs programs and staff. Nevertheless there are ways to keep the esprit going.

I have insisted that all choirs be present at all of these rituals in an effort to underscore the community nature of Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil.

This was a new idea when I arrived and of course there is still lots of resistance (see the Friedman comments above).  But there are going to be some rilly cool moments. Tonight at the Holy Thursday ritual, the  chamber choir will perform Durufle’s Ubi Caritas. A lovely lovely setting. Tomorrow night at Good Friday service, the prelude is a gorgeous Bach unaccompanied cello suite movement and the Chamber Choir anthem is a setting of the Adoramus Te text by Brahms.

I am glad to be working in a denomination that values intellectual honesty enough to accept my own fixed struggle with the idea of God and the terrible nature of religion in general and Christianity in specific.

Like Zappa said, the last time someone checked unlike the Bible and Christianity no one has ever been killed from applying the ideas in the Kama Sutra.

Anway, into the fray I go.

I wandered around in a cynical depression most of yesterday. Funny because I managed to function quite well even as I kept noting aspects of my experience which were confirming my own grumpiness.  I’m still dealing with it.

But, in fact, yesterday, I accomplished quite a bit.

Besides getting my Mom back and forth to a vascular specialist in GR, I completed an application for a college gig, emailed it off. I also emailed a copy of my CV to my boss and the chair of Hope college.

I probably don’t have a prayer of getting in but I was surprised when both departmental chairs of GRCC and Hope College responded promptly to my email. The GRCC guy said he would talk to me in May and arrange an “interview with the Dean,” whatever that means. I thank my cyber friend Ray Hinkle for connecting me up with GRCC and generally jump starting my cold education heart to think once again about teaching.

I am confident I would make (have made) a good college teacher.

But much less so that I fit in in today’s education climate. I am a bit too content driven and interested in student passion and point of view. Bored by bored incompetent teachers. Also I have a ruthless interest in clarity and honesty about what I am teaching and less interest in the typical pettiness I have experienced in people who are teaching college now. In other words, I fail to be that interested in office politics especially the sort that sacrifice any notion of learning or idealism to simple selfish career goals and short sightedness.

Not to mention a plethora of bad behavior that seems pretty un-self aware.

I told you I was grumpy.

I’m pretty sure that I have enough enemies (yes enemies or at least people who find my point of view inexplicable and given the chance would actively block my appointment and be very sorry to see me working alongside them) at Hope that emailing them a CV is a simple courtesy to the chairperson with whom I have pretty good relations.

On a happier note, I am renewing my love affair with Emily Dickinson’s poetry. I love both what and how she says what she says in her poems.

I felt a Funeral in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through —

[link to entire poem]

I also finished Amy Bloom’s Where the God of Love can i buy diazepam in spain Hangs Out.

Bloom is a therapist/novelist who writes with the keen insight of both professions. I do like her writing. Her characters leap off the page as they wander through believable and dubious moral situations of betrayal, incest and hum drum living.  What a writer.

I started The Ask by Sam Lipsyte.

This is another contemporary comic sort of novel (at least so far, I’m on page 78). It is functioning as an antidote for my own depression and cynicism which is confirmed by the mundanity of living in a closed-minded religious deeply unconscious time. Lipsyte has picked up the rhythms of glibness of our time and paints a devastating and funny portrait that soothes my old cynical soul and gives it a laugh at the same time. Fuck the duck, dude.

Sample: (The revolting young temp Horace speaks to his Mom on the phone about his success developing a donor [an “ask”])

“Dude,” he said into the phone, “I just know I’m going to bag this old biddy She’s got to be good for some serious paper heroin … Yes, I mean money … Dude, I don’t know if that’s the latest slang, it’s my slang. We all have our own nowadays …. Anyway, I’m deep into her geriatric ass. I’ve sort of become her protogé. Her son died cliffsurfing a few years ago and I’m like her new son. No offense … Well, it’s sort of like base jumping but more radical.”

So there you have it.  I would like to get off my ass today and do some composing. I have been practicing. Yesterday I got hung up on the 25th variation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Played through it few times and queued it up while I cooked up Eileen’s supper. Also managed to practice some organ and meet with a bass player to help him learn some songs for Easter.  I am kind of dreading the next few days due to the continuing unpleasantness from this past Sunday. But I do like my job and especially appreciate my boss. It helps to have at least one collegial relationship left.

Man I hope I can shake this mood. Poetry helps.

Alone, I cannot be —
For Hosts — do visit me —
Recordless Company —
Who baffle Key —

They have no Robes, nor Names —
No Almanacs — nor Climes —
But general Homes
Like Gnomes —

Their Coming, may be known
By Couriers within —
Their going — is not —
For they’re never gone —

Emily Dickinson

Finished two novels yesterday.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson and Netherland by Joseph O’Neill.

The first is a sort of fashion/cyber mystery/spy romp.

I especially enjoyed the descriptions of England by a young anti-fashion American, Cayce Pollard. She refers to it as mirror-world.  One of the themes seems to be that branding and commercialization breaks down distinctions between cultures. No more mirrors, just the same brands especially those of fashion.

Another theme is that new forms of art emerge from new forms of technology.

Fun stuff. I “follow’ the author, William Gibson, on twitter.

The second novel, Netherland, is a bittersweet trope on isolation, husband/fatherhood, and cricket nostalgia.

Hans van den Broek is working out his relationship with and temporary separation from his wife and child in the throes of post 9/11 New York.

He himself is Dutch and is married to an English woman. If the Gibson’s Pattern Recognition is a techno-fashion spy story, Netherland is a middle-aged male wry look at guy stuff. I found his musings about relationship to his estranged 6 year old son particularly moving.

Also, Hans has a very interesting relationship with another person who is in America but not of America, Chuck Ramkissoon from Trinidad.  They are isolated romantics dreaming their way through the New York streets. Chuck dreams of building a world class cricket stadium and Hans wanders in the dream world of  New York trying to make sense of his own personal history and the city’s.

There is also a bit of a technological underlying point of view.

The author, Joseph O’Neill, cannot resist using Google maps as a metaphor for the usual novelistic magic carpet rides of place and geography.

He has Hans trying to see where he is son is living or where Chuck’s cricket field is lying in disrepair.

I was first attracted to this book reading Sven Birkhert’s poignant admission that while reading this book, he wondered if what the character was doing was actually possible [link to Birkhert’s Reading in a Digital Age] and put the book down and went tried Google Maps.

I was struck by the irony of the author of an article that basically was struggling with the dire impact of the internet on the novel practically contradicting his own main thesis by demonstrating the poetry that emerge from technology.

In this case, O’Neill’s own wonderful descriptions of Googling that motivated me to see if the novel was worth reading.

“… with a single brush on the touch pad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrinkles and all–have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere.”

That sums up nicely my own excitement about the internet: “The option to go anywhere.” I continue to believe that as the internet exists right now, one is mostly limited by one’s own imagination when beginning to explore ideas and information.

So the music went pretty well yesterday, especially the Latin motet by John Sheppard. Between church and the after-service there was some unpleasantness that left a bad taste in my mouth but it’s probably not appropriate to go into it here.

I have been trying to resist both blaming myself for other people’s bad behavior and lapsing into total cynicism about church. Also trying to resist self pity. Fuck the duck.  I’m trying to cleanse this typical foul church mood listening to the birds sing in the dark and sipping coffee.

Kevin Hartnett is getting me off on the right foot this morning with his essay, “Reading War and Peace: the effects of great art on everyday life.”

“One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace?  The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.” [link to essay]

I’m a firm believer that art matters. And by art I mean all human creative endeavor. I omit the qualifier “great.” I have struggled with determining what art is worth and even more importantly what is it for.

I embrace a redemptive stance on art and life in general. Even in the midst of my own emotional turmoil at church yesterday, I was approached by a man who shook my hand and thanked me for the music for the day. I believe that making good music makes a difference.

Evelyn Glennie says that she is hesitant to say that a piece of music is bad. Since she deals with a large amount of recently written music, she has to take many pieces on their own terms and try to see if she has a sympathy for them. That is what is important to her.

It reminded me of the transformation in my own approach in the last ten years or fifteen years. I went from asking is a piece of music well written and well performed to whether or not I had a visceral reaction to a piece of music, did I like it or not?

Much more helpful to someone who is grappling with ideas like worth and meaning.

I have to add that by doing this I have uncovered what looks like quite  a bit of superfluous stuff not to say dishonesty around people and music.  The trick is to ignore this kind of stuff whether it comes from a pompous college teacher or a glib inexperienced young person.

I find myself continually attracted to passion and honesty. They seem to go hand in hand sometimes. People tend to be helpless in the face of their own passions.

There was a phrase that was tossed about quite a bit in the sixties: the frozen people.

I think of good art (and of course especially music) as something that thaws us, that makes us more not less flexible and tunes us in to ourselves. those around us and a general larger awareness that feels like awakening.

I often think about the artistic isolation of Emily Dickinson. I do love her poetry. Howard Bloom goes into his garden and reads her aloud when he is dealing with personal grief. There is something profound both about the ideas in her poetry and the words she uses.

I won’t bore you with quoting my favorite ones that echo in my head. I just recommend her.

And am inspired by her persistence despite very little encouragement.

In a way she helps me see how lucky I am. Despite being isolated from colleagues at this stage of my life, I am so lucky to experience and perform music the way that I do.

The triviality of bad behavior of others pales when I think of the beauty in John Sheppard’s lovely motet “In manus tuas” and the wonderful ideas in Domenico Scarlattis  Exxercisi I have been playing through. Also it helped me to rehearse John Adams’s Road Movies piano accompaniment yesterday.

One time a percussionist said he was surprised that I admired and performed composers like Adams, Glass and Reich. He said usually it is percussionists that go for them.

So I find myself trying to emulate the wonderful example of Evelyn Glennie and digging deeper into learning and understanding music.

I was thinking last night that usually going into Holy Week or for that matter any performance I realize that the work is all done. All that is left is to execute. My main work is preparation and rehearsal. Actually performing is more like a cumulative moment.

This is still partially true for the choirs at church but it has been changing. There is a model many amateur singers have, one that emphasizes individual skills in pulling off a performance. I suppose unfortunately this is also a professional musician model. The professional who disdains rehearsal and comes into a performance utterly reliant on his or her own skills.

Whereas the professional may pull this off, church choirs are notoriously bad at this sort of thing and rely on large numbers to cover up the sins of poor preparation.

At my present gig, I have for the first time relinquished weekly rehearsals for choirs. The reason for this change is poor attendance at rehearsal. Rehearsals are now limited to before and after a service. Consequently preparation time is reduced in quantity and quality.

This Holy week I have four anthems planned that combine youth choir with the regular chamber choir. Usually I would have had at least a run through of these anthems in this manner by now. Unfortunately, I actually have no idea how these anthems will shake out. I have chosen very very simple anthems for combined use and more challenging anthems for the chamber choir alone.

I am finding myself dedicating more rehearsal time to less anthems in order to prepare the singers. Of course when people miss or are late this diminishes their understanding even further.

And I don’t seem to be able to impress people that choral singing is a group sport. Like a basketball team, individuals can help but ultimately it is the group effort that can elegantly achieve beauty.

Switching rehearsals to the weekends has caused me to put my own notions as a choral conductor of excellent choral blend lower on the priorities. My attention is taken up with making sure people can sing their notes. Working on good voice production and consistent vowel sound has to take a back seat to pounding out notes.  An acceptable over-all-sound is not always achievable but much more rare under these circumstances.

Ah well.

I continue to read through the eleven volumes of Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonatas (actually I think he called them “Essercisi”).

I am on the third volume. I bought them from my organ teacher, Craig Cramer. He has written notes all over them which is fun. I like having used music with the imprint of the previous owner on it. Having it be Craig is a bonus. He has written extensive critical notes quoting the best scholars and other editions. Very helpful.

The edition itself is not that helpful because it has tons of added instructions that Scarlatti himself did not put there. This was a usual 19th century editing process with a few exceptions. Interestingly (at least to me) Brahms was an exception as an editor. His edition of Couperin is very true to Couperin’s original score and is a delight even now to use.

On a goofy personal note, I was happy to see that the American Guild of Organist magazine published the information from my organ recital from December of last year.

This trade magazine has a list of recitals from organists around the country which includes the titles and order of pieces they performed. I did some unusual programming so I’m glad that if my colleagues choose they can see what I am doing.

Since I feel somewhat out of touch with the local yokel professionals every little thing like this helps.

Yum. I made hummus last night after I loaded the dishwasher. I fried up some ground garlic in olive oil and used that in it. Omitted the tahini. I think it’s a pretty low fat version of hummus and it is tasting good in my breakfast this morning.

Here’s hoping the music goes well today.

Watched this video while treadmilling this morning. Glennie has important insights about being human and experiencing and creating music. There is so much in this video that I Facebooked it and Tweeted it and now I’m putting it up here. I do so admire this musician.

If you look to the left side of the first page of my web site, you will see that I added a new page called “Jupe Music.”  The last time my web site crashed I was so discouraged that I didn’t bother putting my recordings back up. Part of this was due to the fact that I realized how dissatisfied I was with them and part of this was laziness. Recently I have reconnected with an old friend with whom I share lots of good times and music making. He commented on my recordings and said I really should record. I am definitely for that but find that to record by myself takes more energy than I have to give that particular process.

I have noticed that many of the recordings I admire are the result of a collaborative process between the “talent” (that’s what they call the players) and others who listen and turn the knobs and choose the mikes and help with the mix and make suggestions. There are musicians who can do it all (perform, arrange, record, mix) but usually there seems to be something a bit missing in these recordings. And I certainly don’t have that large an expertise. I just like to make music up.

Last night I was goofing around and decided that it would be a simple task to link in mp3s that are sitting on my server. So that’s what I did. I also added some sheet music to the list of pieces I have composed even though there is a free music sheet music page as well. Just goofing around.

My blood pressure continues to go down. I have been watching my calories and exercising for only about a week and a half. Also no booze. I have to report to my doctor in a couple of weeks. She was a bit concerned about my last blood pressure reading.

I began the process of filing my Mom’s income tax yesterday. This is complicated by my Dad’s death in 2009. My goal is to simply file. I am having a local tax service do it but it still requires some leg work.

I also spent a bit of time rehearsing a couple of organ pieces I have scheduled for Easter. One of them is called “Postlude” and is by the etheral late English composer William Mathias.

Mathis is a favorite of mine. He is not as popular as some of the other English composers like John Rutter and Andrew Carter. But I like his stuff quite a lot. All of these composers use similar musical language: rhythmic, slight dissonance and melody. I decided it was a bit funny to use the name “Postlude” since I have it scheduled for the prelude for the later service on Easter so I decided to put it in the bulletin as “Allegro Moderato.”

The other piece I chose was by Helmut Walcha. Walcha was my teacher Ray Ferguson’s teacher. His music is actually wilder than then the English composers just  mentioned using much more piquant dissonance. This piece is a bit more difficult but not a major project. I like playing Walcha’s music because it is so rarely heard in the U.S. and is quite as good as anything else and represents a tradition of which I myself am a small small part having studied with a student of his.

This piece is  based on a lovely ancient melody called Christ Ist Erstanden. The choral anthem I am using is also based on this piece so it’s one of those nice jupe rhymes that no one notices until  I actually write about it in a little bulletin note.

I’m also working a bit on an organ arrangement of the first fugue from Bach’s
Art of Fugue. I have been thinking about this large work quite a bit in the last few weeks and find performing it on organ satisfying. As soon as it’s in good enough shape it will make a good prelude or postlude.

I meet with my boss this morning to discuss tomorrow’s service. She has been ill.  Eileen helped me move the harpsichord out of the choir area yesterday to make room for both the youth and chamber choir. I think we are in pretty good shape for Holy Week.

I heard back from the chair of the performing arts department at GRCC yesterday. He was very gracious but it’s clear that they are not exactly hurting for adjunct professors. I keep thinking I need to mention this to the chair of the music department at Hope college who is married to a staff person at my church. I forget to say something to him when I see him. I definitely have mixed feelings about working for Hope College. It is such a reactionary institution: homophobic and insisting that teachers sign a loyalty oath to Jesus. I hope if I should stumble across an opening at a college I won’t have to sign such a paper. I was remembering I managed to get on board at GVSU due to their extreme last minute need and my willingness to pick up the reins immediately to a class load. This seem to stay in the mind of the then chair when he assigned further classes. But then they got a new chair. La la la.

I am learning a ton from rehearsing with violinist Amy Piersma and cellist Dawn Van Ark.  Chamber music is a kind of conversation. In fact, after we finished playing through the entire first movement of Mendelssohn’s D minor piano trio, Amy pointed out that one section sounded like an exchange between the piano and the strings. It’s like the piano is getting increasingly rambunctious and playful and then the strings come in and try to calm it down.

This put me in mind of Eliot Carter’s notion that he sees his compositions as conversations between instruments.

I am, however, thinking of much more subtle things as well. An inflection here, a line that comes out here, the feeling of “up-ness” and “down-ness” created by drawing the bow over the strings.

Besides the delight of rehearsing with these two fine musicians I also spent some more time composing. I guess the working title is something like “Street Suite” with the movements possible being: mov 1: “You must be the animal” mov 2 “dead man pants” and mov 3 “one last day”.

I don’t actually have notes for the second two. I have made some beginnings on sketches for a piece called “dead man pants” but haven’t really gotten anywhere with it.

I also weirdly went on myspace and listened to the four recorded tracks I put up there a couple years ago.

http://www.myspace.com/jupiterjenkins

These recordings and songs have been out of my mind for a while. I am beginning to think about them again. I actually am kind of proud of the writing in them. I wish the recordings and the performances themselves were more representative of my intentions. But still, they’re not too bad overall.

My cyber friend Ray has urged me to record.

He is the first person in a while to say anything like that to me. In most situations I am totally the initiator. I have very few people left in my life who respond creatively to most of my initiatives.

That’s one of the reasons I am enjoying the piano trio so much. These two musicians do respond in a refined classical way. I miss creative response, I guess and their responses are nothing if not creative. I gave Amy the violinist the music to John Adams’s Road Movies. This is a tough score. I have been practicing the piano part for a week or so. She agreed to look at it and even seemed interested.

I went on my buddy Jonathon’s myspace and listened to his new recording. http://www.myspace.com/jonathanfegel I miss contact with him but understand that he has moved into a phase of his life (lover and children) that has precluded our work together.

I have been reading in “Where the God of Love Hangs Out” by Amy Bloom and “Netherland” by Joseph O’Neil lately.

O’Neil has an interesting take on Walter Mitty type fantasies:

How many of us are completely free of such scenarios? Who hasn’t known, a little shamefully, the joys they bring? I suspect what keeps  us harmless from them is not, as many seem to believe, the maintenance of a strict frontier between the kingdoms of the fanciful and the actual but the contrary: the permitting of a benign annexation of the latter by the former, so that our daily motions always cast a secondary otherworldly shadow and, at those moments when we feel inclined to turn from the more plausible and hurtful meanings of things, we soothingly find ourselves attached to a companion far-fetched sense of the world and our place in it. It’s the incompleteness of reverie that brings trouble….

Joseph O’Neil, Netherland

I spend an awful lot of time in Walter Mitty land I fear. I like O’Neil’s take that fantasy can help our connection to reality rather than make us less realistic or detract from a clear understanding of ourselves.  I guess I usually think of my fantasy and imagination as sort of a withdrawal or even sometimes a bit of a character flaw. Nice to remember it’s not totally true.

I always liked that bit in “The World According to Garp” by John Irving where Jenny Fields, the mother, continually encourages her son Garp to go off by himself and imagine his secret world.